I’m a Canadian english teacher in Seoul, Korea. I’ve been teaching english in asia for about 5 years now. 3 years in Tokyo, Japan and 2 years in Seoul, Korea. The people here are very nice, I love their culture, I love their food. Life has been great for me here. However, one thing has always bothered me. There seems to be a great distrust between the two people. It’s really sad to see two neighbors, each with great culture and so much to offer to each other, living with so much hate.
In Korea, there seems to be a widespread anti-japanese sentiment. The main reason is, of course, its unfortunate history between the two countries. Many Koreans are upset about Japan’s attitude toward its past crimes, especially the “comfort women”(where 200,000 girls were kidnapped and forced into prostitution by the Japanese army).
In Japan, nobody seems to know or care about what happened during the first half of the 20th century. And many of those who do know claim that “comfort women” did not exist. A Japanese friend of mine claims that it’s been greatly exagerated by Koreans to recieve compensation money from the Japanese government, refering to the following website. http://coralnet.or.jp/kakichi/
My question is this. Did the “comfort women” really exist? Is there any factual basis for its denial?
The victims weren’t just Korean either, women from every single nation occupied by Japanese imperial forces were forced into slavery and forced abortions. Several court cases have been brought before the Japanese courts by Philipino women forced into sexual slavery. Following the capture of British colonies in SE Asia virtually all ‘eligible’ women were imprisoned under conditions of constant rape, often far worse than that experienced by Asian women because of lesser numbers, the inherent racist attitudes of the Japanese towards non-Asians and the ‘novelty’ erotic value of caucasian women to Japanese men. There are several dozen comfort women still alive in Australia/NZ and IIRC about 100 in Bitain in addition to the hundreds or thousands in Asia. If your friend claims it’s all made up by the Koreans then it’s the result of a conspiracy between Indonesia, Timor, PNG, Malaysia, China, Korea, Australia, England, New Zealand and a string other countries. Your freind is well up there with the holocaust deniers.
Gaspode hit the main points real well. Taiwanese were missed on the list and it was an on going issue in the mid-1980’s when I lived there. I’m sure it is still an issue. I’ve read interviews with Dutch women who were sex slaves for the Japanese army.
The one Japanese vetern I knew well in Tokyo, and who spoke native level english, said of course they went to the army run brothels. He said frankly that they neither knew nor cared how the women came to be there. It was set up and the women were available – that’s all they were concerned about.
There is verified documentation on the comfort women taken from army records.
I agree with you that there is a pretty large part of the Japanese population that neither knows nor cares what Japan did during the militaristic period. Certainly a significant percentage of Japanese have bought into the great myth that they are major victims of WW2 by virtue of being the target of a nuclear attack. (Okay, some may argue that Japan deserves something on the victim balance sheet because of the massive bombing they suffered, including the atomic bombs.) Fair enough, but that balance sheet has to include everything else including the comfort women, chemical warfare, treatment of prisoners, vivisection experiments, ad nauseum.
Yeah, welcome to the board! I’m also an English teacher in Seoul (7 1/2 years now) who used to be an English teacher in Tokyo (a little over 2 years). I have no doubt at all that comfort women were real, and I’ve read a few of their stories–really heartbreaking.
But I also remember that Japanese people often told me that it is just not a part of their culture to think about the past. To grossly generalize, it seemed to me that Japanese people did not feel the need to apologize for past wrongs (I’m talking about national wrongs, not personal ones), but they also didn’t ask for any apologies for damages they’ve suffered. My Japanese friends seemed to feel no bitterness at all about the two big bombs. One friend was a child in Nagasaki when the bomb fell. He said he thought it was inevitable, and shrugged. As a culture, they just don’t look back in that way very much. Just my observation.
Oh, and welcome to Korea, too, though after 2 years, I guess you’re settled in by now.
Howdy,
I live and work in East Timor, where some of the surviving comfort women are also still alive and talking about it.
But more recently was the Indonesion military , police, and government sponsored militia treatment of the Timorese women during the previous 25 years of illegal occupation. Unfortunately, noone really cares about punishing countries if they share enough trade.
by Watanabe Kazuko
Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars,
vol. 26, no. 4, Oct.-Dec. 1994
small part of long article below
History of Comfort Women
"Many historians and activists in Korea and Japan have worked to reclaim these women’s pasts, reconceptualizing this violation of human rights and historicizing the Japanese army’s explicit military policy of wartime prostitution. Research shows that the modern Japanese system of prostitution for soldiers began as early as the turn of the century. In the invasion of Siberia starting in 1918 the Japanese military took Japanese prostitutes with them but then left them behind. Most of these women, daughters of poor farmers, had been sold into prostitution by their families and became prostitutes called karayukisan, foreign-bound (literally China-bound) women.12
In the 1920s, as part of Japan’s imperial policies after the colonization of Korea in 1910, the Japanese Imperial Army began to mobilize Korean women as physical laborers or as enforced sex laborers. In particular, beginning with the Japanese invasion of China in 1932, the recruiting of Korean women as prostitutes was gradually institutionalized to arouse soldiers’ fighting spirit, provide them with an outlet for the frustration and fear fostered by hierarchical military life, and, ostensibly, prevent random rapes. Since the official pretext of the war was that Japan was saving other Asian nations from colonization by Western countries, the Korean comfort women were needed to prevent Japanese soldiers from sexually abusing and collectively raping local Chinese women as they did during the Nanjing Massacre in 1937. The procurement of comfort women was institutionalized to avoid atrocities that would damage the reputation of the Japanese army.
At the beginning of World War II, the Japanese army brought Japanese prostitutes with them, but many of them were suffering from venereal diseases and infected the Japanese soldiers. So Japanese brokers recruited Korean village girls, seventeen to twenty years old, from poor families. Toward the end of the war, the supply of women was enlarged by more indiscriminate kidnapping of women aged fourteen to thirty, including married women. Under the enforcement of the Military Compulsory Draft Act in 1943, more women were taken by the Japanese Imperial Army; by then the number had reached approximately 200,000, among whom 70,000 to 80,000 were sent as comfort women to the front lines in Asia.13"
It’s worth noting, now the subject has been bumped anyway, that AFAICT the dispute over comfort women is not so much over whether they existed altogether but over whether and to what extent they were 1) forced into sex slavery 2) by the Japanese military. The alternative view apparently maintains that 1) some of these women were willing participants, and 2) the system was run by private actors with the quiet acquiesence of the Japanese military.
Another thing to consider–my career path and bebegirl’s are pretty similar, though I got into teaching in East Asia about nine years later than she did–is that Japanese, Korean and Chinese students are notoriously disinterested in current events and history.
There are echoes of this in the West as well. Watch people’s eyes roll when topics like slavery, the holocaust, or drones bombing innocent civilians in the Middle East are brought up.
They haven’t apologized for eating American POWs.
Do you recall when the first President Bush was ill at a Japanese dinner?
Some of his associates in the Second World War were eaten by their captors.
Asian culture is big on NOT criticizing the leaders/their heritage/their past. So it’s only natural they lean to just moving on. Revisiting past transgressions borders on criticizing their culture. And, in their eyes, a bigger sin than refusing to acknowledge a shameful past.
Of course that leaves the victims of these horrific acts out in the cold. The excuse "they only seek monetary compensation’, is just that, an excuse.
But true reconciliation does require truth. Still, tiny steps forward count for a lot in such cultures and tiny steps are indeed happening it seems. Too little? Too late? Entirely subjective I suspect!
I don’t know many women who would volunteer to be prostitutes without receiving remuneration at the time … and nobody seems to be willing to claim the women were handed money which they were able to keep a significant portion of. And I know even fewer teen aged girls who think prostitution is the exact career choice they are eager for …
I’ll suggest subjective. The women kidnapped and forced into prostitution that are still alive are elderly, and will soon die. The problem will amount to much less at that point.
No, “they” are not. Perhaps some one or a few people but this is not the common view.
There is no doubt that the Zjspanese managed to evade taking responsibility for many of the atrocities for the war. While this is better than never acknowledging it, it really is something which should have been done much earlier.
This is probably the most significant issue. Look at how much debate there is over slavery reparations - basically, none, and it ain’t happening. Who in the USA wants to discuss slavery, Jim Crow, or what was done to the natives during the drive west, or how blatant was the expansion at the expanse of Mexico, etc.?
Any politicians who are under 60 years old were not born when the war ended. I suspect like Southerners and the debate over the Confederate flag, the Japanese are happy to embrace the parts of their heritage they can put a positive spin on, and want to ignore the bad.
The Koreans, particularly IIRC were a possession of Japan for several decades. They were certainly not regarded as equals by Japanese; they are considered an even lower form of life than the Chinese. Koreans who have lived in Japan for generations do not qualify for citizenship, IIRC. With that attitude, should you be surprised that press-ganging of such women into brothels was seen as acceptable behaviour when the morale of the imperial army was at stake?
So some were Japanese citizens, but the Japanese did whatever they could to prevent the Koreans from becoming integrated into japan, including not providing citizenship.
Many countries are not as generous as the USA, do not automatically confer citizenship to anyone born there regardless of parents.
