http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10625961/page/2/

Why do this? The apology and acknowledgement has been made? Why not try to close the wound?

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America is a melting pot, the people at the bottom get burned while all the scum floats to the top.
- - - Charlie King

Sounds like this prime minister must be an equivalent to Holocaust-deniers.
I mean it looks like he's a different prime minister than the one that joined in the apology. Apparently the two of them are on a different page.

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"It's never over... BOY!"
The Tall Man, Phantasm III

With the extent of the atrocities that the Japanese military commited during the, to try to pull this off is absurd. The gives no mention to the chinese and korean males who were used as moving target practice, or the slave labor, or the torture/medical experimentation of POW's (including our own). History will never forget. Just like 60 years from now, people will look back and judge us.

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America is a melting pot, the people at the bottom get burned while all the scum floats to the top.
- - - Charlie King

Japanese history already forgot a long time ago. Japanese school children are taught a very different history of how ww2 events unfolded.

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"When I'm in command, every mission is a suicide mission!" -Capt. Zapp Branigan
The United Church of the Latter Day Tangential Tarts

The girls I knew and liked well enough to talk to while in Japan acknowledge that they lost and why they were bombed, and their military did not conduct themselve properly during the war. So the kids growing up nowadays in Japan are taught a more accurate version of the real history

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America is a melting pot, the people at the bottom get burned while all the scum floats to the top.
- - - Charlie King

oh ok.. well thats an improvement from a few decades ago.

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"When I'm in command, every mission is a suicide mission!" -Capt. Zapp Branigan
The United Church of the Latter Day Tangential Tarts

Even while visiting Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I met friendly, warm people (much more polite that Tokyo, thats for sure). It was different from what I expected in that I presumed that the locals would be sour due to NOT being told everything.

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America is a melting pot, the people at the bottom get burned while all the scum floats to the top.
- - - Charlie King

What the Japanese are battling over is whether the existence of the comfort women will be recognised by Japan's cultural consensus. Like a flock of birds, the Japanese are particularily keen to stay in step with the rest of the group and believe as they do. If the conservatives succeed in their campaign, the comfort women will not have existed (in the eyes of the Japanese, anyway).

It's their own internal matter in my opinion. I really don't see the Japanese military conducting this kind of behavior again so I say let it go unless Japans own citizens want another apology from their own government.

From what I've read in my history books, most of the "comfort women" were working prostitutes before being drafted into service alongside the military. In Japan, as with other Asian countries, prostitution is viewed as a semi-respectable profession, and supposedly many of the women volunteered their services to the government out of a sense of patriotism -- not to mention adventure. I believe that a major point of contention in Japan is the status of citizens there who are of foreign descent. Historically, Japanese nationals of Korean descent, regardless of how many generations their citizenship goes back to, are treated as somewhat less than full citizens. In that light, one could presume that a percentage of women of foreign descent were unwilling "volunteers".

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When religion ruled the world...wasn't that the Dark Ages?