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Militarism, Colonialism, and the Trafficking of Women:
"Comfort Women" Forced into Sexual Labor for Japanese Soldiers
by Watanabe Kazuko
Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars,
vol. 26, no. 4, Oct.-Dec. 1994
On 6 December 1991 Korean women who identified themselves as "military comfort women" filed a lawsuit against the Japanese government for violating their human rights. They demanded an official apology, some compensatory payment to survivors in lieu of full reparation, a thorough investigation of their cases, the revision of Japanese school textbooks identifying this issue as part of the colonial oppression of the Korean people, and the building of a memorial museum.1 With this action these women finally started to break their silence and disclose the sexual war crimes committed by the Japanese Imperial Army almost fifty years ago.
The term jugun ianfu, "military comfort woman," is a euphemism for enforced military sex laborer or slave for the Japanese Imperial Army in the name of Emperor Hirohito. The term was coined by the Japanese government, military officials, and sexual industry agents, all hoping to obscure the dreadful reality behind the term.2 The women were originally called "teishintai," which means "voluntary corps," with the Confucian connotation of self-victimization. According to Yun Chung-ok, the founder of the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Sexual Military Slavery by Japan, in this context the term also conveyed the more specific meanings of "drafting of women for sexual service to Japanese troops" and "patriotic voluntary military troops."3 It was felt that Korean women would feel more obligated by the connotations of self-sacrifice in the term teishintai because they were educated in the Confucian tradition. In reality the practice of "military comfort women" suggests not only the institutionalized, collective, systematic rape of Korean and other women by Japanese soldiers but also trafficking in women. Moreover, one person who witnessed what happened at the time, military doctor Aso Tetsuo, commented that Korean women were treated as if they were inhuman "female ammunition" and often referred to as "sanitary public toilets."4
War often violates human rights, but the case of the so-called military "comfort women" must be one of the cruelest of such violations. The historical example of "comfort women" teaches us how war perpetuates the exploitation of women and the violation of their human rights. The number of victims involved is estimated as nearly 200,000, though it is possible that the figures are even higher. It reminds us that systematic rape, institutionalized prostitution, and sexual slavery as well as war crimes were not only practiced in the past but can still be seen near military bases around the world such as those near Davao, Naha, and Phnom Penh. The collective rape in the former Yugoslavia is another form of war crime. Thus war and sexual exploitation are closely related in their violence against women that cuts across sex, gender, race, ethnic, and class lines.
The use of the term "comfort women" is obviously itself a travesty, and it would certainly be more accurate to refer to the women who did this work as "enforced military sex laborers or slaves," as Pak Fam (a Korean activist living in Japan) and the Association for Anti-Prostitution Activity suggest.5 Nevertheless, I have used the term "comfort women" in this article because this remains the way they are most commonly referred to. I would prefer to at least encase the term in quotes to register my disapproval of it, but I have not done so because that would be cumbersome if it were done throughout the article.
Although Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese, Filipina, Indonesian, as well as Dutch women also worked as "comfort women," the article focuses on Korean women, not only because they were the majority--80 percent--and have already formed a political movement, but also because the colonial and imperial system is more clearly evident in their case.6 The article has, in fact, grown out of the actions of Japanese and Korean-Japanese women's groups concerned with the "comfort women" issue. I have been following their movements closely as a Japanese woman and thus as both a victim and a victimizer. I am indebted to members of these groups for helping me prepare the article by supplying me with their materials, ideas, and life stories.
Disclosures by Comfort Women
At the meetings and interviews organized by the Military Comfort Women Issue Uriyosong Network around the December 1991 lawsuit, Kim Hak-soon, sixty-eight, was the only plaintiff who revealed her name. In tears, she related her experiences as a comfort woman, explaining that her decision was prompted by the fact that since all had died she no longer had any close family members who would be ashamed of her past. Kim Hak-soon reported: "When I was seventeen years old, the Japanese soldiers came along in a truck, beat us, and then dragged us into the back.... I was told that if I were drafted I could earn lots of money at the textile company, and that it was also the emperor's order. I was taken to China to serve as a comfort woman for Japanese soldiers at military bases. I was raped on that first day, and it never stopped for a single day for the next three months."7 Often forced to accommodate dozens of soldiers in a day, Kim tried to flee three times. Twice she was caught and severely beaten, and finally on the third attempt she escaped with the help of a Korean man. They later married, but she lost her husband and children during the Korean War.
In an interview Kim Hak-soon explained:
I was born as a woman but never lived as a woman....I suffer from a bitterness I do not know how to overcome. I only want to ask the Japanese government not to go to war again. I feel sick when I am close to a man. Not just Japanese men but all men--even my own husband, who saved me from the brothel--have made me feel this way. I shiver when I see the Japanese flag. Because it carried that flag, I hated the airplane I took to come to Japan. I've kept trying to disclose the facts....Why should I feel ashamed? I don't have to feel ashamed.8
Since then significant political actions and campaigns around military comfort women have been on the increase, and hundreds of former comfort women have told similar stories. However, the Japanese government initially denied its involvement and rejected their demands for apologies and compensation, which infuriated the survivors of sexual slavery and motivated them to reveal their pasts and appeal through the courts.
On 13 April 1992 six more Korean women sued the Japanese government. One of them revealed how Korean women were captured and drafted from school. Shim Mija, a South Korean, was said to have rebelled against the Japanese occupation armies by embroidering morning glories instead of the Japanese national flower, cherry blossoms, thus symbolizing that the Japanese government would wither in the evening. She was taken away from her school by the police, who then tortured and raped her. When she regained consciousness, she found herself already in a brothel in Japan. For the next six years she was forced to have sex with Japanese soldiers.9
In December 1992 a public hearing was held by a network of groups working on this issue in Tokyo.10 Former comfort women from six countries testified before a panel that included Theo van Boven, an expert on international law and human rights and a special rapporteur for a United Nations subcommission on protecting minorities. One Chinese woman fainted, overcome by pain and anger, and South and North Korean women who once shared a brothel hugged each other on the stage. Jeanne O'Hearn, a Dutch woman and the first European woman to testify as a comfort woman, did so in front of her daughter. She calmly reported that two hundred Dutch women were forced to provide sex in Java. This event was broadcast on TV news programs in Japan. After this public hearing, the Filipina Comfort Women Core Group organized in the Philippines and filed a lawsuit against the Japanese government. Filipina women can locate brothels and have important documents to prove their claims because most of them were not destroyed after the war.
Supported by various human rights groups, on 5 April 1993 Song Siin-do, a seventy-one-year-old Korean living in Japan, filed a lawsuit against the government in the Tokyo District Court.11 She gave birth in a brothel and her children were left behind in China when she fled to Japan after several years of forced sex labor in China. Her goal has been to change the perpetuation of sexual abuse of women, sexual exploitation, and war crimes under imperialism and colonialism; she has not asked for compensation.
Song Siin-do was also one of the survivors of violence against women who testified on 12 March 1994 at a public hearing of the Asian Tribunal on Women's Human Rights in Tokyo, organized by the Asian Women Human Rights Council and the Women's Human Rights Committee of Japan. Held after the women's human rights tribunal at the Vienna World Human Rights Conference in June 1993, this Asian tribunal brought female victims from other Asian countries to Japan to testify. These included survivors of the trafficking of women from the Philippines and Thailand who had worked as prostitutes in Japan, as well as sexual slaves for the Japanese military abroad and victims of war crimes. The "military comfort women" issue was recognized as a violation of women's human rights.
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
The Japanese government initially denied its involvement and rejected the former comfort women's demands for apologies and compensation, which infuriated the survivors of sexual slavery and motivated them to reveal their past and appeal through the courts.
At the end of World War II, most survivors of military sexual slavery were not informed of Japan's defeat. During Japan's retreat, some of them were deserted by the Japanese army, some were massacred, and others were driven into trenches or caves and either bombed or gunned down. Some of the women who returned home killed themselves when they were unable to overcome the bitter memories and shame; others survived in silence. Some of the former comfort women were obliged to support themselves by working as prostitutes in postwar Japan.14
Historically the emperor system and legal prostitution strengthened the double standard in Japan. The institution of prostitution was not legally prohibited until 1957. Enforcing respect for the emperor was used as part of the colonization of Asian people. Sixth-grade girls in Seoul's primary schools were drafted as teishintai laborers, called the emperor's children. A former Japanese teacher in Korea, Ikeda Masae, reported that "girls joined the `comfort girls' corps of their own will by either persuading their parents or overcoming opposition from their family members."15
Comfort Women and the Trafficking of Women
The testimony of former comfort women and documents on them show how women were recruited by force, kidnapped from factories and farms, or taken away because of their rebellious attitude toward Japanese colonization. Each woman was made to serve an average of thirty to forty soldiers per day, with the soldiers waiting in line outside her small room. Women who were not submissive were brutally beaten and tortured, and escape was impossible due to strict surveillance.16 Japanese soldiers were reminded that women were their common property.
Comfort women were usually placed in hierarchies according to class and nationality. Many Korean women seem to have come from lower-class worker and farmer families. Korean and other Asian women were assigned to lower-ranking soldiers, while Japanese and European women were for higher-ranking officers.
The institution of comfort women was a public practice. A document discovered in Washington, D.C. discloses how a civilian brothel owner who was captured in Burma applied to the Japanese army headquarters in Pyongyang for permission to transport the comfort girls. He took Korean girls he purchased from Pusan to Burma with tickets provided by the Japanese army.17 In another example, because of the shortage of comfort women toward the end of Word War II, Korean village leaders were ordered to send young women to participate in "important business for the Imperial Army."18
Most of the Korean comfort women were forced to lose their own nationality, called by Japanese names, and forbidden to speak Korean.19 A notice hanging at the entrance to a brothel on the outskirts of Shanghai stated: "We welcome courageous soldiers who are on duty for the holy war; Yamato nadeshiko (literally the flower called "wild pinks of Yamato," meaning "our flowerlike women of Japan") obediently dedicate their minds and bodies to you."20
Those survivors, wherever they may be living, have been physically and emotionally battered. They suffer from physical health problems such as sterility, headaches, asthma, insomnia, and fears associated with their bitter experience. Nervous breakdowns are also common.
Why did it take fifty years to disclose this issue? Why have comfort women kept silent so long? These women's stories did not surface after the war in part because the Japanese government destroyed military documents and in part because many Korean women themselves tried not to face what happened to them. This may be a reaction in common with rape or sexual harassment cases where women often remain silent because of fear of further humiliation or being attacked again. A Korean-Japanese former comfort woman, Pe Bon-gi, isolated herself in Okinawa without any welfare support, rejecting attention. In 1991 she was found dead in her small cottage. Her story became known through a nonfiction work, Akagawara no ie (A house with a red roof), written by Kawada Ayako, who was one of the few who helped her during her life.21
Confucian taboos put a priority in Korea on women's chastity, thus inhibiting women from speaking about their own sexual terror.22 Confucianism trapped women into perpetuating both the patriarchal system that created a double standard and the chastity myth. Moreover, Confucianism allowed men to continue to own women as private property. In the beginning women often had only two alternatives: either they could become comfort women or they could kill themselves to protect their own chastity--which Korean Confucianism taught them to consider more important than their lives. To live was to be guilty. They thought loss of chastity was shameful to their families. Some survivors committed suicide or stayed away from their families and led solitary lives. Thus these women suffered doubly and triply from sexual discrimination. "I was afraid to reveal my past for fifty years, but now I realize I've got only a short life left, and I will tell the whole world," said Kim Hak-soon, the first former comfort woman to reveal her name in court.23
In Japan women tend to be divided into two categories for men: mothers and prostitutes. Mothers produce soldiers as well as male children in the patriarchal institution of marriage and family, while prostitutes give the pleasure of sex in the equally patriarchal institution of prostitution. Women were, and continue to be, treated by men only as sex objects. Thus, the patriarchal, imperial, and legal prostitution system continued throughout Japan's period of modernization. The issue of comfort women as an integral part of Japanese patriarchy and imperialism cuts across divisions of state, class, gender, race, and ethnicity. Interwoven into all these divisions, the use of comfort women helped to institutionalize the trafficking of women.
Japanese Government Response to the Comfort Women Issue
On 16 January 1992, just before Japan's former prime minister Miyazawa visited South Korea, documents on "military comfort women" were discovered in the Self Defense Force Library in Tokyo by Yoshimi Yoshiaki, a professor of Japanese history at Chuo University.24 Since then many documents on "military comfort women" have been found in Japan and Washington, D.C., and witnesses have come forward to disclose how institutionalized prostitution and sexual slavery were controlled and supervised by the Japanese Imperial Army.
The inhuman practice of comfort women is rooted in discrimination in gender, race, and ethnicity, and driven by the imbalance in the international economy and systematic commodifying of female bodies.
Until Yoshimi's discoveries of incriminating documents, the Japanese government kept denying the compulsory drafting and recruiting of Korean women. During his visit to Korea on 17 January 1992, however, the Japanese prime minister apologized to the Korean people in a public speech in Parliament. Nevertheless, at that time he ruled out compensation for the military comfort women, suggesting that war compensation between Japan and Korea was settled in a 1965 agreement on war reparations. His comment disappointed the Korean and Japanese people committed to this issue.
In its second report on comfort women, the Cabinet Councilors' Office on External Affairs finally stated on 5 August 1993 that the "government admitted that Japanese military authorities were in constant control of women forced to provide sex for soldiers before and during WW II, and the government apologizes and expresses remorse over the issue." However, the Japanese government still did not bring up the issue of compensation.
After a year of further criticism and pressure, in November 1994 the Japanese government announced its plan to promote youth exchanges, create a center to support the financial independence of women, and establish a private-sector redress fund including a donation from the government to provide former comfort women with alternative compensation. However, former Korean comfort women and their supporters, primarily the Korean Council For the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, have rejected such donation or charity money as a token apology, demanding that the Japanese government provide compensation directly, along with an official letter of apology. The former comfort women and their supporters have been backed in this by a Geneva-based human rights group of legal experts from around the world, the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), which issued a 240-page report in late November 1994 urging the Japanese government to provide full rehabilitation and restitution, and as a purely interim measure the sum of U.S. $40,000 each to between 100,000 and 200,000 former comfort women.
[The International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) is a nongovernmental organization in consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council. The U.N. Human Rights Commission decided in August 1992 to look into the issue of compensation for comfort women, and the resulting ICJ report is the outcome of its mission to the Philippines, North and South Korea, and Japan in April 1993. The ICJ mission interviewed more than forty victims, three former soldiers, and government representatives, nongovernment organizations, lawyers, academics, and journalists. The report was then compiled by Ustina Dolopol of Flinders University in South Australia. The International Commisson of Jurists, P.O. Box 160, 26 Chemin de Joinveille, CH-1216, Cointrin/Geneva, Switzerland. Telephone, (41 22) 788-47 47; fax, (41 22) 788-488 80 --ED.]
The Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan also announced in July 1994 that it would file a complaint with the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague to clarify whether Japan is obliged to compensate individual women who were forced to provide sex for Japanese soldiers before and during World War II. The Permanent Court of Arbitration requires agreement by both parties, however, and the Japanese government has repeatedly decided not to accept the request. There is a need for international pressure urging the Japanese government to voluntarily present itself at the international court.
Comfort Women as a Feminist Issue and Action
In Korea agitation by the women's movement as well as anger at the Japanese government's attitude has brought the comfort women issue into the spotlight. The revelation of the condition of comfort women triggered stormy national protests, fueling animosity in Korea and encouraging more disclosures and lawsuits. In both Korean and Japan, however, without the women's movement the disclosures about comfort women and their lawsuits may never have happened or perhaps would have taken much longer to surface.
The women's movement in Korea and Japan has started to encourage women to discuss their sexuality and control their own bodies. The most influential court case occurred in Korea in the late 1980s: a Korean woman for the first time talked publicly about being raped in prison by a policeman.(25) This case taught Korean women how important it was to protest all kinds of sexual abuse.
Both in Korea and Japan women have been discovering and renaming the violation of women's sexuality--including such sexual violence as sexual harassment, domestic violence, pornography, and stereotyped images of women and gender roles. Especially, women have come to notice that sexual violence, violation of women's human rights, and sex industries and prostitution in Asian countries have worsened, and that women's bodies have been increasingly commodified. Sensing this situation, in the mid-1970s feminist activists in Korea began actions against the sex industries. At the same time, the Asian Women's Association was organized in Japan and started to protest Japanese men's sex tourism, establishing connections between Korea and Japan. Trying to examine prostitution historically, these women discovered the issue of comfort women.
Thus women started to make the connection between comfort women and the Japanese cultural apparatus responsible for the current trafficking of women and sexual violence. Sexuality was and is used to control and rule both men and women. Created through legalized prostitution based on patriarchy, colonialism, and imperialism, the system of comfort women clearly demonstrates that capitalism, sexism, and racism are linked and perpetuated both in the colonial and postcolonial eras.
Women's organizations and self-help groups were formed in Japan to politicize the issue. Through such groups women have been trying to bring about a revolution and liberation from patriarchy, militarism, and colonialism and to raise consciousness and establish their own autonomy. They have also been working to make this historic case of military slavery an international issue, utilizing international human rights laws that provide for an individual's right to compensation. This has become an urgent task, for it must be done before former comfort women are too old to be able to use compensation to improve their lives.
In August 1992 the Asian Women's Network of East Asian Countries was established in Seoul to exchange information, provide support, and nurture mutual empowerment.26 The network sent a legal appeal to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. This network has been creating a climate that will help survivors share their experiences.
To promote this network Yun Chung-ok, who is part of the same generation as the comfort women, has played a key role in the movement by conducting research on comfort women and helping establish the network of women's groups in Korea that are protesting the trafficking of women and sexual violence. This network has created a climate that has enabled women survivors to come forth to tell their experiences. In 1993 the second "Asian Solidarity Forum on Militarism and Sexual Slavery" was held in Tokyo with former comfort women and activists of eight Asian countries including South Korea, North Korea, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Japan. At the solidarity forum Yun Chung-ok's Seoul-based group, the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, proposed as an additional new goal the prosecution of the persons responsible for the planning and execution of military sexual slavery.27 Although the lawsuit by the Korean council was not accepted at the Tokyo district court, the council is moving ahead, as described in the previous section, by filing a complaint with the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague asking it to clarify whether Japan is obliged to compensate former comfort women.
Confucianism trapped women into perpetuating both the patriarchal system that created a double standard and the chastity myth. Moreover, Confucianism allowed men to continue to own women as private property.
Comfort women's hot lines have been installed by civic groups in both Korea and Japan. In the first three days the Japanese hot lines received 231 calls in Tokyo and 61 in Osaka. Most calls came from veterans over seventy years old, army doctors, and female nurses. There was one call from a former Japanese comfort woman included in the report published as Jugun ianfu 110 ban (Military comfort women hot lines). Nishino Rumiko, director of the Society Concerned with World War II, and the Group Supporting Comfort Women helped organize the hot lines. One former military man confessed: "I wanted to talk about these women for a long time, but I could not because it concerned my own sexuality. However, I felt relieved after telling you about my experience in the war."28
Three different types of action groups in Japan emphasize different aspects of the issues. The first type consists mostly of men such as the Karabao group, men's liberation groups, and Japanese-Korean groups emphasize racism, colonialism, and imperialism. They see the Japanese armies using sexual enslavement to castrate Asian men and colonize Asian women as a way of controlling these countries. These male-dominated action groups note that the Japanese army enslaved Korean women's bodies to protect Japanese women's chastity. Korean men living in Japan also felt dehumanized by Japan's degradation of Korean women. Sexual debasement in wartime contributed to the inability of the colonized countries to struggle for independence and their own identity as human beings. They were deprived of their human rights.29
In contrast, Japanese feminists groups, which are broad and the members of which are from many different professions, emphasize sexism. Women like Suzuki Yuko and other historians see in the issue of comfort women the universality of sexual violence and discrimination practiced in such sex industries as sex tourism and trafficking in women. They feel that both developed and developing countries share the guilt of sexual exploitation by treating women as commodities and creating a sexist culture.
One of these feminists, Fukushima Mizuho, a Japanese woman lawyer who has been working on the lawsuits of migrant Asian women workers and comfort women, points out the similarity between comfort women during wartime and migrant women workers who work in the sex industries in present-day Japan: "There is a parallel between comfort women and Asian women today who are deceived into coming to Japan and are then forced to work as prostitutes against their wills. Both of these groups were and are deluded by the same seductive voice: if you come to Japan, you will easily find well-paid jobs."30
Similarly, historian Suzuki Yuko suggests, sex tourism by Japanese men in other Asian countries and trafficking in Asian women is a contemporary version of the Japanese Imperial Army's prior exploitation of Asian women as comfort women. The only difference lies in whether men are in military uniforms or in business suits. It is male degradation of women as commodities.31 This analysis has been pointed out by many other feminists.
Many feminists also believe that men too are victims and are treated as commodities in militarist and capitalist societies.32 As they see it, and I agree with their argument, male soldiers were regarded as animals in need of prostitutes because they were supposedly unable to control their own sexual impulses. Male soldiers were actually made inhumane in order to be "good" fighters. The military and colonial soldiers were stimulated by sexuality just like economic soldiers in the postcolonial era. Prostitution is the reward for businessmen who may suffer death from overwork (karoshi) for their companies, as it was for the Japanese Imperial Army soldiers who were forced to risk death for the emperor on the battlefield. In this way women's sexuality has been used to expand the Japanese state's power in other Asian countries, and this continues today when migrant workers who come to Japan are forced into prostitution.
A third group, the Korean-Japanese women's groups such as the Military Comfort Women Issue Uriyosong Network based in Tokyo and the Group Considering the Korean Military Comfort Women Issue in Osaka,( )both of which were organized in 1991 to support former comfort women in Korea, tell us that the whole structure of sexism joined with racism allowed the Japanese army to institutionalize the comfort women system, and this combination continues today in sex industries that service Japanese men. The inhuman practice of comfort women is rooted in discrimination in gender, race, and ethnicity, and driven by the imbalance in the international economy and systematic commodifying of female bodies. Women's rights to control their own bodies were and are violated by a sexist and racist social structure both in the past and present. Korean-Japanese women in Japan themselves have no civil rights so that they have experienced social as well as racial and gender discrimination. Korean-Japanese Hwangbou Kangja, a committed member of the Group Considering the Korean Military Comfort Women Issue, says that she first tried to avoid facing the issues of comfort women as a wartime tragedy. But when she realized the importance of these issues, she committed herself to them as a way of grasping her own identity and raising her consciousnes.33 Through protesting against the Japanese government and organizing international conferences together, Japanese and Korean-Japanese feminist groups have started a dialogue for working together for the future.
Protest against a Condom Manufacturer
Women's action groups, such as Osaka Women against Sexual Assault, women teachers' unions, and the Group Considering the Korean Military Comfort Women Issue, have formed a coalition linking the issue of comfort women with sexual violence, postcolonial exploitation by Japanese corporations, and racism in our everyday lives. As a symbolic action they have undertaken actions against the Okamoto Rubber Manufacturing Company, the biggest condom maker in Japan. This company recently produced condoms with two names on the packages: "Rubber Man" and "Attack Champion" (Totsugeki Ichiban). The condom called Attack Champion suggests that the man's most important duty is to "charge" or "attack" enemies. In a sexual context this term is highly provocative, closely associated with collective rapes and pornographic cartoons such as Reipu man (Rape man).34 The Japanese Imperial Army officially provided Japanese soldiers with the original condom called Attack Champion to use in brothels during World War II to protect the soldiers from venereal diseases. It is obvious that this reissued name is reminiscent of the comfort women and sex industries of earlier days.
The Okamoto Manufacturing Company monopolized the condom business during Word War II under the name Kokusai Rubber Company. During the present AIDS epidemic era, this company has expanded, building factories in Malaysia with the help of Japanese official development assistance money. Raw materials have been imported into Japan from the Asian countries the Japanese Imperial Army invaded, and the company's products have been sold in Asia as well as in the United States to help family planning, good contraception, and protection from AIDS. All this shows us how human-rights-violating sexism and racism are being perpetuated in the capitalist and postcolonial era.
Women's action groups have demanded that this company conduct research on its own company's past actions, take responsibility for its actions, publicly apologize for them, educate employees about human rights, acknowledge its part in the systematic rape of Asian women during World War II, and denounce violence against women. Also, these groups demand that each condom box have a label stating that "every sexual intercourse without the women's consent is a rape."
Conclusion
So, what can we do now we have learned about this brutal aspect of history? We need new strategies. Unless sexual violence and the commodification of women's bodies is eliminated, there will always be comfort women. Recently the world has seen additional offensive cases, such as a representative of the Japanese government suggesting providing Japanese Peace-Keeper Operation (PKO) soldiers with condoms when they were sent from Japan to Cambodia. This equipping of men to buy women in other Asian countries brings to mind the practice of comfort women.
We have to change social structures as well as our consciousness, and acknowledge victims as courageous survivors. We have to keep re-creating a climate in which women will speak out against rape, sex tourism, prostitution, and the use of comfort women. Women must unite to fight against myths that obscure reality. A global women's movement has encouraged women to establish a network to halt the trafficking of women, unify the peace movement, and also form support groups for former military comfort women. Japanese women must establish close networks with Korean-Japanese women in Japan as well as with Korean women in Korea to change the social structures that allow men to exploit women's sexuality.
Global pressure is also needed to push the Japanese government to take full responsibility for what it has done in neighboring countries during war. The Japanese government is sensitive to international pressure. Women's collective voices must be a great force for change in the Japanese government's attitude regarding comfort women. By forcing the Japanese government to deal with the compensation issues, such pressure may help build closer relationships between Japan and other Asian nations.
We have to stop war; we have to monitor the new militarism in Japan--such as the bill attempting to allow the dispatch of Japanese Self-Defense Corps troops under the PKO and to change the constitution that prohibits any armaments. The United Nations Anti-Discrimination Act appropriately says that "without peace there would be no equality; without equality there would be no peace." I must add that there will be no human rights either. Hwangbou Kangja suggests that the Japanese government's treatment of the comfort women issue is a barometer of its sensitivity to human rights. Eight former comfort women have passed away in the last few years, three in 1993 alone. There is little time left.
Endnotes
*An earlier version of this article was read at the "Fifth International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women" held at the University of Costa Rica in February 1993. Since then it has been revised, and more information has been added to it. I wish to thank the Japanese and Japanese-Korean women's groups that provided me with information and stories about "comfort women," and E. Patricia Tsurumi and Edward Friedman of the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars for their help with editing. We at the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars also wish to thank Kevin Rooney, Kyung Menkick, and Alice Yun Chai for translating caption information for us, and Ito Takashi, Yun Chung-ok, Shimada Yoshiko, E. Patricia Tsurumi, Alice Chai, Joan Ericson, Brenda Stoltzfus, and Saundra Sturdevant for helping us obtain graphics for this article.
Jugun Ianfu Mondai Uriyosong Nettowaku (Military Comfort Women Issue Uriyosong Network), ed., Kono han o toku (To liberate this bitterness) (Tokyo, Jugun Ianfu Mondai Uriyosong Nettowaku, 1992); and Kaiho Shuppansha, ed., Kim Hak-soon-san no shogen (The testimony of Kim Hak-soon) (Tokyo: Kaiho Shuppansha, 1993). See the end of this article for a list of the names and addresses of twenty-three of the many organizations (thirteen mentioned in this article) that have dealt or are now dealing with comfort women and related issues.
Kim Iryumiyon, Tenno no guntai to Chosenjin ianfu (The emperor's army and Korean comfort women) (Tokyo: Sanichi Shobo, 1976); Suzuki Yuko, Jugun ianfu to Naisen kekkon (Military comfort women and marriage between Japanese and Koreans) (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1992); Suzuki Yuko, Chosenjin jugun ianfu (Korean military comfort women) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1991); and Suzuki Yuko, "Jugun ianfu" mondai to sei boryoku ("Military comfort women" issues and sexual violence) (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1994).
Yun Chung-ok, "Chosenjin jugun ianfu" (Korean military comfort women), in Chosenjin jugun ianfu mondai shiryoshu 3 (Chongshindae resource collection 3) (Tokyo: Chosenjin Jugun Ianfu Mondai o Kangaeru Kai). This collection is a Japanese version of Yun Chung-ok, Chongshindae chaeryojip 3: chongshindae munje Ashia daehwee bokoso (Chongshindae resource collection 3: report of the Asian conference on the "comfort women" issue) (Seoul: Hankuk Chongshindae Munje Daechaek Hyopwihwe [literally the Committee to Resolve the Comfort Women Issue, but the name used in English is the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan], July 1992).
Nishino Rumiko, Jugun ianfu: moto heishitachi no shogen (Military comfort women: testimony of former soldiers) (Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 1991), pp. 42-43. Jugun Ianfu Mondai Kodo Nettowaku (Military Comfort Women Issue Action Network), Jugun Ianfu Mondai Ajia Rentai Kaigi Hokokushu (Report on the Asian Association Conference on the Comfort Women Issue) (Tokyo: Baibaishun Mondai to Torikumu Kai [Association of Anti-Prostitution Activity], 1993); and Kim Iryumiyon, Tenno no guntai to Chosenjin ianfu, p. 17.
National Christian Council, ed., Report: The Asian Solidarity Forum on Militarism and Sexual Slavery (Nishi-Waseda, Tokyo: National Christian Council, 1994).
Zainichi no Ianfu Saiban o Sasaeru Kai (Support Group for the Lawsuit of Korean Former Comfort Women Resident in Japan), ed., Sojo (Written complaints) (Tokyo: Zainichi no Ianfu Saiban o Sasaeru Kai, 1993).
Kaiho Shuppansha, ed., Kim Hak-soon san no shogen; and Jugun Ianfu Mondai Uriyosong Nettowaku, ed., Kono han o toku.
Ibid.
Hirabayashi Hisae, Kyosei renko to jugun ianfu (Forced recruits and military comfort women) (Tokyo: Nihon Tosho Centa, 1992) p. 189.
Executive Committee, International Public Hearing Concerning Post War Compensation by Japan, ed., War Victimization and Japan: International Public Hearing Report (Tokyo: Toho Shuppan, 1993).
Jugun Ianfu Mondai Uriyosong Nettowaku Nyusuretta (The Military Comfort Women Issue Uriyosong Network newsletter), no.5 (April 1993); and the Zainichi no Ianfu Saiban o Sasaeru Kai, Sojo. This support group also published a booklet, Zainichi moto jugun ianfu, Song Siin-do (The story of Song Siin-do, Korean former "comfort woman" resident in Japan) (Tokyo: Zainichi no Ianfu Saiban o Sasaeru Kai, 1993).
Many books on Korean comfort women are available in Japanese. My report is based on Suzuki's three books (see n. 1) as well as her speeches.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Asahi Shinbun Sha, ed., Onnatachi no Taiheiyo Senso (Women's Pacific War) (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbun Sha, 1992).
Kankoku Teishintai Mondai Taisaku Kyogi Kai (the Japanese name for the Hankuk Chongshindae Munje Daechaek Hyopwihwe, in English the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Sexual Slavery by Japan [see n. 3] ), ed., Shogen: Kyosei renko sareta Chosenjin gun ianfu tachi (Testimony: kidnapped Korean military comfort women) (Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 1993). This book was written in Korean and then translated into both Japanese and English.
Yun Chung-ok, Chosenjin jugun ianfu mondai shiryoshu 2-3, the Japanese version of Yun Chun-ok, Chongshindae chaeryojip 2-3 (Chongshindae resource collection 2-3).
Ibid.
Zainippon Chosenminshu Josei Domei (People's Republic of Korea Resident in Japan Women's Association), ed., Chosenjin "ianfu" (Korean "comfort women") (Tokyo, Zainippon Chosenminshu Josei Domei, 1992).
Ibid.
Kawada Ayako, Akagawara no ie (A house with a red roof) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1989). Also see Asahi Shinbun Sha, ed., Onnatachi no Taiheiyo Senso.
Kim Iryumiyon, Jugun ianfu to Naisen kekkon; and Yun Chung-ok, ed., Chosenjin josei ga mita "ianfu mondai" (Korean women's view of the comfort women issue) (Tokyo: Sanichi Shobo, 1992).
Jugun Ianfu Mondai Uriyosong Nettowaku, Kono han o toku.
Yoshimi Yoshiaki, ed., Jugun ianfu shogen shu (A collection of trial documents of military comfort women) (Tokyo: Otsuki Shoten, 1992).
Suzuki, Chosenjin jugun ianfu.
Jugun Ianfu Mondai Kodo Nettowaku, ed., Jugun Ianfu Mondai Ajia Rentai Kaigi Hokokushu.
National Christian Council, ed., Report: The Asian Solidarity Forum on Militarism and Sexual Slavery.
Jugun Ianfu 110 Ban Henshu Iinkai (Military Comfort Women Hot Line Editorial Committee), ed., Jugun ianfu 110 ban (Military comfort women hot lines) (Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 1992).
Takagi Kenichi, Jugun ianfu to sengo hosho (Military comfort women and war compensation) (Tokyo: Sanichi Shobo, 1992).
Fukushima Mizuho, personal interview with the author, April 1992.
Suzuki, "Jugun ianfu" mondai to sei boryoku.
Ibid.
Hwangbou Kangja, "`Zaini' josei to Chosenjin jugun ianfu mondai" (The issue of forced military prostitution from the perspective of Korean women resident in Japan), Joseigaku Nenpo (Women's studies yearly report), vol. 13 (1992), pp. 36-45.
Reipu man (Rape man) is the title of a comic and the name of the central character, whose profession is to rape women.
Saturday, September 7, 2013
Friday, September 6, 2013
the main Leading of anti-Japan attacks in the U.S is China GA
http://sankei.jp.msn.com/world/news/130831/amr13083108510003-n1.htm
米国にいる日本攻撃の主役
2013.8.31 08:46 （1/3ページ）［米国］
７月３０日、米西部グレンデール市内に設置された慰安婦を象徴する像と記念撮影をする韓国人ら （黒沢潤撮影）
米国カリフォルニア州南部のグレンデール市に慰安婦像が設置されて１カ月が過ぎた。すぐ近くのブエナパーク市での同様の動きは地元在住の日本人たちの明確な反対もあって阻止されたようだ。だがこんどは同州北部のミルピタス市で似た動きがあるという。
日本非難を露骨にしたこんな活動を米国内で一貫して進めるのは一体、だれなのか。日本側では単に「韓国ロビー」というだけで、その実態は伝えられない。
すでに慰安婦碑を建てた東部のニュージャージー州などでの動きを含めて表面に出るのは、ごく少数の韓国系米国人の名と特定地域で旗揚げした「カリフォルニア州韓国系米国人フォーラム（ＫＡＦＣ）」というような新参の団体名だけなのだ。全米規模で機能する韓国系組織の存在は感じられない。
そんなことをいぶかっていたら真の主役がやはり顔を出してきた。中国系在米反日組織の「世界抗日戦争史実維護連合会」（抗日連合会）である。
抗日連合会はカリフォルニアやニュージャージーでの慰安婦像などの設置を自己の活動の「最新の前進」として自サイトで公式に発表したのだ。米国各地での慰安婦像の設置を今後も推進すると宣言していた。
しかも抗日連合会の創設者で現副会長のイグナシアス・ディン氏は、グレンデールの慰安婦像に関する中国共産党直轄の英字紙「チャイナ・デーリー」の長文記事で、設置運動の最高責任者のように描かれていた。
この記事は抗日連合会の元会長、アイビー・リー氏の「慰安婦問題では中国も犠牲者なのだ」という言葉をも強調していた。だからグレンデールでもこの中国系組織が韓国系を背後から全面支援していたというのである。
米国下院の２００７年の慰安婦決議も抗日連合会が最初から最後まで最大の推進役だった。同連合会は１９９０年代からカリフォルニア州会議員だったマイク・ホンダ氏に慰安婦をはじめとする日本の「戦争での罪悪」を教示し、州議会で日本糾弾の決議を採択させた。
ホンダ氏が２０００年に連邦議会の下院選に立った時はディン氏、リー氏ら抗日連合会の幹部たちは選挙資金を集中的に寄付した。その後、ホンダ氏は下院に慰安婦決議案を４回も出したが、その内容は同連合会との完全な合作だった。
抗日連合会は１９９４年に、中国政府と連携した中国系米人たちによりカリフォルニアを本部に設立された。「日本に戦争での残虐行為を謝罪させ、賠償させる」ことを主目的とし、南京、捕虜虐待、７３１部隊、慰安婦を挙げてきた。戦犯裁判や対日講和条約での日本の責任受け入れを一切、認めない点で明白な反日組織である。
だから抗日連合会は米国での慰安婦問題での日本叩きはもう２０年近くの超ベテランなのだ。ちなみにその活動の頂点に立つディン氏は今年６月、橋下徹大阪市長の慰安婦発言を非難するサンフランシスコ市議会の決議案も自分が起草したと述べている。
グレンデールの実情に詳しい在米２６年のビジネスマン、今森貞夫氏も「地元では、韓国系だけでは組織も活動も希薄で、抗日連合会に扇動され、指導された構図が明白だった」と語る。
米国を利用してのこの慰安婦問題は日本への汚辱を世界に、そして日本の後世に、残そうとする意図が露骨である。そんな対日攻撃への備えでは主敵がだれなのかの認定がまず重要だろう。（ワシントン駐在客員特派員 古森義久）
世界抗日戦争史実維護連合会
世界抗日战争史实维护联合会、英語表記はGlobal Alliance for Preserving the History of WW II in Asia[1])は、抗日・反日ロビー活動を主眼とする中国系アメリカ人による団体。本部はアメリカ合衆国カリフォルニア州。
対日集団訴訟などへのよびかけでも強い影響力を持っており、アイリス・チャンの著書『ザ・レイプ・オブ・南京』②の宣伝販売や、日本企業に強制労働を強いられたとする賠償請求運動、日本軍の慰安婦問題についての支援活動やロビー活動、2007年の日本軍慰安婦を性奴隷であり「20世紀最大の人身売買」と断定して日本に謝罪を要求したアメリカ合衆国下院121号決議が可決された際、中心的な役割を果たしたことでも知られる。
略称は抗日連合会(Global Alliance)、抗日戦争史実維護会など。本稿では以下、抗日連合会と称す。wiki
http://www.global-alliance.net/mission.html
http://www.global-alliance.net/index.html
南京1937年 日本侵略 中国首都南京状況
Nanjing,1937, japanese forces invade the capital city of China
today,Nanjing memorial museum,achild ponders an unimaginable massacre
http://www.global-alliance.net/home.html
An introduction
The Global Alliance, a world-wide consortium, is dedicated to disclosing truthfully the facts about the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945). Only by accurately reconstructing and carefully studying the history of this period can justice be restored to millions of victims of Imperial Japan's aggression, invasion, and occupation of mainland Asia and island nations of the Pacific.
We invite all to join this venture, to participate in this study, to honor the memory of the victims, and to seek peace, justice, and reconciliation among all nations of the Pacific.
Scenes of Japanese aggression in China
A brief outline of Japan's aggression in mainland Asia:
1870s – Following the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and its modernization program, Japan tries to assert itself as a Western power in Asia. It attempts to coerce China into signing an “unequal” trade treaty following the Western model. China refuses.
1879 – Japan annexes the Ryukyu Islands, which up to this point, have been considered a tributary state of China. Its name is now changed to Okinawa and becomes part of the Japanese state thus extending Japan’s borders.
1895 – In the Treaty of Shimonoseki following the defeat of China in the First China-Japanese War 1894-95 over Korea, China cedes Taiwan and the Pescadores Islands to Japan. Taiwan remains under Japanese colonial rule for 50 years until the end of the war in 1945.
1905 – Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) leads to the cession of the Russian controlled South Manchurian Railroad to Japan adding to Japan’s growing influence in Northeast Asia.
1910 – Japan’s gradual inroads into Korea lead the Japanese to annex Korea, which is then subjected to harsh Japanese colonial rule for 35 years until 1945.
1914 – Taking advantage of Germany’s declaration of war in Europe, Japan declares war on Germany and sends troops to seize German properties in Shandong province in China proper.
1915 – The Japanese issue the infamous “21 Demands” on China to cede to Japan special rights in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, and control of southeast China and the Yangtze valley.
1928 – On May 3 Japanese instigated an incident in Ji’nan, Shandong that leads to the Ji’nan Massacre in which over 4,000 people were killed by Japanese troops. Eventually over 30,000 invading Japanese troops enter and occupy Ji’nan, continuing the massacre, rape, and looting.
1931 – On September 18 the Japanese proceed to occupy Manchuria following the Mukden incident of 1931, which marks the beginning of the 14-year long brutal War of Resistance against Japan.
By 1930 Japan's rulers had devised a national plan of military expansion in Asia, and exploitation of China's resources. The Chinese were left with nothing to modernize their own society. Both Europe and the US had began to profit from trade with China.
In 1931 Japanese military aggression expanded in a fabricated incident that Japan alleged was started by Chinese thieves. The "Mukden Incident" became the excuse for Japan to occupy Manchuria, and to begin a murderous campaign of conquest in China. A six-year Japanese campaign of aerial bombing of civilian populations and use of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction culminated with the Second China-Japanese War in 1937. In July of that year, Japan attacked Chinese forces in Beijing. They invaded Shanghai in August.
On December 13, marching west from Shanghai, Japanese forces entered Nanjing, the national capital city of China. So began the Japanese "Rape of Nanjing."
Before it was finally ended in August, 1945, Japan had achieved an unmatched record of barbarous warfare, killing and looting. Today, eight decades later, Japan shows no remorse and no contrition.
米国にいる日本攻撃の主役
2013.8.31 08:46 （1/3ページ）［米国］
７月３０日、米西部グレンデール市内に設置された慰安婦を象徴する像と記念撮影をする韓国人ら （黒沢潤撮影）
米国カリフォルニア州南部のグレンデール市に慰安婦像が設置されて１カ月が過ぎた。すぐ近くのブエナパーク市での同様の動きは地元在住の日本人たちの明確な反対もあって阻止されたようだ。だがこんどは同州北部のミルピタス市で似た動きがあるという。
日本非難を露骨にしたこんな活動を米国内で一貫して進めるのは一体、だれなのか。日本側では単に「韓国ロビー」というだけで、その実態は伝えられない。
すでに慰安婦碑を建てた東部のニュージャージー州などでの動きを含めて表面に出るのは、ごく少数の韓国系米国人の名と特定地域で旗揚げした「カリフォルニア州韓国系米国人フォーラム（ＫＡＦＣ）」というような新参の団体名だけなのだ。全米規模で機能する韓国系組織の存在は感じられない。
そんなことをいぶかっていたら真の主役がやはり顔を出してきた。中国系在米反日組織の「世界抗日戦争史実維護連合会」（抗日連合会）である。
抗日連合会はカリフォルニアやニュージャージーでの慰安婦像などの設置を自己の活動の「最新の前進」として自サイトで公式に発表したのだ。米国各地での慰安婦像の設置を今後も推進すると宣言していた。
しかも抗日連合会の創設者で現副会長のイグナシアス・ディン氏は、グレンデールの慰安婦像に関する中国共産党直轄の英字紙「チャイナ・デーリー」の長文記事で、設置運動の最高責任者のように描かれていた。
この記事は抗日連合会の元会長、アイビー・リー氏の「慰安婦問題では中国も犠牲者なのだ」という言葉をも強調していた。だからグレンデールでもこの中国系組織が韓国系を背後から全面支援していたというのである。
米国下院の２００７年の慰安婦決議も抗日連合会が最初から最後まで最大の推進役だった。同連合会は１９９０年代からカリフォルニア州会議員だったマイク・ホンダ氏に慰安婦をはじめとする日本の「戦争での罪悪」を教示し、州議会で日本糾弾の決議を採択させた。
ホンダ氏が２０００年に連邦議会の下院選に立った時はディン氏、リー氏ら抗日連合会の幹部たちは選挙資金を集中的に寄付した。その後、ホンダ氏は下院に慰安婦決議案を４回も出したが、その内容は同連合会との完全な合作だった。
抗日連合会は１９９４年に、中国政府と連携した中国系米人たちによりカリフォルニアを本部に設立された。「日本に戦争での残虐行為を謝罪させ、賠償させる」ことを主目的とし、南京、捕虜虐待、７３１部隊、慰安婦を挙げてきた。戦犯裁判や対日講和条約での日本の責任受け入れを一切、認めない点で明白な反日組織である。
だから抗日連合会は米国での慰安婦問題での日本叩きはもう２０年近くの超ベテランなのだ。ちなみにその活動の頂点に立つディン氏は今年６月、橋下徹大阪市長の慰安婦発言を非難するサンフランシスコ市議会の決議案も自分が起草したと述べている。
グレンデールの実情に詳しい在米２６年のビジネスマン、今森貞夫氏も「地元では、韓国系だけでは組織も活動も希薄で、抗日連合会に扇動され、指導された構図が明白だった」と語る。
米国を利用してのこの慰安婦問題は日本への汚辱を世界に、そして日本の後世に、残そうとする意図が露骨である。そんな対日攻撃への備えでは主敵がだれなのかの認定がまず重要だろう。（ワシントン駐在客員特派員 古森義久）
世界抗日戦争史実維護連合会
世界抗日战争史实维护联合会、英語表記はGlobal Alliance for Preserving the History of WW II in Asia[1])は、抗日・反日ロビー活動を主眼とする中国系アメリカ人による団体。本部はアメリカ合衆国カリフォルニア州。
対日集団訴訟などへのよびかけでも強い影響力を持っており、アイリス・チャンの著書『ザ・レイプ・オブ・南京』②の宣伝販売や、日本企業に強制労働を強いられたとする賠償請求運動、日本軍の慰安婦問題についての支援活動やロビー活動、2007年の日本軍慰安婦を性奴隷であり「20世紀最大の人身売買」と断定して日本に謝罪を要求したアメリカ合衆国下院121号決議が可決された際、中心的な役割を果たしたことでも知られる。
略称は抗日連合会(Global Alliance)、抗日戦争史実維護会など。本稿では以下、抗日連合会と称す。wiki
http://www.global-alliance.net/mission.html
http://www.global-alliance.net/index.html
南京1937年 日本侵略 中国首都南京状況
Nanjing,1937, japanese forces invade the capital city of China
today,Nanjing memorial museum,achild ponders an unimaginable massacre
http://www.global-alliance.net/home.html
An introduction
The Global Alliance, a world-wide consortium, is dedicated to disclosing truthfully the facts about the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945). Only by accurately reconstructing and carefully studying the history of this period can justice be restored to millions of victims of Imperial Japan's aggression, invasion, and occupation of mainland Asia and island nations of the Pacific.
We invite all to join this venture, to participate in this study, to honor the memory of the victims, and to seek peace, justice, and reconciliation among all nations of the Pacific.
Scenes of Japanese aggression in China
A brief outline of Japan's aggression in mainland Asia:
1870s – Following the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and its modernization program, Japan tries to assert itself as a Western power in Asia. It attempts to coerce China into signing an “unequal” trade treaty following the Western model. China refuses.
1879 – Japan annexes the Ryukyu Islands, which up to this point, have been considered a tributary state of China. Its name is now changed to Okinawa and becomes part of the Japanese state thus extending Japan’s borders.
1895 – In the Treaty of Shimonoseki following the defeat of China in the First China-Japanese War 1894-95 over Korea, China cedes Taiwan and the Pescadores Islands to Japan. Taiwan remains under Japanese colonial rule for 50 years until the end of the war in 1945.
1905 – Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) leads to the cession of the Russian controlled South Manchurian Railroad to Japan adding to Japan’s growing influence in Northeast Asia.
1910 – Japan’s gradual inroads into Korea lead the Japanese to annex Korea, which is then subjected to harsh Japanese colonial rule for 35 years until 1945.
1914 – Taking advantage of Germany’s declaration of war in Europe, Japan declares war on Germany and sends troops to seize German properties in Shandong province in China proper.
1915 – The Japanese issue the infamous “21 Demands” on China to cede to Japan special rights in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, and control of southeast China and the Yangtze valley.
1928 – On May 3 Japanese instigated an incident in Ji’nan, Shandong that leads to the Ji’nan Massacre in which over 4,000 people were killed by Japanese troops. Eventually over 30,000 invading Japanese troops enter and occupy Ji’nan, continuing the massacre, rape, and looting.
1931 – On September 18 the Japanese proceed to occupy Manchuria following the Mukden incident of 1931, which marks the beginning of the 14-year long brutal War of Resistance against Japan.
By 1930 Japan's rulers had devised a national plan of military expansion in Asia, and exploitation of China's resources. The Chinese were left with nothing to modernize their own society. Both Europe and the US had began to profit from trade with China.
In 1931 Japanese military aggression expanded in a fabricated incident that Japan alleged was started by Chinese thieves. The "Mukden Incident" became the excuse for Japan to occupy Manchuria, and to begin a murderous campaign of conquest in China. A six-year Japanese campaign of aerial bombing of civilian populations and use of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction culminated with the Second China-Japanese War in 1937. In July of that year, Japan attacked Chinese forces in Beijing. They invaded Shanghai in August.
On December 13, marching west from Shanghai, Japanese forces entered Nanjing, the national capital city of China. So began the Japanese "Rape of Nanjing."
Before it was finally ended in August, 1945, Japan had achieved an unmatched record of barbarous warfare, killing and looting. Today, eight decades later, Japan shows no remorse and no contrition.
What Japanese history lessons leave out By Mariko Oi BBC News, Tokyo
What Japanese history lessons leave out
By Mariko Oi
BBC News, Tokyo
Japanese boys taking place in historical re-enactment
Continue reading the main story
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Japanese people often fail to understand why neighbouring countries harbour a grudge over events that happened in the 1930s and 40s. The reason, in many cases, is that they barely learned any 20th Century history. I myself only got a full picture when I left Japan and went to school in Australia.
From Homo erectus to the present day - more than a million years of history in just one year of lessons. That is how, at the age of 14, I first learned of Japan's relations with the outside world.
For three hours a week - 105 hours over the year - we edged towards the 20th Century.
It's hardly surprising that some classes, in some schools, never get there, and are told by teachers to finish the book in their spare time.
When I returned recently to my old school, Sacred Heart in Tokyo, teachers told me they often have to start hurrying, near the end of the year, to make sure they have time for World War II.
"When I joined Sacred Heart as a teacher, I was asked by the principal to make sure that I teach all the way up to modern history," says my history teacher from Year Eight.
"We have strong ties with our sister schools in the Asian region so we want our students to understand Japan's historical relationship with our neighbouring countries."
I still remember her telling the class, 17 years ago, about the importance of Japan's war history and making the point that many of today's geopolitical tensions stem from what happened then.
Japanese history book showing footnote about rape of Nanking
Mariko's Japanese textbook: Only a footnote on the Nanjing massacre
I also remember wondering why we couldn't go straight to that period if it was so important, instead of wasting time on the Pleistocene epoch.
When we did finally get there, it turned out only 19 of the book's 357 pages dealt with events between 1931 and 1945.
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Nanjing massacre, 1937-38
Flowers at memorial for Nanjing massacre
A six-week period of bloodshed, after the Japanese capture of the city in December 1937
International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), set up after WWII, estimated more than 200,000 people were killed, including many women and children
Dispute over scale of atrocity remains a sticking point in Chinese/Japanese relations - some Japanese question whether a massacre took place
Scarred by history: The Rape of Nanking
BBC History: Japan's Quest for Empire
There was one page on what is known as the Mukden incident, when Japanese soldiers blew up a railway in Manchuria in China in 1931.
There was one page on other events leading up to the Sino-Japanese war in 1937 - including one line, in a footnote, about the massacre that took place when Japanese forces invaded Nanjing - the Nanjing Massacre, or Rape of Nanjing.
There was another sentence on the Koreans and the Chinese who were brought to Japan as miners during the war, and one line, again in a footnote, on "comfort women" - a prostitution corps created by the Imperial Army of Japan.
There was also just one sentence on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I wanted to know more, but was not quite eager enough to delve into the subject in my spare time. As a teenager, I was more interested in fashion and boys.
My friends had a chance to choose world history as a subject in Year 11. But by that stage I had left the Japanese schooling system, and was living in Australia.
I remember the excitement when I noticed that instead of ploughing chronologically through a given period, classes would focus on a handful of crucial events in world history.
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“
Start Quote
Nobukatsu Fujioka
All of the photographs that China uses as evidence of the massacre are fabricated”
Nobukatsu Fujioka
So brushing aside my teacher's objection that I would struggle with the high volume of reading and writing in English - a language I could barely converse in - I picked history as one of my subjects for the international baccalaureate.
My first ever essay in English was on the Rape of Nanjing.
There is controversy over what happened. The Chinese say 300,000 were killed and many women were gang-raped by the Japanese soldiers, but as I spent six months researching all sides of the argument, I learned that some in Japan deny the incident altogether.
Nobukatsu Fujioka is one of them and the author of one of the books that I read as part of my research.
"It was a battlefield so people were killed but there was no systematic massacre or rape," he says, when I meet him in Tokyo.
"The Chinese government hired actors and actresses, pretending to be the victims when they invited some Japanese journalists to write about them.
"All of the photographs that China uses as evidence of the massacre are fabricated because the same picture of decapitated heads, for example, has emerged as a photograph from the civil war between Kuomintang and Communist parties."
As a 17-year-old student, I was not trying to make a definitive judgement on what exactly happened, but reading a dozen books on the incident at least allowed me to understand why many people in China still feel bitter about Japan's military past.
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Comfort women
Former comfort women in South Korea protest against Japan
200,000 women in territories occupied by Japan during WWII estimated to have been forced into becoming sex slaves for troops, or "comfort women"
In 1993 Japan acknowledged use of wartime brothels
In 2007 Japanese PM Shinzo Abe was forced to apologise after casting doubt on the existence of comfort women
While school pupils in Japan may read just one line on the massacre, children in China are taught in detail not just about the Rape of Nanjing but numerous other Japanese war crimes, though these accounts of the war are sometimes criticised for being overly anti-Japanese.
The same can be said about South Korea, where the education system places great emphasis on our modern history. This has resulted in very different perceptions of the same events in countries an hour's flying time apart.
One of the most contentious topics there is the comfort women.
Fujioka believes they were paid prostitutes. But Japan's neighbours, such as South Korea and Taiwan, say they were forced to work as sex slaves for the Japanese army.
Without knowing these debates, it is extremely difficult to grasp why recent territorial disputes with China or South Korea cause such an emotional reaction among our neighbours. The sheer hostility shown towards Japan by ordinary people in street demonstrations seems bewildering and even barbaric to many Japanese television viewers.
Equally, Japanese people often find it hard to grasp why politicians' visits to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine - which honours war criminals among other Japanese soldiers - cause quite so much anger.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, visiting the Yasukuni Shrine in 2012
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, visiting the Yasukuni Shrine in 2012
I asked the children of some friends and colleagues how much history they had picked up during their school years.
Twenty-year-old university student Nami Yoshida and her older sister Mai - both undergraduates studying science - say they haven't heard about comfort women.
"I've heard of the Nanjing massacre but I don't know what it's about," they both say.
"At school, we learn more about what happened a long time ago, like the samurai era," Nami adds.
Seventeen-year-old Yuki Tsukamoto says the "Mukden incident" and Japan's invasion of the Korean peninsula in the late 16th Century help to explain Japan's unpopularity in the region.
"I think it is understandable that some people are upset, because no-one wants their own country to be invaded," he says.
But he too is unaware of the plight of the comfort women.
Chinese demonstration 18 September 2012
Chinese protesters often mark anniversaries of 20th Century clashes with Japan
Former history teacher and scholar Tamaki Matsuoka holds Japan's education system responsible for a number of the country's foreign relations difficulties.
"Our system has been creating young people who get annoyed by all the complaints that China and South Korea make about war atrocities because they are not taught what they are complaining about," she said.
"It is very dangerous because some of them may resort to the internet to get more information and then they start believing the nationalists' views that Japan did nothing wrong."
I first saw her work, based on interviews with Japanese soldiers who invaded Nanjing, when I visited the museum in the city a few years ago.
"There were many testimonies by the victims but I thought we needed to hear from the soldiers," she says.
"It took me many years but I interviewed 250 of them. Many initially refused to talk, but eventually, they admitted to killing, stealing and raping."
Tamaki Matsuoka (2010)
Matsuoka accuses the government of a deliberate silence about atrocities
When I saw her video interviews of the soldiers, it was not just their admission of war crimes which shocked me, it was their age. Already elderly by the time she interviewed them, many had been barely 20 at the time, and in a strange way, it humanised them.
I was choked with an extremely complex emotion. Sad to see Japan repeatedly described as evil and dubbed "the devil", and nervous because I wondered how people around me would react if they knew I was Japanese. But there was also the big question why - what drove these young soldiers to kill and rape?
When Matsuoka published her book, she received many threats from nationalist groups.
She and Fujioka represent two opposing camps in a debate about what should be taught in Japanese schools.
Fujioka and his Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform say most textbooks are "masochistic" and only teach about Japan in negative light.
Continue reading the main story
History tuition in Japan
Students first learn about Japanese history in Year Six, over 105 hours of lessons
In Year Eight of junior high school, they study the history of Japan's relations with the rest of the world - this course now lasts for 130 hours
Seven history textbooks are approved by the Education Ministry - schools can choose which they use
Students can also choose to study World History in Year 11
"The Japanese textbook authorisation system has the so-called "neighbouring country clause" which means that textbooks have to show understanding in their treatment of historical events involving neighbouring Asian countries. It is just ridiculous," he says.
He is widely known for pressuring politicians to remove the term "comfort women" from all the junior high school textbooks. His first textbook, which won government approval in 2001, made a brief reference to the death of Chinese soldiers and civilians in Nanjing, but he plans to tone it down further in his next book.
But is ignorance the solution?
The Ministry of Education's guidelines for junior high schools state that all children must be taught about Japan's "historical relations with its Asian neighbours and the catastrophic damage caused by the World War II to humanity at large".
"That means schools have to teach about the Japanese military's increased influence and extension of its power [in the 1930s] and the prolonged war in China," says ministry spokesman Akihiko Horiuchi.
Continue reading the main story
Textbook crisis
2005 protest in South Korea against Japanese history textbooks
In 2005, protests were sparked in China and South Korea by a textbook prepared by the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, which had been approved by the government in 2001.
Foreign critics said it whitewashed Japan's war record during the 1930s and early 1940s.
It referred to the Nanjing massacre as an "incident", and glossed over the issue of comfort women.
The book was not used in many schools, but was a big commercial success.
"Students learn about the extent of the damage caused by Japan in many countries during the war as well as sufferings that the Japanese people had to experience especially in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Okinawa in order to understand the importance of international co-operation and peace.
"Based on our guideline, each school decides which specific events they focus on depending on the areas and the situation of the school and the students' maturity."
Matsuoka, however, thinks the government deliberately tries not to teach young people the details of Japan's atrocities.
Having experienced history education in two countries, the way history is taught in Japan has at least one advantage - students come away with a comprehensive understanding of when events happened, in what order.
In many ways, my schoolfriends and I were lucky. Because junior high students were all but guaranteed a place in the senior high school, not many had to go through what's often described as the "examination war".
For students who are competing to get into a good senior high school or university, the race is extremely tough and requires memorisation of hundreds of historical dates, on top of all the other subjects that have to be studied.
They have no time to dwell on a few pages of war atrocities, even if they read them in their textbooks.
All this has resulted in Japan's Asian neighbours - especially China and South Korea - accusing the country of glossing over its war atrocities.
Meanwhile, Japan's new Prime Minister Shinzo Abe criticises China's school curriculum for being too "anti-Japanese".
He, like Fujioka, wants to change how history is taught in Japan so that children can be proud of our past, and is considering revising Japan's 1993 apology over the comfort women issue.
If and when that happens, it will undoubtedly cause a huge stir with our Asian neighbours. And yet, many Japanese will have no clue why it is such a big deal.
http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/kiko10da/14385722.html
慰安婦教育ノススメ
３月21日のＮＪ（ニュージャージー）州の下院で、またまた民主、共和両党が結束し出席者全員一致により、また新たな慰安婦決議が可決された。これは、やはり今年の１月に可決されたＮＹ州上院の慰安婦決議に次ぐものだ。この州決議は1999年のカリホルニア州、2013年のＮＹ州、と米国では三番目の州決議である。
ＮＪといえば、世界大都市ＮＹに隣接するベッドタウンとして目立たない小さい州であったのが、最近では元祖慰安婦記念碑のあるパリセーズ・パーク、最近のバーゲン郡慰安婦碑と、名前だけは日本人にもすっかりおなじみとなった感がある。
パリセーズ・パークの慰安婦記念碑は2009年に設置された。去年の５月、晴天の霹靂のごとくはるばる日本から殴りこみにきたネトウヨ衆のことがおきるまでは、記念碑自体は、市の図書館のの横で人知れずひっそりと立っていた。拙者のブログ記事、『パリセーズ・パークの慰安婦騒動』でもこの事件を取り上げている。興味のある方はどうぞ。
今回のＮＪ決議案は、2007年の合衆国下院の慰安婦決議案を州全体として支持することの決意表明だそうだが、ＮＹ州のように、人道に反する罪、という表現は使用していないものの、内容的にもっと突っ込んだものでかなり日本に対してきつい、というのはさる著名なネトウヨ・ブログから。
拙者は、この決議文は、去年の５月にパリセーズパークに殴りこみをかけ、墓場の卒塔婆を思わせる白い竹島杭を打ち込んだり、住民の心理を逆撫でするような内容と書き方に問題のあるヘタな英語で地元新聞に宣伝広告を出した日本のネトウヨによる執拗ないやがらせ攻撃に対するＮＪ側の反撃だと思っている。
要するに、“Doｎ‘t mess with NJ”（ＮＪにケチつけるのは許さんぞ！）というネトウヨ衆への警告なのだ。
特に決議文の中で、自称日本代表議員団がケチをつけた２点についてしっかり反撃されていることに注目しよう。
まず、ネトウヨが捏造だと主張する慰安婦人口総数20万人については、単なる推定に過ぎないが、正確な数が不明なのは、終戦直後の日本政府が資料を破壊したからだ、という州側の逆襲に注目。
もう一点は、パリセーズ・パークの碑文に使われた“abducted” の意味であるが、日本側はもちろん拉致一点張りであり、それが捏造の証拠、とケチつけたのだ。このabductは主張者側の視点から「違法に連れていかれる」、という意で、拉致も意味として含まれている。
しかし、この決議文では、何と、forcibly kidnapped を使っている。疑いの余地なく「暴力を使った女性の連行」である。だが、これは歴史的にも一致している。朝鮮半島からの供給が間に合わない時には、自分たちで現地女性を暴力的に集めたのだ。
誤解しないでほしいのは、拙者の意図は決して日本人を卑しめることではないということだ。拙者は一体この原因はどこにあるのか、ということに一人の読書忙人として興味を抱いている。
とにかく、ＮＪ州は今回もまたヘタなＥメールでシツコクつきまとったネトウヨ勢に肘鉄を喰わせたといったところだろうが、これは戦争であるから、この先何が飛び出すがわからない、といったのが現状だろう。
そもそも、米で州が次々に慰安婦決議を出すこと自体はかなり異様、と拙者は思う。
州決議だから、日本に謝罪を求めることは出来ない。外交は連邦政府の領域であるからだ。しかし、ＮＪ州は、日本政府による若い世代の慰安婦教育推進をよびかけている。つまり、『慰安婦教育ノススメ』、というわけだ。
ＢＢＣの大井真理子さん、あなたはやはり正しかった。
以下は拙訳である。
ニュージャージー州下院 慰安婦決議 ： ＡＣＲ１５９
日本軍陣地において強制的に抑留された慰安婦の耐えなければならなかった苦難を記念することを主旨とする
日本軍陣地で強制的に抑留された慰安婦の耐えなければならなかった苦難を記念する同意による決議は、
『慰安婦』という用語は日本政府が使っている修辞語（＝体裁を繕う言葉）であり、1932年から1945年の期間大日本帝国軍により性奴隷を強要された女性達を指していること；そして
ほとんどの慰安婦達は韓国または中国系であったがタイ、ヴェトナム、インドネシア、マレーシア、フィリピン、オーストラリア、オランダの女性達も皆同様に、大日本帝国軍による直接運営の、または軍の委託業者による、慰安所に抑留されたこと；そして
その内のある女性達は未成年でありながら慰安所に売られ、他の女性達は勧誘時にブローカーによる就業または金銭的援助という虚偽の約束を真に受け、そしてその他の女性達は暴力で誘拐され、日本の占領地域内くまなくに配置されていた兵士達に『つくす』目的で送り込まれたこと；そして
公式文書のほとんどが第二次大戦直後に日本政府の命令で破壊されてしまったので、慰安婦総数を推定することが困難にされ；多くの歴史家とメディアはおよそ20万人の若い女性達が勧誘又は兵士達による誘拐により日本軍の売春宿でサービスを強いられたと推定していること；そして
約３分の４の慰安婦人口は抑留先で過酷な待遇を受けたことが原因で死亡した。生存者達は暴力的性交と性病が原因で身体不妊となったが、強制的に抑留された日本軍慰安所でのしいられた苦難の数々に対する日本政府のきちんとした認識なくして、今日多数が亡くなりつつあること、そして
大日本帝国軍による性奴隷制について歴史上の責任を受け入れ、あのような数々の犯罪について若い世代を教育することを、日本政府に呼びかけた合衆国下院の慰安婦決議（H.R.121）５周年を記念することは、この州下院にとってふさわしいこと、等の理由によって今日、
ニュジャージー州下院議会により決議されるべし。
このネトウヨ・ＮＪ戦争がここまで発展してしまったことに対しての日本政府の責任は重大だ。なぜなら、最初にパリセーズ・パークを先駈け訪問したのは、他でもないＮＹのヒロキ総領事だからだ。彼はその時市長に慰安婦記念碑を撤去することを持ちかけたのだ。
撤去が日本政府の意にもとずいたものであれば、このヒロキ総領事は政府の仕事をしているわけだが、そうでなかったら当然失職である。まず、政府及び外務省はその点を明確にする必要があった。だが、日本領事館側の対応はそれに輪をかけたかのごとく全く不可解。
当時の野田政権のノラリクラリぶりと日本領事館によるヒロキ発言はなかった！という米国住民を全くバカにした不誠実きわまりない態度で乗り切ろうという官僚による外交失態が、今日のこの深刻な日米対立の原因となっている。結果的にこの代償は日本国民が負わねばならないという、昔も今も変わらぬ責任ある人々の見事な責任転嫁ぶりだ。外務省は責任を明確にすべきだ。これも、日本人が日本人を騙す、の典型だ、というのが拙者。
冷戦の真っ最中であったニクソン時代だと思うが、かって極地戦争の論理というのが唱えられた。これは東西冷戦としての米・ソの対立は中心をはるか離れた極地で紛争化となって現れるというのだが、そのよい例としてヴェトナム戦争があげられたものだ。
ところで、ネトウヨ・NJ 戦争というのは何やらそれを思いおこさせないだろうか。
Bergen Recognizes Comfort Women With Memorial by Ann Piccirillo
http://paramus.patch.com/groups/around-town/p/bergen-recognizes-comfort-women-with-memorial
Bergen Recognizes Comfort Women With Memorial
Memorial now sits in front of the Hackensack Bergen County courthouse which is dedicated to those women who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese during World War II.
Posted by Ann Piccirillo , March 11, 2013 at 05:45 PM
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Despite the fact that the weather moved the dedication of the Comfort Women Memorial indoors, it did not prevent people from coming out to the ceremony on Friday.
The memorial, sponsored by the Comfort Women Memorial Committee, takes its place in front of Hackensack's Bergen County Justice Center (Courthouse) beside monuments commemorating the Holocaust, Armenian Genocide, the Irish Great Hunger and African American Slavery.
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County Executive Kathleen Donovan, calling this memorial "a long time coming," said it was dedicated to comfort women not only from Korea, but from all of the countries so affected.
Comfort women were those who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Armed Forces. According to the Comfort Women Memorial Committee, the monument honors approximately 200,000 enslaved women.
Donovan, speaking of her trip to South Korea last fall where she visited former comfort women at the Sharing House, said, "I cannot imagine the agony and the suffering that those women went through in the years of World War Two, but the dignity and grace of them now would astonish all of us."
When Donovan asked their permission to tell their story in a monument, they all said yes. They wanted the world to know their story.
"In some small way we are able to do that today with the unveiling and dedication of the Comfort Women Memorial," Donovan said.
Also speaking at the ceremony was Congressman Bill Pascrell. He, too, had the opportunity to meet with former comfort women when they visited Washington, D.C. He told the audience that the stories the women told of their ordeal "strengthen our commitment to the preservation of human rights."
Dongchan Kim, President of Korean American Civic Empowerment, which organized the campaign for the Comfort Women Memorial in Palisades Park, said, "By having the memorial at this location, the Bergen County government is officially recognizing the Comfort Women issue as the same kind of international human rights violation as the other four human rights abuses remembered by Bergen County in front of the Bergen County Courthouse."
Bergen County is home to the largest population of Korean-Americans. In 2012, election ballots were printed in Korean.
WWII Korean 'comfort Woman' Visits NJ Monument
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JJ August 27, 2013 at 06:13 PM
Tom, What's going on at GUS BECKERS PLACE/ RAMBO'S SALOON ? I WENT BY THE OTHER DAY AND THERE WAS A RENTED CHAIN LINK FENCE AROUND THE FRONT OF THE PROPERTY ?? DID MAYOR AND CONS NAGG ,ON THE DEAL WHEN THEY THOUGHT EVERYONE WAS ON VACATION ?? AND YET ANOTHER SOON TO BE NEW TWO FAMILY HOUSE ??
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Tom Meyers August 28, 2013 at 01:24 PM
The construction fencing has been around the building for months. The fact is last Thursday night the Fort Lee Mayor & Council voted unanimously in favor of an ordinance that will allow the Fort Lee Housing Authority purchase the house, via funds from developers, and restore it for the creation of two affordable units. We are on top of this and much in favor of the purchase that will enable this historic building / site to survive. The fencing will be removed shortly. The Fort Lee Film Commission has sent a letter to the Fort Lee Housing Authority requesting a meeting where we can pitch the idea of placement of a historic marker on the site and access to the front room which was the old saloon for creation of a small display area to include large archival photos of the site when it was used as a movie location - this would be open to the public during our bi-annual historic jitney tours, for our historic jitney tours for Fort Lee Public School students and we hope once a year for a celebration of the history of the site and a screening of a film shot at the site.
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William Mays August 29, 2013 at 02:07 AM
Perhaps it would be possible to restore the front room to the way it was in the old days?
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Tom Meyers August 29, 2013 at 03:22 PM
We are working on that in terms of our pitch to the Fort Lee Housing Authority as there would still be plenty of room for the 2 affordable units and to me that would be a win win.
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JJ August 30, 2013 at 10:01 AM
Tom, It sounds all good on what you wrote, And hopefully everyone got a memo on it including the wrecking company coming on one of the days no one is present, And taking down the house before anyone notice's that it shouldn't be done ! That's nice a historic marker. In Hackensack you have the Zabriskie House and many other Historical Landmark's, I haven't noticed if there are any Vacant apartment's in the Bergen county area at Historical Site's. It's not you Tom, It's Fort Lee looking to make a buck off the Building that they though no one looked at anymore of forgot about !
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JJ August 30, 2013 at 10:08 AM
Tom, As willie stated, Keep the two front rooms as the Original Bar, And when you have the Jitney rides or every other weekend, Sell soda pop an Lite sandwiches to Help Fort Lee Film Commission, Advertise in many Publications about Ramboo's Saloon/ Gus Becker's Place and why it has Historical Value.Get Volunteers to work as bar keep ect...
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Bergen Recognizes Comfort Women With Memorial
Memorial now sits in front of the Hackensack Bergen County courthouse which is dedicated to those women who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese during World War II.
Posted by Ann Piccirillo , March 11, 2013 at 05:45 PM
patch
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Despite the fact that the weather moved the dedication of the Comfort Women Memorial indoors, it did not prevent people from coming out to the ceremony on Friday.
The memorial, sponsored by the Comfort Women Memorial Committee, takes its place in front of Hackensack's Bergen County Justice Center (Courthouse) beside monuments commemorating the Holocaust, Armenian Genocide, the Irish Great Hunger and African American Slavery.
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County Executive Kathleen Donovan, calling this memorial "a long time coming," said it was dedicated to comfort women not only from Korea, but from all of the countries so affected.
Comfort women were those who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Armed Forces. According to the Comfort Women Memorial Committee, the monument honors approximately 200,000 enslaved women.
Donovan, speaking of her trip to South Korea last fall where she visited former comfort women at the Sharing House, said, "I cannot imagine the agony and the suffering that those women went through in the years of World War Two, but the dignity and grace of them now would astonish all of us."
When Donovan asked their permission to tell their story in a monument, they all said yes. They wanted the world to know their story.
"In some small way we are able to do that today with the unveiling and dedication of the Comfort Women Memorial," Donovan said.
Also speaking at the ceremony was Congressman Bill Pascrell. He, too, had the opportunity to meet with former comfort women when they visited Washington, D.C. He told the audience that the stories the women told of their ordeal "strengthen our commitment to the preservation of human rights."
Dongchan Kim, President of Korean American Civic Empowerment, which organized the campaign for the Comfort Women Memorial in Palisades Park, said, "By having the memorial at this location, the Bergen County government is officially recognizing the Comfort Women issue as the same kind of international human rights violation as the other four human rights abuses remembered by Bergen County in front of the Bergen County Courthouse."
Bergen County is home to the largest population of Korean-Americans. In 2012, election ballots were printed in Korean.
WWII Korean 'comfort Woman' Visits NJ Monument
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Tom, As willie stated, Keep the two front rooms as the Original Bar, And when you hav…
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JJ August 27, 2013 at 06:13 PM
Tom, What's going on at GUS BECKERS PLACE/ RAMBO'S SALOON ? I WENT BY THE OTHER DAY AND THERE WAS A RENTED CHAIN LINK FENCE AROUND THE FRONT OF THE PROPERTY ?? DID MAYOR AND CONS NAGG ,ON THE DEAL WHEN THEY THOUGHT EVERYONE WAS ON VACATION ?? AND YET ANOTHER SOON TO BE NEW TWO FAMILY HOUSE ??
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Tom Meyers August 28, 2013 at 01:24 PM
The construction fencing has been around the building for months. The fact is last Thursday night the Fort Lee Mayor & Council voted unanimously in favor of an ordinance that will allow the Fort Lee Housing Authority purchase the house, via funds from developers, and restore it for the creation of two affordable units. We are on top of this and much in favor of the purchase that will enable this historic building / site to survive. The fencing will be removed shortly. The Fort Lee Film Commission has sent a letter to the Fort Lee Housing Authority requesting a meeting where we can pitch the idea of placement of a historic marker on the site and access to the front room which was the old saloon for creation of a small display area to include large archival photos of the site when it was used as a movie location - this would be open to the public during our bi-annual historic jitney tours, for our historic jitney tours for Fort Lee Public School students and we hope once a year for a celebration of the history of the site and a screening of a film shot at the site.
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William Mays August 29, 2013 at 02:07 AM
Perhaps it would be possible to restore the front room to the way it was in the old days?
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Tom Meyers August 29, 2013 at 03:22 PM
We are working on that in terms of our pitch to the Fort Lee Housing Authority as there would still be plenty of room for the 2 affordable units and to me that would be a win win.
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JJ August 30, 2013 at 10:01 AM
Tom, It sounds all good on what you wrote, And hopefully everyone got a memo on it including the wrecking company coming on one of the days no one is present, And taking down the house before anyone notice's that it shouldn't be done ! That's nice a historic marker. In Hackensack you have the Zabriskie House and many other Historical Landmark's, I haven't noticed if there are any Vacant apartment's in the Bergen county area at Historical Site's. It's not you Tom, It's Fort Lee looking to make a buck off the Building that they though no one looked at anymore of forgot about !
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JJ August 30, 2013 at 10:08 AM
Tom, As willie stated, Keep the two front rooms as the Original Bar, And when you have the Jitney rides or every other weekend, Sell soda pop an Lite sandwiches to Help Fort Lee Film Commission, Advertise in many Publications about Ramboo's Saloon/ Gus Becker's Place and why it has Historical Value.Get Volunteers to work as bar keep ect...
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Thursday, September 5, 2013
Critics cause Fort Lee to reconsider monument honoring Korean WWII prostitutes Print Dan Ivers/NJ.com By Dan Ivers/NJ.com
http://www.nj.com/bergen/index.ssf/2013/04/critics_cause_fort_lee_to_reconsider_monument_honoring_korean_wwii_prostitutes.html
Critics cause Fort Lee to reconsider monument honoring Korean WWII prostitutes
Print Dan Ivers/NJ.com By Dan Ivers/NJ.com
on April 06, 2013 at 7:31 AM, updated April 06, 2013 at 7:33 AM
Bergen officials dedicate 'comfort women' memorial
The text of a monument to 'comfort women' outside the Bergen County courthouse in Hackensack. Plans for a similar memorial in Fort Lee were recently scrapped after Korean groups warned it could be perceived as anti-Japanese.
S.P. Sullivan/NJ.com
FORT LEE — Plans for a monument honoring hundreds of thousands of women forced into sexual slavery during World War II have been scrapped after various Korean-American groups voiced concerns it could be insulting to Japan.
According to The Record, the borough council approved the monument, which would honor Korean "comfort women" who worked in Japanese military brothels during the 1940s, last month.
Similar monuments have already been dedicated in New York and elsewhere in Bergen County, which has a burgeoning Korean population. The first of its kind was put up in Palisades Park, and county officials held a ceremony to unveil a memorial outside the courthouse in Hackensack earlier this year.
However, organizations such as the Hackensack-based Korean American Civic Empowerment Group quickly started petitions to nix the new monument, or at least change the wording to take out specific references to the Japanese.
Media organizations such as NJ.com have received dozens of letters and emails from Japanese opponents of the memorials in recent weeks, many of whom call the slavery allegations "propaganda."
An email sent Friday from Nicky Yamazaki claims there is no evidence that Korean women were ever held in Japanese brothels, and that the issue is causing diplomatic tensions between the two countries.
"Japanese are upset about this situation. We do not try to rewrite the history. Also we are not revisionists or right wings," it reads. "As the fabricated history is spreading, we cannot miss damaged our ancestors’ honor, and we want you to know the fact what the real history is."
mikeccrider4 months ago
That finish
Report No. 49: Japanese Prisoners of War Interrogation on Prostitution
UNITED STATES OFFICE OF WAR INFORMATION
Date : Oct 1, 1944
Prisoners: 20 Korean Comfort Girls
This report is based on the information obtained from the interrogation of twenty Korean "comfort girls" captured around the tenth of Aug, 1944 after the fall of Myitkyin a in Burma.
A "comfort girl" is nothing more than a prostitute or "professional camp follower" attached to the Japanese Army for the benefit of the soldiers.
A "comfort girl" is nothing more than a prostitute
A "comfort girl" is nothing more than a prostitute
A "comfort girl" is nothing more than a prostitute
I hope. Korean liar and a foolish Please disappear from this world.
thank you.
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mikeccrider4 months ago
Koreans should not deceive their own people in a textbook of this lie.
Koreans to cause problems in the world, because they believe in the historicity of the distorted.
America was Korean Territory - YouTube
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kittykat554 months ago
First of all, I condemn military brothel system. However it happened everywhere and still there are a bunch of brothels near American military base in S.Korea.
Then I wondered why still Koreans tribute women to foreign soldiers. I think Korean comfort women issue has the cultural background.
1.They Were Getting Paid.
http://www.exordio.com/1939-1945/codex/Documentos/...
The Korean government requested to the Japanese gov't "Secure comfort women's saving money and properties in occupied lands in South"-Japan-Korea negotiations report No3 (1953)
2.Comfort Women Recruitment Ads Exist.
3.There Were Plenty Of Japanese Comfort Women But Never Been Discussed About Them.
That shows the comfort women campain by Korean nationalists has racism.
4.Surviving Korean Comfort Women Change The Stories All The Time.
Changing story is a typical symptoｍ of perjury.
Ref: "A Country of Liars by Kim DaeJoong"-July.3,2005 The Chosun Ilbo
6.Korea Had Comfort Women System During Korean War.
"It was such a degraded situation under the American occupation in the Korean war that a friend of mine who served in the Korean war said on Friday night they would bring in a half ton truck full of 150 women and they would be in a movie house having sex. These undoubtedly included women who were comfort women for the Japanese army." http://www.wnyc.org/news/articles/31050
But The Korean government said they were prostitutes so no problem.
Movie "Field of Honor"(1986) portrays the Korean comfort women in Korean war.
7.The Japanese Police In Those Days Busted Korean Sex Traffickers.
Pleanty of the news paper articles about it remain.
If anybody wants to see them click here http://goo.gl/wjnj6
8.Sex Slave System Was Korean Tradition.
Joseon dynasty Korea had slaves called Nobi. Female Nobi were usually sold as prostitute.
King Sejong to send prostitutes to front line. (Annals of Joseon Sejong 1436)
(The King) sent the following instructions to the Governor of Hangil Province:
“In the past, prostitutes were sent to camps on the frontier to service soldiers without wives. It had a long history. Even now government giseangs are stationed at frontier camps and administrative posts to service travellers. Moreover, on the northern frontier we have large camps, including Gyeongwon, Hoiryeong, and Gyeonseong, which are in your province. Troops guarding the frontier are far from their families and must endure two (years) of cold and heat, making their daily duties even more difficult; therefore, I think it is appropriate to station prostitutes to service the troops.
9.Sex Business And Trafficking In Modern Korea.
According to Han-nara party's survey,total 100000 Korean women are working as prostitutes outside of Korea.
50000 are in Japan, 25000 are in Australia, 250 are in Guam. Oct, 28, 2010
"Ask Mu Yung Shin, presently a prostitute at a Korean massage parlor in Dallas. Abducted at the age of 14 from her village home in South Korea by a group of Korean criminals"
http://www.stanford.edu/group/reflections/Winter19...
Diary of a sex slave by San Francisco Chronicle is good to read.
10.Raping of Japanese refugees by Koreans after WWII.
http://youtu.be/E4g2lsaTPeg
This historical fact is big taboo in Korea so some Koreans are demanding libraries in the states to remove this book "So Far From The Bamboo Grove"
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mikeccrider4 months ago
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mikeccrider4 months ago
to Joe Kim
You are also a sad Korean.
Your claim is not true.
"2 million people were forced entrainment" you said,but fact is a stowaway of 2 million people.
It is same situation that currently Korean American.
Every year several million people had been starved to death in Korea.
Japanese Imperial Army are yearning of the Korean people, the volunteers was a competitive rate of 2000 times.
5th President of South Korea was the officer of the Japanese Imperial Army.
Korean comfort women is also the same.
the Japanese were treated the Koreans as the same Japanese.
http://24.media.tumblr.com/569d1eef9c1d657d209c8bd...
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Pak4 months ago
Thirty nine (39) comfort women and their supporters were arrested in Korea by Korean police for their fraud. They raised about 1.2 million dollars from about 30,000 Korean citizens saying that they can collect a lot of compensation money from Japan and they can give back a lot of money to the citizens. Of course they could not get compensation and could not distribute the "profit" to those people.
They also looked for candidate "comfort women" who just lived the WWII era even though they were NOT comfort women. They said if you lived in the era, you could be a comfort woman to demand compensation to Japan.
Money talks.
1
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Pak4 months ago
It is well-known in Asia that Koreans make false accusations too often.
Westerners may think all people in all Asian countries are similar but this is not true. Each culture, way of thinking is very different in each country.
Again, Koreans make too many false accusations. Here are some quotes from The Korea Herald.
"In 2007, Koreans indicted for perjury or calumny totaled 1,544 and 2,171, respectively, compared to only nine and 10 in Japan."
"experts said the figures indicate that Koreans commit perjury and make false accusations about 420 times and 540 times the rate of the Japanese."
"Law enforcement officials here also complain they are having difficulties with witnesses giving false testimonies."
Source: "A low-trust society" The Korea Herald Published : 2011-08-02
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chocolate4 months ago
Hi ppl.
The Koreans are trying to build the statues all over the States. What for? I don't know why they do such a thing in the country which has nothing to do with this issue. This is much political one, still in question. Political matters are very sensitive for all nations. Japan and the U.S have been allies and developped a trusting relationship after the war. The Japanese like American cultures and Americans. I'm afraid that the issue could undermine our bilateral relation by granting the one side of the story.
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Jack Frost4 months ago
Them horndogs VOLUNTEERED!
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spanneta4 months ago
"Critics cause Fort Lee to reconsider monument honoring Korean WWII prostitutes"
What a TERRIBLE bit of headline writing! First of all, the plaque plainly memorializes the women of many countries, not just Korea, who were FORCED into prostitution.
From the OFFICIAL Japanese apology issued in 1993:
"Today the Government said it had concluded that the bitter claims of the women were true: many were forced to act as virtual slaves, providing sex for imperial soldiers. ...The report concluded that many women lived as captives of the military beginning in 1932, when Japan invaded China, to the end of the war in 1945. Among the women forced to have sex with soldiers were Japanese, Chinese, Koreans and Filipinos, as well as Dutch women captured in Indonesia, then a Dutch colony.
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/05/world/japan-admi...
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Pak4 months ago
The Kono statement was a compromise between Japan and Korea.
Korean government asked Japanese government to admit some level of forced prostitution. And, Korean government said once Japan admits the forced prostitution, Korean government will never bring up the issue again.
Japan kept the promise and Korea broke the promise.
The Kono statement is a typical Japanese, vague statement. Many things are not clearly mentioned. Rape cases are blended in the statement.
>and that, at times, administrative/military personnel directly
> took part in the recruitments.
These statements are mentioning the cases like the one in Indonesia where Netherlands and Australian women were raped repeatedly for 2 months. I am sure some Japanese criminals raped Asian women in China and other countries, also, as all military individuals with any nationality have been doing. Those cases have to be severely criticized.
Because of the vagueness of the statement, many Japanese think that the Kono statement has to be revised.
1
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spanneta4 months ago
"Even the notorious Kono statement does not say Japanese government/military abducted women/girls . CHEAP SHOT!!!! "
No? Transferring against their will by coercion (especially by an occupying military power) sure sounds like abduction to me!
"The Government study has revealed that in many cases they were recruited against their own will, through coaxing coercion, etc., and that, at times, administrative/military personnel directly took part in the recruitments. They lived in misery at comfort stations under a coercive atmosphere."
"The Korean Peninsula was under Japanese rule in those days, and their recruitment, transfer, control, etc., were conducted generally against their will, through coaxing, coercion, etc."
"Undeniably, this was an act, with the involvement of the military authorities of the day, that severely injured the honor and dignity of many women. The Government of Japan would like to take this opportunity once again to extend its sincere apologies and remorse to all those, irrespective of place of origin, who suffered immeasurable pain and incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women."
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Pak4 months ago
>No? Transferring against their will by coercion
>(especially by an occupying military power) sure
>sounds like abduction to me!
Coercion by WHO???
It is coercion by Korean sex brokers/traders.
Don't use your sense of 21st century. Military helped comfort women to move to the brothels because there is no public transportation in the battle field during the war time. Also, military offered medical examination to comfort women because if they transfer sexual disease to soldiers, they can't fight. This is the same practice among military in various nations and not specific to Japan.
You have determined mind to humiliate Japan firsthand, then, you cannot see the bigger picture.
Comfort women existed in all nations.
Again, SINGLING OUT Japan to blame sex in battle field is DISCRIMINATION against Japan/Japanese.
1
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Joe Kim4 months ago
Japanese police in Korea were no doubt deeply involved in the recruitment of comfort women.
Comfort women weren't the only people who were forcibly recruited by Japanese.
During WWII, Japan forcibly conscripted 6 million Koreans (out of a total population of 24 million) and used them as slave laborers for its war machine. Japanese policemen went door-to-door and rounded people up.
(Up to half a million of them perished due to the harsh working conditions and brutal treatment.)
It's unfortunate that Japan destroyed so much evidence regarding its war crimes (including its military sex slaves) just prior to the end of WWII.
But the fact is that so much Japanese documents from the WWII era, including Japanese colonial police records from Korea and other relevant archives, remain classified and locked up.
Even Japanese researchers of comfort women, such as Yoshimi and Tanaka, have complained that so much Japanese documents are classified and that they only have had access to the "tip of the iceberg".
Japanese apologists who claim that there's no evidence of forced recruitment of comfort women, even when so much Japanese WWII records remain secret and locked up, are really being disingenuous.
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Incogvito4 months ago
...Some Japanese folks are traveling in Egypt...They are in denial
1
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simkin1684 months ago
How about a memorial for all the slaves white people raped from 1600 to 1865?
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Bob Backlund4 months ago
168,
Way to attempt to hijack a news story for your own personal agenda. If it is so important to you do the research, get evidence this happened with names, fund it and put it up in your irrelevant town. You will get ZERO support for your plight..
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800meterrunner4 months ago
From the accounts that I've read there is no doubt that the Japanese victimized so many Korean women during World War II. These women didn't volunteer to be prostitutes. They were promised jobs in war factories. Most were too embarrassed to return home after the war, though their sexual enslavement was not their fault.
The Japanese have never openly admitted what they have done.
After the war a number of Japanese war criminals weren't prosecuted because the U.S. needed a bulwark in Asia that was anti-Communist. Germany has done a fine job in educating their youth about the horrors of the Third Reich. Japan has dropped the ball on that issue. It's a shame because modern Japan is a far different country than it was in the 1920s and 30s.
Another fact. Japan was given Korea to govern after the Russo-Japanese War in the early 1900s. Koreans were brutally treated for almost the next half century.
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Pak4 months ago
>From the accounts that I've read there is no doubt that the Japanese
> victimized so many Korean women during World War II. These women
>didn't volunteer to be prostitutes. They were promised jobs in war factories.
This is also a typical Korean's and its frinends' statement.
Koreans mix Women's Volunteer Corps and Comfort women. Some Koreans do so intentionally to disgrace Japan and Japanese people.
The system called Women's Volunteer Corps is that Japanese government created. Because all Japanese young men went to war, there was no work force in the factories. So, the government mobilized women to work at factories. They did not offer any sexual service.
Women's Volunteer Corps has nothing to do with comfort women.
There are numerous newspaper advertisements by sex brokers/traders to recruit comfort women. Some of them have a picture of naked woman. Their salary promised on the advertizement is usually 300 yen a month. This is the same/similar amount paid to military colonels and prefecture (equivalent to US State) governors.
When there is a picture of a naked woman on the comfort woman advertisement promising that high salary when women were not supposed to work in the conservative era, what does it mean??
... prostitution!!
Do you think she could not imagine what she was going to do with the high salary???
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Joe Kim4 months ago
@Pak,
>As you said, we liberated Korea's slaves. About 40% of your people was slaves.
And you are lying again.
In late Choson, 40% of the population were commoners.
10% of the population were slaves.
> What will happen to female slaves? They were of course raped.
I don't know where you got this idea, but you are wrong again.
In Choson times, sex criminals were punished very harshly.
Even slave owners could not rape female slaves. If they did, they were punished.
If a man raped an underage girl, it was instant execution.
Traditional Korean culture was a conservative culture.
BTW, you try to make it look like Japan came and rescued Korea from backwardness.
You know? Maybe Koreans would be grateful to Japan if Japanese had treated Koreans nicely.
But you Japanese annexed Korea and treated Koreans like a sub-species.
You tried to eradicate Korean culture, language, and identity.
When Koreans demonstrated peacefully for independence, you brutally killed them by the thousands.
You tortured them and used them for human experimentation.
Then you started WWII Pacific War and dragged Korea into the war as well.
Forcibly conscripting 1/4 of the population (so much so that the only people left in Korean villages were the elderly and children) and forcing them to do slave labor. Treating them so badly that up to 500,000 of them perished.
Forcing tens of thousands of Korean women into sex slavery for the Japanese military.
Apologizing for these heinous war crimes, then trying to take back your apologies.
Calling the comfort women liars.
Do you really think they are liars?
Do you really think that 80-90 year old ex-prostitutes, some of them who can barely walk, would protest every single week in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul, demanding justice?
Do you think they are just whores who want money?
Do you know that in 2011 when Japan was hit by that earthquake and tsunami, even the Korean comfort women sent condolences and donations to Japan?
Koreans are not vindictive people.
They don't like to hold grudges.
Koreans want peace with Japan.
But first the comfort women issue must be resolved.
Japan was properly apologize, and pass laws making it illegal for Japanese to deny the comfort women issue, as well as other WWII war crimes.
They must also properly teach Japanese children about these issues.
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Pak4 months ago
@Joe Kim
＞And you are lying again.
＞In late Choson, 40% of the population were
＞commoners. 10% of the population were slaves.
Quote
Another 30-40% of the population were slaves (nobi), "low borns" (cheonmin) or untouchable outcastes (baekjeong). Slavery was hereditary, as well as a form of legal punishment.
Quote ends.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseon
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jim4 months ago
sorry folks but the Japanese were some of the most brutal occupiers around actullay we should put up a memorial celebrating the end of the pacific war and a tribute to the atom bomb makers
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an7614 months ago
The gross injustice here is that the victims and their families of the Japanese have never been compensated for their pain and suffering while Germany made reparations to those harmed
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Pak4 months ago
This is also a typical statement that Korean and its friends make.
Japan compensated much more than German did.
I am not saying that German was not willing to compensate. German was waved to compensate because of the western culture of forgiveness and because of their reflection from WWI. After WWI neighboring countries demanded too much compensation to Germany and Germany was going into bankruptcy. Then, German people became mad and started to become aggressive.
On the contrary, China and Korea has a culture of grudge. （恨の文化） They tend to grudge almost forever. However, China was great because China waived Japan. Japan, then, legally does not (cannot) compensate for the bad things that Japan did against China. It is settled between the 2 nations.
However, Korea has been demanding compensation too much. Korea was a part of Japan and fought with Japan against allies. Then, legally, we cannot pay compensation. However, we gave all infrastructure to Korea and under the name of "economic cooperation" we gave twice as much as then Korea's national budget to Korea.
Another good example is Indonesia. Netherlands tried to re-colonize Indonesia after the WWII but Japanese soldiers who remained in the country fought against Netherlands with Indonesians. After Indonesia's independence, Netherlands demanded payment for the infrastructure they did in the country as a retaliatory action. Indonesia was not able to pay for it. Then, Japan paid as a part of "compensation" for Indonesia.
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njtomasso4 months ago
Japan's vehement denial of widespread and horrific war atrocities is comparable to those who claim the Holocaust was faked and that films of liberating the death camps were shot on a secret movie set.
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Pak4 months ago
Who said Holocaust was fabricated?
It is a real story that actually happened though it seems to be over-exaggerated.
You should stop humiliating German people who admitted the holocaust. Almost all of the lay German people did know know what was going on back then. Nevertheless, when Korean had a succor game with Germans, you put up Hakenkreuz image with a huge X mark on it.
Koreans even said, "Welcome, war criminals!!"
Also, Japan has been denying ONLY what are NOT true such as the comfort women issue. We have admitted all bad things we did during WWII and paid astronomical compensation to numerous countries.
On the contrary, Korea was a part of Japan during WWII and fought against allies together with Japan but Korea has never paid any compensation to any countries. When majority of Korean was eager to become a part of Japan then and fought bravely against the allies, you are people who lost the war and have to compensate for what you did.
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Joe Kim4 months ago
People like you who call the former comfort women liars are precisely the reason why these comfort women monuments must be built.
By the way, SDH (Society for Dissemination of Historical Fact), whose articles you keep citing, is a Japanese ultra right-wing organization that claims that America started the WWII Pacific War.
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Pak4 months ago
@Joe Kim
>By the way, SDH (Society for Dissemination
>of Historical Fact), whose articles you keep
>citing, is a Japanese ultra right-wing organization
>that claims that America started the WWII Pacific War.
This is always what Koreans say.
Every Japanese activity/everyone that Koreans don't like is labeled "ultra right-wing" by Koreans trying to paint us. Koreans always to impression manipulation.
Even if you WERE correct, SDHF is just translating papers into English.
Poor Joe Kim.
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Barry074 months ago
Would anyone object to a memorial for the millions of German women and children subjected to mass rapes after the second world war. Every people have their sad stories to tell. The victors write the history ensuring only certain peoples, such as the Germans and Japanese, wear the mark of Cain. War brings horror. Why is it we blame entire peoples but never high finance who orchestrate these wars and finance both sides? We should love the Koreans and Japanese, realizing those who created the war were of neither people.
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Pak4 months ago
Again, who denied the holocaust? Why you want to relate the comfort woman issue to the holocaust. Those are totally different issues. Koreans and its friends are desperate to relate the comfort woman issue to holocaust. You are also humiliating German people over-reminding their wrongdoing when you try to relate the comfort woman issue to holocaust.
Why don't you relate the holocaust to what Koreans did during Vietnam War. Koreans killed tens of thousands of Vietnamese women in a most cruel/atrocious/inhumane manner.
Why don't you relate the holocaust to 保導聯盟事件 （보도연맹 사건, Bodo Yeonmaeng Sageon) in which Koreans killed up to 1,200,000 own people?
Those atrocities should be remembered in the USA because the USA seems to be the place to erect a monument with US tax money for whatever the event all over the world even then the event is fabricated.
My personal opinion is,
The USA should not become a melting pot of hatred/controversy/humiliation for all things/events all around the world.
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take_fox4 months ago
If these animations are seen, the annexation time of Japan and South Korea is known well.
1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xauBLG1zZGY
2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1FAClJccVA
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Kohyu Nishimura4 months ago
And i would like to recommend to read an authorized essay by historian professor Ikuhiko Hata.
Professor Hata, the most knowledgeable expert on the “comfort women” issue,illustrates the reality of the comfort women. He even reveals the testimonies of the former “comfort women” are unreliable and also fallacy of Kono Statement. He concludes The truth relating to the “comfort women” need to be discussed to diffuse the prevailing irrational media-induced hysteria.
NO ORGANIZED OR FORCED RECRUITMENT: MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT
COMFORT WOMEN AND THE JAPANESE MILITARY
Hata Ikuhiko
http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL02_1/31_S4.pdf
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Kohyu Nishimura4 months ago
continued・・・
On the contrary, many documents were found warning private brokers not to force women to work against their will
Army memorandum 2197, issued on March 4, 1938, explicitly prohibits recruiting methods that fraudulently employ the army's name or that can be classified as abduction, warning that those employing such methods have been punished. A Home Affairs Ministry directive (number 77) issued on February 18, 1938, states that the recruitment of "comfort women" must be in compliance with international law and prohibits the enslavement of abduction of women. A directive (number 136) issued on November 8 the same year, moreover, orders that only women who are 21 years old or over and are already professionally engaged in the trade may be recruited as "comfort women." It also requires the approval of the woman's family or relatives.
A historian who claims that the number of "comfort women" reached 200,000 - a contention frequently quoted in the US media - believes, on the other hand, that the memorandum offers proof of the army's active involvement.
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Kohyu Nishimura4 months ago
No historical document has ever been found by historians or research organizations that positively demonstrates that women were forced against their will into prostitution by the Japanese army.
A search of the archives at the Japan Center for Asian Historical Records, which houses wartime orders from the government and military leaders, turned up nothing indicating that women were forcibly rounded up to work as ianfu, or comfort women."
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SkepticBob4 months ago
Do you expect a search of the JAPAN Center... archives gives a fair and balanced treatment of the subject? Covering up war crimes is common. All nations do it.
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kittykat554 months ago
What The Japan Center for Asian Historical Records has are actual historical records or official documentations related to Asia and Japan relations from the National Archives. Korean researchers do use the archives too.
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Sizzla4 months ago
The amount of disgusting and downright insulting comments left by Japanese netizens and their army of apologists is disturbing but unfortunately par for the course when it comes to anything related to comfort women published in English.
To those who claim there are no official documents that corroborate the claims made by former comfort women leave out one hugely inconvenient and indisputable fact. The Imperial Japanese Army knew months ahead of their official surrender that they were destined to lose the war. Knowing this, Japan's leaders then implemented a campaign focused on damage control and their main objective was to destroy any official documents or evidences that corroborated their numerous war crimes and atrocities. This is a FACT. Docs relating to comfort women were among those that were destroyed. Despite this systematic destruction of evidence, some documents still exist and a few have been unearthed by Japanese researchers in the last two-three decades (Yoshimi...google him). Some also speculate (with merit) that the Japanese gov. currently still has some of these docs and that these are among the many files that are still closely guarded and highly classified.
Now let's pretend for arguments' sake that there was no documentary evidence (which is absolutely not the case). The most compelling evidence that should be considered is the personal testimony of those surviving women who were victimized as sexual slaves by the IJA. There are women from Korea, China, Taiwan, Philippines, Southeast Asia, Dutch, etc. etc. that have consistently told the same story so it's not some personal vendetta from citizens from one or two countries. This is a multinational group of old women who deserve to be officially recognized by Japan's government and deserve to be memorialized so that these apologists and revisionists don't ever have the opportunity to victimize them again with their lies and accusations of being willing child prostitutes.
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iida4 months ago
>Docs relating to comfort women were among those that were destroyed.
Can you give me evidence other than your imagination?
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Pak4 months ago
>Docs relating to comfort women were among those that
>were destroyed.
Then, why we can find numerous government/military documents that supports our statement: comfort women were well-paid prostitutes?
Would you explain to us before you humiliate, disgrace, and discriminate Japan and Japanese?
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Kohyu Nishimura4 months ago
Questions by member of The House of Representative Nakayama @The House of Representatives on March 8, 2013
"This was not truth that comfort women were yanked forcibly"
8th March 2013
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ausRSDUxKr4
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Kohyu Nishimura4 months ago
I post again.
All American may have to learn the basic first step of the history between Japan and Korea.
If you would be able to find any historical facts, most of all American、rational intellectual prudent, would understand the facts about so-called "comfort woman", as many American always watch many news about the case some Korean women had been forced to return their country by American police now.
So I would like to recommend the my article translated in English for an authoritative Japanese opinion-magazine "WiLL" bellow.
*Summary: http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL02_2/78_S1.pdf
*Full text: http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL02_1/97_S4.pdf
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Sizzla4 months ago
Those laughable pdf files that you've linked to tell us all any informed person should know about you. The organization that you present as a non biased source is notorious for their outrageous attempts of revisionist history and even more hilariously is named the "Society the Dissemination of Historical Fact (sic)". These people claim that America was the aggressor in WW2, that Japan was a victim that was merely trying to liberate their Asian brother from the yoke of Western Imperialism. They deny well established facts and more disturbingly deny any responsibility for Japan's war crimes. In short...they are joke and anyone who cites them as a credible source is even more of a joke.
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Kohyu Nishimura4 months ago
i know you are not only rational and intellectual, but just a coward, mean, anonymous, racist.
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Kohyu Nishimura4 months ago
Yes,there is No historical document has ever been found by historians or research organizations that positively demonstrates that women were forced against their will into prostitution by the Japanese army.
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ja076574 months ago
So you expect the military to keep activity logs on all of it's prostitution events? Interesting...
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iida4 months ago
Were they really "sex slaves" ? doubt it.
"They lived in near-luxury in Burma in comparison to other places."
"While in Burma they amused themselves by participating in sports events with both officers and men, and attended picnics, entertainments, and social dinners. They had a phonograph and in the towns they were allowed to go shopping."
"The girls were allowed the prerogative of refusing a customer. "
"...there were numerous instances of proposals of marriage and in certain cases marriages actually took place."
http://www.exordio.com/1939-1945/codex/Documentos/...
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soupbowl4 months ago
Last year, Nikon cancelled a photo exhibition of wartime sex slaves, and the Japan Visual Journalist Association slammed Nikon's censorship. If the subject matter is "bogus" as claimed by the posters here, then why would the Japanese visual journalists complain? Read the news here on The Japan Times (in English): http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2012/05/29/news/v...
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Kohyu Nishimura4 months ago
you just have only read a biased news paper.
Japan Times is well known to ordinal Japanese people as anti-Japan ultra left wing media.
I know many Japanese journalists protested such a silly propaganda anti-japan event.
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soupbowl4 months ago
Dear Star Ledger, you sounds like you don't know whom to believe, then perhaps you should listen to the Australian: http://www.awm.gov.au/exhibitions/alliesinadversit...
and Amnesty International Australia:
http://www.amnesty.org.au/comfort
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Pak4 months ago
Ａｕｓｔｒａｌｉａｎ/Netherlands women were not comfort women. They are rape victims. Korean/Chinese advocates/lobbyists take advantage of those cases for their propaganda. They mingle those rape cases with the comfort woman issue to disgrace Japan.
They were raped for about 2 months in Indonesia against the Japan's military rule. Just after the rape cases were reported to a Japanese colonel, he immediately shut down the comfort station that the criminals used to rape those women. The criminals were taken to courts and punished already. Some were sentenced to death. Korean/Chinese exaggerate this case and generalize it to the entire comfort woman issue to disgrace Japan/Japanese people.
Amnesty International is connected to Rep Mike Honda who has been humiliating Japan and Japanese people. Though most Amnesty International's jobs are respected, they seem to have been misled to disgrace Japan. Mike Honda gets money from a powerful Chinese lobbyist group.
When we talk about women's right these days, everything, any accusation could be justified. Be careful when you accuse any people, any country. If you don't have sufficient objective evidence, it is highly likely that you will make a false accusation. Isn't it something that Amnesty wants to correct - false accusation??
Amnesty International does not like Japan because we support capital punishment. Then it is easily understandable that they jumped onto the propaganda.
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soupbowl4 months ago
Dear Star Ledger, do not listen to "Pak's" lie. I know the history. Do you suppose the Korean/Chinese/Phillipinos/Taiwanese/Australian/Malaysian...etc. all come together to do a consipiracy?
Those women were forced into sex slavary, and "Pak" insults them even more by discrediting their testimonies.
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Pak4 months ago
@soupbowl
Listen to the testimonies carefully that Chinese/Phillipinos/Taiwanese/Australian/Malaysian make. As far as I read/listened to, assuming that their stories are all true, their testimonies cannot prove that Japanese government/military abducted those women/girls.
If government/military abducted those women systematically, there has to be a written order. Also, again, assuming that all of their stories are true, they were RAPED by Japanese soldiers. On the contrary, we have found so many government orders to protect comfort women from sex brokers/traders. An example was that one order says that the brothel owners have to pay, if I remember correctly, 70% of payment from clients to comfort women. Some brothel owners did not give payments to comfort women, then, the military order was to secure their income they deserved to receive.
You mix up those rape cases with the prostitution system to disgrace, humiliate Japan and Japanese. We, Japanese, are totally upset at your propaganda.
The US military also says that the comfort women were just prostitutes
- A US Military Report: Japanese Prisoner of War Interrogation Report No. 49.
http://www.exordio.com/1939-1945/codex/Documentos/...
Quote: “A "comfort girl" is nothing more than a prostitute or
"professional camp follower" attached to the Japanese Army for the
benefit of the soldiers.”
Why don't Americans believe its own report??
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Pak4 months ago
>If government/military abducted those women systematically, there has
>to be a written order. Also, again, assuming that all of their stories are
>true, they were RAPED by Japanese soldiers.
I mean they were rape victims and not comfort women. Comfort women were paid prostitutes.
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Pak4 months ago
Don't forget to erect a monument for tens of thousands of Vietnamese women who were killed/raped by Korean solders atrociously/brutally during the Vietnam War.
I learned that any monument can be erected in the USA even thought those are not related to the USA.
Ms. Donovan, the Bergen County Executive would love to install a monument for the women who had never received any apology, compensation, and anything from South Korea.
There are about 30,000 children called Lai Đại Hàn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lai_%C4%90%E1%BA%A1i_... between those women and Korean solders who have been discriminated in Vietnam. They should get sincere apology from South Korean government and alimony or something from South Korea.
Watch this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDQrISRFwmc&fea...
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Pak4 months ago
By the way, the video is subbed with Japanese but he talks in English.
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Pak4 months ago
Oops, because of the parenthesis, the link became unavailable.
Here is the link to Lai Đại Hàn.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lai_%C4%90%E1%BA%A1i_...
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Pak4 months ago
Thank you to some Korean Americans.
I have been personally conducting my counter-propaganda against Koreans but this time I was greatly moved to read this:
>However, organizations such as the Hackensack-based Korean American
>Civic Empowerment Group quickly started petitions to nix the new
>monument, or at least change the wording to take out specific references
>to the Japanese.
and I want to extend my sincere thank you to Korean Americans who raised the voice.
It was really mysterious to me to have had seen that almost no Korean/Korean-American did not question the Korean propaganda. We know that there are China and North Korea behind this controversy/propaganda in an attempt to weaken the tie between Japan and the USA but it is extremely weird that almost no South Korean spoke against the propaganda even considering their extreme anti-Japan education.
I, again, would like to say thank you to those courageous people.
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Tomoko Yamano4 months ago
字幕【テキサス親父】偽慰安婦強制連行問題の原因はこいつだ！: http://youtu.be/Tqffmz7zuWE @youtubeさんから
What is the essence of this problem?
A "comfort-women problem" begins to be made for business.
Probably, American people are going to be used for South Koreans' business.
No less than 50,000 South Korean prostitutes are in Japan.
Americans must not be involved in South Koreans' "comfort-women business", either.
The compensation of a "sex slave" will be charged in several years.
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Kohyu Nishimura4 months ago
What holocaust? are you kidding?
if you said comfort-women is same as holocaust,you would look from a racial discrimination-like viewpoint for a Japanese like Korean people.
Do you know how many Jews Japanese saved and rescued during World War II?
And you have to show the historical evidence that comfort women was same as holocaust.
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speedracer4 months ago
Why would we worry about insulting Japan? We should have nuked the whole country. They were savages. Remember Iwo Jima and the Bataan death march? Remember the atrocities committed against the filipinos? The atrocities committed against US marines, GI's and air force?
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Ma123784 months ago
Other interesting Artikel.(January 7, 2009 )
[Ex-Prostitutes Say South Korea and U.S. Enabled Sex Trade Near Bases ]
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/world/asia/08kor...
-------Now, a group of former prostitutes in South Korea have accused some of their country’s former leaders of a different kind of abuse: encouraging them to have sex with the American soldiers who protected South Korea from North Korea. They also accuse past South Korean governments, and the United States military, of taking a direct hand in the sex trade from the 1960s through the 1980s, working together to build a testing and treatment system to ensure that prostitutes were disease-free for American troops.------
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Kohyu Nishimura4 months ago
And also I would like to recommend this contents.
Let us please introduce you a
videoclip which we believe is indispensable to the basic
understanding of this issue.
「Sex, Lies, and Comfort Women」
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLyKJsbw4G4&
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Orangepope4 months ago
The headline needs to be changed. Thye were"prostitute" they were compelled into it. They were slaves.
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DrJitter4 months ago
...by the families who sold them into it. selling off extra daughters into the sex trade has been an economic survival tactic in Asia for centuries, part of the culture and history. why Bergen County has to get its panties up in a knot over it at this point is beyond me. in prostitution there are always at least two willing parties-- buyer and seller. In a patriarchal society like Korea where dad (and Dear Leader Kim) have ultimate decision power it could only have been the fathers doing the selling (and the compelling) if the daughters were not willing parties to the transaction.
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Pak4 months ago
@B.Dear
It is you that seem to be ignorant.
For example, this is totally wrong.
>Perhaps you can ask the Patriarch of the Korean families
> why they where compelled to change their names to
>Japanese ones.
Koreans were not compelled to change their name to Japanese ones. In Korean history books, it is written that way, though. They distort the facts and fabricate their history. It is well-known among Asian countries.
The truth is Korean begged Japan to allow to have Japanese name. At that time Chinese looked down on Korean severely. Then they wanted to have Japanese names so that they won't be discriminated.
Again, we, Japanese, have a lot of objective evidence to support the statement I wrote above.
B.Dear, before you humiliate anyone, you should learn the fact.
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Joe Kim4 months ago
The Japanese government has already admitted that during WWII they forced women from other countries into sexual slavery for the Japanese army, and has apologized for it.
Even PM Shinzo Abe said that he feels "heartbreaking pain" when he thinks of how the comfort women's human rights were violated by Japan.
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avxnj4 months ago
Who is this "Nicky Yamazaki" quoted in the article? Chances are, "Nicky" is as bogus as her claim of no evidence.
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nlewis4 months ago
While these women may have suffered at the hands of a foreign government in a foreign land I see no need to create a memorial here. How about building one in Korea. A simple rule for public memorials in the U.S. should be: did the event we are memorializing happen here? And were the people we are memorializing Americans? Sorry this memorial doesn't meet this simple criteria. I have nothing against Korean Americans and think the same criteria should apply to a Holocaust memorial or a memorial to the Irish Potato Famine (both of which exist on public land in the NY metro area). Why not commemorate the American soldiers of the Revolution, some of whom died in the same town where the memorial is proposed. Not P.C. enough for you, then how about a memorial to the 120 or so Native Americans slaughtered in 1643 by Dutch governor Willem Kieft in the location of today's Jersey City?
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nlewis4 months ago
Oh yeah, and how about a memorial to the African American slaves executed in Hackensack following the alleged New York slave rebellion of 1740. (BTW they were burned at the stake.)
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mikynewark4 months ago
I agree with Nicky Yamazaki, totally bogus. I don't see any monuments to Polish women who were forced to bear Nazi sons.
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DrJitter4 months ago
All these NJ nail salons getting busted fronting for Korean prostitutes. Who "enslaved" these women? The Japanese Imperial Army?
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B.Dear4 months ago
You are an idiot. It's that simple.
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2wm4 months ago
First off, who pays for these stupid monuments? Taxpayers? We the people?
Second, who cares....... why would we waste our hard earned taxpayer money on things such as this when we still have homeless and hungry men, women and children in this country?
Just my curiosity coming out I guess.....
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DrJitter4 months ago
We would do best to stay out of this. Sorry to burst the PC bubble here, but you don't even need to research original sources to know that Asian families have been selling their spare daughters into the sex trade for centuries, and that the prostitution industry closely follows the movement of armies around the globe. Military authorities have long understood the necessity of working with local govts to establish licensed brothels to prevent spread of disease among the troops. Though they will vociferously deny it, the S.Korean govt itself has long been in the business of providing "comfort women" to American soldiers stationed there, and provided the same service to the Japanese, because it was and remains a lucrative trade. The idea that the Japanese Army came marching in and "enslaved" Korean women is a total crock. So where were the fathers and brothers in all this? We don't hear much about that because the records show they were making pretty good money off all this enslavement. Point a finger, and there are three pointing right back at you. Instead of demonizing another community (the Japanese) that has served Bergen county (and our country very well), the Korean community needs hit the pause button on the grudge-mongering & ask itself a few hard questions. If I was the Japanese community I would sue Fort Lee and every one of these towns putting up these memorials as it creates a hostile environment in the community for Japanese based on grievances that they had nothing to do with. That would really put a curb on our politicians' greed for Korean cash once they see that money start flying out of the borough treasuries.
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dk4 months ago
Are you saying that the Japanese did not forcefully occupy other countries?
What was the attack on Pearl Harbor then? The Japanese saw the US as a threat to their expanding empire.
Countries occupied by Japan nearly had their cultures erased, and replaced with revisionist history proclaiming how Japan was bringing these primitive people into the modern age. It is a fact that a significant part of Asia and the Pacific was enslaved by the Japanese.
But I don't think that we should continue to put up plaques that bring up the horrible past. There are already monuments for these women, why do they need more?
The current Japan is not the same as the Japan of WWII.
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dortelere4 months ago
I think some of this discussion is misplaced. Such a memorial should be everlasting. So it is to cause awareness on the part of those who in the future will be too young to remember. The purpose of such memorials has changed. It is not done today for our own consolation but to teach those that come later of an earlier tragedy or injustice.
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IFHTC4 months ago
NJ needs to STOP with these STUPID 'Memorials'.
Kids shot at a school? Give them a memorial.
Kids molested at church? Give them a memorial.
Government flies a few planes into buildings? Blame someone else THEN give them a MEMORIAL.
How about some CLASS? Memorials are not for everything and what we choose to memorialize is just insane. As is calling someone a prostitute who was forced into sex work. That is not a prostitute that is a sex slave. Big difference.
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Mary Beth Jahn4 months ago
Wow, did you wake up on the cranky side of the bed today. What's wrong, no one has changed your soiled Depends yet? If you don't like memorials, don't look at them. They give great comfort to people who have lost loved ones through no fault of their own.
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2wm4 months ago
I'm not against memorials, as long as they are on private property and not paid for with tax dollars.
We really need to get our priorities straight and use our money a little more wisely.
And memorials for people who had problems in the past, in another country?
I May understand if it happened here, but I'm not really into having a Memorial for the plight of the Turkish farmer who had problems in 1462.
We need to draw a line somewhere.....
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trueaccount4 months ago
The City of San Francisco puts up a memorial plaque for every street person found dead in an alley.
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NJNANNA4 months ago
This is nuts, make a memorial to all the women and kids that were left behinh here when their fathers, husbands, brothers, uncles, and many other family men were killed and they were left to fend for themselves here. Many did without and many worked for the WPA and never knew what was going on over there because there was hardly any mail. Let Japan feel guilty about what they did, and lets honor our own unsung warriors .They started this mess, send them the plaque and tell them to hang it. Tax payer money for something so stupid, no wonder we are broke.
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Tradizione4 months ago
Inacurrate and inflammatory headline, shame on you! Nowhere in the text of the article is the word 'prostitute' used; indeed, the article acknowledges the women were enslaved.
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NJCrazyDad4 months ago
Putting aside the reasons for the memorial or the choice of location, this has to be the dumbest reason to re-do the wording. Because the Japanese are going to be offended for something they did? Are we supposed to expunge the name of the guilty everywhere? I guess Pearl Harbor was the result of a meteor. It is healthy for a culture to come to grips with what they've done. And it's healthy for all of us to realize it happened and could happen again. Please stop this PC nonsense!!!
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Mary Beth Jahn4 months ago
Seeing as the Korean-American groups, whose ancestors were victimized by this practice, are asking for a rewording because their relatives in Korea and Japan have come to grips with this particular horror of war, it's absolutely appropriate. Think of it as a lesson learned from the war.
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DINO!4 months ago
Bergen County and Fort Lee you must be kidding us, right?! Wasting tax dollars on plaques and monuments to honor foriegn prostitutes and hookers.
Pathetic!
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ammo17ae4 months ago
the only monuments that should be built in this country is those honoring american citizens,and that goes for the holocaust museums they belong in europe especially in germany and the balkan countries.
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deacon854 months ago
Who at NJ.com signed off on the "prostitutes" headline? These women were not prostitutes, they were forced into sexual slavery. And while I can't fathom the argument that this didn't happen (it's in the history books, folks; a lot of what happened in WW II is open to debate, but this happened), I also don't see the need for a memorial at this location. Why not memorials to victims of Nanking, or Stalingrad, or Dresden or London? The list is limitless.
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justintime734 months ago
i agree with your take on the headline, it struck me the same way. could someone please explain all it to dino?
the reason that this memorial is right for this location is the 23.5% of the fort lee population (2010 census) that is korean-american
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deacon854 months ago
I understand that's the rationale for the memorial in Fort Lee, but it is a good idea to use that as the criteria for locating memorials? I can appreciate the desire for a memorial, but I just don't think it should depend on having a significant portion of the population being of an ancestry of people that were victimized. Just my opinion.
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DINO!4 months ago
Thanks for your post justintime73...but I'm just voicing my opinion in this open forum to the article pally...I don't work for the SL or nj.com, so your issue with the headline is with the media, not me...but if you rationale is correct, why don't we just erect plaques and monuments honoring Italians, Germans, Irish, etc. from foriegn countries that have been mistreated abroad all over the Garden State with the tax payers money. So when your property taxes increase letter arrives in the mail, and you feel your pocket has been picked again, just think about the feel good of your money going to wasteful spending like this.
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Ovaljoe4 months ago
Last time I rode through Palisades Park, I don't remember seeing a Monument to Korean War (Iam sorry "Conflict") G.I. s maybe there, maybe I missed it......
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JenfromNJ4 months ago
Oh, brother. The truth is going to offend someone. Boo hoo.
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bospherus4 months ago
We will never forget what the evil Japanese did during the WWII era. How this respectful and decent society became so twisted is a study in Fascism and its consequences. If it was up to me I would erect statues honoring the ones who suffered in the Philippines, Nanking, and Burma alongside the Korean statue; for surely these horrors must never be forgotten or repeated.
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justintime734 months ago
well said
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justintime734 months ago
propaganda? yeah, right, the nanking massacre never happened either. or the bataan death march. denial don't work. the comfort women, relatively speaking, were lucky. they lived through it
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thedalek4 months ago
Remember Pearl Harbor! Try and re-write that, Hirohito!
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Toshihide Masaki4 months ago
we want you to investigate the fact what the real history is.
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Critics cause Fort Lee to reconsider monument honoring Korean WWII prostitutes
Print Dan Ivers/NJ.com By Dan Ivers/NJ.com
on April 06, 2013 at 7:31 AM, updated April 06, 2013 at 7:33 AM
Bergen officials dedicate 'comfort women' memorial
The text of a monument to 'comfort women' outside the Bergen County courthouse in Hackensack. Plans for a similar memorial in Fort Lee were recently scrapped after Korean groups warned it could be perceived as anti-Japanese.
S.P. Sullivan/NJ.com
FORT LEE — Plans for a monument honoring hundreds of thousands of women forced into sexual slavery during World War II have been scrapped after various Korean-American groups voiced concerns it could be insulting to Japan.
According to The Record, the borough council approved the monument, which would honor Korean "comfort women" who worked in Japanese military brothels during the 1940s, last month.
Similar monuments have already been dedicated in New York and elsewhere in Bergen County, which has a burgeoning Korean population. The first of its kind was put up in Palisades Park, and county officials held a ceremony to unveil a memorial outside the courthouse in Hackensack earlier this year.
However, organizations such as the Hackensack-based Korean American Civic Empowerment Group quickly started petitions to nix the new monument, or at least change the wording to take out specific references to the Japanese.
Media organizations such as NJ.com have received dozens of letters and emails from Japanese opponents of the memorials in recent weeks, many of whom call the slavery allegations "propaganda."
An email sent Friday from Nicky Yamazaki claims there is no evidence that Korean women were ever held in Japanese brothels, and that the issue is causing diplomatic tensions between the two countries.
"Japanese are upset about this situation. We do not try to rewrite the history. Also we are not revisionists or right wings," it reads. "As the fabricated history is spreading, we cannot miss damaged our ancestors’ honor, and we want you to know the fact what the real history is."
mikeccrider4 months ago
That finish
Report No. 49: Japanese Prisoners of War Interrogation on Prostitution
UNITED STATES OFFICE OF WAR INFORMATION
Date : Oct 1, 1944
Prisoners: 20 Korean Comfort Girls
This report is based on the information obtained from the interrogation of twenty Korean "comfort girls" captured around the tenth of Aug, 1944 after the fall of Myitkyin a in Burma.
A "comfort girl" is nothing more than a prostitute or "professional camp follower" attached to the Japanese Army for the benefit of the soldiers.
A "comfort girl" is nothing more than a prostitute
A "comfort girl" is nothing more than a prostitute
A "comfort girl" is nothing more than a prostitute
I hope. Korean liar and a foolish Please disappear from this world.
thank you.
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mikeccrider4 months ago
Koreans should not deceive their own people in a textbook of this lie.
Koreans to cause problems in the world, because they believe in the historicity of the distorted.
America was Korean Territory - YouTube
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kittykat554 months ago
First of all, I condemn military brothel system. However it happened everywhere and still there are a bunch of brothels near American military base in S.Korea.
Then I wondered why still Koreans tribute women to foreign soldiers. I think Korean comfort women issue has the cultural background.
1.They Were Getting Paid.
http://www.exordio.com/1939-1945/codex/Documentos/...
The Korean government requested to the Japanese gov't "Secure comfort women's saving money and properties in occupied lands in South"-Japan-Korea negotiations report No3 (1953)
2.Comfort Women Recruitment Ads Exist.
3.There Were Plenty Of Japanese Comfort Women But Never Been Discussed About Them.
That shows the comfort women campain by Korean nationalists has racism.
4.Surviving Korean Comfort Women Change The Stories All The Time.
Changing story is a typical symptoｍ of perjury.
Ref: "A Country of Liars by Kim DaeJoong"-July.3,2005 The Chosun Ilbo
6.Korea Had Comfort Women System During Korean War.
"It was such a degraded situation under the American occupation in the Korean war that a friend of mine who served in the Korean war said on Friday night they would bring in a half ton truck full of 150 women and they would be in a movie house having sex. These undoubtedly included women who were comfort women for the Japanese army." http://www.wnyc.org/news/articles/31050
But The Korean government said they were prostitutes so no problem.
Movie "Field of Honor"(1986) portrays the Korean comfort women in Korean war.
7.The Japanese Police In Those Days Busted Korean Sex Traffickers.
Pleanty of the news paper articles about it remain.
If anybody wants to see them click here http://goo.gl/wjnj6
8.Sex Slave System Was Korean Tradition.
Joseon dynasty Korea had slaves called Nobi. Female Nobi were usually sold as prostitute.
King Sejong to send prostitutes to front line. (Annals of Joseon Sejong 1436)
(The King) sent the following instructions to the Governor of Hangil Province:
“In the past, prostitutes were sent to camps on the frontier to service soldiers without wives. It had a long history. Even now government giseangs are stationed at frontier camps and administrative posts to service travellers. Moreover, on the northern frontier we have large camps, including Gyeongwon, Hoiryeong, and Gyeonseong, which are in your province. Troops guarding the frontier are far from their families and must endure two (years) of cold and heat, making their daily duties even more difficult; therefore, I think it is appropriate to station prostitutes to service the troops.
9.Sex Business And Trafficking In Modern Korea.
According to Han-nara party's survey,total 100000 Korean women are working as prostitutes outside of Korea.
50000 are in Japan, 25000 are in Australia, 250 are in Guam. Oct, 28, 2010
"Ask Mu Yung Shin, presently a prostitute at a Korean massage parlor in Dallas. Abducted at the age of 14 from her village home in South Korea by a group of Korean criminals"
http://www.stanford.edu/group/reflections/Winter19...
Diary of a sex slave by San Francisco Chronicle is good to read.
10.Raping of Japanese refugees by Koreans after WWII.
http://youtu.be/E4g2lsaTPeg
This historical fact is big taboo in Korea so some Koreans are demanding libraries in the states to remove this book "So Far From The Bamboo Grove"
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mikeccrider4 months ago
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mikeccrider4 months ago
to Joe Kim
You are also a sad Korean.
Your claim is not true.
"2 million people were forced entrainment" you said,but fact is a stowaway of 2 million people.
It is same situation that currently Korean American.
Every year several million people had been starved to death in Korea.
Japanese Imperial Army are yearning of the Korean people, the volunteers was a competitive rate of 2000 times.
5th President of South Korea was the officer of the Japanese Imperial Army.
Korean comfort women is also the same.
the Japanese were treated the Koreans as the same Japanese.
http://24.media.tumblr.com/569d1eef9c1d657d209c8bd...
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Pak4 months ago
Thirty nine (39) comfort women and their supporters were arrested in Korea by Korean police for their fraud. They raised about 1.2 million dollars from about 30,000 Korean citizens saying that they can collect a lot of compensation money from Japan and they can give back a lot of money to the citizens. Of course they could not get compensation and could not distribute the "profit" to those people.
They also looked for candidate "comfort women" who just lived the WWII era even though they were NOT comfort women. They said if you lived in the era, you could be a comfort woman to demand compensation to Japan.
Money talks.
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Pak4 months ago
It is well-known in Asia that Koreans make false accusations too often.
Westerners may think all people in all Asian countries are similar but this is not true. Each culture, way of thinking is very different in each country.
Again, Koreans make too many false accusations. Here are some quotes from The Korea Herald.
"In 2007, Koreans indicted for perjury or calumny totaled 1,544 and 2,171, respectively, compared to only nine and 10 in Japan."
"experts said the figures indicate that Koreans commit perjury and make false accusations about 420 times and 540 times the rate of the Japanese."
"Law enforcement officials here also complain they are having difficulties with witnesses giving false testimonies."
Source: "A low-trust society" The Korea Herald Published : 2011-08-02
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chocolate4 months ago
Hi ppl.
The Koreans are trying to build the statues all over the States. What for? I don't know why they do such a thing in the country which has nothing to do with this issue. This is much political one, still in question. Political matters are very sensitive for all nations. Japan and the U.S have been allies and developped a trusting relationship after the war. The Japanese like American cultures and Americans. I'm afraid that the issue could undermine our bilateral relation by granting the one side of the story.
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Jack Frost4 months ago
Them horndogs VOLUNTEERED!
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spanneta4 months ago
"Critics cause Fort Lee to reconsider monument honoring Korean WWII prostitutes"
What a TERRIBLE bit of headline writing! First of all, the plaque plainly memorializes the women of many countries, not just Korea, who were FORCED into prostitution.
From the OFFICIAL Japanese apology issued in 1993:
"Today the Government said it had concluded that the bitter claims of the women were true: many were forced to act as virtual slaves, providing sex for imperial soldiers. ...The report concluded that many women lived as captives of the military beginning in 1932, when Japan invaded China, to the end of the war in 1945. Among the women forced to have sex with soldiers were Japanese, Chinese, Koreans and Filipinos, as well as Dutch women captured in Indonesia, then a Dutch colony.
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/05/world/japan-admi...
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Pak4 months ago
The Kono statement was a compromise between Japan and Korea.
Korean government asked Japanese government to admit some level of forced prostitution. And, Korean government said once Japan admits the forced prostitution, Korean government will never bring up the issue again.
Japan kept the promise and Korea broke the promise.
The Kono statement is a typical Japanese, vague statement. Many things are not clearly mentioned. Rape cases are blended in the statement.
>and that, at times, administrative/military personnel directly
> took part in the recruitments.
These statements are mentioning the cases like the one in Indonesia where Netherlands and Australian women were raped repeatedly for 2 months. I am sure some Japanese criminals raped Asian women in China and other countries, also, as all military individuals with any nationality have been doing. Those cases have to be severely criticized.
Because of the vagueness of the statement, many Japanese think that the Kono statement has to be revised.
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spanneta4 months ago
"Even the notorious Kono statement does not say Japanese government/military abducted women/girls . CHEAP SHOT!!!! "
No? Transferring against their will by coercion (especially by an occupying military power) sure sounds like abduction to me!
"The Government study has revealed that in many cases they were recruited against their own will, through coaxing coercion, etc., and that, at times, administrative/military personnel directly took part in the recruitments. They lived in misery at comfort stations under a coercive atmosphere."
"The Korean Peninsula was under Japanese rule in those days, and their recruitment, transfer, control, etc., were conducted generally against their will, through coaxing, coercion, etc."
"Undeniably, this was an act, with the involvement of the military authorities of the day, that severely injured the honor and dignity of many women. The Government of Japan would like to take this opportunity once again to extend its sincere apologies and remorse to all those, irrespective of place of origin, who suffered immeasurable pain and incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women."
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Pak4 months ago
>No? Transferring against their will by coercion
>(especially by an occupying military power) sure
>sounds like abduction to me!
Coercion by WHO???
It is coercion by Korean sex brokers/traders.
Don't use your sense of 21st century. Military helped comfort women to move to the brothels because there is no public transportation in the battle field during the war time. Also, military offered medical examination to comfort women because if they transfer sexual disease to soldiers, they can't fight. This is the same practice among military in various nations and not specific to Japan.
You have determined mind to humiliate Japan firsthand, then, you cannot see the bigger picture.
Comfort women existed in all nations.
Again, SINGLING OUT Japan to blame sex in battle field is DISCRIMINATION against Japan/Japanese.
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Joe Kim4 months ago
Japanese police in Korea were no doubt deeply involved in the recruitment of comfort women.
Comfort women weren't the only people who were forcibly recruited by Japanese.
During WWII, Japan forcibly conscripted 6 million Koreans (out of a total population of 24 million) and used them as slave laborers for its war machine. Japanese policemen went door-to-door and rounded people up.
(Up to half a million of them perished due to the harsh working conditions and brutal treatment.)
It's unfortunate that Japan destroyed so much evidence regarding its war crimes (including its military sex slaves) just prior to the end of WWII.
But the fact is that so much Japanese documents from the WWII era, including Japanese colonial police records from Korea and other relevant archives, remain classified and locked up.
Even Japanese researchers of comfort women, such as Yoshimi and Tanaka, have complained that so much Japanese documents are classified and that they only have had access to the "tip of the iceberg".
Japanese apologists who claim that there's no evidence of forced recruitment of comfort women, even when so much Japanese WWII records remain secret and locked up, are really being disingenuous.
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Incogvito4 months ago
...Some Japanese folks are traveling in Egypt...They are in denial
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simkin1684 months ago
How about a memorial for all the slaves white people raped from 1600 to 1865?
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Bob Backlund4 months ago
168,
Way to attempt to hijack a news story for your own personal agenda. If it is so important to you do the research, get evidence this happened with names, fund it and put it up in your irrelevant town. You will get ZERO support for your plight..
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800meterrunner4 months ago
From the accounts that I've read there is no doubt that the Japanese victimized so many Korean women during World War II. These women didn't volunteer to be prostitutes. They were promised jobs in war factories. Most were too embarrassed to return home after the war, though their sexual enslavement was not their fault.
The Japanese have never openly admitted what they have done.
After the war a number of Japanese war criminals weren't prosecuted because the U.S. needed a bulwark in Asia that was anti-Communist. Germany has done a fine job in educating their youth about the horrors of the Third Reich. Japan has dropped the ball on that issue. It's a shame because modern Japan is a far different country than it was in the 1920s and 30s.
Another fact. Japan was given Korea to govern after the Russo-Japanese War in the early 1900s. Koreans were brutally treated for almost the next half century.
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Pak4 months ago
>From the accounts that I've read there is no doubt that the Japanese
> victimized so many Korean women during World War II. These women
>didn't volunteer to be prostitutes. They were promised jobs in war factories.
This is also a typical Korean's and its frinends' statement.
Koreans mix Women's Volunteer Corps and Comfort women. Some Koreans do so intentionally to disgrace Japan and Japanese people.
The system called Women's Volunteer Corps is that Japanese government created. Because all Japanese young men went to war, there was no work force in the factories. So, the government mobilized women to work at factories. They did not offer any sexual service.
Women's Volunteer Corps has nothing to do with comfort women.
There are numerous newspaper advertisements by sex brokers/traders to recruit comfort women. Some of them have a picture of naked woman. Their salary promised on the advertizement is usually 300 yen a month. This is the same/similar amount paid to military colonels and prefecture (equivalent to US State) governors.
When there is a picture of a naked woman on the comfort woman advertisement promising that high salary when women were not supposed to work in the conservative era, what does it mean??
... prostitution!!
Do you think she could not imagine what she was going to do with the high salary???
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Joe Kim4 months ago
@Pak,
>As you said, we liberated Korea's slaves. About 40% of your people was slaves.
And you are lying again.
In late Choson, 40% of the population were commoners.
10% of the population were slaves.
> What will happen to female slaves? They were of course raped.
I don't know where you got this idea, but you are wrong again.
In Choson times, sex criminals were punished very harshly.
Even slave owners could not rape female slaves. If they did, they were punished.
If a man raped an underage girl, it was instant execution.
Traditional Korean culture was a conservative culture.
BTW, you try to make it look like Japan came and rescued Korea from backwardness.
You know? Maybe Koreans would be grateful to Japan if Japanese had treated Koreans nicely.
But you Japanese annexed Korea and treated Koreans like a sub-species.
You tried to eradicate Korean culture, language, and identity.
When Koreans demonstrated peacefully for independence, you brutally killed them by the thousands.
You tortured them and used them for human experimentation.
Then you started WWII Pacific War and dragged Korea into the war as well.
Forcibly conscripting 1/4 of the population (so much so that the only people left in Korean villages were the elderly and children) and forcing them to do slave labor. Treating them so badly that up to 500,000 of them perished.
Forcing tens of thousands of Korean women into sex slavery for the Japanese military.
Apologizing for these heinous war crimes, then trying to take back your apologies.
Calling the comfort women liars.
Do you really think they are liars?
Do you really think that 80-90 year old ex-prostitutes, some of them who can barely walk, would protest every single week in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul, demanding justice?
Do you think they are just whores who want money?
Do you know that in 2011 when Japan was hit by that earthquake and tsunami, even the Korean comfort women sent condolences and donations to Japan?
Koreans are not vindictive people.
They don't like to hold grudges.
Koreans want peace with Japan.
But first the comfort women issue must be resolved.
Japan was properly apologize, and pass laws making it illegal for Japanese to deny the comfort women issue, as well as other WWII war crimes.
They must also properly teach Japanese children about these issues.
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Pak4 months ago
@Joe Kim
＞And you are lying again.
＞In late Choson, 40% of the population were
＞commoners. 10% of the population were slaves.
Quote
Another 30-40% of the population were slaves (nobi), "low borns" (cheonmin) or untouchable outcastes (baekjeong). Slavery was hereditary, as well as a form of legal punishment.
Quote ends.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseon
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jim4 months ago
sorry folks but the Japanese were some of the most brutal occupiers around actullay we should put up a memorial celebrating the end of the pacific war and a tribute to the atom bomb makers
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an7614 months ago
The gross injustice here is that the victims and their families of the Japanese have never been compensated for their pain and suffering while Germany made reparations to those harmed
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Pak4 months ago
This is also a typical statement that Korean and its friends make.
Japan compensated much more than German did.
I am not saying that German was not willing to compensate. German was waved to compensate because of the western culture of forgiveness and because of their reflection from WWI. After WWI neighboring countries demanded too much compensation to Germany and Germany was going into bankruptcy. Then, German people became mad and started to become aggressive.
On the contrary, China and Korea has a culture of grudge. （恨の文化） They tend to grudge almost forever. However, China was great because China waived Japan. Japan, then, legally does not (cannot) compensate for the bad things that Japan did against China. It is settled between the 2 nations.
However, Korea has been demanding compensation too much. Korea was a part of Japan and fought with Japan against allies. Then, legally, we cannot pay compensation. However, we gave all infrastructure to Korea and under the name of "economic cooperation" we gave twice as much as then Korea's national budget to Korea.
Another good example is Indonesia. Netherlands tried to re-colonize Indonesia after the WWII but Japanese soldiers who remained in the country fought against Netherlands with Indonesians. After Indonesia's independence, Netherlands demanded payment for the infrastructure they did in the country as a retaliatory action. Indonesia was not able to pay for it. Then, Japan paid as a part of "compensation" for Indonesia.
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njtomasso4 months ago
Japan's vehement denial of widespread and horrific war atrocities is comparable to those who claim the Holocaust was faked and that films of liberating the death camps were shot on a secret movie set.
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Pak4 months ago
Who said Holocaust was fabricated?
It is a real story that actually happened though it seems to be over-exaggerated.
You should stop humiliating German people who admitted the holocaust. Almost all of the lay German people did know know what was going on back then. Nevertheless, when Korean had a succor game with Germans, you put up Hakenkreuz image with a huge X mark on it.
Koreans even said, "Welcome, war criminals!!"
Also, Japan has been denying ONLY what are NOT true such as the comfort women issue. We have admitted all bad things we did during WWII and paid astronomical compensation to numerous countries.
On the contrary, Korea was a part of Japan during WWII and fought against allies together with Japan but Korea has never paid any compensation to any countries. When majority of Korean was eager to become a part of Japan then and fought bravely against the allies, you are people who lost the war and have to compensate for what you did.
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Joe Kim4 months ago
People like you who call the former comfort women liars are precisely the reason why these comfort women monuments must be built.
By the way, SDH (Society for Dissemination of Historical Fact), whose articles you keep citing, is a Japanese ultra right-wing organization that claims that America started the WWII Pacific War.
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Pak4 months ago
@Joe Kim
>By the way, SDH (Society for Dissemination
>of Historical Fact), whose articles you keep
>citing, is a Japanese ultra right-wing organization
>that claims that America started the WWII Pacific War.
This is always what Koreans say.
Every Japanese activity/everyone that Koreans don't like is labeled "ultra right-wing" by Koreans trying to paint us. Koreans always to impression manipulation.
Even if you WERE correct, SDHF is just translating papers into English.
Poor Joe Kim.
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Barry074 months ago
Would anyone object to a memorial for the millions of German women and children subjected to mass rapes after the second world war. Every people have their sad stories to tell. The victors write the history ensuring only certain peoples, such as the Germans and Japanese, wear the mark of Cain. War brings horror. Why is it we blame entire peoples but never high finance who orchestrate these wars and finance both sides? We should love the Koreans and Japanese, realizing those who created the war were of neither people.
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Pak4 months ago
Again, who denied the holocaust? Why you want to relate the comfort woman issue to the holocaust. Those are totally different issues. Koreans and its friends are desperate to relate the comfort woman issue to holocaust. You are also humiliating German people over-reminding their wrongdoing when you try to relate the comfort woman issue to holocaust.
Why don't you relate the holocaust to what Koreans did during Vietnam War. Koreans killed tens of thousands of Vietnamese women in a most cruel/atrocious/inhumane manner.
Why don't you relate the holocaust to 保導聯盟事件 （보도연맹 사건, Bodo Yeonmaeng Sageon) in which Koreans killed up to 1,200,000 own people?
Those atrocities should be remembered in the USA because the USA seems to be the place to erect a monument with US tax money for whatever the event all over the world even then the event is fabricated.
My personal opinion is,
The USA should not become a melting pot of hatred/controversy/humiliation for all things/events all around the world.
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take_fox4 months ago
If these animations are seen, the annexation time of Japan and South Korea is known well.
1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xauBLG1zZGY
2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1FAClJccVA
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Kohyu Nishimura4 months ago
And i would like to recommend to read an authorized essay by historian professor Ikuhiko Hata.
Professor Hata, the most knowledgeable expert on the “comfort women” issue,illustrates the reality of the comfort women. He even reveals the testimonies of the former “comfort women” are unreliable and also fallacy of Kono Statement. He concludes The truth relating to the “comfort women” need to be discussed to diffuse the prevailing irrational media-induced hysteria.
NO ORGANIZED OR FORCED RECRUITMENT: MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT
COMFORT WOMEN AND THE JAPANESE MILITARY
Hata Ikuhiko
http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL02_1/31_S4.pdf
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Kohyu Nishimura4 months ago
continued・・・
On the contrary, many documents were found warning private brokers not to force women to work against their will
Army memorandum 2197, issued on March 4, 1938, explicitly prohibits recruiting methods that fraudulently employ the army's name or that can be classified as abduction, warning that those employing such methods have been punished. A Home Affairs Ministry directive (number 77) issued on February 18, 1938, states that the recruitment of "comfort women" must be in compliance with international law and prohibits the enslavement of abduction of women. A directive (number 136) issued on November 8 the same year, moreover, orders that only women who are 21 years old or over and are already professionally engaged in the trade may be recruited as "comfort women." It also requires the approval of the woman's family or relatives.
A historian who claims that the number of "comfort women" reached 200,000 - a contention frequently quoted in the US media - believes, on the other hand, that the memorandum offers proof of the army's active involvement.
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Kohyu Nishimura4 months ago
No historical document has ever been found by historians or research organizations that positively demonstrates that women were forced against their will into prostitution by the Japanese army.
A search of the archives at the Japan Center for Asian Historical Records, which houses wartime orders from the government and military leaders, turned up nothing indicating that women were forcibly rounded up to work as ianfu, or comfort women."
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SkepticBob4 months ago
Do you expect a search of the JAPAN Center... archives gives a fair and balanced treatment of the subject? Covering up war crimes is common. All nations do it.
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kittykat554 months ago
What The Japan Center for Asian Historical Records has are actual historical records or official documentations related to Asia and Japan relations from the National Archives. Korean researchers do use the archives too.
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Sizzla4 months ago
The amount of disgusting and downright insulting comments left by Japanese netizens and their army of apologists is disturbing but unfortunately par for the course when it comes to anything related to comfort women published in English.
To those who claim there are no official documents that corroborate the claims made by former comfort women leave out one hugely inconvenient and indisputable fact. The Imperial Japanese Army knew months ahead of their official surrender that they were destined to lose the war. Knowing this, Japan's leaders then implemented a campaign focused on damage control and their main objective was to destroy any official documents or evidences that corroborated their numerous war crimes and atrocities. This is a FACT. Docs relating to comfort women were among those that were destroyed. Despite this systematic destruction of evidence, some documents still exist and a few have been unearthed by Japanese researchers in the last two-three decades (Yoshimi...google him). Some also speculate (with merit) that the Japanese gov. currently still has some of these docs and that these are among the many files that are still closely guarded and highly classified.
Now let's pretend for arguments' sake that there was no documentary evidence (which is absolutely not the case). The most compelling evidence that should be considered is the personal testimony of those surviving women who were victimized as sexual slaves by the IJA. There are women from Korea, China, Taiwan, Philippines, Southeast Asia, Dutch, etc. etc. that have consistently told the same story so it's not some personal vendetta from citizens from one or two countries. This is a multinational group of old women who deserve to be officially recognized by Japan's government and deserve to be memorialized so that these apologists and revisionists don't ever have the opportunity to victimize them again with their lies and accusations of being willing child prostitutes.
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iida4 months ago
>Docs relating to comfort women were among those that were destroyed.
Can you give me evidence other than your imagination?
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Pak4 months ago
>Docs relating to comfort women were among those that
>were destroyed.
Then, why we can find numerous government/military documents that supports our statement: comfort women were well-paid prostitutes?
Would you explain to us before you humiliate, disgrace, and discriminate Japan and Japanese?
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Kohyu Nishimura4 months ago
Questions by member of The House of Representative Nakayama @The House of Representatives on March 8, 2013
"This was not truth that comfort women were yanked forcibly"
8th March 2013
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ausRSDUxKr4
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Kohyu Nishimura4 months ago
I post again.
All American may have to learn the basic first step of the history between Japan and Korea.
If you would be able to find any historical facts, most of all American、rational intellectual prudent, would understand the facts about so-called "comfort woman", as many American always watch many news about the case some Korean women had been forced to return their country by American police now.
So I would like to recommend the my article translated in English for an authoritative Japanese opinion-magazine "WiLL" bellow.
*Summary: http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL02_2/78_S1.pdf
*Full text: http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL02_1/97_S4.pdf
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Sizzla4 months ago
Those laughable pdf files that you've linked to tell us all any informed person should know about you. The organization that you present as a non biased source is notorious for their outrageous attempts of revisionist history and even more hilariously is named the "Society the Dissemination of Historical Fact (sic)". These people claim that America was the aggressor in WW2, that Japan was a victim that was merely trying to liberate their Asian brother from the yoke of Western Imperialism. They deny well established facts and more disturbingly deny any responsibility for Japan's war crimes. In short...they are joke and anyone who cites them as a credible source is even more of a joke.
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Kohyu Nishimura4 months ago
i know you are not only rational and intellectual, but just a coward, mean, anonymous, racist.
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Kohyu Nishimura4 months ago
Yes,there is No historical document has ever been found by historians or research organizations that positively demonstrates that women were forced against their will into prostitution by the Japanese army.
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ja076574 months ago
So you expect the military to keep activity logs on all of it's prostitution events? Interesting...
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iida4 months ago
Were they really "sex slaves" ? doubt it.
"They lived in near-luxury in Burma in comparison to other places."
"While in Burma they amused themselves by participating in sports events with both officers and men, and attended picnics, entertainments, and social dinners. They had a phonograph and in the towns they were allowed to go shopping."
"The girls were allowed the prerogative of refusing a customer. "
"...there were numerous instances of proposals of marriage and in certain cases marriages actually took place."
http://www.exordio.com/1939-1945/codex/Documentos/...
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soupbowl4 months ago
Last year, Nikon cancelled a photo exhibition of wartime sex slaves, and the Japan Visual Journalist Association slammed Nikon's censorship. If the subject matter is "bogus" as claimed by the posters here, then why would the Japanese visual journalists complain? Read the news here on The Japan Times (in English): http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2012/05/29/news/v...
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Kohyu Nishimura4 months ago
you just have only read a biased news paper.
Japan Times is well known to ordinal Japanese people as anti-Japan ultra left wing media.
I know many Japanese journalists protested such a silly propaganda anti-japan event.
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soupbowl4 months ago
Dear Star Ledger, you sounds like you don't know whom to believe, then perhaps you should listen to the Australian: http://www.awm.gov.au/exhibitions/alliesinadversit...
and Amnesty International Australia:
http://www.amnesty.org.au/comfort
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Pak4 months ago
Ａｕｓｔｒａｌｉａｎ/Netherlands women were not comfort women. They are rape victims. Korean/Chinese advocates/lobbyists take advantage of those cases for their propaganda. They mingle those rape cases with the comfort woman issue to disgrace Japan.
They were raped for about 2 months in Indonesia against the Japan's military rule. Just after the rape cases were reported to a Japanese colonel, he immediately shut down the comfort station that the criminals used to rape those women. The criminals were taken to courts and punished already. Some were sentenced to death. Korean/Chinese exaggerate this case and generalize it to the entire comfort woman issue to disgrace Japan/Japanese people.
Amnesty International is connected to Rep Mike Honda who has been humiliating Japan and Japanese people. Though most Amnesty International's jobs are respected, they seem to have been misled to disgrace Japan. Mike Honda gets money from a powerful Chinese lobbyist group.
When we talk about women's right these days, everything, any accusation could be justified. Be careful when you accuse any people, any country. If you don't have sufficient objective evidence, it is highly likely that you will make a false accusation. Isn't it something that Amnesty wants to correct - false accusation??
Amnesty International does not like Japan because we support capital punishment. Then it is easily understandable that they jumped onto the propaganda.
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soupbowl4 months ago
Dear Star Ledger, do not listen to "Pak's" lie. I know the history. Do you suppose the Korean/Chinese/Phillipinos/Taiwanese/Australian/Malaysian...etc. all come together to do a consipiracy?
Those women were forced into sex slavary, and "Pak" insults them even more by discrediting their testimonies.
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Pak4 months ago
@soupbowl
Listen to the testimonies carefully that Chinese/Phillipinos/Taiwanese/Australian/Malaysian make. As far as I read/listened to, assuming that their stories are all true, their testimonies cannot prove that Japanese government/military abducted those women/girls.
If government/military abducted those women systematically, there has to be a written order. Also, again, assuming that all of their stories are true, they were RAPED by Japanese soldiers. On the contrary, we have found so many government orders to protect comfort women from sex brokers/traders. An example was that one order says that the brothel owners have to pay, if I remember correctly, 70% of payment from clients to comfort women. Some brothel owners did not give payments to comfort women, then, the military order was to secure their income they deserved to receive.
You mix up those rape cases with the prostitution system to disgrace, humiliate Japan and Japanese. We, Japanese, are totally upset at your propaganda.
The US military also says that the comfort women were just prostitutes
- A US Military Report: Japanese Prisoner of War Interrogation Report No. 49.
http://www.exordio.com/1939-1945/codex/Documentos/...
Quote: “A "comfort girl" is nothing more than a prostitute or
"professional camp follower" attached to the Japanese Army for the
benefit of the soldiers.”
Why don't Americans believe its own report??
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Pak4 months ago
>If government/military abducted those women systematically, there has
>to be a written order. Also, again, assuming that all of their stories are
>true, they were RAPED by Japanese soldiers.
I mean they were rape victims and not comfort women. Comfort women were paid prostitutes.
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Pak4 months ago
Don't forget to erect a monument for tens of thousands of Vietnamese women who were killed/raped by Korean solders atrociously/brutally during the Vietnam War.
I learned that any monument can be erected in the USA even thought those are not related to the USA.
Ms. Donovan, the Bergen County Executive would love to install a monument for the women who had never received any apology, compensation, and anything from South Korea.
There are about 30,000 children called Lai Đại Hàn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lai_%C4%90%E1%BA%A1i_... between those women and Korean solders who have been discriminated in Vietnam. They should get sincere apology from South Korean government and alimony or something from South Korea.
Watch this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDQrISRFwmc&fea...
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Pak4 months ago
By the way, the video is subbed with Japanese but he talks in English.
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Pak4 months ago
Oops, because of the parenthesis, the link became unavailable.
Here is the link to Lai Đại Hàn.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lai_%C4%90%E1%BA%A1i_...
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Pak4 months ago
Thank you to some Korean Americans.
I have been personally conducting my counter-propaganda against Koreans but this time I was greatly moved to read this:
>However, organizations such as the Hackensack-based Korean American
>Civic Empowerment Group quickly started petitions to nix the new
>monument, or at least change the wording to take out specific references
>to the Japanese.
and I want to extend my sincere thank you to Korean Americans who raised the voice.
It was really mysterious to me to have had seen that almost no Korean/Korean-American did not question the Korean propaganda. We know that there are China and North Korea behind this controversy/propaganda in an attempt to weaken the tie between Japan and the USA but it is extremely weird that almost no South Korean spoke against the propaganda even considering their extreme anti-Japan education.
I, again, would like to say thank you to those courageous people.
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Tomoko Yamano4 months ago
字幕【テキサス親父】偽慰安婦強制連行問題の原因はこいつだ！: http://youtu.be/Tqffmz7zuWE @youtubeさんから
What is the essence of this problem?
A "comfort-women problem" begins to be made for business.
Probably, American people are going to be used for South Koreans' business.
No less than 50,000 South Korean prostitutes are in Japan.
Americans must not be involved in South Koreans' "comfort-women business", either.
The compensation of a "sex slave" will be charged in several years.
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Kohyu Nishimura4 months ago
What holocaust? are you kidding?
if you said comfort-women is same as holocaust,you would look from a racial discrimination-like viewpoint for a Japanese like Korean people.
Do you know how many Jews Japanese saved and rescued during World War II?
And you have to show the historical evidence that comfort women was same as holocaust.
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speedracer4 months ago
Why would we worry about insulting Japan? We should have nuked the whole country. They were savages. Remember Iwo Jima and the Bataan death march? Remember the atrocities committed against the filipinos? The atrocities committed against US marines, GI's and air force?
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Ma123784 months ago
Other interesting Artikel.(January 7, 2009 )
[Ex-Prostitutes Say South Korea and U.S. Enabled Sex Trade Near Bases ]
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/world/asia/08kor...
-------Now, a group of former prostitutes in South Korea have accused some of their country’s former leaders of a different kind of abuse: encouraging them to have sex with the American soldiers who protected South Korea from North Korea. They also accuse past South Korean governments, and the United States military, of taking a direct hand in the sex trade from the 1960s through the 1980s, working together to build a testing and treatment system to ensure that prostitutes were disease-free for American troops.------
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Kohyu Nishimura4 months ago
And also I would like to recommend this contents.
Let us please introduce you a
videoclip which we believe is indispensable to the basic
understanding of this issue.
「Sex, Lies, and Comfort Women」
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLyKJsbw4G4&
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Orangepope4 months ago
The headline needs to be changed. Thye were"prostitute" they were compelled into it. They were slaves.
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DrJitter4 months ago
...by the families who sold them into it. selling off extra daughters into the sex trade has been an economic survival tactic in Asia for centuries, part of the culture and history. why Bergen County has to get its panties up in a knot over it at this point is beyond me. in prostitution there are always at least two willing parties-- buyer and seller. In a patriarchal society like Korea where dad (and Dear Leader Kim) have ultimate decision power it could only have been the fathers doing the selling (and the compelling) if the daughters were not willing parties to the transaction.
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Pak4 months ago
@B.Dear
It is you that seem to be ignorant.
For example, this is totally wrong.
>Perhaps you can ask the Patriarch of the Korean families
> why they where compelled to change their names to
>Japanese ones.
Koreans were not compelled to change their name to Japanese ones. In Korean history books, it is written that way, though. They distort the facts and fabricate their history. It is well-known among Asian countries.
The truth is Korean begged Japan to allow to have Japanese name. At that time Chinese looked down on Korean severely. Then they wanted to have Japanese names so that they won't be discriminated.
Again, we, Japanese, have a lot of objective evidence to support the statement I wrote above.
B.Dear, before you humiliate anyone, you should learn the fact.
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Joe Kim4 months ago
The Japanese government has already admitted that during WWII they forced women from other countries into sexual slavery for the Japanese army, and has apologized for it.
Even PM Shinzo Abe said that he feels "heartbreaking pain" when he thinks of how the comfort women's human rights were violated by Japan.
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avxnj4 months ago
Who is this "Nicky Yamazaki" quoted in the article? Chances are, "Nicky" is as bogus as her claim of no evidence.
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nlewis4 months ago
While these women may have suffered at the hands of a foreign government in a foreign land I see no need to create a memorial here. How about building one in Korea. A simple rule for public memorials in the U.S. should be: did the event we are memorializing happen here? And were the people we are memorializing Americans? Sorry this memorial doesn't meet this simple criteria. I have nothing against Korean Americans and think the same criteria should apply to a Holocaust memorial or a memorial to the Irish Potato Famine (both of which exist on public land in the NY metro area). Why not commemorate the American soldiers of the Revolution, some of whom died in the same town where the memorial is proposed. Not P.C. enough for you, then how about a memorial to the 120 or so Native Americans slaughtered in 1643 by Dutch governor Willem Kieft in the location of today's Jersey City?
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nlewis4 months ago
Oh yeah, and how about a memorial to the African American slaves executed in Hackensack following the alleged New York slave rebellion of 1740. (BTW they were burned at the stake.)
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mikynewark4 months ago
I agree with Nicky Yamazaki, totally bogus. I don't see any monuments to Polish women who were forced to bear Nazi sons.
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DrJitter4 months ago
All these NJ nail salons getting busted fronting for Korean prostitutes. Who "enslaved" these women? The Japanese Imperial Army?
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B.Dear4 months ago
You are an idiot. It's that simple.
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2wm4 months ago
First off, who pays for these stupid monuments? Taxpayers? We the people?
Second, who cares....... why would we waste our hard earned taxpayer money on things such as this when we still have homeless and hungry men, women and children in this country?
Just my curiosity coming out I guess.....
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DrJitter4 months ago
We would do best to stay out of this. Sorry to burst the PC bubble here, but you don't even need to research original sources to know that Asian families have been selling their spare daughters into the sex trade for centuries, and that the prostitution industry closely follows the movement of armies around the globe. Military authorities have long understood the necessity of working with local govts to establish licensed brothels to prevent spread of disease among the troops. Though they will vociferously deny it, the S.Korean govt itself has long been in the business of providing "comfort women" to American soldiers stationed there, and provided the same service to the Japanese, because it was and remains a lucrative trade. The idea that the Japanese Army came marching in and "enslaved" Korean women is a total crock. So where were the fathers and brothers in all this? We don't hear much about that because the records show they were making pretty good money off all this enslavement. Point a finger, and there are three pointing right back at you. Instead of demonizing another community (the Japanese) that has served Bergen county (and our country very well), the Korean community needs hit the pause button on the grudge-mongering & ask itself a few hard questions. If I was the Japanese community I would sue Fort Lee and every one of these towns putting up these memorials as it creates a hostile environment in the community for Japanese based on grievances that they had nothing to do with. That would really put a curb on our politicians' greed for Korean cash once they see that money start flying out of the borough treasuries.
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dk4 months ago
Are you saying that the Japanese did not forcefully occupy other countries?
What was the attack on Pearl Harbor then? The Japanese saw the US as a threat to their expanding empire.
Countries occupied by Japan nearly had their cultures erased, and replaced with revisionist history proclaiming how Japan was bringing these primitive people into the modern age. It is a fact that a significant part of Asia and the Pacific was enslaved by the Japanese.
But I don't think that we should continue to put up plaques that bring up the horrible past. There are already monuments for these women, why do they need more?
The current Japan is not the same as the Japan of WWII.
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dortelere4 months ago
I think some of this discussion is misplaced. Such a memorial should be everlasting. So it is to cause awareness on the part of those who in the future will be too young to remember. The purpose of such memorials has changed. It is not done today for our own consolation but to teach those that come later of an earlier tragedy or injustice.
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IFHTC4 months ago
NJ needs to STOP with these STUPID 'Memorials'.
Kids shot at a school? Give them a memorial.
Kids molested at church? Give them a memorial.
Government flies a few planes into buildings? Blame someone else THEN give them a MEMORIAL.
How about some CLASS? Memorials are not for everything and what we choose to memorialize is just insane. As is calling someone a prostitute who was forced into sex work. That is not a prostitute that is a sex slave. Big difference.
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Mary Beth Jahn4 months ago
Wow, did you wake up on the cranky side of the bed today. What's wrong, no one has changed your soiled Depends yet? If you don't like memorials, don't look at them. They give great comfort to people who have lost loved ones through no fault of their own.
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2wm4 months ago
I'm not against memorials, as long as they are on private property and not paid for with tax dollars.
We really need to get our priorities straight and use our money a little more wisely.
And memorials for people who had problems in the past, in another country?
I May understand if it happened here, but I'm not really into having a Memorial for the plight of the Turkish farmer who had problems in 1462.
We need to draw a line somewhere.....
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trueaccount4 months ago
The City of San Francisco puts up a memorial plaque for every street person found dead in an alley.
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NJNANNA4 months ago
This is nuts, make a memorial to all the women and kids that were left behinh here when their fathers, husbands, brothers, uncles, and many other family men were killed and they were left to fend for themselves here. Many did without and many worked for the WPA and never knew what was going on over there because there was hardly any mail. Let Japan feel guilty about what they did, and lets honor our own unsung warriors .They started this mess, send them the plaque and tell them to hang it. Tax payer money for something so stupid, no wonder we are broke.
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Tradizione4 months ago
Inacurrate and inflammatory headline, shame on you! Nowhere in the text of the article is the word 'prostitute' used; indeed, the article acknowledges the women were enslaved.
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NJCrazyDad4 months ago
Putting aside the reasons for the memorial or the choice of location, this has to be the dumbest reason to re-do the wording. Because the Japanese are going to be offended for something they did? Are we supposed to expunge the name of the guilty everywhere? I guess Pearl Harbor was the result of a meteor. It is healthy for a culture to come to grips with what they've done. And it's healthy for all of us to realize it happened and could happen again. Please stop this PC nonsense!!!
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Mary Beth Jahn4 months ago
Seeing as the Korean-American groups, whose ancestors were victimized by this practice, are asking for a rewording because their relatives in Korea and Japan have come to grips with this particular horror of war, it's absolutely appropriate. Think of it as a lesson learned from the war.
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DINO!4 months ago
Bergen County and Fort Lee you must be kidding us, right?! Wasting tax dollars on plaques and monuments to honor foriegn prostitutes and hookers.
Pathetic!
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ammo17ae4 months ago
the only monuments that should be built in this country is those honoring american citizens,and that goes for the holocaust museums they belong in europe especially in germany and the balkan countries.
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deacon854 months ago
Who at NJ.com signed off on the "prostitutes" headline? These women were not prostitutes, they were forced into sexual slavery. And while I can't fathom the argument that this didn't happen (it's in the history books, folks; a lot of what happened in WW II is open to debate, but this happened), I also don't see the need for a memorial at this location. Why not memorials to victims of Nanking, or Stalingrad, or Dresden or London? The list is limitless.
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justintime734 months ago
i agree with your take on the headline, it struck me the same way. could someone please explain all it to dino?
the reason that this memorial is right for this location is the 23.5% of the fort lee population (2010 census) that is korean-american
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deacon854 months ago
I understand that's the rationale for the memorial in Fort Lee, but it is a good idea to use that as the criteria for locating memorials? I can appreciate the desire for a memorial, but I just don't think it should depend on having a significant portion of the population being of an ancestry of people that were victimized. Just my opinion.
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DINO!4 months ago
Thanks for your post justintime73...but I'm just voicing my opinion in this open forum to the article pally...I don't work for the SL or nj.com, so your issue with the headline is with the media, not me...but if you rationale is correct, why don't we just erect plaques and monuments honoring Italians, Germans, Irish, etc. from foriegn countries that have been mistreated abroad all over the Garden State with the tax payers money. So when your property taxes increase letter arrives in the mail, and you feel your pocket has been picked again, just think about the feel good of your money going to wasteful spending like this.
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Ovaljoe4 months ago
Last time I rode through Palisades Park, I don't remember seeing a Monument to Korean War (Iam sorry "Conflict") G.I. s maybe there, maybe I missed it......
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JenfromNJ4 months ago
Oh, brother. The truth is going to offend someone. Boo hoo.
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bospherus4 months ago
We will never forget what the evil Japanese did during the WWII era. How this respectful and decent society became so twisted is a study in Fascism and its consequences. If it was up to me I would erect statues honoring the ones who suffered in the Philippines, Nanking, and Burma alongside the Korean statue; for surely these horrors must never be forgotten or repeated.
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justintime734 months ago
well said
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justintime734 months ago
propaganda? yeah, right, the nanking massacre never happened either. or the bataan death march. denial don't work. the comfort women, relatively speaking, were lucky. they lived through it
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thedalek4 months ago
Remember Pearl Harbor! Try and re-write that, Hirohito!
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Toshihide Masaki4 months ago
we want you to investigate the fact what the real history is.
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