Published on August 6, 2019.
This article introduces an essay by Otaka Miki published in the monthly magazine WiLL.
Based on a report by Korea Future Initiative, it examines the reality of North Korean women and girls who have escaped their country only to become victims of human trafficking, forced marriage, prostitution, and cybersex exploitation inside China.
At the same time, it critically examines Japanese and Korean human rights activists who have spread the comfort women issue internationally, the international community’s neglect of North Korean human rights abuses, the Lai Dai Han issue, the Korean Council, and the activities of the late Matsui Yayori.

August 6, 2019.
The existence of Japanese and Korean human rights activists who, acting as agents of the North and drawing in the international community, have propagandized the comfort women issue, fabricated out of things true and untrue.
The following is from a laborious work by Otaka Miki, who is now continuing to do good work as a rising journalist, published in this month’s issue of the monthly magazine WiLL under the title, “The Korean Peninsula: The Problem Is Today’s Sex Slaves Rather than the Comfort Women, Isn’t It!”
Liberal gentlemen of the human rights camp!
“Human rights violations” are still happening right there even now, you know?
Serious human rights violations.
The organization “Korea Future Initiative (KFI),” based in London and pursuing human rights violations against North Korean women and children, published a report on North Korean defector women titled “Sex Slaves: The Prostitution, Cybersex, and Forced Marriage of North Korean Women and Girls in China” (2019).
It says that most of the 200,000 North Korean defectors hiding in China are women, and that about 60 percent of them, after being trafficked, are made into sex slaves in forced marriages or brothels.
KFI began interviews over two years with more than 45 victims living in China and South Korea.
As a result, it reports that a black-market trade worth more than 105 million dollars a year, about 11.6 billion yen, involving the trafficking of North Korean defector women was uncovered.
It contains shocking content, some of which one hesitates even to translate.
The collapse of the fantasy of North Korea as a paradise had gradually begun to leak into Japan after Frozen Republic: A Journey of Disillusionment in North Korea was published by Aki Shobo in 1984.
The Hanmi-chan incident, in which a family of North Korean defectors rushed into the Japanese Consulate in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, China, in May 2002, is also still fresh in memory.
The late 1990s was a period when millions of people died of starvation due to food famine, and in 1997 North Korean Defector Ahn Myong-chol’s North Korea’s Despair Camps was published by Bestsellers.
The hellish reality of the forced labor camps that Mr. Ahn witnessed was exposed and shocked the whole world.
If, at that point, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and others had dispatched investigation teams and seriously addressed the North’s human rights problem, at least to some extent the expansion of today’s tragedy of North Korean defector women might have been prevented.
Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the greatest factor that prevented this problem from being watched closely by the international community was the existence of Japanese and Korean human rights activists who, acting as agents of the North and drawing in the international community, have propagandized the comfort women issue, fabricated out of things true and untrue.
The sins of anti-Japanese activists.
I will discuss their merits and demerits later, but why is such a movement emerging from Britain now?
It appears that, with London as the stage, a strange information war between Korean conservative forces and North Korea is unfolding beneath the surface.
The trigger began on May 9, 2017, when Moon Jae-in, a pro-North figure, became president in South Korea.
First, on August 4, 2017, only KFI’s logo mark was uploaded on the web, and the first report they published on North Korean defector women was in March 2018.
Since about eight months passed before the report was published, it is presumed to be an organization that was hastily launched.
With the inauguration of the Moon administration, fearing that South Korea’s shameful parts, such as the Lai Dai Han issue, would spread even in Europe, it is also possible that they began now to take up the tragedy of North Korean defector women as a diversion.
This is because, if they truly wanted to conduct human rights activities to rescue North Korean defectors, they should have begun much earlier.
In fact, in Japan, there has been an organization called the Life Funds for North Korean Refugees since 1998, and its representative, Kato Hiroshi, overcame even the language barrier and, despite having been detained in China in the past, continues rescue activities at the risk of his life even now.
I asked Mr. Kato about KFI.
“I think this organization has a short history as an organization dealing with the human rights issues of women from the North.
It is possible that the investigative report itself was undertaken at the request of some sponsor, and perhaps it may be part of an information war,” he said, tilting his head in puzzlement.
At any rate, what rose up as a counter to KFI may be “Justice for Lai Dai Han.”
This is a private organization established on September 12, 2017, at the call of British civic activist Peter Carroll.
On June 10, 2019, the “Lai Dai Han statue” was unveiled.
From the beginning of the organization’s establishment, the figure of former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw can also be seen.
Speaking of Lai Dai Han, this refers to incidents in which South Korean troops who participated in the Vietnam War raped and massacred Vietnamese women locally, and the mixed-race children born of rape and abandoned are said to number from several thousand to thirty thousand.
The first to scoop this issue in 1999 was the Korean left-wing media outlet Hankyoreh 21.
The fact that enraged veterans, reacting to the report, attacked the Hankyoreh company shows that this had long been taboo in South Korea.
Incidentally, the pro-North Korean Council, which is erecting comfort women statues not only in South Korea but around the world, is involved in this Lai Dai Han issue.
In a sense, the South Korean government, which had used the Korean Council as a vent for anti-Japanese sentiment, was struck by a boomerang.
Therefore, there is also a possibility that the North is involved in some form in “Justice for Lai Dai Han.”
In recent years, even in South Korea, conservatives who feel a sense of crisis over the extreme leftward shift of the Moon administration have begun to appear among the military and university professors.
Since they are expressing fair views on the comfort women issue and the wartime laborer issue, this is welcome for Japan, but that does not mean Japan should be naively overjoyed.
If one surveys the history of the Korean Peninsula, it has always been marked by sadaejuui, serving the great.
We must not forget that the background is the present age, in which China is weakening in the U.S.-China trade war and Japan’s presence in the international community is rising.
As proof of this, during the period when Japan was weak-kneed and was scattering meaningless apologies and money in response to South Korean propaganda, there were only a handful of Korean scholars and intellectuals who transmitted information on the comfort women issue from a fair perspective.
It is a country whose character, since the Yi Dynasty, has been that no one other than the yangban, the ruling class, is treated as a person, and the majority of people do not even try to pay attention to the tragedies of others.
In addition to the situation on the Korean Peninsula, the further problem is anti-Japanese activists inside Japan.
At the head of them was the late Matsui Yayori, a former Asahi Shimbun reporter.
VAWW RAC, the “Violence Against Women in War” Research Action Center, is an organization that Matsui launched, and she also hosted the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery, an outrageous mock trial held with North Korean agents and others intervening.
It operates the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace in Nishi-Waseda, Tokyo, and when one pays the 500-yen admission fee and enters, it is an absurd facility where a photograph of His Majesty’s face is displayed as a war criminal in the Second World War under the label “Emperor Hirohito.”
Because of space limitations, I will omit detailed explanations, but she was the very person who cunningly used the comfort women report of the first Asian Solidarity Conference held in Seoul in 1992, lobbied the Prime Minister’s Office for a full two days, and made the Kono Statement be issued.
Let me introduce how Honda Katsuichi, a former Asahi Shimbun reporter, described Matsui.
In her later years, Matsui was deeply despairing of the Japanese mass media that ignored the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal, and at the same time she even made the following statement.
“For example, the abduction reporting.
‘How many thousands of thirteen- or fourteen-year-old women did the Japanese state abduct from Korea and make into comfort women?’
‘They do not report such things at all’” (Honda Katsuichi, Thoughts for Those Who Have Passed Away, Kodansha; boldface by the author).
Speaking of her later years, Matsui passed away on December 27, 2002, and on September 17 of the same year, General Secretary Kim Jong-il formally admitted to Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro that the abduction issue had been committed by the North.
On the other hand, evidence that the Japanese military forcibly took away comfort women has still not been found, even though both the Japanese and South Korean governments have investigated enormous amounts of documents.
What on earth was Matsui thinking as she listened from her sickbed to Kim Jong-il’s confession?
At any rate, Matsui’s view seems to me to have splendidly represented the North’s intention to fabricate the forcible taking away of comfort women and relativize it with the abduction issue, but…
To be continued.