b********n
发帖数: 38600 | 1 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/15/opinion/comfort-women-and-jap
The Comfort Women and Japan’s War on Truth
By MINDY KOTLERNOV. 14, 2014
WASHINGTON — In 1942, a lieutenant paymaster in Japan’s Imperial Navy
named Yasuhiro Nakasone was stationed at Balikpapan on the island of Borneo,
assigned to oversee the construction of an airfield. But he found that
sexual misconduct, gambling and fighting were so prevalent among his men
that the work was stalled.
Lieutenant Nakasone’s solution was to organize a military brothel, or “
comfort station.” The young officer’s success in procuring four Indonesian
women “mitigated the mood” of his troops so well that he was commended in
a naval report.
Lieutenant Nakasone’s decision to provide comfort women to his troops was
replicated by thousands of Imperial Japanese Army and Navy officers across
the Indo-Pacific both before and during World War II, as a matter of policy.
From Nauru to Vietnam, from Burma to Timor, women were treated as the first
reward of conquest.
We know of Lieutenant Nakasone’s role in setting up a comfort station
thanks to his 1978 memoir, “Commander of 3,000 Men at Age 23.” At that
time, such accounts were relatively commonplace and uncontroversial — and
no obstacle to a political career. From 1982 to 1987, Mr. Nakasone was the
prime minister of Japan.
Today, however, the Japanese military’s involvement in comfort stations is
bitterly contested. The government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is engaged
in an all-out effort to portray the historical record as a tissue of lies
designed to discredit the nation. Mr. Abe’s administration denies that
imperial Japan ran a system of human trafficking and coerced prostitution,
implying that comfort women were simply camp-following prostitutes.
The latest move came at the end of October when, with no intended irony, the
ruling Liberal Democratic Party appointed Mr. Nakasone’s own son, former
Foreign Minister Hirofumi Nakasone, to chair a commission established to “
consider concrete measures to restore Japan’s honor with regard to the
comfort women issue.”
The official narrative in Japan is fast becoming detached from reality, as
it seeks to cast the Japanese people — rather than the comfort women of the
Asia-Pacific theater — as the victims of this story. The Abe
administration sees this historical revision as integral to restoring Japan
’s imperial wartime honor and modern-day national pride. But the broader
effect of the campaign has been to cause Japan to back away from
international efforts against human rights abuses and to weaken its desire
to be seen as a responsible partner in prosecuting possible war crimes.
A key objective of Mr. Abe’s government has been to dilute the 1993 Kono
Statement, named for Japan’s chief cabinet secretary at the time, Yohei
Kono. This was widely understood as the Japanese government’s formal
apology for the wartime network of brothels and front-line encampments that
provided sex for the military and its contractors. The statement was
particularly welcomed in South Korea, which was annexed by Japan from 1910
to 1945 and was the source of a majority of the trafficked comfort women.
Imperial Japan’s military authorities believed sex was good for morale, and
military administration helped control sexually transmitted diseases. Both
the army and navy trafficked women, provided medical inspections,
established fees and built facilities. Nobutaka Shikanai, later chairman of
the Fujisankei Communications Group, learned in his Imperial Army
accountancy class how to manage comfort stations, including how to determine
the actuarial “durability or perishability of the women procured.”
Japan’s current government has made no secret of its distaste for the Kono
Statement. During Mr. Abe’s first administration, in 2007, the cabinet
undermined the Kono Statement with two declarations: that there was no
documentary evidence of coercion in the acquisition of women for the
military’s comfort stations, and that the statement was not binding
government policy.
Shortly before he became prime minister for the second time, in 2012, Mr.
Abe (together with, among others, four future cabinet members) signed an
advertisement in a New Jersey newspaper protesting a memorial to the comfort
women erected in the town of Palisades Park, N.J., where there is a large
Korean population. The ad argued that comfort women were simply part of the
licensed prostitution system of the day.
In June this year, the government published a review of the Kono Statement.
This found that Korean diplomats were involved in drafting the statement,
that it relied on the unverified testimonies of 16 Korean former comfort
women, and that no documents then available showed that abductions had been
committed by Japanese officials.
Then, in August, a prominent liberal newspaper, The Asahi Shimbun, admitted
that a series of stories it wrote over 20 years ago on comfort women
contained errors. Reporters had relied upon testimony by a labor recruiter,
Seiji Yoshida, who claimed to have rounded up Korean women on Jeju Island
for military brothels overseas.
The scholarly community had long determined that Mr. Yoshida’s claims were
fictitious, but Mr. Abe seized on this retraction by The Asahi to denounce
the “baseless, slanderous claims” of sexual slavery, in an attempt to
negate the entire voluminous and compelling history of comfort women. In
October, Mr. Abe directed his government to “step up a strategic campaign
of international opinion so that Japan can receive a fair appraisal based on
matters of objective fact.”
Two weeks later, Japan’s ambassador for human rights, Kuni Sato, was sent
to New York to ask a former United Nations special rapporteur on violence
against women, Radhika Coomaraswamy, to reconsider her 1996 report on the
comfort women — an authoritative account of how, during World War II,
imperial Japan forced women and girls into sexual slavery. Ms. Coomaraswamy
refused, observing that one retraction did not overturn her findings, which
were based on ample documents and myriad testimonies of victims throughout
Japanese-occupied territories.
There were many ways in which women and girls throughout the Indo-Pacific
became entangled in the comfort system, and the victims came from virtually
every settlement, plantation and territory occupied by imperial Japan’s
military. The accounts of rape and pillage leading to subjugation are
strikingly similar whether they are told by Andaman Islanders or
Singaporeans, Filipino peasants or Borneo tribespeople. In some cases, young
men, including interned Dutch boys, were also seized to satisfy the
proclivities of Japanese soldiers.
Japanese soldiers raped an American nurse at Bataan General Hospital 2 in
the Philippine Islands; other prisoners of war acted to protect her by
shaving her head and dressing her as a man. Interned Dutch mothers traded
their bodies in a church at a convent on Java to feed their children.
British and Australian women who were shipwrecked off Sumatra after the
makeshift hospital ship Vyner Brooke was bombed were given the choice
between a brothel or starving in a P.O.W. camp. Ms. Coomaraswamy noted in
her 1996 report that “the consistency of the accounts of women from quite
different parts of Southeast Asia of the manner in which they were recruited
and the clear involvement of the military and government at different
levels is indisputable.”
For its own political reasons, the Abe administration studiously ignores
this wider historical record, and focuses instead on disputing Japan’s
treatment of its colonial Korean women. Thus rebuffed by Ms. Coomaraswamy,
the chief cabinet secretary, Yoshihide Suga, vowed to continue advocating in
international bodies, including the United Nations Human Rights Council,
for Japan’s case, which is to seek to remove the designation of comfort
women as sex slaves.
The grave truth about the Abe administration’s denialist obsession is that
it has led Japan not only to question Ms. Coomaraswamy’s report, but also
to challenge the United Nations’ reporting on more recent and unrelated war
crimes, and to dismiss the testimony of their victims. In March, Japan
became the only Group of 7 country to withhold support from a United Nations
investigation into possible war crimes in Sri Lanka, when it abstained from
voting to authorize the inquiry. (Canada is not a member of the Human
Rights Council but issued a statement backing the probe.) During an official
visit, the parliamentary vice minister for foreign affairs, Seiji Kihara,
told Sri Lanka’s president, “We are not ready to accept biased reports
prepared by international bodies.”
Rape and sex trafficking in wartime remain problems worldwide. If we hope to
ever reduce these abuses, the efforts of the Abe administration to deny
history cannot go unchallenged. The permanent members of the United Nations
Security Council — all of whom had nationals entrapped in imperial Japan’s
comfort women system — must make clear their objection to the Abe
government’s perverse denial of the historical record of human trafficking
and sexual servitude.
The United States, in particular, has a responsibility to remind Japan, its
ally, that human rights and women’s rights are pillars of American foreign
policy. If we do not speak out, we will be complicit not only in Japanese
denialism, but also in undermining today’s international efforts to end war
crimes involving sexual violence. | a******1
发帖数: 1031 | 2 ``young men, including interned Dutch boys, were also seized to satisfy the
proclivities of Japanese soldiers." mlgb | a******1
发帖数: 1031 | 3 Japanese soldiers raped an American nurse at Bataan General Hospital 2 in
the Philippine Islands; other prisoners of war acted to protect her by
shaving her head and dressing her as a man. Interned Dutch mothers traded
their bodies in a church at a convent on Java to feed their children.
British and Australian women who were shipwrecked off Sumatra after the
makeshift hospital ship Vyner Brooke was bombed were given the choice
between a brothel or starving in a P.O.W. camp. Ms. Coomaraswamy noted in
her 1996 report that “the consistency of the accounts of women from quite
different parts of Southeast Asia of the manner in which they were recruited
and the clear involvement of the military and government at different
levels is indisputable.”
这个案在白大人这是翻不了了 | w********e
发帖数: 8594 | 4 奥巴马和中国有了共识，就不需要日本这条狗到处乱吠了。美国已经对日本这条狗的野
心有警觉了。NYT的报道只不过是给日本使个脸色。 | f****a
发帖数: 621 | 5 想靠这个混到去中国报道的权利？
投名状一个，看管用否
Borneo,
Indonesian
【在 b********n 的大作中提到】
: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/15/opinion/comfort-women-and-jap
: The Comfort Women and Japan’s War on Truth
: By MINDY KOTLERNOV. 14, 2014
: WASHINGTON — In 1942, a lieutenant paymaster in Japan’s Imperial Navy
: named Yasuhiro Nakasone was stationed at Balikpapan on the island of Borneo,
: assigned to oversee the construction of an airfield. But he found that
: sexual misconduct, gambling and fighting were so prevalent among his men
: that the work was stalled.
: Lieutenant Nakasone’s solution was to organize a military brothel, or “
: comfort station.” The young officer’s success in procuring four Indonesian
| b***d
发帖数: 439 | 6 铲党太把自己当根葱了吧，你对国内国外的媒体控制，生怕别人不知道你可耻 | z******o
发帖数: 3073 | 7 因为日本是和美国直接竞争的 而且如果美国不用一些非常规手法 他竞争不过日本 而
中共是和美国一条心 一起活剥中国普通老百姓的皮
美国如果单纯为了利益违背良心 当然是和中国政府站一起 控制日本
【在 w********e 的大作中提到】
: 奥巴马和中国有了共识，就不需要日本这条狗到处乱吠了。美国已经对日本这条狗的野
: 心有警觉了。NYT的报道只不过是给日本使个脸色。
| b***d
发帖数: 439 | 8 你不觉得习帝是要联合美国，消灭铲党及其元老？
【在 z******o 的大作中提到】
: 因为日本是和美国直接竞争的 而且如果美国不用一些非常规手法 他竞争不过日本 而
: 中共是和美国一条心 一起活剥中国普通老百姓的皮
: 美国如果单纯为了利益违背良心 当然是和中国政府站一起 控制日本
| n***c
发帖数: 7400 | 9 NY Times的妓者们拿到10年签证后马上话锋一转。等着瞧吧。 | S**********e
发帖数: 433 | 10 慰安妇问题日本必须向东南亚、东亚和日本本国人民道歉。
日本的东亚共荣之战是一场正义的战争，有理想的战争。慰安妇问题给这场事业抹黑了
，是个耻辱。是耻辱，就要面对，避免以后的战争中再犯。 | c****x
发帖数: 6601 | |
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