How truthful are the claims re. comfort women made in this recent Best Of'd post?

by thynnus

The claims in this post are fairly shocking, and if grounded in reality would add nuance to our understanding of what happened during and after WWII. OTOH it smacks of rape apology and whitewash.

I checked the post history here on this topic and it is so far light on fact, and does not address the types of claims made there.

As a side question, how do historians deal with questions like this where highly charged topics intersect with changing norms of accepted behavior?

Edit: Fixed some autocorrected words.

[deleted]

One thing that immediately jumps out is this assertion:

Now what happened was that many comfort women were paid in gunpyo or Japanese military tickets. Because Japan lost the war, these gunpyo all became worthless. So understandably people feel cheated and want to be compensated.

...

The Japanese side wanted to compensate individuals, but the Korean government at the time insisted that Japan give the Korean government a lump sum payment and that the Korean government will pay the Koreans. In reality the Korean government took the money and used it to fuel their economic development. So in theory the Korean government should compensate the individuals. However, they didn't.

So to deal with this issue, the Japanese government set up the Asian Women's Fund (1995-2007) and along with an apology letter from the Prime Minister of Japan, the Japanese government gave out 2 million yen to each former comfort woman who accepted.

In other words, the poster is asserting that the Japanese government established the Asian Women's Fund because the comfort women had been paid in money that became useless after the war, and they felt cheated. This curiously avoids any mention of the material uncovered in Japanese archives by Yoshimi Yoshiaki, who discovered

several official documents at the National Institute for Defense Studies Library in Tokyo. Contrary to Japan's previous official position, these documents revealed that the imperial army was involved in both establishing and operating "comfort stations" (ianjo). The Japanese government was compelled to finally acknowledge the involvement of the wartime imperal state in the establishment and maintenance of the military comfort women system before and during World War II. On January 13, 1992, Tokyo issued an apology.

The Japanese government only apologized and established the AWF after evidence was found that compelled them to do so. This is summarized in multiple articles on the subject, and in this case I am quoting C. Sarah Soh's article Japan's National/Asian Women's Fund for "Comfort Women" (found here). Additionally, there is no explanation of why it took 50 years for the fund to be established (or why, if the Korean government should have compensated the women in 1965, when Japan and Korea signed a treaty, it still took 30 years for Japan to establish the fund).

There is much, much more to this, but I need to go to bed. Suffice it to say, the information in that post does not sit with the dozens and dozens of peer-reviewed works on the subject. This sub frowns on simply listing sources, so I will not do that. However, I will mention two major books on the subject, Comfort women, Sexual slavery in the Japanese Military during World War II, by Yoshimi Yoshiaki, and Japan's Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II and the US Occupation, by Yuki Tanaka.

nlcund

I cross-posted that thread in /r/badhistory yesterday, and I felt caught between that and /r/askhistorians, since I could have used some help from real historians. There were some rhetorical issues where he danced around the bulk of evidence, and I don't consider myself halfway educated on the issue, so it was hard for me to fill in the holes.

Here's my response in that post; I put in some counterexamples that I was able to dig up, but didn't try to be comprehensive:

These points contradict many accounts from all over Asia, for instance on the Asian Women's Fund site, this account by a Japanese-Korean woman:

When she was 16 years old, she went to Seoul for better employment on the recommendation of her friend who worked as housemaid for a Japanese family. Led by a Japanese, she was put on a train to go from Seoul to Tianjin, China, then from Tianjin via Peitan to Zaoqiang. There she was forced to be a comfort woman for the Japanese military.

On the issue of direct military involvement:

At 4 o'clock in the morning we took ride on a train. It stopped for two hours at Shanhaiguan at which point myself and Yoshiko attempted to escape. But the exits were blocked by military police. We were much too scared to escape from the train. We spent one night in the train and on the second day arrived at Tianjin at 11 o'clock. When we got off the train at Tianjin, fully armed soldiers were waiting for us with a truck, a coach and a jeep.

The Yoshida Seiji story has gained some currency among Japanese right-wingers who see its retraction as a confirmation that all of the above didn't happen, and that the Kono statement had no basis in fact, but the review of the statement did not call the basic facts into question:

The 1993 statement says the frontline brothels, called “comfort stations,” were established at the request of Japanese military authorities, who also were involved directly or indirectly in their management and transfer of the women to such establishments. “The recruitment of the comfort women was conducted mainly by private recruiters who acted in response to the request of the military” and “in many cases they were recruited against their own will, through coaxing, coercion, etc., and that, at times, administrative/military personnel directly took part in the recruitments,” the statement says.