Before the war, Japan had a system of licensed prostitution. Comfort women were essentially an extension of this system brought to the battlefield. The women who became comfort women were victims of poverty.
This was something both Japanese and Koreans knew. However, in the early 1990s, some anti-Japanese groups in Japan widely disseminated the absurd lie that the Japanese military, under the National Mobilization Law, had forcibly abducted Korean women like slaves to become comfort women.
However, the false image that "200,000 young Korean women were forcibly abducted by the Japanese military and made into sex slaves" still persists in South Korea and the international community. The comfort women issue for Japan is about how to dismantle this lie.
Finally, courageous scholars and activists have emerged in South Korea who are directly confronting this lie. I call them not pro-Japanese, but anti-anti-Japanese. This is because they are fighting against the lies of the anti-Japanese faction in South Korea, not defending Japan.
In July 2019, former Seoul National University Professor Lee Young-hoon published "Anti-Japanese Tribalism," arguing, with numerous academic grounds, that comfort women were licensed prostitutes managed by the military, not sex slaves. The book became a bestseller in South Korea.
As a spokesperson for the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs recently admitted, the "evidence" for the forced abduction theory consists only of the testimonies of former comfort women and UN reports such as the Coomaraswamy report. However, the evidence in the Coomaraswamy report is based on a book by a Japanese man named Seiji Yoshida, who claimed to have abducted and forcibly taken women from the Korean Peninsula while serving in the Japanese military. In reality, South Korea has found no evidence of forced abduction of comfort women despite extensive searching.
Regarding the testimonies, researchers in Japan, including myself, have already verified that the same individuals have given contradictory accounts and that the stories do not match the historical context, rendering them unusable as "evidence." That's right, much later, Seiji Yoshida confessed that his claims of kidnapping and forcibly transporting women from the Korean Peninsula were completely false and fabricated. In South Korea, critical examination of the testimonies of former comfort women also began in earnest.
In April 2018, the courageous journalist Hwang Ui-won wrote a lengthy article examining the changes in the testimonies of former comfort women (a translated version was published in the August issue of the monthly magazine "Seiron").
Recently, Kim Byung-heon, director of the National History Textbook Research Institute, has been actively pursuing this work and isleading a movement demanding that the South Korean government revoke the designation of "comfort women victims." According to their research, for example, one former comfort woman who actively criticizes Japan initially stated that she "received a red dress and leather shoes from a private contractor and happily went along,
" but later, in her testimony to the US Congress and other places, she began to say that she was "threatened and taken away by Japanese soldiers."āāā
And as the narrative of forced recruitment of comfort women by Japan became established, women from the Korean Peninsula, China, and other countries came forward and began to testify that they were kidnapped and forcibly taken away by the Japanese military. However, in reality, most of the comfort women who worked for the Japanese military were Japanese.āāā