李栄薫教授の著書「反日種族主義」が英語記事で紹介されている。記事を書いたのは外信記者クラブ会見で司会を務めたAndrew Salmon氏。Asia Timesは中立メディアなので受けてくれたのだろう。NYTやWPのような主流メディアが取り上げてくれれば良いのだが左派だから無理ですなw https://t.co/0s3ZDbdF1Q
— H.S. Kim (@xcvbnm67890) 2019年9月25日
He slams Korea’s education system and politics, argues that Imperial Japan was, while oppressive, a force for modernity in its colony, and above all, questions the conventional wisdom on forced laborers and “comfort women.”
Rather than relying heavily or exclusively on personal accounts that have emerged from victims since the 1990s, he deploys a wide range of data – ranging from official colonial-era statistics to comfort women’s postal ledgers, military brothel rules and regulations and accounting books from Japanese mines.
Lee says he was moved to write the book after an experience with his granddaughter. “One day, my granddaughter came home from kindergarten and said, ‘Japan is our enemy,’” he recalled. “So, we should take a look at what kind of education is being taught: It is teaching ‘evil.’”
Lee compares the current situation to war and its corollary, propaganda. “In war, it does not matter if a leader tells the truth or not,” he said. “That is the emotional situation we are in.”
Lee does not deny the existence of the “comfort women” system, nor that it was created for Japanese troops. He does, however, challenge virtually everything else about it, citing research into institutional and judicial records that, he claims, have been ignored by other Korean researchers.
In terms of numbers, he called 200,000 “a groundless and manufactured figure … no one has been able to prove this.” While other researchers cite numbers of 20,000-40,000, Lee has a radically lower estimate, of up to 7,000.
He believes that many women were, in fact, Japanese or Korean prostitutes laboring in brothels near Japanese military bases. When the official “comfort women” system was promulgated by Tokyo in 1937, a number of these brothels were converted to “comfort stations.”
He also disputes the “sex slave” narrative, stating that comfort women were contracted sex workers – a profession legal in the Japanese Empire. They enjoyed some freedom of movement and were paid.
“’Sex slave’ is very political terminology,” he said. “We found operational rules and regulations for comfort stations … these rules were adhered to and many women from Korea and Japan were able to save up for their lives after service.”
As for kidnappings by Japanese troops, he offered “a different notion of the recruitment process than we are accustomed to.” Lee’s research indicates that many of the comfort women were, in fact, poor peasant girls sold to civilian human traffickers.
“Parents or guardians had to sign an agreement to allow girls to work for brothels,” he said. When “pimps went to low-income and remote areas with large sums,” parents, who “could not afford three meals a day” literally sold their daughters on contracts.
Still, it is a risky path he is walking. South Korea has powerful defamation laws which have already been deployed: academics have been fined and even sentenced to jail for questioning the “comfort women” narrative.
But Lee is not backing down. “Most of the criticism was emotional,” he said. “There has yet to be any serious academic criticism.”
