"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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