Through a documented episode, this essay examines the severe class discrimination and treatment of women on the Korean Peninsula before annexation, challenging historical distortions surrounding the comfort women issue.

2016-02-25

Passages marked by asterisks are my own.

Kusaka

What came to mind at that time was an episode involving a Korean woman.

It was a true story reported in an Osaka newspaper.
In the Meiji era, there was a Japanese diplomatic mission in Busan.

A Korean woman who worked there was accused of having relations with a Japanese diplomat and was stoned to death in a public square.
Apparently, such a cruel punishment existed under Korean law at the time, and a Japanese journalist who witnessed the execution wrote about it.

“I have not had a single happy day from the day I was born until today.
I have suffered terribly.
But while I was employed by the Japanese and worked at the mission, it felt like heaven.
Therefore, even if I am beaten to death by stones now, I will die saying ‘thank you’ to the Japanese.”

The statement above proves that, prior to Japan’s annexation, the Korean Peninsula was a country with one of the world’s worst systems of class discrimination.
Even scholars belonged to discriminated classes.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that women were not treated as human beings.
Those who speak today as “comfort women” are replacing their own historical past with the Japanese military.
For example, a woman born as a slave in a yangban household was the property of that yangban for her entire life.
This is an undeniable historical fact of the Korean Peninsula before it became a unified state with Japan.
Not only the Japanese people, but people all over the world must know this fact.

Stories like this can be gathered endlessly if one chooses to look for them.
Nevertheless, the Asahi Shimbun paid no attention to such matters and instead sought only to uncover reasons to denounce Japan.
Therefore, that former reporter Takashi Uemura, who continued to condemn the Japanese military under the theme of “forced abduction of comfort women,” must have had some particular agenda.