The Comfort Women and Japan's War on Truth
NY Times published another bogus article. They still confuse military coercion with human trafficking.
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.Japanese administration has never contested the military’s involvement. As Nakasone wrote, they set up many comfort stations operated by private agents and managed by the Army. Koichi Kato, the chief cabinet secretary, apologized it in 1992. What does NYT want more from 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.
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.Japan has never denied human trafficking and sexual servitude, as the U.S. can't. But the difference is that Japan didn't legalize human trafficking by the Constitution as the U.S. did. So American government should apologize for their national crime forever, but Japanese government has no such obligation. Historically, Japan has never had slavery in the western sense.
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