Tuesday, November 3, 2015

Memorial of comfort women masquerades as a peace and human rights promoter



The following is a letter sent by K. Takahashi, Chino Hills, CA, to Board of Supervisors, City and County of San Francisco, which had a public hearing for establishing a “Comfort Women” memorial in September 2015. The letter is highly comprehensive and self-explanatory - please read on.



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Dear Board of Supervisors,

I express my strong opposition to the proposal of the city’s building a memorial of comfort women for the reasons below:

First, while the proposed memorial of comfort women masquerades as a monument to promote peace and human rights, the erection of the memorial in your city would only promote hate towards the people and nation of Japan and generate unnecessary racial divide within the city.  We have in fact experienced racial tension created by an erection of a comfort women statue in the city of Glendale in July of 2013. The erection has also jeopardized the strong bilateral friendship and mutual understanding that were nurtured between the U.S. and Japan for more than half a century after WWII.                                                        
Former Glendale Mayor on the erected comfort women statue < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4eydc8bmRA>                                                     
Second, to this date, no evidence has been found to corroborate the surviving comfort women’s testimonies that they were coerced into sex slavery by the former Japanese military, despite a plethora of research conducted on the issue of comfort women over the last two decades. Academically, the theory of the Korean comfort women being sex slaves by the Imperial Japanese Army has already been refuted.  Bruce Cumings (University of Chicago) has pointed out that many women were mobilized as prostitutes by ethnic Korean procurers (then Japanese nationals), and many documents also show that the Japanese authority was trying to control illegal human trafficking in the Korean peninsula.  Yoshiaki Yoshimi (Chuo University), one of the strongest proponents of the theory of sex slavery by the Japanese military, has begun to say that “coercion” included “poverty that led the woman to sign a contract with a broker.”  Ahn Byeong-jik (Seoul Nat’l University) and Chunghee Sarah Soh (San Francisco State University), among others, have pointed out surviving comfort women’s testimonial falsification. Recently, “Comfort Women of the Empire,” written by Park Yuha (Sejong University), has been banned in South Korea, and this fact elucidates South Korea’s political milieu that would not allow a view that deviates from the dominant, paradigmatically established image of all former comfort women having been drafted by the Japanese military. < http://scholarsinenglish.blogspot.com/ >

Third, there are two important official US documents that report non-existence of evidence of forced prostitution by the Imperial Japanese Army.  It should be noted that prostitution was a legal profession until 1960 in Japan and until 2004 in Korea; it is still a legal profession in many countries, such as Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Denmark, Germany, Indonesia, Netherlands, and the UK: 
(1) Report No. 49 < http://www.exordio.com/1939-1945/codex/Documentos/report-49-USA-orig.html> states that “a comfort girl is nothing but a prostitute or ‘professional camp follower’ recruited by the Japanese and the contract they signed bound them to Army regulations and to war for the ‘house master’ for a period of from six months to a year depending on the family debt for which they were advanced.”  
(2) The report titled Final Report to the US Congress on Nazi War Crimes & Japanese Imperial Government Records <http://www.archives.gov/iwg/reports/final-report-2007.pdf > was authored by the Interagency Working Group (IWG) and published in the spring of 2007.  The US government, under the Clinton and Bush administrations, spent 7 years and 30 million dollars to look into Nazi and Japanese war crimes. Out of millions of pages of newly declassified material, much of it related to Japan, they were unable to find evidence of forced prostitution.  They also looked for information about the Nanjing Massacre and unit 731, but found no smoking guns. A Chinese organization named “Global Alliance for Preserving the History of WWII in Asia” (hereafter Global Alliancelobbied for the IWG investigation, and the IWG report offers an apology to Global Alliance for not finding anything.
Fourth, the inscription on the comfort women monuments that were built in California and New Jersey includes huge lies, the hugest being “200,000 women were forced into sex slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army.”  200,000 is the number of female factory workers conscripted to make up for the shortage of labor as WWII progressed, in accordance with the National Mobilization Law that was put into effect in 1943 in Japan. About 150,000 of these women were Japanese and 50,000 were Koreans, according to Park Yuha’s banned book.        

Fifth, the myth of the comfort women being coerced into sex slavery completely collapsed when the Asahi Newspaper finally retracted in August of 2014 a series of articles on comfort women written since 1980s.  < http://jbpress.ismedia.jp/articles/-/41617 > 

It is often pointed out that the problem of comfort women lies in human rights and in the sexual exploitation of women, and I agree completely; however, why should a controversial memorial be built in a community unrelated to the issue of comfort women to single out and criticize Japan at this juncture when we know that the violation of the dignity of women during wartime is a common problem in many parts of the world and that human trafficking and sex trafficking are current problems that building a monument or two would not stop? 

It is hypocritical that the comfort women monuments built in California and New Jersey do not mention the Korean comfort women who provided sexual services to US soldiers, despite the fact that 122 former comfort women are now suing the Korean government <http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/07/11/us-southkorea-usa-military-idUSKBN0FG0VV20140711. It is also hypocritical not to mention the Vietnamese comfort women who provided sexual services to US and Korean soldiers during the Vietnam War.  Is it because violence committed against Vietnamese women by the US and Korean soldiers are already well known that such information is completely missing in the inscription of the comfort women monument? < http://www.nationofchange.org/2015/04/09/the-scars-of-war-vietnam-comfort-women/ >

It is my sincere hope that San Francisco refrain from conforming to any attempt to exploit the humanitarian issue of comfort women for the political cause of negative campaigning against Japan.  No memorial should be built on inaccurate knowledge of history.  No constructive dialogue about human rights issues could be generated on propaganda.  Before closing, I’d like to share a video of former Buena Park Mayor Elizabeth Swift answering questions in regard to the city’s decision NOT to build a comfort women monument <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JRf5UCuEsE >.  I hope her words speak to you.  Please vote down the proposal to build a comfort women memorial in your city as well. 

Sincerely,

K. Takahashi
Chino Hills, CA


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