Rather than merely demanding that South Korea honor the comfort women agreement, Japan must respond with factual rebuttals. Professor Lee Young-hoon of Seoul National University has demonstrated through extensive documentation that comfort women were part of a regulated military prostitution system, not sexual slaves, and has refuted the claim of 200,000 Korean comfort women.

Japan must counter the comfort women narrative with facts, not slogans.
Professor Lee Young-hoon of Seoul National University has shown through documents and testimony that comfort stations were regulated military prostitution, not sexual slavery, and that the claim of 200,000 Korean victims is historically untenable.
Fact-based rebuttal is indispensable.

2017-06-28

In the future, Japan must not limit its demands toward South Korea to merely honoring the comfort women agreement, but must absolutely engage in timely rebuttals that address factual issues directly.
In doing so, Japan should cite the work of a history professor at Seoul National University, South Korea’s most prestigious academic institution, who has presented extensive documentation asserting that comfort women were part of a military-managed system of regulated prostitution and were not sexual slaves.
Professor Lee delivered a twelve-part lecture series titled The Illusory Nation on an internet television channel hosted by conservative commentator Chung Kyu-jae.
The final installment, “Women in the Comfort Stations,” consisted of over two hours of lectures uploaded in three segments on August 22 and 23, 2016.
In these lectures, Professor Lee academically examined a wide range of materials, including diaries kept by managers of Japanese military comfort stations and testimonies of former comfort women who had accumulated savings of 25,000 yen, and concluded that Japanese military comfort stations were “regulated prostitution attached to military units.”
He pointed out that women generally became comfort women through human trafficking such as parents selling their daughters for money or through fraudulent employment offers, and that claims asserting “illegal abduction by the military or police” are mostly based on oral testimony and lack credibility as objective historical evidence.
Professor Lee also explained that, except in frontline areas, requests by comfort women to leave the profession were generally accepted, and he explicitly rejected the claim that comfort women were sexual slaves.
He stated that while many scholars accept the sexual slavery narrative based on claims of restricted movement, confinement, daily violence, and lack of proper compensation, a comprehensive review of multiple sources reveals that these claims are largely insufficiently substantiated.
Professor Lee further rejected the claim that there were 200,000 Korean comfort women.
If there had been 200,000 Korean comfort women, the total number including Japanese and Chinese women would have had to reach several hundred thousand, which is implausible given that the total number of Japanese soldiers at the time was approximately 2.5 million.
He concluded that it is reasonable to estimate the maximum number of Korean comfort women at around 5,000.