Healing the 'comfort women' rift

[unhappycamper]

http://atimes.com/atimes/Korea/KOR-01-070814.html



Healing the 'comfort women' rift
By Yu Bin
Aug 7, '14

A specter haunts East Asia - the specter of a steadily growing divide between the mounting condemnation of Japan's wartime "sex slave" brutality on one hand, [1] and an increasingly revisionist Japan to deflect, deny or defend its "comfort women" policy on the other. [2] With the polarization of the issue, a radically different approach - which is not only more historical and analytical but also practical - should be considered to accommodate the values and interests of all sides, including those of Japan.

An emerging consensus outside Japan is to redefine the term "comfort women" as "sex slaves". For the 300,000 young Asian women who were duped, abducted, or coerced into Japan's vast network of managed prostitution, [3] the difference between the two phrases means very little because their life was forever altered and mostly ruined. The dichotomy, however, misses two vital pieces in a unique historical triangle of human interaction: millions of the Emperor's soldiers in Asia and hundreds of millions of "untouched" Asian women. Thanks to the timely and systemic "service", or sacrifice, by a fraction of women at the time, these two large human groups were mostly separated, at least in theory.

On January 13 1938, the headquarters of the Japanese Shanghai Expeditionary Forces (SEF) opened a large comfort station named Yangjiazai Entertainment Station in Shanghai, which employed, for the first time, a large number of young Korean women. By the time of Japan's surrender in August 1945, Shanghai had 149 registered comfort stations for the Japanese military, while several thousand comfort stations were in operation across China and beyond, serving millions of Japanese soldiers. [4]

The rapid expansion of the comfort stations from early 1938 onward was an emergency measurement to curtail the widespread rape and murder of Chinese women. In the first few months of Japan's all - out invasion of China during August - December 1937, the fast advance of the SEF from Shanghai to Nanking was not accompanied by adequate comforting, or military prostitution, services. This was one of the root causes for the brutal killing and raping of civilians. For three months following the fall of the Chinese capital city of Nanking in early December 1937, the Emperor's soldiers killed 300,000 Chinese and raped an estimated 20,000 women. Many of those women were killed immediately after being raped, often through explicit mutilation.