Japan historians add insult to the wounds of comfort women

Osaka Mayor Hirofumi Yoshimura has vowed to snap his city’s six-decade sister-city relationship with San Francisco in protest against the US city accepting a statue of “comfort women” as public property.

“Comfort women”, a euphemism for some 200,000 girls and young women who were coerced, kidnapped, sold or captured to be sexually exploited in Japan’s military brothels before and during World War II, is a taboo term for many in Japan. And these people have been trying to sweep the issue under the carpet.

The statue in San Francisco features three women — a Chinese, a Korean and a Filipina — with the two words, “sex slaves” inscribed on a plaque. Yoshimura has written several letters to his San Francisco counterpart Edwin Lee this year, saying some historians don’t recognize the historical facts about “comfort women”.

Ikuhiko Hata is one of those historians. In an interview with Yasuo Naito, editor in chief of Japan Forward, Sankei Shimbun’s English-language website, Hata said the Republic of Korea uses the “history war” as a weapon and women were not abducted to be sexually exploited. He said that his research shows the women who worked in the “comfort stations” were not “sex slaves” and did not live under the cruel conditions.

Hata also said the wartime newspapers in Seoul carried advertisements for recruiting “comfort women”, and the recruiters were not Japanese but Koreans. And he claims that the majority of “comfort women” in Japan and Korea were professional prostitutes. The “comfort women” earned 300 yen ($2.7 now) every month, he said, while Japanese soldiers were paid on average 10 yen.