Comfort Women Post

"The Truth About the 'Comfort Women'" by Moteki Hiromichi seems to me a defensive attempt to deflect blame on the comfort women scandal of the Japanese military, calling those who speak out against the atrocities "misinformed or willfully ignorant." It attempts to discredit the major arguments of the activists. The major claims are that prostitutes came along willingly with the army and were not at all coerced (since that was what American comfort women were according to historical records), that activists are distorting the historical records to make themselves appear the victims, an anecdotal account of one reporter unable to confirm reports of women abductions at a village, and the fact that the U.S. and South Korea are asking the Japanese government for apologies but they themselves partake in regulating prostitution. I have difficulty accepting these claims. The first two claims, that the prostitutes wanted to be there and that activists are just playing the victims, sound too much like weak (but too often respected) claims from a rapist that the sexual act was consensual. The entire article takes this tone, claiming that Japan and the Japanese government are inherently worthy of respect and that anyone trying to attack its integrity is therefore automatically a villain. One could even say that this is an argument from privilege, that it could only be made by a privileged group or person, similar to the defense of the rich against the poor in America today. The prostitutes being dragged from their home, and the village of Koreans afraid and ashamed to acknowledge their history to some random reporter, aren't in a fair circumstance. Also, while I think that it is bad of the U.S. or Korea to regulate military prostitution while simultaneously asking Japan for an apology for it, I don't think that it frees Japan (or the U.S. or Korea) from responsibility for these actions. Two wrongs don't make a right. Finally, Japan like many countries have a history of illegitimate historical revisionism for the sake of their ideology and politics. For all of the claims by Moteki Hiromichi that activists are partaking in historical revisionism, it seems that his article may be doing just the same.