Comfort Women

In Yu Bin’s satirical essay “Comfort Women: A Final Solution”, he characterizes the argument defending Japan’s use of comfort women as claiming that it prevented a “worsening of anti-Japanese feelings in China”, avoided “leaking military secrets as a result of contact with Chinese women”, and “was a natural extension of Japan’s state-organized and licensed prostitution”. Each of these claims is dependent on the idea that Japan’s comfort stations prevented the rape and murder of Chinese women. First, this seems to resemble a fallacy of bifurcation, as it assumes that either Japan must provide comfort women, which are compared to sex slaves (which suggests a lack of consent), or Chinese women will be raped. If this were true, then that would mean that Japanese soldiers had to rape someone, but obviously this is not true, since they could have chosen to not rape anyone. Secondly, it resembles a false cause fallacy because it assumes that Japanese comfort women directly prevented the rape and murder of Chinese women, even though no actual evidence or reasoning for this causation is given. Third, it resembles an ad consequentiam fallacy by suggesting that the use of comfort women was validated because not having comfort women would have resulted in worse consequences, though this disregards the question of whether or not the use of comfort women is morally acceptable in itself. Finally, the last reason given is illegitimate because in questioning whether it is morally acceptable for Japan to permit a sex trade, Japan itself cannot be used as an authority for justification based on its own use of a sex trade.