The “comfort women” issue appears, on the surface, to be a bilateral problem between South Korea and Japan. In reality, it is deeper. The key player is increasingly not South Korea, but China, and the ultimate target is not Japan, but the United States, as the comfort women are co-opted by Beijing in its anti-American information war.
China has been waging this war since Beijing realized after the First Gulf War that it would likely be unable to the United States on the battlefield. As the document Unrestricted Warfare, published by two high-ranking Chinese military officials, makes clear, the Chinese have chosen to fight the US, and particularly the US-Japan alliance, using desinformatsiya rather than hardware and troops.
Chinese information warfare in the United States is a massive and multi-front campaign. In December 2017 the Washington Post alerted its readers to “the huge scope and scale of Chinese Communist Party influence operations inside the United States, which permeate American institutions of all kinds.” In May 2017, the New York Times reported that the Chinese Students and Scholars Association at the University of California-San Diego managed “within hours” to get the Dalai Lama uninvited as UCSD commencement speaker. The more than 150 Chinese students and scholars associations in the US, the Times added, are funded and influenced by Chinese Communist Party headquarters.
In January 2018, the Washington Post detailed that UT-Austin rejected funds from the China United States Exchange Foundation because the “Hong Kong-based foundation and its leader, Tung Chee-hwa, are closely linked to the branch of the Chinese Communist Party that manages influence operations abroad.”
But on-campus campaigns are just the tip of the iceberg. The comfort women issue represents arguably Beijing’s most aggressive information-war maneuver. It has been a source of serious friction between Seoul and Tokyo since the 1990s, and in the past three years, has threatened to upend the uneasy security relationship, triangulated through Washington, between South Korea and Japan. Rending relations between the three democracies is China’s premier policy goal in East Asia.
The South Korean government uses the comfort women issue mainly for domestic consumption – as a sure vote-getter or deflector of unwanted scrutiny. China’s ambitions are bigger. The CCP is much more interested in how this issue serves its global agenda; domestic politics runs a distant second. This is the difference and the reason that Beijing can operate on a much larger scale than Seoul on the comfort women front.
A three-front strategy
Globally, Beijing has so far moved through three main vectors: overseas Chinese networks; a largely compliant press; and the United Nations.
An example of the first is the comfort woman statue that mysteriously appeared in Manila in 2017. An investigation by the Sankei Shimbun revealed that the statue project was orchestrated by Overseas Chinese groups in the Philippines, including the Wai Ming Charitable Trust Foundation Company – long a front for politicizing the comfort women issue in mainland China.
Overseas Chinese groups have also pressed hard on the comfort women and Nanjing issues in the US and Canada: In San Francisco, Superior Court judges Julie Tang and Lillian Sing retired from the bench in order to co-found the Comfort Women Justice Coalition, which was ultimately successful in bringing a comfort woman statue to San Francisco. Chinese-American San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee was himself a vocal proponent of the comfort woman statue. In Canada, Chinese-Canadian legislator Jenny Kwan has been pushing for a “Nanking Memorial Day” under the auspices of Canada ALPHA, a propaganda outlet run in-country by Hong Kong-born doctor Joseph Yu Kai Wong. Dr. Wong was one of the first, in 1997, to promote Iris Chang’s book Rape of Nanjing, a project which was, in turn, funded and coordinated by Chinese-American Ignatius Ding and his pro-China group Global Alliance.
A sympathetic Western media, for its part, has largely accepted South Korean and Chinese historical claims and repeats – without adding critical context – what Beijing’s spokespersons say. For example, speaking on January 10, 2018, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang “scolded” Japan about the comfort women issue, standing with South Korean President Moon Jae-in in pressing Tokyo to make yet another apology.
At the United Nations, China has been working to register the comfort women with the UNESCO “Memory of the World” program. Also at the UN, Beijing has repeated the talking points of “sex slavery” and “systematic rape,” demanding that Japan offer a full apology and reparations. In fact, China has partnered with North Korea in the registration efforts. It is notable that several prominent persons connected with Chong Dae Hyup, the most vocal comfort woman-related NGO in South Korea, have been arrested as North Korean spies.
The comfort women issue allows China, a country which leads the world in forced abortions, gendercide (sex-selective abortions of girls in favor of giving birth to boys), and draconian restrictions on a woman’s rights to have children, to deflect from its own women’s rights record. In portraying Japan as uniquely perverted, China hopes to isolate its perennial enemy from the world community while assuming the mantle of champion of gender equality.
The more China can convince the international community to believe the worst about the Japanese, the easier it will be for China to have its way in Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Bhutan, Nepal, Vietnam, the Philippines, Mongolia, and beyond. The comfort women are unwitting ground troops in China’s push to whitewash its own programs against Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongolians, Falun Gong practitioners, Chinese girls, and dissident Chinese citizens, topple the United States’ base network in East Asia, and retain its title as the regional hegemon.
Comfort women: a nuanced history
None of this is to say that a comfort woman system did not exist.
In the Japanese Empire, time-tested Korean practices of buying and selling women as concubines to members of the elite yangban ruling class served as models for the Japanese military for contracting women to work at military brothels in Manchuria, China, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific.
Korea was annexed by Japan in 1910 and was as much a part of the Japanese Empire then as Hawaii is part of the US today. Many women recruited from Korea were bought from their parents by Korean pimps or else were made vague promises by brokers—again, largely Korean—of employment prospects abroad. The Korean pimps and brokers simply repurposed the old yangban trafficking practice in order to deliver the Korean women to the “comfort stations” which the Japanese military used to combat sexually-transmitted diseases and prevent soldiers from revealing classified information to civilian spies posing as prostitutes in unlicensed brothels.
Many comfort women were professional prostitutes from Japan. Traditional Japanese pleasure quarters like Yoshiwara suffered from falling clientele as increasing numbers of Japanese young men were shipped to the front. Many prostitutes made the savvy business decision to go where the work was.
Some comfort women earned enough for their services (at rates set and enforced by the Japanese military authorities) to pay off the advance money given to their parents. Saving money was encouraged by the Japanese military, and accumulating large sums was hardly impracticable.
Now-deceased comfort woman Mun Ok-chu saved up a staggering 26,000 yen in three years (at a time when a sergeant in the Japanese army made between 23 and 30 yen per month). Mun made more money in 1943 – a lot more – than the Japanese lieutenant-general commanding all Imperial land forces in Burma.
More than history
Careful historians in South Korea, Japan, the United States, and elsewhere have repeated historical facts in an attempt to modulate the now-conventional rhetoric. But these historians have been mistaken in imagining that the comfort women issue as simply a historical question. It is not – it is another mode of Chinese disinformation.
But while comfort women propaganda is targeted at the US, a collateral benefit for Beijing lies in seeking revenge against Japan.
For example, in a recent policy speech, Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed three new “State Memorial Days”: July 7, in commemoration of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident; September 3, in commemoration of the Japanese surrender to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces; and December 13, in commemoration of the Japanese advance into Nanking. In other words, China is invoking history in its direct confrontation with Japan.
China is, therefore, co-opting comfort women into the grand project of the CCP to re-assert its authority and to retake East Asia and beyond. What appears to be an issue between South Korea and Japan over history is actually a live-fire battle to draw East Asian states into satellite positions around the “Middle Kingdom” once again.
Jason Morgan is assistant professor at Reitaku University in Chiba, Japan, and a research fellow at the Japan Forum for Strategic Studies. He holds a PhD in Japanese history from the University of Wisconsin, and an MA in Chinese Studies from the University of Hawaii, Mānoa. From 2014 to 2015 Morgan was a Fulbright scholar at Waseda University in Tokyo.
Ming,
Your reply demonstrates you don’t have a full grasp of the facts.
1. China was not under a "scar" as this is not mentioned by the Chinese, either KMT, CCP or otherwise until it began to be an issue in the early 1990s and fit with the CCP program to divert people away from the growing realization of CCP crimes against humanity inside China by pointing to the "other" be it Falun Gong or the Japanese.
2. You state all they need to do is "apologize" like Germany and it will be all right. First, as the others mentioned above, this is a disgusting comparison and you should read what Germany actually did and maybe you will understand why it not analogous. Second, Japan actually did apologize on multiple occasions to include financial payments above and beyond international treaty limits. Only agent provocateurs like to say Japan didn’t apologize or apologize "enough". Israel and the Jewish people did not need an apology (in fact many argued against it, stating "what dood does it do, the dead are dead."
The KMT held it’s war crimes trials in 1946. They didn’t bring it up.
The KMT and CCP also held their normalization treaties. They didn’t bring it up.
The only scar in this case is the imaginary one that is manufactured to engender ethnic and racial hatred.
Fung.
Actually, your response has gone a long way to demonstrate the opposite. But I understand that in Borneo, it might be difficult to have access to comprehensive English lessons, so we won’t quip on that one.
However, we should still look at facts vs. emotions. You hold a position that none of the article is true.
Present your facts that counter it.
Sinon Sean Lee (Dan), how so?
Most of the commenters on here stating that is is "rubbish" or that the article is propoganda, have not presented the facts to support that.
Most of the commenters are also clearly using sound bytes and talking points that have long since been debunked, but are still used by extremists supporting the CCP, neo fascism in Korea, and other extremist groups.
Here are the facts:
The article lays forth a solid foundation for clearly linking just a few of the CCP and SK neo fascist connections, and appears to have not even touched the origin of the narrative itself in the late 1980s that actually began with a group of Japanese communists supporting the North Korean allies.
The historical record is clear: The Comfort Women were contracted prostitutes. All evidence from the period points to this.
For those saying this article is PR spin or "bull": Where is your documentation stating otherwise?
The contemporary evidence is clear: The CCP is engaging on a clearly organized campaign of disinformation and manipulation of emotion and narrative in order to essentially "divide and conquor", as well as what the author didn’t mention which is to engender ethic and racial hatred.
For those saying this article is PR spin or "bull": Where is your documentation stating otherwise?
NOTHING the Japanese did in East Asia during WWII was comparible to the Nazi program of ethnic clensing and racial extermination. NOTHING. To state otherwise or attempt to infer that somehow they are parallel, or worse, that the Japanese conduct was worse than the Nazis is in itself a soft form of Holocaust and history denialism.
For those saying otherwise, you should first be ashamed of yourself, and second you should study what the Holocaust really was and the campaign that the Nazis did to educate yourselves on how disgusting comparing the two actually is.
Then you will understand why the only comparible event between Asia and Nazi Germany is the CCP genocide in China and Pol Pot in Cambodia. Not the Japanese during WWII or the 1930s. They were engaging in a variation of European style colonialism, one with Asian centric features, NOT a National Socialist ethnic cleansing campaign.
another monkey with Japanese resume. Chinese information warfare is amateurish compared to American propaganda industrial complex. the comfort women issue however is as real as genocide of native americans and slavery.
I find this to be a fascinating article and the comments just as interesting. I have researched WWII records on comfort Women and have found nothing that contradicts Dr Morgan’s article. If anyone has records that prove otherwise, I would be most appreciative to have access. Rape is a separate issue. Both rape and forced prostitution were considered war crimes and prosecuted as such after Japan’s surrender. The number of forced prostitution is exaggerated. Instead of 200,000, the never is closer to 200.
As for Korean men, I have served with Korean troops in both the Korean War and in Vietnam. They were outstanding. In the former, I personally knew many Korean officers who were former officers in the Japanese military, among them General Won Young-dock, the Provost Marshal General and later Defense Minister. Korean men would not have stood idly by as their women were being abducted as sex slaves. That is an insult.
If you have any comments, please attack what I write and not me personally since I am very sensitive about barbs thrown at me.
The only one party dictatorship Communist China tries to be looked good to spread fake history information to accuse Japan. Now many people are getting wake up from mesmerized Chinese Communist’s fake history propaganda and intention to control human beings.
If the Communist China succeeded, we will be invaded, massacred, tortured, exploited and killed by the Communist China, like Tibetan people, Uyhglu people, let alone Ho Rongong innocent people.
Was there under the table money to write this juicy story?
Complicity doesn’t even come close to how Mao & Co. literally backstabbed Chang Kai-shek after reconciling differences. Instead of executing him, per Russians’ advice, they had the Nationalists face Japan while they aimed their guns at them from behind. This is how Communists operate, whether it’s yesteryear or today.
Yes, start with routes to China’s Bachelor Villages where hundreds of thousands of Asian women have been taken away to. Such is the direct result of Mao’s great revolution.
The difference is that Japan has apologized and paid reparations. What has China done to come clean for the crimes against its own people? They continue to commit more crimes and blame others for them.
Again, more use of an offensive racial slur… speaking of kneeling, you must do so before Mao’s portrait every morning.
What’s so apparent is that those with Chinese and Korean names online quickly resort to racial slurs because that’s really all they have. The int’l community will judge them accordingly.
Japan’s comfort women system has nothing to do with then Germany’s policy against the Jewish people. Japan refused to round up Jews in Japan and parts of Asia when Hitler made such request – hence you have stories of men like Sugihara and Major Gen. Higuch.
The ‘narrative’ that 200,000-400,000 daughters and wives were taken away to be raped and murdered while the men stood there??? At least think of something that makes more sense.
You san stay humiliated all you want, for Mao has slaughtered tens of millions of his own people like cattle in the name of ‘progress.’ With the continued massacres and violence taking place, the Chinese are simply not qualified to lecture anyone about ‘taking responsibility’ or ‘human rights.’ To equate what Nazi Germany did with Japan’s comfort women system borders on utter imbecilic fantasy – you have absolutely no conception of reality.
Starting with Beijing — for the tens of millions of people Mao had raped, starved, and murdered.
Why don’t you take that wax Mao thing in Beijing and melt it down and make something useful, like candles to sell on streetcorners.
Yet another racist whinging about racism.
When will China come clean?
Listen to Fj. I do not know him, but he is making sensible comments. A breath of fresh air.
Lol. Yeah, because Americans who come from every country in the world cannot understand "the Asian mind." False. Koreans come from Korea. Americans come from everywhere. A lot of us understand a lot more than you might imagine from the little box.
Korea is still massively involved in sex trade.
Not hard to do. China has been an incredible demon. Japan has had only breif historical periods of excess. China — well, excess is China. China has killed more people than Nazis — and that has been AFTER World War II.