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 Wang The Taiwanese comfort women were closer to their 70s when they received apology and compassion funds. And wasn’t their idea to reject Japan’s money. The mass organization that handled them ordered them to reject the support because they wanted the ladies to focus on a class action suit. (Japan told them they could take part in a lawsuit AND accept the money. )
All of theTaiwanese ladies managed to accept the money by doing an end run around the organization that served as their "handlers". Turns out that a Taiwanese lawyer agreed to help funnel Japan’s funds to them under the table! So, if they are now claiming they received no money from Japan, that is simply not true. It is also NOT true that Japan was waiting for the ladies to die off before given them thanks and compassion money. Total BS! The comfort women only started coming forward in the early 1990’s and first Japan needed to craft an official state apology (Kono statement) and then locate the former comfort women from a number of countries, not just Taiwan.
The comfort women had been hired by private brothel owners with businesses in Japan, and the then-territories of Korea and Taiwan! Those brothels contracted with the IJA to be allowed to travel with them. But since some of the former comfort women claimed (in the 1990s that they had been mistreated while working in their brothel the Japanese felt moved to apologize for any hardships the ladies claimed they had suffered (primarily as a result of the owner’s mistreatment, not the soldier’s — though there were a few documented instances — one in which the comfort woman killed an unruly soldier in self-defense and she was exonerated by the IJA court ). If anything the brothel owners should have been the ones to apologize for mistreating their sex workers, but its nearly impossible to find and hold such a person accountable after 45 to 50 years!
Ming Wang, this comments section contains tons of information and references to books and documents about the comfort women and actually most are not by the Japanese. Many references are by Korean scholars or actual comfort women or brothel owners, or American translations of captured IJA documents. There are also British and Dutch documents. If you are serious about studying this issue, I leave it to you to peruse the comments and pick out documents that interest you. Take care and good night. I’m signing off from this blog.
Bee Foo Enough of your opinion. Show me any creditable information not from Japan and not personal opinion to prove your point. I already pointed out the Wikipedia link, which stated that most comfort women were from Korea and China. Simplify discrediting Wikipedia is not enough. I have a feeling that your unbiased research were solely based on Japan’s propaganda.
Speaking of the comfort women situation in Taiwan. Japn has longed denied it and by the time Japan offered the money, they were less than 50 left and they were at their 80’s. Taiwanese comfort women rejected Japan’s money because they would never accept that they were volunteered. If what you said were true, then there was no reason for them to turned down US $100k each and protected till their death. This information is available from Taiwanese news, which I already pointed out.
Yap C Seng
Again, you are arguing from ignorance and attempting an emotional appeal by trying to link two dissimilar things.
First, as Israeli Ambassador Eli Cohen noted "There is nothing in any way, in Asia, that the Japanese did that is like the Holocaust." So stop trying your form of Holocaust denial by trying to link it with contract prostitution. It is disguisting to attempt to do so. I recommend you go back and study what the Holocaust was, so you can see how terrible that analogy is.
The only event in Asia in the 20th Century that is analogous with the Holocaust would be the CCP euphamistically named "Great Leap Forward/Cultural Revolution and Ethnic Genocide against non Han minorities in China to include the Falun Darfa" and Pol Pot in Cambodia.
So if emotion in China was tied to events parallel to the Holocaust, then it would be against the CCP. Yet the CCP after 1989 worked overtime to try and divert the people’s knowledge away from the criminal actions by the state, and that is why they focus so heavily on the "other" i.e. Japan.
Again, thank you for proving my points.
Ming Wang
Your own post betrays your lack of depth and knowledge on this issue. You said " I trusted Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_women more than your opinion. "
1st: As everyone knows Wikipedia is NOT a valid research site, it is a "mob edited" infoblog.
In fact, in the ultimate irony, Wikipedia even says it is not a credible source, yet you trust their opinion….NOT to be a credible source. So you self admit to posting informtion from sources that are not credible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_not_a_reliable_source
And "my opinions" are based on credible sources. In fact the ONLY sources to have interviewed the 46 Korean Comfort Women who self identified in the late 80s early 90s for the lawsuit. Professor Ahn Byong Jik of Seoul University, as well as the other professor who was able to research the womens claims in the 2000s through 2010 and found the same; Professor Yuha Park of Sejong University.
In addition to these there are the actual source documents from the MULTIPLE investigations of the Comfort Women by the US, Dutch, and Britain during the war…when we were mortal enemies of the Japanese and had every motivation to find them guilty of everything. Not to mention the post war trials which included the KMT Chinese research.
ALL of these formed my "opinion" vs. your source which self admits it is not credible.
Thank you for proving my point. CCP Shills work on emotions, while the rest of us work on facts.
Yes, he seems to work in Universtites in Japan. He got more inflrmation from Japam. And I beleive he is a pro-Japan. Nothing is woring.
If you dont agree to have supporter who are get paid by any organization, I want to look at big Chinese and Korean lobbies in the US. They are well connected mainly Democrats Pary which can influece MSM. Do you really think that people in the US love to talk about ww2 in Asia without any political and bussiness agenda? Dont be so naive.
Ming Wang All your inflromations are from Wiki. Have you see any documets in English, Chinaese , Korean or Japanese? Actually all declossfied information from Japan about the comfort women ( orprotustion house for miritary) has been translated in English. I know you dont want to see anything. if you are arguing sake of arguing it is ok. Just enjoying victiminsosng and being Marxist or Ameican democrat. like Nacy Polezi. ww
However , if you are talking about really historical truth, you need to visit the IWG and the IS National arvhive. It is political battle between China with North Korea and Japan. Please dont igonore that it is very importan factor to undersatnd entire picture.
http://www.exordio.com/1939-1945/codex/Documentos/report-49-USA-orig.
htmlhttps://www.archives.gov/files/iwg/reports/final-report-2007.pdf
http://scholarsinenglish.blogspot.jp/2014/10/why-has-south-korea-still-not.html#comment-form
Bee Foo
In your own words "THE COMFORT WOMEN SCAM.". My who is the troll.
Never mind, even Einstein cannot overcome stupidity.
If they were prostitutes, where were the pimps to rebuttal them ? And why would Korean authorities support them ?
The worst type of prostitutes are those who prostitutes their mind.
Yap C Seng You are the one who is blind and also thick as a brick — on purpose. Of course the comfort women existed. No one said they didn’t and you know it. The point is they were just prostitutes working in private brothels, not kidnapped by the IJA. You are not interested in serious discussion. You are just trolling. I have wasted my time. And in answer to your question. Here for the nth time is your original post: "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. " Okay peace out.
Al Johnson
Your evasiveness does not hide your poor knowledge of history. CIA tricks are becoming less and less effective due to the increasing poor quality personnel.
It’s really stupid to cordon Japanese atrocities when examples of their crimes against Allied POWs is so well documented.
There was little documentation or pictures about comfort women because these were events happening in Japanese armed forces ; so were destroyed by Japanese military themselves.
Koreans and Chinese are especially emotional about this because we suffered this atrocity. It is like asking the Jews to justify their emotion about Holocaust.
And the white man who ridiculed or belittled this will be marked and not forgiven.
Americans have fought many wars over past 60 years but still not learn when not to touch on emotional issues.
Bee Foo
My, my perhaps you have bad eye sight as well as being plain stupid. When did I ever ask people to curb themselves from expressing their opinion ?
All I did was either counter their arguments or point out their deficiency.
Like in my first answer to your post, all your errors. In my post rebuttal to Gung Ho Al, his boorishness. It is YOU who imply that I am asking people not to criticize.
For your further enlightenment and because of your bad eyesight/memory Dr. Morgan himself confessed that comfort women did exist. His excuse is that they were prostitute.
but for such an ‘enlightened’ person it is strange that in his world prostitues are NOT entitled to human rights. In his own words money is paid to the parents ie ‘sold by the parents’. Now what parents willingly sell their chidren ?.And to Japanese army where they get raped by hundreds at a time ? And he claimes one Mun Ok-chu saved lots of money. Why only one saved so much ? Since there are so many comfort women , servicing hundreds of ‘clients’, and no where to spend their money ?
Yes Chinese and Koreans are emotional about this issue. Because it is about mothers and daughters. Because it is about a atrocity which the Japanese refused to be accountable for.
And we will never forget about this like the Jews will never forget about the Holocaust.
Ming Wang (1) If you did unbiased research on the issue you would learn that the majority of the comfort women were in fact Japanese. The next largest number were Korean women, and finally Taiwanese women. Also, some local brothels later signed up to participate in places like the Philippines and Burma (2) The prostitutes worked directly for brothel owners who did their own hiring. ALL the brothels and their prostitutes made good money. (3) It makes perfect sense that Japan first invited brothels from Japan proper and Japan’s territories. to follow the army from garrison to garrison and only later allowed local brothels to participate. (4) Taiwan was Japanese territory since 1895. The Korean peninsula did not become part of Japan due to invasion. The Korean peninsula was ANNEXED in 1910 BY REQiUEST by an influential group of Koreans who believed the only way for Korea to modernize and get out from under their feudal rulers was to petition Japan to annex Korea. Not all Japanese wanted that responsibility and cost. A lot of Japanese taxpayer money went into modernizing Korea, including the building of 5000 schools, infrastructure, sanitation, factories, etc. (5) I do not trust Wikipedia as a reliable source when it comes to political issues like the comfort women because any user of Wikipedia can "contribute" their personal viewpoint based on their own biases. Wikipedia doesn’t check people’ credentials. Wikipedia is not a reliable source except when it comes to things like listing all the elements on the periodic chart! 🙂 (6) The fact that some Taiwanese women protest is not at all proof that the Japanese army kidnapped and coerced them into the brothels. Protests are a dime a dozen, I’ve been to at least 50! The Taiwanese comfort women already accepted Japan’s apology and compassion money health and welfare support back in the 1990s, but certain leftist forces in Taiwan want to bring back the issue and are behind the protests. It is not difficult to get people to gather and protest (I have helped organize protests myself). It is quite easy for political opportunists to rally the masses around an issue that promises possible money or 15 minutes of fame or political capital. Former Korean comfort women protest regularly, some against their will. But the kidnap narrative IS A SCAM! Chong Dae Hyup controls and coaches the women to say they were abducted by the Japanese army. Funny thing. Originally (in the early 1990s some of those same ladies said they worked in a brothel (comfort station) for the good money or to pay back a personal loan or a loan to their parents. That was befoe Chong Dae Hyup coached them on what to say to improve chances of winning a lawsuit against Japan. I don’t know if you know much about mass organizing, but sometimes protest are legit, and sometimes they are staged as opportunist ploy.
Al Johnson It’s good of you to bring this discussion back to the topic at hand, which is THE COMFORT WOMEN SCAM. Some posters managed to derail the conversation with emotional and repetitive patriot rhetoric that I’ve been hearing since the 1990s. Nothing new. Pretty old hat, really. I once again offer my congratulations to Dr. Morgan for quite a perceptive article that cuts through layers of BS!
Al Johnson If it’s such high paid contract job, how come the comfort women were all from the occupied countries? Wouldn’t you expect a lot more from Japan?
Al Johnson I trusted Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_women more than your opinion. "Young women were abducted from their homes in countries under Imperial Japanese rule."
Vic Mason Stay on the topic about "Comfort women". What kind of logic is this? Japan didn’t commit any crime because the forced soliders visited forced comfort women.
Bee Foo You should do a google search "Taiwan comfort women protested" and ask yourself why they continued to protect every year if Japan is doing what you said they did.
I see more Chinese names here who resort to racial slurs… they seem to have taken over the comfort women propaganda narrative. Quite fitting as the fat boy from the North went to see his big boss in PRC for instructions.
Ming Wang Japan’s ‘only crime’? Then we need to include the Koreans and Taiwanese who fought along with the Japanese and also went to comfort stations, don’t we? If you really believe the Chinese people were happy to have their parents exterminated by Mao, I don’t think there’s a cure for ya…
Again, these side issues are not relevent to the topic at hand (Chinese weaponization of the Comfort Women) EXCEPT to demonstrate to all reading that the PR shills for the CCP side like Wong, Sing, and Chang, base their arguments off of a lack of facts and emotional appeal talking points, that anyone wtih a bit of knowledge in history will easily see through, as Jason Morgan did in his article.
Bottom line is that the article is spot on, so we see the neo fascist Han lobby take to the keyboards in an amatuerish attempt to distract and distory the truth.
Yap C Seng
At this point it is clear that you are not arguing from ignorance, you are simply lying outright, in hopes that the less well informed will believe you, and to fight off the potential paradigm shift as your concious is exposed to the truth and must retreat to hold your old worldview, and maintain the CCP debunked talking points.
1. Your Claim: You claim "The US position on "One China" is defacto a support for the 9 dash line.
1. Facts: Not true.
The US rejected China’s claim in a 26 Page rebuttal paper issued on December 12th after China sent its 9 dash line map to the United Nations claiming 2 million square killometers, much of which violates the soverignty of Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Phillipines, in addition to internaitonal waters protected by UNCLOS. The borders were nothing like the 9 dash line claimed by Taiwan in 1947. Again, you promote internal propoganda and argue devoid of facts.
2. Your Claim: By inference that the MCP was not a group that terrorized the Malaysian population and was controlled and mostly staffed by the Mainland Chinese communists.
2. Facts: The MCP was a mainland inspired and led organization that was interested in organizing the ethnic Han Chinese in Malaysia and siezing power, the MPAJA, was a tactical move to gain weapons and a breathing space from the British.
In fact the British formed a seperate unit so they did NOT have to continue dealing with the MPAJA (front for the MCP) because as the SoE records make clear "The MPAJA was more effective at terrorizing the local villagers than the Jap (sp) army throughout the war." And as I mentioned before, Chin Peng’s own diary never mentioned fighting Japanese. They husbanded weapons and money to fight after the war was over.
For the others in this group that are interested Mohd Rizal Yaakop of
University Kebangsaan Malaysia has excellent research on the MCP, including more elaboration of the above. Yap Seng and his fascist idiology will think that Mohd Rizal Yaakop (A Malaysian professor in a Malaysian University from a very distinguished and long line of Malaysian scholars) is an "Anglo" as he is want to do in his Chinese Han supremicist bent, but as is obvious to non fascists, this is a Malaysian view. The UK view is even more damning against the MCP and MPAJA during and after the war.