NEW YORK ¨C ¡°My Dear Abe-san, the moment you became the prime minister, you totally messed up Japan¡¯s relations with Korea,¡± Bong Yun-hu, my Korean friend in Pennsylvania, has recently written to me. ¡°You seem to argue that the Japanese could not have possibly forced young Korean girls to become ¡®comfort women,¡¯ but to me, a 90-year old woman who lived in that period, the conclusion is that the Japanese deceived poor farm maidens. Which is more heinous, forcing someone or deceiving someone, is self-evident.¡±
Not that Bong thinks I have some private conduit to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. She was mainly responding to my 20-year old article I¡¯d sent her about how my family was repatriated from Taiwan following Japan¡¯s defeat in 1945.
Briefly, in the late 1920s my father emigrated from Fukuoka, Kyushu, to Taiwan, which Japan had acquired in 1895 as a colony. Japan was in a chronic economic funk following the boom during World War I, and he, a high school graduate, tried a dozen jobs but none of them suited him.
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