Published on August 6, 2019.
Continuing from the previous chapter, this article introduces an essay by Otaka Miki published in the monthly magazine WiLL.
It examines the absurdity of comfort women testimonies reported in Japanese media from North Korea in 1992, while also discussing an interview with Professor Ahn Byung-jik, who was involved in comfort women testimony investigations together with the Korean Council, the realities of North Korean prison camps, poverty on the Korean Peninsula, and the trafficking of North Korean defector women inside China.
The article asks whether the brutal testimonies attributed to Japanese military crimes are in fact a mirror reflecting the realities of China and the Korean Peninsula, and calls for attention to ongoing human rights violations.

August 6, 2019.
Reading it now, it is an utterly laughable article, but let me also introduce the fact that in 1992, such banal reports of comfort women testimonies from North Korea were being made in the Japanese media.
The following is the continuation of the previous chapter.
A mirror reflecting the image of their own country.
Reading it now, it is an utterly laughable article, but let me also introduce the fact that in 1992, such banal reports of comfort women testimonies from North Korea were being made in the Japanese media.
Kim Dae-il, born in 1916, was taken away by a Japanese man at the age of sixteen, when she had no parents, and while working at a hospital in Osaka, she was raped by the director, who carried a sword, and was sold to the continent as a military comfort woman.
“One day when I was twenty-three or twenty-four, I had to deal with as many as fifty men, and I became exhausted and collapsed.
Then soldiers put lit cigarettes into my nostrils and uterus.
(omitted) Just before the end of the war, they lined up about fifty of us Korean and Chinese women in two rows and said, ‘We don’t need these women anymore,’ and the platoon leader began beheading us with a sword, saying, ‘For the Emperor.’”
Lee Bok-nyeo, who was at a comfort station in Dalian, witnessed one day two Korean comfort women who did not obey soldiers’ orders being hung from a garden tree.
“They, the Japanese soldiers, gouged out their breasts with swords.
Blood spurted out.
When they died, they cut off their heads, put them into boiling water, and forced us to drink that water.”
She also testified that when she tried to escape, a red-hot iron bar was pressed against her buttocks, and that the Japanese military killed comfort women by mixing poison into their meals.
Former requisitioned worker Chang Jin-su, who was taken to the Truk Islands, also testified that the Japanese military “used malnourished Koreans as targets for test-cutting with military swords and put the bodies into refrigerators” (Monthly Socialist Party, Ito Takashi).
This kind of testimony is full of points that invite criticism.
For procurers and comfort station operators, comfort women were important merchandise, so if the Japanese military had really done such things, the operators would not have kept silent, and the military too would surely have put those responsible before a court-martial and punished them.
I once interviewed Professor Ahn Byung-jik of Seoul National University, who had been involved in comfort women testimony investigations in South Korea together with the Korean Council, about the credibility of comfort women testimonies.
I asked him about the fact that many shocking testimonies had emerged not only from North Korea but also from comfort women in South Korea.
Japanese soldiers allegedly drew swords, threatened comfort women, and demanded relations; comfort women were allegedly subjected to electric torture by comfort station operators; women who refused Japanese soldiers’ demands were allegedly stabbed in the crotch with swords.
They were allegedly made to deal with dozens of men a day without food or drink, comfort women who died of exhaustion were allegedly abandoned in the mountains, and corpses were allegedly fed to dogs…
When I asked Mr. Ahn about the credibility of these testimonies, he said, “They are saying things that are impossible… (bitter laugh).
When we first conducted interviews, in fact, not a single comfort woman spoke ill of the Japanese military.
Rather, I sensed feelings of admiration toward Japan.”
—Why were those initial testimonies erased, and why did they transform into extreme expressions condemning the Japanese military?
Was it because the more harshly they denounced the Japanese military, the more activists such as the Korean Council praised the comfort women, saying, “Well said!” and became excited?
Then Professor Ahn gave a bitter laugh and said, “There is that aspect too…
To tell the truth, I no longer want to go near the Korean Council.”
The article I published in Shukan Bunshun after interviewing Professor Ahn was later fiercely denounced as fabrication and invention by a former Korean Council university professor and by Shukan Kinyobi, and under the pressure for conformity peculiar to South Korea that permits no dissenting view, Professor Ahn also turned over to that side, and the matter even became a lawsuit, but in the High Court it was proved that there had been no fabrication in my article, and the matter ended without incident.
Normally, speech is answered with speech, but the fact that they attacked me by the ruthless means of a trial, conversely, means that Professor Ahn’s testimony had touched a taboo that came that close to the core of the comfort women issue.
The scene of actually feeding human beings to dogs is also pointed out by Ahn Myong-chol, whom I introduced at the beginning.
It is a scene in which a guard interrogates a woman who had become pregnant in a forced labor camp about who the father was.
“That woman would not give the man’s name no matter how much she was tortured.
Even when we threw her child to the dogs, she still would not speak.
Then, when we stuck a stick into her genitals and stirred it around, she finally gave the name Kim Man-sun.
Only that part was splendid.
But because a piece of wood was forcibly inserted there and stirred around, her screaming had no sex appeal or anything of the sort” (North Korea’s Despair Camps, Bestsellers).
Even sucking the blood of fleas.
There is also such a report.
“Political prisoners placed in the detention center go outdoors once a month to sunbathe.
Because the security unit headquarters and the detention center are back to back, I often saw them sunbathing.
(omitted) Numerous shaved, bluish-white heads, men’s and women’s alike, were lined up under the brief sunlight.
Perhaps scratched with metal skewers, pus had accumulated in their injured places, such as their faces, throats, hands, and feet.
Many could not even walk because of exhaustion and injuries from torture, and they crawled on all fours like dogs, their clothes covered with blood and pus and giving off a foul stench.
While sunbathing, they caught fleas and sucked the blood of fleas crushed with their fingernails.
Whether they valued their own blood or were trying to ease their hunger, the sight of them, men and women alike, silently sucking the blood of fleas, was too pitiful” (the aforementioned book).
Incidentally, this has nothing to do with sex slavery, but the reason I dare to introduce this testimony is that I myself actually heard it in South Korea from Mrs. Kim Su-im.
Mrs. Kim was involved until her later years, together with Princess Masako Nashimoto, who married His Imperial Highness Yi Un, in the operation of facilities to help children with disabilities in South Korea.
Every time I visited South Korea, I met Mrs. Kim, and while she guided me to the tomb where Princess Masako rests and to welfare facilities, she taught me many things.
Kim:
“Korea in the old days was terribly poor, so people survived by sucking even the blood of fleas.”
Otaka:
“What?
How did they suck it?”
Kim:
“People living on the streets are filthy, aren’t they?
The backs of their clothes are packed with fleas.
They would lick those clothes up with their tongues, fill their mouths with fleas, suck the fresh blood, and spit out the remaining dregs,” she taught me.
Therefore, to Japanese people, the unimaginable testimonies from the Korean Peninsula can only appear absurd, but when one once again listens to the realities of that country, one understands that such unimaginable human rights violations have in fact been carried out routinely since long ago.
When people from China and the Korean Peninsula fabricate crimes by the Japanese military, the fact that they mistake their own sensibility for Japan’s sensibility is also the limit of their propaganda.
For example, Kim Hee-tae, Secretary-General of the Third Way for North Korean Human Rights, said about the reality of human trafficking victimization of North Korean defector women in China, “The most common form of human trafficking is sale-marriage.
The majority of Chinese men who marry or live with North Korean defector women are people who have failed to adapt to society, such as the poor, the elderly, people with physical disabilities or mental disabilities, and criminals.
And in China, human trafficking has been practiced customarily for a long time and has been regarded as extremely natural.
For that reason, purchased North Korean defector women cannot receive humane treatment, and human rights violations such as beatings and cruel acts occur frequently.
(omitted) For example, a North Korean defector woman sold into a household of a father and two sons was made the sex toy of the three men, and when she could not bear children, there were cases in which she had to live as a slave on the grounds that she was an infertile woman.
Many problems occur, including cases in which people around them collectively assault North Korean defector women, saying that human trafficking marriages occur because North Korean defector women have entered.
In Chinese karaoke shops operated in the style of Korean room salons, providing drinking and sexual services in private rooms, very many North Korean defector women are working.
In about thirty karaoke shops on Xita Street in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, a little over one hundred North Korean defector women are working, and in Qingdao as well, several hundred North Korean defector women are working.
(omitted) Moreover, such red-light districts mainly arise in rural areas.
Around Qinhuangdao City in Hebei Province, about ten operators are concentrated.
One operator operates in a three-story building, with the first floor as a restaurant, the second floor as karaoke, and the third floor as lodging and a prostitution site.
This operator made about one hundred North Korean defector women work, and in 2007, when one woman escaped, they caught her, cut off her left arm with an axe, and killed her, and in 2008, they cut the right leg
at the knee of a woman who had escaped with a saw.
This woman is now said to be working in the kitchen wearing a rubber prosthetic leg.”
I have never heard in Japan of such cruelty as calmly amputating the leg of a woman who escaped.
To be continued.