This essay highlights what the comfort women debate has ignored: men’s dignity and the reality that many soldiers prioritized sending money home over personal indulgence.

2016-02-27

What follows is a continuation of the previous section.

During the war, I was fifteen years old, but even looking back now, I remember thinking, “Even if I go into the military, I would never buy a comfort woman.”
That, too, is what constitutes “men’s dignity.”

Why does no one ever say this?

I know many people who served in the military, and there are plenty who returned home without ever engaging in prostitution.

What is missing from the discussion is both men’s dignity and the fact that men also needed to send money home to their families.

There were military canteens known as saho, but there are countless stories of soldiers who refrained from spending money there and instead sent it to their parents.

In this way, the comfort women issue is also an issue concerning men.

Yet such matters have never been discussed anywhere.

Even when one reads documents that address the comfort women issue, there is not a single word about men; the discussion is framed exclusively from the perspective of women as victims.

Watanabe

They are ignorant when it comes to the military, Korea, and history—those “Asahi-style” people.

To be continued.