Wow. Japanese right-wingers, you did NOT just do this near my neck of the woods. Oh shit, you DID.
When Glendale officials proposed a memorial to "comfort women" — sex slaves who served the Japanese army in occupied countries during World War II — they saw it as a quiet gesture of goodwill for the city's Korean community.
The planned statue shows a young girl seated next to an empty chair: a symbolic memorial to the estimated 80,000 to 200,000 women, mostly from Korea, who spent the war in Japanese military brothels serving up to 50 men per day.
But city leaders soon realized that they had stepped into a major international controversy. They've been bombarded with hundreds of angry emails, mostly from Japan, accusing them of falling for "anti-Japan propaganda" and calling the Korean women, many of whom say they were abducted from their homes as teenagers, "liars" and willing "prostitutes."
What, because a Korean
teenager getting repeatedly raped by Japanese soldiers during WWII is somehow
better than if it were a Korean
adult woman?? Who are these sick fuckwads defending this bullshit??
More of the disgusting story below the fold.
Good on Glendale for not backing down to this disgusting revisionist smear campaign.
Proposed memorials in New Jersey, New York and Singapore faced similar organized opposition.
The uproar has left Glendale officials stunned but undeterred. The City Council late Tuesday approved the statue despite the opposition.
"A 14-year-old girl doesn't voluntarily leave her village in Korea to go serve the Japanese army, give me a break," said Councilman Frank Quintero, who said he was surprised that such a "low-key" memorial could stoke such fury. "We never intended to kick up a hornet's nest," he said.
These are the tactics of the revisionists. Note the similarity of the arguments of the Holocaust deniers. Acknowledge some fact, and then twist what should be logical to any sane person to suit their own propaganda.
The emails protesting the comfort women's memorial, which have also been addressed to Times editors and reporters, generally don't deny that the brothels existed. Instead, they argue that soldiers from all nations, including the U.S., patronize prostitutes during wartime. Any coercion used to staff the Japanese "comfort stations," they say, was committed by unscrupulous Korean pimps — not Japanese officials.
"The girls were sold by their parents to private sex brokers, which is a tragedy," wrote one Japanese man who said he lives in the U.S. and only identified himself by his pen name, Pakku Rareman. "Or they volunteered to feed their family" during the war, he wrote.
Oh bullshit. What fucking bullshit. These women were KIDNAPPED. You seriously fucking want us to believe CHILDREN left their families VOLUNTARILY to be gangraped by dozens of Japanese soldiers on a daily basis for YEARS to make money for their parents back home?? Show me one fucking shred of evidence that they were paid a salary that they sent part of back home to their family. You fucking can't.
While this is obviously not the Japanese government doing so, it's unfortunately part of a growing movement of the right-wing in Japan that's spearheading this fake revisionist garbage.
The Japanese government issued a formal apology to the comfort women in 1993. It acknowledged that the Japanese military had established a vast network of brothels and its officers, at times, had a direct role in recruiting women against their will. As a result, the apology said, "a great number of comfort women … suffered immeasurable pain and incurable physical and psychological wounds"
In the last 20 years, however, a growing number of Japanese conservatives have argued that the evidence underlying the government study was thin. In May, Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto said the brothels had been a "necessary" part of Japan's war effort and questioned the level of coercion involved.
Seriously, fuck you Hashimoto.
Here's an account from a survivor of all those years of rape by Japanese soldiers.
The new, combative tone coming from Japan has done nothing to silence 86-year-old Kang Il-chuk and others who live in a home for former comfort women outside Seoul.
"I won't just disappear quietly," Kang said in an interview last week with The Times. "Until the day I die, I will raise my voice to fight the Japanese government."
Kang said when she was 15, Japanese soldiers came to her rural home while her parents were out and ordered her to come with them. She wound up on a train to China, where she said she spent nearly four years in a military brothel.
"I can't even remember how many hours I worked in a day, and how many men I had to serve. It was just endless," Kang said.
Others say they had sex with 40 to 50 men per day.
One day, Kang said, she took too long in the bathroom because she was bleeding from her rectum. A Japanese soldier came in and beat her in the back of the head, she said, ordering her to return to work. She still has a scar from the soldier's blows, Kang said.
These women were tortured for years. And now the right-wing in Japan is trying to rewrite history. We cannot let this stand.
This story has really pissed me off, partly because the Japanese in WWII essentially murdered several members of my family in China. I should have had two aunts growing up, but instead I only had blood relative uncles, because both girls died of starvation and illness from the Japanese blockade. Before my grandmother passed away from Alzheimer's, her memory had gotten so bad she couldn't even recognize her own daughter (my mom), but could still remember the horrors of witnessing the Rape of Nanking, which has its own denial movement in Japan, much like Holocaust deniers.
There's a reason a lot of Chinese people feel the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal was little more than a joke, because it absolved the Emperor of any actual responsibility for his role in war crimes, claiming he was so oblivious not to know what was happening right under his nose. Bull-fucking-shit. That let them off waaaaaaaaaay too easy, and helped spawn this denial movement.
And now we see this denial movement spread to the Korean sex workers as well. The only good news is that so far, they've FAILED. They tried to intimidate New Jersey to take down their monument last year; that effort miserably failed. And so too have they failed here in Glendale, California.
We need to keep exposing liars like this to make sure they continue to fail in their revisionist history efforts.
And amazingly, this actually seeped down into a House race last year, when Dan Halloran (R) actually tried to sleazily use this controversy in NY-06 against now-Rep. Grace Meng (D) to boost his profile by cutting out the man actually responsible for trying to set up the memorial, NYC councilman Peter Koo (D), because he had endorsed Meng, and trying to make it look like it was thanks to his efforts. Sheesh.