This month's issue of Yoichi Shimada's serial column “The Great Way of Heaven” in the monthly magazine Will, published on 4/26, is Who Persecuted Chinese Comfort Women?
Emphasis in the text is mine.
The March 6 edition of the Korean newspaper JoongAng Ilbo carried an article that made me laugh (or perhaps it is rude to say so).
The title of the article was “Kohin's Memorial Poem for Chinese Comfort Women Amid Sexual Harassment and Scandal to Be Removed.
Let me summarize.
A monument inscribed with a poem written by 85-year-old Koh Yin, a prominent South Korean poet, in memory of comfort women was taken down late last month.
A women's group had been calling for the removal of the monument after a female poet exposed sexual harassment by Koh.
The reason was that it would be inappropriate for a poet in the midst of sexual harassment to commemorate a victim of former Japanese military sexual slavery.
Gao's poem begins as follows.
'You, who were the life of sacrilege that was left in the bud / Trampled down in the bud.'
As an example, according to the article, after a lecture at a university, Gao touched the body of a woman next to him at a party and even removed her genitals from her pants.
In other words, he “trampled on a flowery maiden” in the bud.
This is nothing short of the height of hypocrisy.
The director of “Nanum no Ie,” a welfare facility for former comfort women, is said to have angrily told Ko that he must not only sincerely apologize to those who had the courage to confess, but must also thoroughly reflect on his actions. In any event, this form of anti-Japanese sentiment is a good way to get rid of Japan.
In any case, it would be good to see the anti-Japan movement self-destruct in this way and the removal of comfort women statues and monuments one after another.
However, this is not the time to be complacent.
If there is self-destruction in South Korea, it will be limited to a small part of the country, and the comfort women statues and monuments will continue to be erected.
And China is now at the center of the international campaign to falsely portray the comfort women.
The Chinese government's historical war against Japan is even more strategic than that of South Korea.
Its aims can be summarized in the following three major areas.
(1) Disarm Japan mentally. In other words, to instill a sense of perpetrator and a historical view of atonement in Japan, a regional power that will be an obstacle to China's hegemony in Asia, and to weaken its will to resist.
(2) To justify the one-party dictatorship of the Communist Party by stirring up hostility toward “unrepentant Japan” and claiming that if “unity” is broken, Japan will be invaded again.
(iii) To divert attention from the “present” of China, which lacks freedom, democracy, rule of law, and human rights, to the “past.
Under the CCP's strategy, Su Zhiliang, a professor at Shanghai Normal University, has been at the center of the research and dissemination of the comfort women story.
The English-language edition of Chinese Comfort Women (Chinese Comfort Women, 2014), published by the prestigious Oxford University Press, is slowly gaining influence.
However, the book, which claims that many Chinese women were abducted by the Japanese military, gang raped without compensation, and mostly murdered, contains a huge boomerang of a story that is the result of an impossible reconciliation.
In China, as in South Korea, the existence of former comfort women, long out of the public consciousness, suddenly became a “problem” after 1992, when the Asahi Shimbun and others began their falsehood campaign.
Therefore, as a research book, it is necessary to explain why such a serious and large-scale “war crime” has gone unnoticed.
The Chinese Comfort Women” argues in general as follows.
In Chinese society, where patriarchal ideology permeates, a woman's purity is more important than her life. With the addition of political prejudice, the surviving comfort women were considered immoral and betrayed the country. They were also branded as “counter-revolutionaries” under the Communist regime, and were even more humiliated and persecuted by being sent to forced labor in the north for “sleeping” with Japanese soldiers. Some of them committed suicide because they could not bear it any longer. This is the reason why China has been slow to raise the issue of comfort women, even though it is the country that suffered the most.
This is nothing new.
According to a leading scholar of comfort women in China, it was the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that unreasonably persecuted the comfort women who survived the war and returned to their hometowns in comfort stations run by the Japanese military, sending them to their deaths.
This is not the hypocrisy of South Korea's sexually harassed poets.
The Chinese Communist Party should be held most strongly responsible.
Yoichi Shimada was born in Osaka in 1957. Professor of international politics at Fukui Prefectural University. He is a member of the planning committee of the National Institute for Basic National Problems and vice president of the National Council of “Save the Kidnapped Victims”.
2024/6/4 in Kanazawa
