Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto made a remark that the system of comfort women was necessary at the time of the Second World War. This remark has sparked controversy in Japan and around the world too.
May 15, 2013, 12:47 pm
Did Japan 'Need' Comfort Women?
By CAROL GIACOMO
In recent years, Toru Hashimoto, a 43-year-old former television commentator who is mayor of Osaka, Japan’s third largest city, has been making political waves, challenging the status quo with a brash, very un-Japanese approach. He’s known for provocative right-wing statements, quick, the-buck-stops-with-me decisions, and a willingness to battle labor unions and the establishment in a culture known for consensus-building. Last September, he formed a new political party, the Japan Restoration Association, and named about 350 candidates, most political neophytes, to run in the next parliamentary elections.
Whatever one thinks of his style, however, he crossed a line on Monday with his reprehensible comments on Japan’s wartime behavior. This politician, who some envision as a future prime minister, effectively endorsed wartime rape and sexual enslavement.
During Japan’s occupation in World War II, as many as 200,000 women were rounded up across Asia to work as sex slaves — the Japanese euphemism is “comfort women” — for the Japanese Army. Many of the women came from China and South Korea but others were from the Philippines, Indonesia and Taiwan.
Survivors still bear the scars of this abuse and Japan formally apologized in 1993.
One might expect that given his young age, his education (he is a lawyer) and the fact that he is living in a highly developed country where women are also becoming more educated and independent, Mr. Hashimoto would revile — and vow never to repeat — the sins of the past.
Instead, he told reporters that the sex slaves served a useful purpose. “When soldiers are risking their lives by running through storms of bullets, and you want to give these emotionally charged soldiers a rest somewhere, it’s clear that you need a comfort women system,” he said.
He insisted that brothels “were necessary at the time to maintain discipline in the army;” and he claimed there was no proof that the Japanese authorities had forced women into servitude. He attributed the women’s experiences, vaguely, to “the tragedy of war.” At least he bothered to say that surviving comfort women deserved kindness from Japan.
There are any number of countries where men continue to exploit conflict to rape women, including Syria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Would Mr. Hashimoto defend such atrocities as a necessary respite for overworked soldiers?
Mr. Hashimoto’s comments may be among the most extreme but he is not the only Japanese politician revisiting the country’s wartime history and stoking dangerous new tensions with the countries Japan once occupied.
Japanese ultranationalists have condemned the 1993 apology to comfort women, as well as a 1995 apology to nations that suffered from Japanese aggression during the war. The new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, initially signaled that he might revise the apologies, but last week his government promised to uphold them.
On Tuesday, the Japanese government distanced itself from Mr. Hashimoto’s comments but Mr. Abe and other top officials need to go further and condemn them outright. It’s hard to believe that anyone who espouses such outrageous views as Mr. Hashimoto has much of a political future in Japan or anywhere else.
Source: Did Japan 'Need' Comfort Women? (The New York Times)
After reading this article, you may get the impression that the comfort women were all abducted from foreign countries, but that is not true. Actually about 25 percent of the comfort women seem to be Japanese women. In fact, one plausible estimate says that 25% of the comfort women were Japanese, 40% were Korean, and 30% were Chinese.
The sign boards at the Japanese military brothels said "GENUINE Japanese women are here to give your cordial service with everything they have." It seems that these comfort women were supposed to be all Japanese. So, 70% of them were fake if the above figures are correct.
Second, most of the comfort women were not forced to go with the Japanese troops. They were offered a monthly salary of 13,300 US dollars plus an optional advance payment of 133,000 US dollars in terms of the current monetary value, and they applied for the job of their own free will.
One Korean comfort woman saved up 26,145 Japanese yen in three years at the time when a college graduate can only make 20 Japanese yen a month. With 26,145 Japanese yen, you could buy 20 to 30 houses. It takes a lifetime for the average Japanese to buy only one single house even now, and many can't in their lifetime.
So a lot of women chose to be comfort women of their own accord because they wanted to be rich. Sadly, however, some women seem to have been forced to become comfort women by deception, threat, etc. This happened both in Japan and in Korea.
The Japanese government prohibited such acts, but in Korean, some Koreans broke the law and forced some Korean women to become comfort women, and they were arrested by the Japanese police during the war.
The same thing happened in Japan. Some Japanese women were forced to become comfort women, only none of them demanded compensation after the war. In any case, those people, Korean or Japanese, who forced women to become comfort women must have made huge profits out of their illegal business practice.
That is how the Japanese government came to be criticized for employing comfort women. Naturally there are people, like Toru Hashimoto, who think that the Japanese government should not be blamed for the use of the comfort-women system. The real question is who should take responsibilities for the women who were forced to become comfort women. The problem is that we do not know who did all this now except those arrested during the war.
Koreans and Chinese claim that the Japanese government kidnapped Korean and Chinese women and used them as sex slaves, but that is definitely false. That was done by some Koreans or Chinese, and the question is whether the Japanese government is responsible for the illegal acts done by those Koreans and Chinese.
Personally I do not know. Maybe the Japanese government should have spent more time and energy to prevent it. But maybe even if they had done their best, they might not have been able to stop all of them.
It may appear unusual that Toru Hashimoto keeps saying those politically inappropriate remarks about the comfort women issue. However, there are many Japanese people who support what he says. A long time ago, his political career would have been terminated, but things have been changed over the last ten years.
Japanese people did not use to know the truth about the comfort women issue because Japanese mass media had been hiding it. In fact they are still hiding it, but we have the Internet now. Japanese people have now learned the truth about the comfort women. So a growing number of Japanese people are getting angry about the lies that the Koreans and Chinese have been telling them.
That is why those nationalists like Toru Hashimoto, Shinzo Abe, and others are gaining popularity. I really do not want them to gain power because we do need to build a peaceful society. So I want Koreans and Chinese to express their views based on the correct historical facts.
Related Pages:
Did Japan 'Need' Comfort Women? (The New York Times)
Yomiuri on the Comfort Women (AMPONTAN)
The Politics of Apology for Japan's 'Comfort Women' (The New York Times)