hankyoreh

By Hankyoreh English staff

An August 15 Policy Brief by the US-Korea Institute at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) has reiterated evidence refuting claims made in Japan that dispute the fact that so-called comfort women were forcibly mobilized to serve as sexual slaves to the Japanese military during World War II.

The historical distortions were recently expressed in an August 1 editorial in the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s most widely circulated daily newspaper. The editorial argued that, “no historic document has ever been found by historians or research organizations that positively demonstrates that women were forced against their will into prostitution by the Japanese army.”

Dennis Halpin, author of the SAIS brief, details a report under the command of General MacArthur entitled “Amenities in the Japanese Armed Forces” which was declassified in 1992 and provided to US congress in 2006. The report found that the trafficking of women and girls for purposes of sexual exploitation was carried out with participation by the Japanese state, arguing specifically, “the establishment of brothels under strict regulation is sanctioned by military authorities in any areas where there are large numbers of troops.”

Halpin’s policy brief describes reluctance on the part of US congress to bring forward such a serious human rights criticism against Japan, a major US ally. Then-US House International Relations Committee Chairman Henry Hyde reportedly viewed the report as the “smoking gun” on the comfort woman issue, and led a markup of it as H. Res. 759 toward the end of the 109th Congress, but it failed to pass due to lobbying on behalf of the Japanese government.

The resolution eventually passed a Democrat-controlled Senate in 2007. In the summer of 2012, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, described comfort women as “enforced sex slaves” during a closed-door State Department briefing.

This evidence clearly disproves Yomiuri Shimbun’s argument that there is no historical document substantiating the fact that comfort women were forcibly mobilized, as opposed to having acted freely as many right-wing Japanese continue to claim to this day.

The full briefing can be viewed at the website below

http://uskoreainstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/2013-0815-Halpin-Comfort-Women.pdf

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]