The top or most interesting stories from Japan for January 27
– UPDATED: Overnight in Japan, ISIS released a new video in which they said the Japanese and Jordanian governments have 24 hours to organise the group’s proposed prisoner swap or hostage Kenji Goto and the Jordanian Air Force pilot, Mu’ath Said Yousef al-Kasasbeh, will be executed (The Japan Times, The Independent).
The Tokyo Broadcasting System has, according to The Japan Times, been in touch with sources who indicate ISIS wants an additional 27 prisoners freed as well as Sajida al-Rishawi, an attempted-suicide bomber.
– Voice analyst experts and friends of ISIS hostage, Kenji Goto, have expressed doubts that it’s actually his voice that is heard in the latest ransom video. This as Jordan looks into negotiating a release deal that would see Goto and an ISIS-captured Jordania Air Force piolt traded for suicide-bomber Sajida al-Rishawi and another prisoner.
Jordan is interested in seeing the safe return of the pilot and its willingness in organising a swap could be supposed after negotiating a prisoner swap last year for its ambassador to Libya. The Japanese Foreign Ministry is helping Amman with its negotiations.
In the meantime, the New York Times has profiled Kenji Goto and the late Haurna Yukawa and their meeting in Syria.
– The Japanese parliament, the Diet, reconvened yesterday for another 150 days. The hsotage crisis is Syria is expected to bring the government’s national security agenda into the spotlight, as well as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s economic reforms and the cotnroversial changes to Japan’s pacifist costitution.
– The Japanese newspaper, the Asahi Shimbun is facing a lawsuit filed by over 10,000 people for its retraction of articles on Japan’s ‘comfort women’.
In August last year, the paper formally withdrew 18 articles on Seiji Yoshida, a man who claimed to have been responsible for rounding up comfort women for Imperial Japan in World War II. However, after Yoshida’s death, the Asahi Shimbun determined his testimonies to be false.
The retraction has been embraced by right-wingers and nationalists in Japan who deny that Imperial Japan forced thousands of women to be sex slaves, or ‘comfort women’, for Japanese troops during its colonial past.
– At the same time, the Abe government continues to express a desire to move Japan’s official position away from a 1995 statement on Japan’s tainted colonial history (The Japan Times, WSJ). In 1995, then-Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama admitted Japan had made the people of Asia suffer under its rule.
This year’s statement marking 70 years since the end of World War II may, according to Abe, exclude words which would see Japan apologising. This is likely to raise tensions with both the South Korean and Chinese governments, who have been watching the statements progress intently.
– An entrepreneur in Japan’s Iwate Prefecture hopes to reduce the amount of animals killed in Japan to zero by the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. In 2013, Japanese government data records that over 128,000 cats and dogs were killed.
