David McNeill

Harpooned. Japan and the future of whaling

David McNeill — 2007-06-13T01:05:00Z

Portions of this article have appeared in Newsweek Japan and the South China Morning Post.

Back to the starting block for Japan's multi-million dollar campaign to overturn the international whaling moratorium.

The look on Nakamae Akira's face said it all. In the somber press conference that followed the end of the 2007 International Whaling Commission conference in Anchorage, the deputy director of Japan's Fisheries Agency was as impassive as an Alaskan iceberg.. Japan's silk-smooth spokesman Morishita Joji as always did most of the talking. When Nakamae did eventually answer a single question after spending the bulk of the press conference staring out the window of the Hotel Captain Cook, he was brutally direct: “Why should we leave the IWC, we're not the problem.”

“Unlike the anti-whaling countries, we abide by the original mission of the IWC — the conservation and managed use of all marine resources,” he said. “The IWC should accept sustainable use. The countries which deny any take of whale should leave, not us.” (...)

- / Japan Focus

Japan's History Wars and Popular Consciousness

David McNeill — 2007-05-01T20:42:50Z

This is a revised version of an article that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education on April 27, 2007. Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert is a Tokyo-based photographer. His photographs can be found here.

Revisionist academics and best selling authors fuel a revival of nationalism that is poisoning Japan's relations with neighboring nations

Tokyo Ko Bunyu's comic book Introduction to China is not for the fainthearted. In 300 graphic pages, it claims that the Chinese are incapable of democracy, practice cannibalism, and have the world's leading sex economy. In one sequence, famous political figures say the country is the source of most of Asia's contagious diseases. In another, illustrated with naked, spread-eagled women, China is said to have exported 600,000 "AIDS-infested" prostitutes.

Mr. Ko spends much of the quieter moments in the comic book developing an unusual historical narrative: that China, not Japan, was the aggressor in the Pacific war. (...)

- / Japan Focus

Dead Men Walking: Japan's Death Penalty

C. M. Mason, David McNeill — 2007-04-09T18:25:48Z

This article was written for The Japan Times, where it appeared on April 8, 2007. This slightly revised version appeared at Japan Focus on April 8, 2007.

Japan's death penalty is cruel, secretive and out of step with much of the developed world say its opponents. As a record 97 men and 5 women await the hangman's noose, one man alive and free who knows its true horrors speaks.

After breakfast on Christmas Day, 2006, three Japanese pensioners and a middle-aged former taxi-driver were given an hour to live. The men were told to clean their cells, say their prayers and write a will. Fujinami Yoshio, 75, scribbled a note to his supporters before he was taken to the gallows of the Tokyo Detention Center in a wheelchair. “I cannot walk by myself, I am ill and yet you still kill such a person,” he wrote. “I should be the last person executed.” (...)

- / Japan Focus

In the Shadow of Hiroshima. U.S. Marines and Japanese SDF collaborate at Iwakuni six decades after the bomb

David McNeill — 2007-03-26T21:10:00Z

This is an extended version of an article that was carried in the Irish Times on Feb. 25, 2007.

Inside the Iwakuni marine base, a slice of Americana: a mess canteen adorned with solemn portraits of former presidents and tributes to fallen US troops in battlefields around the world. TVs mounted on the walls flicker with US sports programming as beefy marines tuck into pasta, tacos and cheesecake.

The sight of American and Japanese soldiers on the same military facility in Hiroshima can be a surprise. This is, after all, just miles from where the Pacific war ended in a nuclear holocaust unleashed from a US bomber that killed 140,000 people. (...)

- / Japan Focus

Japan and the Whaling Ban: Siege Mentality Fuels 'Sustainability' Claims

David McNeill — 2007-02-15T00:35:00Z

This is a revised version of an article that appeared in the Japan Times on February 11, 2007.

It is a question that puzzles much of the world: Why does Japan thumb its nose at one of the environmental movement's few lasting achievements—the ban on commercial whaling? As Japan's whaling fleet ploughs the Antarctic in search of minke and endangered fin, David McNeill talks to politicians, bureaucrats, journalists and environmentalists and finds that far from weakening in the face of worldwide condemnation, the campaign to overturn the ban is gathering strength. February 2007, indeed, sees an important attempt by Japan to bypass what it perceives as the paralysis of the International Whaling Conference (IWC), when Tokyo plays host to a gathering dubbed the Conference for the Normalization of the International Whaling Commission. Despite being boycotted by New Zealand, Britain, the United States and around 20 other countries, many fear that this conference could seal the fate of the IWC.

- / Japan Focus

The Samurai Dolphin Man and the Japan Connection

David McNeill — 2007-01-03T01:46:53Z

Rick O' Barry's website, including a video on the dolphin hunt in Taiji, is http://www.savejapandolphins.org

Ric O' Barry is one of the world's best known environmentalists. A former US Navy diver, he later trained the five dolphins that played ‘Flipper' in the hit 1960's TV series before turning against dolphin captivity in 1970. He has spent his life since as an animal rights campaigner and much of the last decade fighting what he calls the ‘secret genocide' of dolphins in the Wakayama Pref. town of Taiji, where thousands of the animals are killed from October – March every year.

O' Barry travels to the small port town several times a year to film the annual dolphin-hunt for a coalition of environmental groups – http://www.savejapanwhales.org. He claims he is despised by the town office, trailed by goons and harassed and threatened by whalers. “One fisherman down there told me if the whalers could kill me, they would,” he says. “I was kind of flattered. They call me ‘Samurai dolphin man,' which shows that at least they respect me.” (...)

- / Japan Focus

The Struggle for the Japanese Soul: Komori Yoshihisa, Sankei Shimbun, and the JIIA controversy

David McNeill — 2006-09-06T20:26:51Z

On August 18, 2006, the entire collection of English language commentaries was abruptly pulled from the website of the Japan Institute of International Affairs (JIIA) following an attack by a columnist in the nationalist Sankei Shimbun. When the site reopened, all texts by Japanese authors had been eliminated.

The controversy hinges on the fact that the Institute, whose English language website describes it as “an academically independent institution affiliated with the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs” (MOFA), also describes itself as Japan's “foremost center for producing and disseminating ideas on international relations.” (The official, Japanese language site is silent on the subject both of “independent” and “affiliated with MOFA”.)

What does the controversy reveal about contemporary Japanese and East Asian politics and international relations? The issue provoked a storm of international controversy and thus far little comment in the Japanese press and journals. Yet it reflects above all a contemporary conflict within Japanese politics over Japan's place in Asia. (...)

- / Japan Focus

David and Goliath

David McNeill — 2006-04-19T19:10:00Z

Tanaka Tetsuro has been protesting his dismissal from an electronics company for a quarter of a century. Now his struggle, one of the longest one-man campaigns in Japanese history, is to be the subject of a documentary.

It's a Friday morning in Takao, west Tokyo and a sleepy grey army of salary-men and women is snaking through the gates of Oki Electric.

At a few minutes before 8 a.m., Tanaka Tetsuro pulls up on a moped outside the factory gates, sets up a mike stand attached to a bullhorn and begins strumming his guitar and singing:

There is a wall between you and me which we can't see

Wall of borders, wall of language, wall of history and life

Nobody - not the bleary-eyed workers, security guards or even the schoolchildren and mothers walking by Oki - acknowledges the odd sight of a middle-aged man in a cowboy hat crooning peace songs in English before one of Japan's largest electronics companies. (...)

- / Japan Focus

Enemy of the State

David McNeill — 2006-02-10T04:36:00Z

Explores recent moves by the Japanese state to crushthe pacifist movement

Is Obora Toshiyuki a threat to society? The Japanese state certainly seems to think so. The police arrested the bespectacled, 47-year-old elementary school worker, interrogated him in grueling five-hour stretches and held him in detention for 75 days. “I thought it would never end,” says Obora, who claims the arrest came “out of the blue.”

After confiscating his computer and rifling through his personal belongings, the police called his workplace from where he was forced to take 10 months leave and a 60 percent pay cut. Prosecutors demanded a six-month prison term. When a district court threw the charge out, the state spent thousands of hours and millions of yen challenging the decision and fighting it in the Tokyo High Court. (...)

- / Japan Focus

Family Ties: The Tojo Legacy

David McNeill — 2005-11-15T05:00:00Z

The granddaughter of Japan's wartime leader Tojo Hideki has become one of his staunchest public defenders since emerging from obscurity a decade ago. But exactly who is she and why has she come in from the political cold?

Contrary to those who put Tojo in the small club of World War 2 monsters along with Hitler and Mussolini, she says the man who ordered the Pearl Harbor attack led a "war of freedom" in Asia. "He was defending his country against foreign aggressors. His greatest crime was that he loved his country."

In another time or place, Ms. Tojo might be considered a harmless relic, or have opted to remain living anonymously under her real name, Iwanami Toshie. But 60 years after the end of World War II, this tiny woman with impeccable manners and the air of a retired school teacher is one of the most toxic figures in a growing historical revisionist movement that is again pulling Asia apart. (...)

[November 10, 2005]

- / Japan Focus

US military retreats over Japanese base after protests by islanders

David McNeill — 2005-10-27T11:10:00Z

in Tokyo

The United States has been forced to back down over its plan to build a large offshore military base on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa after local protests stalled construction.

Washington and Tokyo had wanted to build a heliport and 1.5-mile runway over pristine coral reef more than a mile offshore, near Heneko village. But the plan enraged many locals on the small island, which already hosts around half of the 37,000 American troops stationed in Japan. Environmentalists joined the opposition to the planned base, saying it would destroy the reef, which is home to the dugong, an endangered species of sea mammal. (...)

- / Independent

Using a sledgehammer to crack a nut

David McNeill — 2005-09-17T03:12:00Z

This is a slightly revised version of an article that appeared in The Japan Times on September 6, 2005 and in Japan Focus on September 6, 2005.

Japanese authorities are preparing for the destruction of Article 9 of Japan's 'Peace Constitution' by attempting to destroy the remnants of the peace movement.

- / Japan Focus, Japan Times

Koizumi ducks out of Shrine visit on 60th war anniversary

David McNeill — 2005-08-16T12:24:00Z

in Tokyo

With Japan's most divisive election in decades looming next month, the Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi yesterday avoided a politically explosive visit to the controversial war memorial Yasukuni Shrine on the 60th anniversary of World War II, and instead offered an apology for the country's war record.

The Shinto memorial, which enshrines 2.5 million soldiers and war criminals including wartime leader General Hideki Tojo, was the most closely watched block in Asia, where many feared a prime ministerial visit on the day Japan surrendered could plunge already strained ties to new lows. (...)

- / Independent

The Pain of Remembering August 6, 1945

David McNeill — 2005-08-10T03:08:31Z

The Pain of Remembering August 6, 1945 Hiroshima Hibakusha reflect on the bomb, the war, their lives, and the nuclear age.

"The plane came out of a clear blue sky," says Yamaoka Michiko, and you can't help recalling the now iconic video footage of the hijacked Boeing 767 as it sailed into the World Trade Center's north tower.

But Yamaoka is remembering not the horrors of 9/11 but those of Hiroshima 60 years ago, when an atomic bomb detonated as she walked from her house into the city's center on Aug. 6, 1945. The only warning was the familiar drone of a single B-29.

Yamaoka's 15-year-old face was destroyed in an instant. Even today, after over two dozen operations and under heavy make-up, it looks mottled and lumpy, like it has been reconstructed from burnt clay. She rarely looks at interviewers directly.

As she flew through the air from the force of the blast, Yamaoka knew she'd been bombed. "I thought: 'Goodbye Mother' in my heart." It was her mother who helped pull her from the wreckage; face swollen like a balloon, skin hanging from her arms in ribbons.

"I lost all my hair and there was blood when I went to the toilet. My face was so awful I hid for a long time. If I had been alone I probably would have killed myself but my mother was there every day taking care of me, even though she was sick herself. I stayed alive for her. She told me to live."

Her mother died in 1979; when they cremated her body they found shards of glass in the ashes, still embedded deep in her body from the force of the bomb. (...)

[Ohmy News, August 6, 2005]

- / Japan Focus

Hiroshima tells the 'nuclear club' to stop jeopardising the world

David McNeill — 2005-08-07T20:10:00Z

At the site of the world's first atomic attack, thousands remember the 240,000 killed amid emotional calls for peace

in Hiroshima

Tens of thousands of people from around the world gathered in Hiroshima yesterday to renew calls for the abolition of nuclear arms on the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of the city.

Under a blazing summer sun, survivors and families of victims assembled at the Peace Memorial Park near the spot where the bomb detonated on 6 August 1945, killing thousands and levelling the city.

The anniversary came as regional powers met in Beijing to urge North Korea to give up its nuclear programme, seen by Tokyo as a threat and one of the reasons behind calls within Japan to strengthen its defence and seek closer military ties with the US. (...)

- / Independent on Sunday