A Japanese comfort woman

By -
Japan Times reports a story of a Japanese comfort woman:
Shirota lived a relatively quiet life until she was 14 and her mother died in 1935. Her family bakery went bankrupt, and her father began gambling. To pay off his debts, he sold her to a brothel. Prostitution was legal then, and Shirota's was a common fate. With no other choice, she accepted it with resignation.

 At first, Shirota was an assistant, helping the older women with their clothes and makeup. But gradually, she was brought into the reality of the brothel. When she was 18, she was ordered to serve her first customer. Locked in a room, she was raped. She was bedridden for days, and was treated for syphilis.

 Her father continued to gamble, and took out loans from the brothel. A broker in Yokohama sold her to another brothel in Taiwan.
Indeed it was a tragedy, but her case proves that she was not "coerced by a gun" but bought from her father. And the brothel was set up by the broker who sold her to another broker. No Army officials interrupted.

It would be a myth that the majority of comfort women were Koreans. Prof. Hata estimates that 40 per cent of them (less than 20,000) were Japanese.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A troubling position on 'comfort women'

By -
The Yomiuri Shimbun's editorial criticizes the EU Parliament's resolution: The Japanese government must lobby other governments to persuade them not to follow in the footsteps of the European Parliament in adopting a resolution that sullies Japan's standing. The European Parliament has adopted a resolution condemning Japan over the "comfort women" issue. The resolution calls for the government to apologize, saying the Imperial armed forces coerced young women in Asia to work as "sex slaves" before and during World War II. The latest development resembles the resolution adopted by the U.S. House of Representatives over the comfort women issue in July. This matter has now spilled over to Europe. The parliaments of Canada and the Netherlands also have adopted similar resolutions. However, interest in the comfort women issue has not necessarily been high in Europe. The European Parliament's resolution was advocated by the minor Green Party and fewer tha
Read more

Norimitsu Onishi, a liar

By -
The most influential source of lies is Norimitsu Onishi , the Tokyo bureau chief of NY Times . He was born in 1969 in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture, Japan, and moved to Canada when he was four. He graduated from Princeton University and joined the Times and covered Africa, Afganistan, and other foreign countries before he came to Japan in 2003.
Read more

Asahi Shimbun fabricated "comfort women"

By -
Image
All these things began with a wrong article. "Comfort women" or  "military abduction" weren't discussed before it. The Asahi Shimbun reported in the front page on 11 January 1992 that the historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi discovered documents that proves the Army's "commitment" to comfort women in the archives of Japan's Defense Agency.
Read more