At the end of last year, another comfort women statue was erected in front of the Japanese consulate in Pusan, Korea. This action is in violation of the agreement reached between the Japanese and Korean governments in December 2015 and the provisions of the Vienna Convention concerning maintenance of public order and dignity of diplomatic missions abroad. Last week, the Japanese government announced that it has temporarily recalled its ambassador to Korea and suspended discussions on Japan-Korea currency swaps [and other high-level economic cooperation].
On the 7th, the Asahi Newspaper published an editorial critical of this action to the effect that “Such hasty and wide-ranging measures lack calmness. Excessive reactions will rather invite an adverse environment of worsening relations. Japan should consider more appropriate diplomatic measures.”
This is representative of the sort of coddling and failed disciplinary philosophy where children are spoiled rotten, as seen in the numerous scandals concerning relatives of former Korean presidents and members of the founding families of Korean conglomerates.
Korea has broken its agreements with Japan time and again, but Japan has repeatedly been too forgiving. In accordance with the aforementioned comfort women agreement, Japan made a payment of 1 billion yen [ten million dollars] before the statue in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul was dismantled [the statue still stands]. This is like a parent paying an allowance to a child who promised at some time to try eating green peppers, but has not yet actually eaten one.
Having thus succeeded in the past, Korea repeats its actions and never grows up. In this case, it is important to make clear not only to the Koreans but to the whole world that Japan has severed the umbilical cord.
In the first place, the most important reason that Korea started erecting strange comfort women statues all over the world is that the Asahi Newspaper reported author Seiji Yoshida’s false assertions that “comfort women were forcibly recruited,” and over a period of 30 years let those assertions stand [Asahi Newspaper has since admitted that the reports were false]. The Japanese government’s handling of these assertions was also totally inept, and not only Japanese and Koreans, but people all over the world believed them, including me.
Based on the Asahi Newspaper’s reports, the “Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan” (Teikyoutai) was established, which solicited testimony of harm from former comfort women. Among those few women who responded were some women who during World War II were just over ten years old, and it is thought that they were actually comfort women (yankonju) who served the U.N. forces during the Korean War.
In that case, the reasoning that “only the Japanese military was at fault” collapses. And perhaps for that reason, the comfort women statues have come to be called “shojozou” (statues of virgin girls).
[See the following regarding comfort women in Korea:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitutes_in_South_Korea_for_the_U.S._military]
In this way, the Japanese military was stigmatized as “fiends who kidnapped virgins and raped them.”
In August 2015, the Asahi Newspaper retracted its articles concerning comfort women as falsehoods. It has also published a woefully inadequate retraction article in English on the internet, which has not gained wide attention.
[See:
http://www.asahi.com/articles/SDI201408213564.html
This was reported in the Japan Times as follows:
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/08/05/national/politics-diplomacy/asahi-shimbun-admits-errors-in-past-comfort-women-stories/#.WHo7AxuLQ2w]
If I were a normal resident of the United States and could not read Japanese, I would probably still believe that forcible recruitment of comfort women by the Japanese military occurred.
It’s not too late. Before criticizing the actions of the Japanese government regarding this issue, the Asahi Newspaper should publish in the New York Times in English, the People’s Republic of China (PRC)’s People’s Daily in Chinese, and the Korean Chosun Ilbo in Korean full page apologies for its “mistaken reporting concerning alleged forcible recruitment of comfort women.” In the absence of such action, the Asahi Newspaper has no standing to be commenting on this Japanese-Korean issue.
Kent Gilbert

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