The following is from today's Sankei Shimbun.
International Symposium on comfort women issue
No evidence for the theory of sexual slavery was found.
Japanese, U.S., and Korean Researchers Discuss
On July 10, the International Institute for Historical Review sponsored an international symposium on the comfort women issue in Tokyo.
Researchers from Japan, the U.S., and South Korea discussed the impact of the comfort women issue on Japan-Korea relations, society, and education in both countries.
Lee Yeong-hun, author of the best-selling book "Anti-Japanese Racism," delivered the keynote speech, stating that in the process of writing the article on comfort women included in the book, "we could not confirm any empirical evidence that is appropriate for the theory of forced marriage and sexual slavery that existing researchers have been advocating.
Lee explained that comfort women, like private-sector prostitutes, were "women who entered the prostitution business as a result of indentured servitude contracts in which the custodians of the poor and lowly classes approved their daughters' employment as comfort women after receiving a substantial advance loan from a broker.
Most of the women either repaid their debts or left the comfort station to pursue new lives as their contracts expired," he said.
Professor Mark Ramseyer of Harvard University, who has written an academic paper showing that comfort women were not "sex slaves" but had entered into indentured servitude contracts with the comfort stations that included an advance payment and a period of labor, also spoke at the conference.
Ramseyer said of the Japanese historians in the U.S. who had attacked him personally and demanded that he retract his paper, "They are not reading Japanese literature. It is the state of Japanese studies in the United States.," he said.
He appealed, "As a human being, rather than a scholar, your responsibility is to tell the truth, write the truth, and never apologize when you are attacked."
2024/7/8 in Akashi
