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Post by Admin on Dec 6, 2015 19:46:17 GMT
Two years ago Park Yu-ha entered into one of the most turbulent debates in East Asia by publishing a study of Korean “comfort women” from World War II, stating that many were prostitutes, and not just “sex slaves” commandeered by Japanese soldiers. Now Ms. Park, an academic who studies Japanese literature, faces prosecution here for criminal defamation. She goes on trial Dec. 14 for impugning the honor of the surviving comfort women, many of whom she interviewed to reach her conclusions. The history and status of Korean women recruited to frontline brothels for the Japanese military has been the iciest issue between Japan and South Korea – one responsible until recently for a freeze on any talks between them. The issue drives the identity politics that divide the two US military allies. South Korean President Park Geun-hye, the first female head of state here, has criticized Japanese leader Shinzo Abe for promoting the view that Korean women were willing participants in the brothels and for claiming that the Japanese military was not culpable. Enter Park Yu-ha, a professor at Sejong University. Her 2013 book, “Comfort Women of the Empire,” paints a more nuanced picture that undercuts the simplistic or patriotic positions taken in Seoul and Tokyo. Some Korean recruiters and pimps did bear blame for delivering females to Japanese brothels, she says. Some women were misled with promises of work and not forcibly abducted. Others grew emotionally attached to Japanese soldiers and considered themselves as part of the Japanese empire. Yet by describing the women mainly as “prostitutes” who served the Japanese empire, rather than as sex slaves, Park has incensed both officials and the public in South Korea. Last month she was indicted by the eastern district prosecutor in Seoul and if found guilty faces tens of thousands of dollars in fines or up to seven years in prison. This week in a press conference held in Seoul she defended her writings as based on historical documents and the testimony of former comfort women. “The book was not intended to criticize or defame any comfort women… and it did not harm the public interest as claimed,” she was quoted as saying. Park accused prosecutors of trampling on academic freedom. More than 200 intellectuals and scholars have signed two petitions in protest of the charges against her. The case against Park also comes amid a divisive push by the president to issue an official single interpretation of history, to be enshrined in school textbooks in coming years. Last month, some 70,000 anti-government protesters took to the streets of Seoul, largely inspired by the textbook controversy. “Truth will and should out,” says Mr. Foster-Carter. “The trouble is, nationalism and nuance don’t mix, and heat tends to crowd out light.”
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Post by Admin on Dec 16, 2015 19:54:19 GMT
Perceptions of Korean comfort women have been polarized. South Koreans portray them as “sex slaves,” or girls who were taken away forcibly and violently. But Japanese who doubt these accounts say the women were mere “prostitutes.” During a recent interview with The Asahi Shimbun, Park, who was visiting Japan, said she wrote the book in an attempt to re-portray them in light of the variety of testimonies provided by former comfort women. She said their words opened her eyes to the sheer diversity of the circumstances and experiences of Korean comfort women, and to the bigger picture of “an empire and its colony.” “Many of the Korean comfort women were apparently recruited while being cheated by agents of prostitution, some of whom were Koreans, or being sold by their parents,” Park said. “While some have testified they were forcibly taken away by military personnel, I suppose that such cases, if there were any, were exceptional.” “Korean comfort women were, among other things, ‘quasi-Japanese’ who were substitutes for Japanese women,” the professor said. Testimonies provided by Korean comfort women indicate that they were instructed to use Japanese names and behave as graceful paragons of Japanese women. Some comfort women even braved the snow to sweep the tombs of Japanese soldiers and joined their palms to pray for them on the rare days off from the comfort stations, according to Park. Because of these arguments, the Korean edition of “Comfort women of the empire” caused an uproar after it was published in summer 2013. “It is not easy to state opinions in South Korea that go against ‘public memory,’” Park said. “I was once called a ‘prostitute of Japanese imperialism.’ But younger South Koreans tend to show more understanding.”
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Post by Admin on Dec 19, 2015 19:44:36 GMT
In the early 20th century, the official history holds, Japan forcibly took innocent girls from Korea and elsewhere to its military-run brothels. There, they were held as sex slaves and defiled by dozens of soldiers a day in the most hateful legacy of Japan’s 35-year colonial rule, which ended with its defeat in World War II. As she researched her book, combing through a rich archive in South Korea and Japan and interviewing surviving comfort women, Park, 58, said she came to realize that such a sanitized, uniform image of Korean comfort women did not fully explain who they were and only deepened this most emotional of the many disputes between South Korea and Japan. In trying to give what she calls a more comprehensive view of the women’s lives, she made claims that some found refreshing but many considered outrageous and, in some cases, traitorous. In her book, she emphasized that it was profiteering Korean collaborators, as well as private Japanese recruiters, who forced or lured women into the “comfort stations,” where life included both rape and prostitution. There is no evidence, she wrote, that the Japanese government was officially involved in, and therefore legally responsible for, coercing Korean women. Although often brutalized in a “slavelike condition” in their brothels, Park added, the women from the Japanese colonies of Korea and Taiwan were also treated as citizens of the empire and were expected to consider their service patriotic. They forged a “comradelike relationship” with the Japanese soldiers and sometimes fell in love with them, she wrote. She cited cases where Japanese soldiers took loving care of sick women and even returned those who did not want to become prostitutes. The book sold only a few thousand copies. But it set off an outsize controversy. “Her case shows how difficult it has become in South Korea to challenge the conventional wisdom about comfort women,” said Kim Gyu-hang, a social critic. Park’s book, published in Japan last year, won awards there. Last month, 54 intellectuals from Japan and the United States issued a statement criticizing South Korean prosecutors for “suppressing the freedom of scholarship and press.” Among them was a former chief Cabinet secretary in Japan, Yohei Kono, who issued a landmark apology in 1993 admitting coercion in the recruitment of comfort women. Park said she had tried to broaden discussions by investigating the roles that patriarchal societies, statism and poverty played in the recruitment of comfort women. She said that unlike women rounded up as spoils of battle in conquered territories like China, women from the Korean colony had been brought to the comfort stations in much the same way that poor women today enter prostitution. She also compared the Korean comfort women to more recent Korean prostitutes who followed American soldiers into their winter field exercises in South Korea in the 1960s through ’80s. (The “blanket corps,” so called because the women often carried blankets under their arms, followed pimps searching for U.S. troops through snowy hills or built field brothels with tents as the Americans lined up outside, according to former prostitutes for the U.S. military.) “Korean comfort women were victims, but they were also collaborators as people from a colony,” Park wrote in one of the redacted sentences in her book. But she added that even if the Japanese government did not directly order the women’s forced recruitment and some Korean women joined comfort stations voluntarily, the government should still be held responsible for the “sin” of creating the colonial structure that allowed it to happen.
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Post by Admin on Dec 20, 2015 19:53:08 GMT
A federal judge in San Francisco has dismissed a suit by two South Korean women accusing six Japanese companies, including Toyota, Nissan and Mitsubishi, of aiding Japan’s government in forcing the women to serve as sex slaves — known as “comfort women” — during World War II. A 1965 treaty between South Korea and Japan was meant to resolve all disputes between the two nations, U.S. District Judge William Alsup said Monday. He said the treaty led the Japanese government in 1995 to formally apologize to the coerced women and establish a fund to pay reparations to them. Alsup said the U.S. government, in a similar lawsuit by South Korean women against the government of Japan in 2005, had argued that foreign citizens should resolve such claims through their nations’ treaties, if possible, rather than through lawsuits in U.S. courts. A federal appeals court agreed and dismissed that suit, saying it raised political issues that courts could not decide. “In the aftermath of war, thousands, even millions, will have suffered or died on a vast scale and treaty-making has necessarily been the time-honored way for resolution of those grievances,” Alsup wrote. Even without the treaty, he said, the suit would have to be dismissed because federal law requires such claims to be filed within 10 years of the harm the plaintiffs suffered.
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Post by Admin on Dec 27, 2015 19:31:07 GMT
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe aims to resolve a sensitive issue fraying relations with South Korea in the final days of the year marking the 50th anniversary of the normalization of ties between Japan and its former colony. Abe’s Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida announced Friday he would visit South Korea Dec. 28 to discuss with his counterpart a potential agreement on compensating Korean "comfort women," who were trafficked to Japanese military brothels before and during World War Two. Abe is considering setting up a fund for the women and offering a message of apology that would refer to Japan’s responsibility for their treatment, the Nikkei newspaper said. In return, Japan would seek confirmation that President Park Geun Hye’s administration will consider the matter closed, the paper said. Japan is likely to demand that any settlement be final. The South Korean government may be willing to compromise, local media say. “In a diplomatic negotiation, there can never be a 100-0 win,” a South Korean government official told the Joonang Daily newspaper. “The goal is keeping the score 51-49, but making each side think it has won 51.” Relations have improved in recent months with the first bilateral meeting between Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and South Korean President Park Geun-hye on November 2nd in Seoul. Earlier this month a South Korean court acquitted the Seoul bureau chief of Japan`s Sankei newspaper, who had been accused of defaming President Park.
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