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Post by Admin on Mar 9, 2014 2:20:24 GMT
Japan and South Korea should take the lead in improving relations and the U.S. will do whatever it can to help defuse tensions between its two main Asian allies, Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy said. “The three countries can work together, will work together, and I think these good relations are in everyone’s interest,” Kennedy said in an interview aired yesterday by Japanese broadcaster NHK. “The two countries really should and will take the lead in this process and the United States, being a close ally of both of them, is happy to help.” The U.S.’s biggest challenge in Northeast Asia “may be the deterioration of relations between Seoul and Tokyo,” Sheila Smith, senior fellow for Japan studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, told a Senate committee on March 4. “Memories of the past century continue to infuse contemporary political relations in Northeast Asia; and since 2012, the Japan-Korea relationship has taken a turn for the worse.” Park’s government expressed outrage at Abe’s visit in December to the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo that honors 14 Class A war criminals from World War II, among other war dead. Japan further strained ties by announcing a review of a 1993 apology over the military’s use of sex slaves, many of them Korean, during the 1930s and 1940s. “I think anything that distracts from all the positive work we do together and makes the regional climate more difficult is something that is not as constructive moving forward,” Kennedy said when asked about Abe’s shrine visit. Park said last week that Japan needs to overcome its “painful” history and heal the wounds stemming from the issue of the so-called comfort women. A survey by the Seoul-based Asan Institute of Policy Studies this week showed Abe is more unpopular in South Korea than the North’s dictator, Kim Jong-Un. “We appreciate the constructive role that the U.S. has played to improve the South Korea-Japan relations, and we expect the Japanese side to stop making wrong comments and contribute to building the right South Korea-Japan relationship together with us,” the Foreign Ministry in Seoul said in an e-mailed statement.
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Post by Admin on Mar 10, 2014 15:39:14 GMT
"Comfort women" were women provided to Japanese troops by the Japanese Army for sexual purposes. While Japanese military leaders were not alone in providing prostitutes to their men (at least one American division in Australia set up its own brothel), there is considerable evidence that large numbers of comfort women were recruited either by deception or by force, then treated with great cruelty. Young men away from their families, immersed in the hypermasculine environment of the armed services, and deprived of normal emotional outlets tend to seek sexual release, and often the only opportunities for this were provided by prostitutes. This could lead to significant loss of manpower from venereal disease, and many armies responded with institutionalized prostitution. Prostitutes under military control could be checked by medical officers for signs of venereal disease and their customers could be required to use condoms to reduce disease transmission. In the armies of Western powers, whose Judeo-Christian religious traditions strongly discouraged prostitution, any such arrangements were made informally or were otherwise kept discreet. In Japanese culture, prostitution did not carry as much stigma as in the West, and there is no serious dispute that the Japanese Army established a system of "comfort stations" (military brothels) for its troops. Surviving documents in Japanese government archives, corroborated by photographic evidence and the recollections of both Japanese soldiers and the comfort women themselves, show that the Army transported comfort women to the forward areas, set up comfort stations, and regulated their activities. What remains controversial is how many comfort women were recruited, from what backgrounds, and to what extent they were voluntary participants in the system. The comfort system expanded rapidly after the beginning of the China Incident in 1937, when documents show that Army agents were looking for 3000 women to work in the Shanghai comfort stations and another 400 to work in south China. At the same time, Shanghai Special Agency, the Japanese Army's intelligence and subversion branch in Shanghai, was asked to use its contacts in the underworld to recruit comfort women. Criticism of the agents in Japanese police reports suggests that coercion was already beginning to be employed to meet the demand. A memorandum of 23 February 1938 from the Police Bureau of the Home Ministry insisted that the women recruited by the Army must all be at least 21 years of age and already involved in prostitution. Four 'Comfort Girls' captured in the hills of Luzon, play mahjong during recess period in woman's detention home on outskirts of Manila.The girls were part of a group which rotated among various Japanese Battalions Young Korean girls with no previous involvement in prostitution were favored because they would be free of venereal disease and were unlikely to be recruited by the Chinese for espionage, due to the language barrier. Generally, they were recruited from poor families and many of the girls were illiterate. The comfort system followed the Japanese Army into southeast Asia during the Centrifugal Offensive, and recruitment began to include women from the occupied territories. The Japanese also recruited about 200 to 300 comfort women from Caucasian internees in the Netherlands East Indies. Some had been working as prostitutes before war broke out, but in November 1943 the Kempeitai began recruiting "barmaids" from the Muntilan internment camp. The suspicions of the internees were aroused and few volunteered, whereupon the Kempeitai forcibly removed a number of women from the camp in spite of a near-riot by the other internees. Some were later exchanged for volunteer prostitutes from the camp, but on 28 January 1944 another 13 women, mostly married, were taken from the camp. At least 65 of the European comfort women in the Netherlands East Indies were forcibly recruited. Perhaps because European women were involved, the forcible recruitment of comfort women from internment camps was the only aspect of the comfort system that resulted in postwar prosecutions for war crimes. However, the trials were severely hindered by the independence movement on Java, which made it difficult to gather witnesses.
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Post by Admin on Mar 29, 2014 16:16:24 GMT
Last July, the City of Glendale California, unveiled a statute in its central park of a Korean-American who was a so-called “comfort woman” -- one of the women forced to provide sexual services to Japanese soldiers during World War II. In so doing, the city entered a transnational dispute that is progressively becoming fiercer. Local officials and hundreds of people from Glendale's Korean community participated in the statue's unveiling. The focus, though, was not so much on the statue as on its subject -- Bok-Dong Kim -- a local resident and a former "comfort woman." She wants Japan's prime minister to admit his country's mistake and apologize. “An apology, that is my request," stated Bok-Dong Kim. "As a Prime Minister [of Japan] you must apologize for past mistakes, even if they were forged by a former emperor.” It's estimated the Japanese compelled some 200,000 women to provide sexual services to its soldiers during World War II. Most of these women came from Korea, though many were from China, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Taiwan. Japan’s conservative faction, though, denies the charge -- saying there were only 20,000 women at the most and that the overwhelming majority were willing participants. Thus, the comfort women issue has become a recurring historical debate that has soured Japan’s relations with South Korea and China. Many Japanese and Japanese-Americans, though, do not welcome the statue and have called on the city to tear it down. The city has not accepted any of these demands. Last week, a group called the Global Alliance for Historical Truth, along with several Japanese Americans, filed a lawsuit in federal court asking for the statue to be removed. The Glendale statue is the first of its kind outside of the Korean peninsula, but similar commemorations are popping up elsewhere in California. The City of Garden Grove has erected a monument and Sonoma University added three tiles to its Asia Holocaust Monument in honor of comfort women.
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Post by Admin on Mar 30, 2014 22:23:09 GMT
There are, of course, many aspects of the 'comfort women's' history that need more academic research. Surprisingly little is known, for example, about the stories of the many Japanese women recruited to work in the military's sexual empire. A serious plan by the Japanese government to promote research on the history of the 'comfort women' issue, and to communicate that history to the public (as promised by the Kōno Declaration), would be welcomed. Genuine historical research should begin with a careful, responsible and open-minded review of the existing academic literature and other relevant documentation such as memoirs by Japanese officials and soldiers, and accounts by ‘comfort women’. It would involve a willingness to look at the evidence as a whole, and draw balanced conclusions from that evidence, even if those conclusions turn out to be politically inconvenient. This is not a simple process. Many military and government documents were deliberately destroyed at the end of the war. Much evidence on the 'comfort women' issue is oral testimony, which does need to be used with care, as human memories are fallible and stories may sometimes be altered in the telling (for a good discussion of this issue, see Soh 2008). Official documents too need to be read with care, since they may be designed to conceal as much as to reveal the truth. In spite of these difficulties, a very large amount of information on the 'comfort women' has already been collected by Japanese and international academic researchers, UN enquiries, the Japanese government, NGO groups, including evidence collected for a number of court cases (see references below). This information unequivocally documents the existence of a vast network of 'comfort stations' throughout the empire and including the front lines of battle. The system was a complex one. Some 'comfort stations' were operated directly by the military; others by civilians for military use. Some were temporary and local, created by troops on the ground rather than by command from on high. Many thousands of women were recruited in various ways, sometimes by members of the military but often by brokers, who commonly used deceptive promises of work in factories or restaurants to lure women into 'comfort stations'. Once there, some women were physically imprisoned, but even those who were allowed out could rarely escape, as most had been transported to places hundreds or thousands of miles from their homes, frequently on Japanese navy ships, and had no means of return. There is also abundant credible testimony of recruitment by brokers who worked closely with Japanese military or police using deception to lure women to 'comfort stations'; and even where women were recruited by third parties, this in no way diminishes the responsibility of the Japanese military on whose behalf the brokers were working. Japanese military records, soldiers' diaries and recorded recollections by veterans unmistakably record the close involvement of the military in the recruitment, transport and organization of women. Just one of numerous examples of such evidence is an Imperial Japanese Navy document recording the 'collection of native women' for a 'comfort station' in Balikpapan, Indonesia, carried out under the 'management' of the chief accounts officer of a local Japanese naval unit. The chief accounts officer in question (the document notes) was Nakasone Yasuhiro, who went on to serve as prime minister of Japan from 1982 to 1987, and is now a Liberal Democratic Party elder statesman. This document was presented and discussed in the Japanese Diet by an opposition parliamentarian in May 2013, but has been ignored in the recent debate. A second prong in the attack on the Kōno Declaration is the claim that all countries have had equivalents of the ‘comfort women’ system in wartime: an argument made, for example, by the new Director General of NHK Momii Katsuto who, specifically citing France and Germany, stated that similar systems ‘existed everywhere in Europe’ during the war. Of course Japan is far from being the only country whose military has been guilty of sexual violence in war. Momii is incorrect to suggest that military-run networks of brothels existed throughout wartime Europe; but they have existed in places outside the Japanese empire. In colonial India, for example, British rulers authorized a system of brothels in military cantonments between the 1850s and the 1880s. Troops from many counties have been responsible for sexual violence against women in occupied territories - including in occupied Japan itself, where a short-lived system of government-authorized brothels specifically for the use of the allied occupying forces existed between 1945 and 1946, and where events like the Kokura riot of July 1950 resulted in the reported rape of dozens of women by US troops. The system of military 'comfort stations' created in the Japanese empire was not unprecedented in nature; but it was unprecedented in scale, and the misery it caused continues to afflict its victims and their families to this day. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, " Addressing Japan's 'Comfort Women' Issue From an Academic Standpoint," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 12, Issue 9, No. 1, March 2, 2014.
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Post by Admin on Mar 31, 2014 22:52:46 GMT
The Japanese government systematically operated “comfort women” facilities as part of its military “amenities” during World War II, documents showed. According to declassified documents from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, the Southeast Asia Translation and Interrogation Center confirmed that the Japanese government had run “comfort women” facilities for the military. The confirmation came while the center was questioning a Japanese soldier captured in Myanmar in 1945. When the U.S. government grilled him on whether Tokyo had kept “comfort girls” as military “amenities,” the war prisoner answered that one place was located in Maymyo, Mandalay Division, in Myanmar, the declassified documents showed. He also added that the service cost around 3.5 to 5 yen (25,000 yen or 250 dollars) while a soldier’s monthly wage was 24 yen. The document, named “OSS CONFIDENTIAL C.I.D XL8505” was written by an American lieutenant colonel in April 1945. Another declassified document also confirmed that a Japanese army surgeon regularly conducted medical checkups on “comfort women” working at a service facility in Manchuria, China. The information was verified by an American intelligence official who interviewed a female Chinese nurse. According to the report, about 20 Japanese women classified as grade 1 and some 130 Korean women grouped in lower grades were all infected with venereal diseases. The document ― “CONFIDENTIAL JICA R-565-CH-45” ― was written in May 1945 by an American major who served in the military near Kunming, China.
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