Based on interviews conducted in Seoul in 1992, this essay recounts the testimony of Professor Lee Myung-young of Sungkyunkwan University, whose firsthand account of the immediate postwar period contradicts the claim of “forced recruitment of comfort women.”
His father’s actions during the Soviet occupation reveal a reality fundamentally incompatible with the narrative of systematic abduction by the Japanese military.

2016-06-30

What follows is a continuation of “Did not many Japanese people uncritically accept the false story of ‘forced recruitment of comfort women’ in this way?”
It was not only Japanese people.
When I conducted interviews in Seoul in February 1992 at the request of Bungei Shunju, elderly people who had lived through that era unanimously stated that “there was no forced recruitment.”
In particular, after hearing the experiences of Professor Lee Myung-young of Sungkyunkwan University, I became convinced that the claim of “forced recruitment of comfort women” was a fabrication.
Professor Lee was born in Pukchŏn, South Hamgyŏng Province, an area that is now part of North Korea, and later fled to South Korea after the North was communized.
He is a leading authority on North Korean studies and also my mentor.
As soon as I visited him for the interview, he said, “You see, there was no forced recruitment of comfort women,” and then told me the following story from immediately after Japan’s defeat.
Professor Lee’s father was a physician, and when Soviet troops advanced into Pukchŏn, a Japanese elementary school principal secretly approached him for advice in a letter.
The Japanese residents in Pukchŏn had been gathered at that school and separated into classrooms by gender.
The principal had been ordered by a Soviet commander to “produce young women,” and he sought help from Professor Lee’s father, with whom he had social ties as a local notable.
By chance, the Soviet commander came to Professor Lee’s father’s hospital seeking medical treatment.
He had apparently committed rape in Manchuria and contracted a venereal disease, and because consulting a military doctor would have harmed his career prospects, he secretly came to a civilian hospital.
Professor Lee’s father told the commander, “Japanese women lack chastity and are dangerous. Even the obi of their kimono can be quickly used as a pillow,” and “The safe ones are women of that profession who undergo medical examinations for venereal disease. You should choose such women.”
The commander believed this, rescinded his order to “produce young women,” and instead began looking for women from the licensed entertainment quarters.
At the time, Professor Lee was enrolled in the medical faculty of Keijō Imperial University and working as a hospital assistant, and he listened to his father’s story while treating the commander.
If the Japanese military had committed atrocities such as “comfort-women hunts” on the Korean Peninsula, would that Japanese principal have thought to seek help from a Korean?
And no matter that he was a physician, would Professor Lee’s father have gone so far as to threaten a Soviet military officer with lies in order to save Japanese people?
Professor Lee’s father was not a “pro-Japanese collaborator” who actively cooperated with Japanese rule.
When Professor Lee was in the old higher school system, his father told him to go to the Japanese Army Academy.
This was because he wanted him to learn military technology there and then join the “independence forces” that were conducting guerrilla activities in China and Manchuria.
His father was determined to achieve Korean independence even if it meant fighting a military war against Japan.
Nevertheless, he could not permit Japanese women to be unjustly raped by Soviet troops.
It is utterly impossible to believe that there was anything like the slave-hunting forced recruitment of comfort women described by Seiji Yoshida.
To be continued.