Comfort Women
The comfort women issue detonated in 1992 when Japanese history specialist Yoshimi Yoshiaki reported the revelation of archives connecting the Japanese government to the wartime massage parlor arrange in the 1930s and ’40s. Japan was blamed for snatching countless ladies as sex slaves, and after that of slaughtering them in large numbers once the Fifteen-Year War in Asia had been everything except lost. This ignited the Coomaraswamy Report on issue in 1996.
For South Korea, hostility to Japan is an enduring focal point, the Korean comfort women issue would appear to be bogus claim. All the more reason for South Korea pressing on with the subject, only to lose more ground.
There are two primary purposes behind this.
To begin with, the key to Korean comfort women stories are invalid. Aside from uncommon atrocities, there was no systematized “constrained snatching.” The count of 200,000 was inaccurate. A considerable number of the women were not Korean. To be sure, even the Coomaraswamy Report is basically a repeating of possible exaggerations.
The second reason is that the nearer one inspects the issue, the more regrettable different nations (counting South Korean comfort women) start to look. From ancient times to present, the sex trade has dependably taken after the sections. German specialist Magnus Hirschfeld was the first to examine the connection of war and sex. Amid the Great War, Hirschfeld found, there was overwhelming activity at houses of ill-repute organized by warrior governments. Business blasted. World War II was extraordinary, with men positioned in distant lands surrounded by local people. Americans, had the advantage of finding their solace stations a long way from foe lines.
Shockingly, the comfort women testimonies did not end in 1945. The Korean War brought comfort stations for troops from the United States. To be sure, the South Korean government upheld this peninsular framework. Previous president Park Chung-hee by and by marked a request in 1977 to tidy up the camps where there were U.S. troops. What was the point of this exercise? To keep the American military in South Korea and U.S. dollars streaming into the economy. South Korean ladies who work at the bordellos and cafes that were located along U.S. bases are as yet stuck in a perpetual cycle of sex work and societal segregation.
In 1966 and 1968 South Korean troops brutally assaulted and butchered many exposed Vietnamese laborer ladies in Binh Tai, Phong Nhi, and Phong Nhat. There is additionally the record of Korean brutality against Allied POWs in World War II, and the heritage of the Lai Dai Han, a huge number of surrendered, offspring of South Korean fighters conceived amid the Vietnam War.
Notwithstanding, there is something substantially else in progress with the issue. Today, the United States is home to a few monuments, most as of late in San Francisco. Comfort ladies’ statues can be found all through South Korea, also, most outstandingly before the Japanese department in Busan. A solace lady statue went up before the end of last year in Manila, and in Sydney in 2016.
What do every one of these areas have in common? They are altogether entering American partners in Asia. What’s more, the nation with the greatest enthusiasm for separating American partnerships with Asian countries is, obviously, the People’s Republic of China. The debate is a Chinese weapon to destabilize American relations with Asia and debilitate Japan’s remaining far and wide. This is the superseding motivation behind why South Korea must stop squeezing the comfort women issue as a political issue and focus on the social issue.
