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.
Bee Foo
Fascinating diary of a Korean comfort woman
Mun Oku-chu’s memoir
(In Mandalay, Burma)
I saved a considerable amount of money from tips. So I asked a clerical staff whether or not I could have a saving account and put the money in the account. — I got my savings passbook and found 500 yen written on the passbook. I became the owner of the savings passbook for the first time in my life. I worked in Daegu as a nanny and a street seller from the childhood but I remained poor no matter how hard I worked. I could not believe that I could have so much money in my saving account. A house in Daegu cost 1,000 yen at the time. I could let my mother have an easy life. I felt very happy and proud. The savings passbook became my treasure.
(In Rangoon, Burma)
I was able to have more freedom in Rangoon than before. Of course, not completely free but I could go out once a week or twice a month with permission from the Korean owner. It was fun to go shopping by rickshaw.— I thought I should have a jewel myself, so I went and bought a diamond.
(In Saigon, Vietnam)
I put on a pair of high heels, a green coat and carried an alligator leather handbag. I swaggered about in a fashionable dress. No one could guess that I was a comfort woman. I felt so happy and proud.
http://scholarsinenglish.blogspot.com/2014/10/former-korean-comfort-woman-mun-oku.html
http://www.kyobobook.co.kr/product/detailViewKor.laf?ejkGb=KOR&mallGb=KOR&barcode=9788991066106&orderClick=LAA
Diary of a Korean comfort woman
http://scholarsinenglish.blogspot.com/2014/10/former-korean-comfort-woman-mun-oku.html
http://www.kyobobook.co.kr/product/detailViewKor.laf?ejkGb=KOR&mallGb=KOR&barcode=9788991066106&orderClick=LAA
(In Mandalay, Burma)
I saved a considerable amount of money from tips. So I asked a clerical staff whether or not I could have a saving account and put the money in the account. His reply was positive. I knew that all the soldiers put their earnings in the saving accounts in the field post office, so I decided to put my money in the saving account.— I got my savings passbook and found 500 yen written on the passbook. I became the owner of the savings passbook for the first time in my life. I worked in Daegu as a nanny and a street seller from the childhood but I remained poor no matter how hard I worked. I could not believe that I could have so much money in my saving account. A house in Daegu cost 1,000 yen at the time. I could let my mother have an easy life. I felt very happy and proud. The savings passbook became my treasure.
(In Rangoon, Burma)
I was able to have more freedom in Rangoon than before. Of course, not completely free but I could go out once a week or twice a month with permission from the Korean owner. It was fun to go shopping by rickshaw.— I went and bought a diamond.
(In Saigon, Vietnam)
I put on a pair of high heels, a green coat and carried an alligator leather handbag. I swaggered about in a fashionable dress. No one could guess that I was a comfort woman. I felt so happy and proud.
"Koreans I know would not sit idly by and watch this kind of atrocity. "
Your comment coincides with the following US military report:
Composite report on three Korean Navy civilians, list no. 78, dated 28 Mar 45, re "Special question on Koreans” (1945) , [U.S.] Military Intelligence Service Captured Personnel & Material Branch
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Composite_report_on_three_Korean_navy_civilians,_List_no.78
This report is based on "Interrogations of Koreans", List No. 78 of 28 Mar 45. Paragraph numbers correspond to question numbers in this list.
———-
18. All Korean prostitutes that PoW have seen in the Pacific were volunteers or had been sold by their parents into prostitution. This is proper in the Korean way of thinking but direct conscription of women by the Japanese would be an outrage that the old and young alike would not tolerate. Men would rise up in a rage, killing Japanese no matter what consequence they might suffer.
Interesting if implausible theory .
I note that you avoided answering the rebuttals to your initial racist post (calling the poster a "monkey") which refuted your "argument from ignorance" with sources from the South Korean academics themselves, in addition to the Allied records, which you admitted you had no knowledge of.
And yet you still try to deny history state the Comfort Women were not contract prostitutes.
Bee Foo, well said!
Professor Lee Young-hoon was one of the Korean professors, who was threatened and beaten up for saying the truth.
He also argues that the number of comfort women and forced laborers, has been exaggerated in Korea’s textbooks.
http://staff.texas-daddy.com/?eid=502
So Kimleng Choo, are you going to say that he was also paid by Japan to secure his rice bowl? Lol.
I’m afraid this has nothing to do with where the author’s next bowl of rice comes from 🙂 He is an honest scholar who is more interested in seeking truth from fact, than in pandering to the ROK or any other government. IMO his research should be appreciated, especially in this political atmosphere of fake news, historical fabrication and false flag operations. (I’m reminded of the University of Virginia woman who claimed she was gang raped at a fraternity party. She ruined the lives of several innocent man, all to get attention and sympathy — not good!)
You should be aware that there are a number of academically rigorous and honest Korean scholars who have been saying for years, that this comfort women brouhaha is a scam. — that the comfort women really were highly compensated prostitutes, some of whom became quite wealthy, bought multiple homes, even accumulate the money to lend to soldiers and set up their own brothels. But since there is no academic freedom in the ROK, those Korean scholars are threatened, not published, and even beaten up for not toe-ing the party line.
Vic Mason
So how much reparations had japan paid?
Dr Morgan’s article is well written and does not contradict any original source document that I have come across. It is obvious this is a very touchy subject with ingrained beliefs. This does not mean I am calling former comfort women as liars. What it means is, some comfort women claim they were coerced into prostitution. Unfortunately, they did not speak up and seek justice through the war crimes trials like a few others did. However, that in no way “proves” 200,000 to 400,000 women were abducted as sex slaves. Further, without original witness statements or other verification, it becomes she said he said.
Given that number, surely there would be witness statements, and many incidents of clashes with local men. Koreans I know would not sit idly by and watch this kind of atrocity. To Koreans who have also wondered about that, be assured my research thus far has not uncovered a single incident of a Japanese soldier coercing a Korean woman or girl to become a comfort woman. If anyone has any record of such an incident, please let me know so I can include that in my compilation of WWII comfort women documents.
Coming from an author who is based in japan obviously wants to secure his rice bowl.
As far as US is concerned, Japan can revise history all they like as long as the alliance leash is firm. And in cases like comfort women when it actually does some good of antagonizing japan’s neighbors, specially American hegemony nemesis China, the US will throw in some bone of support(like the American professor teaching in Japan that wrote this article) . The fact that Japan is no longer the designated asian whipping boy like in the 1980’s (last decade that Japanese economy saw growth and some its leaders deluded themselves of independence ) provide Japan with some soothing illusion and reprieve from daily reality that it is still an occupied country which US does not trust unless with massive military presence . Facing such scenario ,it is the duty of the Japanese government to create the illusion of sovereignty for its people and it is the duty of its people to at least pretend to believe it.
George Silversurfer. For your information I am neither a monkey nor do I have a Japanese resume other than tracing it back to my parents who left Japan over a century ago. Dr Morgan’s article was about Comfort Women, not me.
Let’s discuss documents on comfort women. There is an abundance of original documents related to the issue. I am sure a historian like Mr Al Johnson has accessed most. As for Japanese documents, large quantities of those do exist. They are very detailed. Some documents were translated into English upon coming into US hands. Korean documents also exist. Also, a government directed Dutch research report on Comfort Women in Indonesia also exists. None of the documents provide evidence of organized abdication by soldiers.
The best records are probably war crimes records on comfort women.There was one case by the US. It involved forced prostitution of two women on Guam. The Dutch had less than half a dozen cases. The Australians none, but they did have one for rape of a local Chinese woman.Thailand was an Ally of Japan. French Indo-China was under France, a reluctant Ally of Germany and therefore not an enemy of Japan. After Japan’s surrender, a few thousand Japanese remained and helped the Vietnamese fight the French. Those Japanese were recently honored by Vietnam. From what I can determine, there were no comfort women war crime trials in the Philippines or Burma or Singapore.
If you you should come across any WWII records on comfort women war crime trials other than those mentioned, I would be very interested.
Yap C Seng There are ethnic Chinese in many countries, but that does not mean they support the Chinese Communist Party and its control over the actions and thoughts of its own people and its expansionist policies in Asia. Many live in other countries because they fled communism!
Well it would be an exaggeration to say that the US can do no wrong, but we are discussing the factual research around the comfort women, which clearly indicates they were not kidnapped and coerced in "sex slavery" by the Japanese army. They were recruited and hired by mainly Korean-owned commercial brothels 🙂
Kim Yuh
Well done. Most people like Silversurfer argue from a position of ignorance.
Same process that led to the belief in Blood Libel, the Loch Ness Monster and Alien Abductions…
Yap C Seng
Thank you for the excellent screen shot of your response demonstrating how this is an ethno nationalist reactionary position (I. E. Fascist) for you and many of the CCP supporters. The Thais of Chinese descent don’t fall for the CCP Fascist rhetoric, and are smarter than most on this issue. They have rejected attempts to make similar statues here, know the real history of comfort women and hate communist and Fascist, especially after seeing what the mainland Han Chinese communists did in Malaya during the Emergency in the 1950s.
Try again.
Ming Wang
Again you are incorrect about the facts.
The Allies, especially the American OSS that was assisting the KMT investigated rape and kidnapping as war crimes, and looked into the Comfort Women system on a number of occasions. The results were always the same. No kidnapping rape etc. In other words no sex slavery
What they did find is consistent with high paid contract prostitution
Outside of neo Fascist / communist China today there is the principle of innocent until proven guilty, and evidence based prosecution .
So it is perhaps difficult for some living under the CCP indoctrination system to understand why you need proof of a crime and why it is bad to prosecute or persecute someone on race alone.
But the facts are very clear. The system was not sex slavery.
The Taiwan women had their chance to go to court and arbitrate, yet they did not, preferring to make a political position and statement. There are no term limits for war crimes, they knew that. Yet they didn’t provide details necessary for a prosecution It’s highly likely that many were groomed by the Japanese lawyer group that started this issue as a means of supporting the North Koreans who were caught actually kidnapping Japanese.
Try again
Yap C Seng
Correct. The Bataan Death March is a war crime against POWs, and not ethnic cleansing and genocide which was the cornerstone of the Nazi party and prosecution of the war in Europe.
You are attempting a tactic of desperation in your debate, to attempt to bring elements into the argument that have nothing to do with the argument at hand, but attempt to confuse the readers and appeal to emotion by a false linking of two dissimilar and unrelated topics.
The only comparison between Asia and the Nazi genocide would be the genocide and ethnic and political cleansing by the Chinese Communists and Cambodian Communists.
How Washingon weaponizes ‘Democracy’ and "Human Rights" as propaganda tool
Please write an article about that… oh wait… US can do no wrong
‘NOTHING the Japanese did in East Asia during WWII was comparible to the Nazi program of ethnic clensing and racial extermination. NOTHING. ‘
So, the Bataan Death March is a NOTHING. The use of POW to build the Bridge over River Kwai is fake propaganda from Hollywood .
I see.
This self glorified American ‘Hero’ wants to single handedly fight the Chinese. He does not even know that 20% of his Thai freinds are ethnically Chinese. It’s so sad that there are still ignoramus like him from US. They are probably the ones who are starting all these mass killings every now and then around the world.