Disputing Korean narrative on 'comfort women'

Discussion in 'History & Past Politicians' started by ThirdTerm, Dec 21, 2015.

  1. ThirdTerm

    ThirdTerm Well-Known Member

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    In February, a South Korean court ordered Park’s book, “Comfort Women of the Empire,” redacted in 34 sections where it found her guilty of defaming former comfort women with false facts. Park is also on trial on the criminal charge of defaming the aging women, widely accepted here as an inviolable symbol of Korea’s suffering under colonial rule by Japan and its need for historical justice, and she is being sued for defamation by some of the women themselves.

    The former comfort women have called for Park’s expulsion from Sejong University in Seoul, where she is a professor of Japanese literature. Other researchers say she is an apologist for Japan’s war crimes. On social media, she has been vilified as a “pro-Japanese traitor.” “They do not want you to see other aspects of the comfort women,” the soft-spoken Park said during a recent interview at a quiet street-corner cafe run by one of her supporters. “If you do, they think you are diluting the issue, giving Japan indulgence.”

    In the early 20th century, the official history holds, Japan forcibly took innocent girls from Korea and elsewhere to its military-run brothels. There, they were held as sex slaves and defiled by dozens of soldiers a day in the most hateful legacy of Japan’s 35-year colonial rule, which ended with its defeat in World War II.

    As she researched her book, combing through a rich archive in South Korea and Japan and interviewing surviving comfort women, Park, 58, said she came to realize that such a sanitized, uniform image of Korean comfort women did not fully explain who they were and only deepened this most emotional of the many disputes between South Korea and Japan. In trying to give what she calls a more comprehensive view of the women’s lives, she made claims that some found refreshing but many considered outrageous and, in some cases, traitorous.

    In her book, she emphasized that it was profiteering Korean collaborators, as well as private Japanese recruiters, who forced or lured women into the “comfort stations,” where life included both rape and prostitution. There is no evidence, she wrote, that the Japanese government was officially involved in, and therefore legally responsible for, coercing Korean women.

    Park said she had tried to broaden discussions by investigating the roles that patriarchal societies, statism and poverty played in the recruitment of comfort women. She said that unlike women rounded up as spoils of battle in conquered territories like China, women from the Korean colony had been brought to the comfort stations in much the same way that poor women today enter prostitution.

    She also compared the Korean comfort women to more recent Korean prostitutes who followed American soldiers into their winter field exercises in South Korea in the 1960s through ’80s. (The “blanket corps,” so called because the women often carried blankets under their arms, followed pimps searching for U.S. troops through snowy hills or built field brothels with tents as the Americans lined up outside, according to former prostitutes for the U.S. military.) “Korean comfort women were victims, but they were also collaborators as people from a colony,” Park wrote in one of the redacted sentences in her book.

    http://www.telegram.com/article/20151219/NEWS/151219202

    Professor Park can read both Japanese and Korean as she teaches Japanese literature in Korea and she can readily see what actually happened to Korean comfort women, without being influenced by the sanitised version of history imposed by the Korean government. “Comfort Women of the Empire,” published in both countries, got her into trouble in South Korea, where disputing the official account of comfort women is illegal, and academic freedom is under threat.
     
  2. ThirdTerm

    ThirdTerm Well-Known Member

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    [video=youtube;XPMwfoEGcOQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPMwfoEGcOQ[/video]

    "Spirits' Homecoming," a Korean film depicting the lives of women forced into sexual slavery for Japanese troops during World War II, surpassed 3 million viewers on the weekend, data showed Sunday. The film drew 120,432 viewers Saturday, its 18th day since the release, to reach a little over 3.03 million, according to the Korean Film Council (KOFIC). A new Disney animated film, "Zootopia," has dethroned "Spirits' Homecoming" at the top of the box office after drawing 148,722 viewers on Saturday. (Yonhap)

    Since the Korean film-makers are hugely successful in forcing their patriotic narrative about Korean comfort women on the Korean people, Professor Park's name would never be cleared in Korea. I have read a few examples of comfort women who were forced to work at military brothels especially in Indonesia. The Dutch investigation found that around 65 Dutch women were taken from internment camps against their will. There were up to 300 Dutch comfort women in the Dutch East Indies and the Dutch government admitted that only 20% of them were conscripted to become comfort women by the Japanese military. The Asahi Shinbun apologized in 2014 for stating the number of 200,000 Korean comfort women which, on reconsideration, was regarded as inaccurate. The real figure is up to 100,000 in a decade of Japanese military rule in Asia and close to 20,000 of them could have been sex slaves.
     

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