An on-the-ground report from Seoul revealing how false claims surrounding the comfort women issue are institutionalized through education, activism, and media—with tacit approval from international organizations.

2016-02-21

The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.

All emphasis within the text, except for the headline, and all passages marked with asterisks are mine.

[Omitted introduction]

“180,000 Massacred”!? False Claims by Opponents of Removing the Comfort Women Statue

In early January, immediately after the Japan–South Korea agreement, I visited Seoul.

In this article, I report from the ground how the agreement has been received in South Korea and how deeply distorted the perceptions held by left-wing groups demanding the nullification of the agreement truly are.

On the afternoon of January 4, I went to the area in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul.

As the embassy is currently under construction and temporarily relocated to another building, it would be more accurate to say that I visited the construction site of the embassy.

On the sidewalk across the road from the embassy, paving blocks had been removed and a comfort women statue had been erected.

Next to it, seven female students were sitting on blankets in a sit-in protest. A man who appeared to be a teacher was accompanying them.

They were studying from a “world history” reference book. Since “world history” does not seem to exist as a university subject, they appeared to be high school students.

Nearby stood an elderly man who looked like an anti-Japanese activist.

Apart from him, several reporters were filming and taking photographs.

Behind them were a few men and women who had come merely to observe.

Following instructions from the accompanying teacher, one of the female students stood up and explained the meaning of the comfort women statue to the seven or eight reporters and onlookers as follows:

“The reason the girl statue is barefoot is to symbolize the fact that a total of 200,000 women were forcibly taken to battlefields and made into sex slaves, and that when the war ended, the Japanese military locked 180,000 of them into air-raid shelters and other places and massacred them. Only about 20,000 were able to return home, and even they were despised as ‘prostitutes’ and could not properly set foot in their homeland. We cannot accept the agreement reached by the foreign ministers of Japan and South Korea. An apology that comes with the condition of removing the girl statue is not a true apology. In order to convey Japan’s state crime to future generations, we believe we must protect the girl statue, and that is why we are sitting here.”

Upon hearing the underlined portion, I could not help but sigh.

The claim of “200,000 sex slaves,” which Prime Minister Abe has clearly denied, is being treated as fact in front of the Japanese Embassy.

Moreover, an entirely fabricated slander has been added—that “the Japanese military massacred 180,000 women.”

On the cover of a weekly magazine sold at a street stand in the city, against the background of a photograph of the comfort women statue, large red Japanese characters declared: “NO, we do not accept your agreement.”

It was the January 11 issue (released on January 4) of Hankyoreh 21, published by the left-leaning Hankyoreh newspaper.

To be continued.

The grim reality of South Korea—where anti-Japanese education initiated by Syngman Rhee, one of the most despicable figures in history, has been continued for 70 years—is something neither Japan (because newspapers like Asahi have never reported it) nor the rest of the world knows at all. The postwar world was supposed to have created the United Nations in order never to allow fascism or totalitarianism to reemerge. Yet while calmly allowing such grotesque realities to persist, the UN, parts of the international community, Japanese media outlets such as Asahi, and the so-called civic groups and cultural figures who echo them continue to defame Japan. What an utterly foolish state of affairs this is.