How Empires Deal with History: The European Parliament Gives Me the Opportunity to Revisit the Comfort Women Issue

Once upon a time, I suggested that I would revisit the comfort women issue more fully than I had up till then. I’ve taken this occasion to put my tentative conclusions and the conclusions only in the form of a conjecture. A fuller treatment at this point would require my reasoning behind each assertion as well as many qualifiers and modifiers.

In an event that even wire services overlooked but the Japanese media dutifully recorded, the European Parliament in its plenary meeting on 13 December passed a resolution closely mirroring the U.S., Canadian and Dutch resolutions. The European Parliament apparently does not need a quorum, since out of the 785 EU MPs, only 54 voted in support while 3 abstained. Regardless, the Yomiuri is alarmed at the possibility of a chain reaction, and has decided to strike back with an editorial calling on the government to “review the Kōno Statement”, which according to the editorial, “suggested that Japanese officials systematically and coercively recruited women to be comfort women.” The editorial further states that “there is not one single document or a shred of evidence that substantiates this”. Knowing Japan hands will likely chide the Yomiuri for rising to the bait and advise it to let yet another non-binding resolution lie.

I for one would fully agree with any public efforts to revisit the entire issue. If such a thing is done, though, I believe that the picture of what most likely occurred over those years will disappoint many people, including the denialists as well as the people pushing the resolutions. It will also displease the Korean public. In fact, I am surprised to find nothing out there from my admittedly intermittent and usually accidental visitations to the issue that resembles what I have come to see as the probable. Since I do not feel the urge to expend my own resources to do the substantial spadework required to provide proper documentation, I offer it here as Okumura’s Conjecture. If anybody is interested in putting up real money to explore it more fully, I’ll be happy to spend some of my time on it. As things stand, the only thing that the denialists obtain is overseas opprobrium, while those who claim to be seeking reconciliation merely achieve revenge as proxy.

The comfort women from Korea and Taiwan were recruited in more or less the same way as the Japanese comfort women, with due adjustments for the greater poverty of those two colonies* as well as the lower status of Koreans and Taiwanese in the Japanese empire. Their treatment once in situ also reflected such status. The business was mostly a private sector affair dominated by Japanese operators but with substantial local involvement. Some of the women did receive financial rewards － if not emotional satisfaction or job security － far exceeding that of a general in the imperial army, but many, if not most, saw conditions quite different from those advertised, never for the better. Some, at times with the complicity of immediate family members, were totally ignorant of what would be in store for them. And speaking of advertisement, most comfort women did not of themselves find placement through newspaper ads.

As the Japanese military moved out beyond Manchuria**, it foraged for supplies***, including women. Beyond whatever contingent that it managed to bring along and locally available local supply, it gang-pressed unwilling women into sexual service****. The overall scope and relative proportion of the latter will never be known. The level and nature of this coercion, even its existence, varied widely from place to place, and also as result of the outlook of local commanding officers. It did this in mainland China, the Dutch Indies, the Philippines and Singapore. It is possible that it did this in other locations as well. The Dutch women were released because the Germans interceded. In any case, the military － local commanders and officers as well as Central Command －was a branch of government just as much as, say, the Emperor’s Privy Council.

The human condition of the comfort women as well as their ultimate fate also varied with time and place. The outlook of local commanding officers had a major effect. As the situation worsened for the Japanese military, the women also suffered. Under extreme conditions, they were treated at best no better than other civilians.

As I’ve said before, I see no reason to retract the Kōno Statement. If － it is an enormous if － the Cabinet decides to issue an apology over and beyond the Prime Ministers’ letters, or the Diet decides to adopt a resolution (passes a motion?) of its own, I think that one or the other will come up with something that I can support. But leaving the political practicalities aside (the resolutions have made a meaningful domestic dialogue impossible for the time being), any such action will have to follow the fullest possible search for the truth. And the truth should lie more or less in the above conjecture.

I believe that the reason that such a scenario fails to be adequately explored is because the public debate is dominated by the two extremes, one dominant in Japan and the other in the West and South Korea. The two ends focus on material that supports their conjectures to the neglect of other evidence direct and circumstantial, historical analogues both Japanese and non-, and other known facts and circumstances as well as common sense that speaks otherwise. Though I have no reason to doubt their sincerity, the truth may be too complicated and unpleasant for these people to handle. But my views, needless to repeat, are mere conjecture. I stand ready to be proven wrong.

Finally, to those legislatures that purport to pass moral judgment on the Japanese government, I will heed your words if and when you destroy your own glass houses. Otherwise I have no regard for your actions, which you believe, falsely, to be costless.


* I use the term “colonies” rather loosely here. In legal terms, imperial Japan in Korea and Taiwan went beyond what the old European empires did. Think Hitler and Sudetenland, only if there had been no ethnic Germans there.

** The origins and the fate of the comfort women from Manchuria should have been similar to those of the Korean, Taiwanese and Japanese comfort women, but I cannot pull any material on them from my memory, so I refrain from including them in the main body of my conjecture.

*** Logistics was never a strong point of the Japanese military.

**** There must have been a large number of women who were raped but were never subsequently conscripted as comfort women. That is a related but different issue.

The Comfort Women Issue after the Asahi Report

There are matters left untouched, and what I have written below does not have the look of a finished product even as a self-indulgent blogger. But I have other matters to tend to, so I shall let it stand for now, perhaps to come back to it if I have something appropriate for a more formal outlet.

The Kono Statement regarding the comfort women was issued to smooth the way to the 1993 Japan-South Korea summit. Since then, the Korean government, citizens, media and expats and their descendants—I will refer to them collectively as Koreans except where it is necessary to be more specific—have assumed ownership of the issue and have demanded restitution and further apologies from the Japanese government and to secure international recognition of their unique suffering, each to varying degrees of success.

The Korean claim in its purest form is that 200,000 or more young Korean women were taken forcibly and detained to provide sexual services against their will for Japanese soldiers. Japanese revisionism at its most extreme holds that the women were highly paid professionals who performed sexual services of their own free will. The Asahi report falls somewhere in between, a more detailed variation of my conjecture some years ago, which I posted on this blog: a Japanese military and government that procured women from Japan, Korea and Taiwan through middlemen to provide sexual services to its soldiers and officers and engaged in the maintenance of the establishments where the females were sequestered or housed₁. As the military pressed forward and secured women locally, the report says that it became more strident and violent for this undertaking, including rape.

The number 200,000 is connected in the Asahi report to a claim that the Korean comfort women were recruited as the Women’s Volunteer Corps. But the Women’s Volunteer Corps of Korea turned out to be the same as their Japanese namesakes, school girls who had been mobilized to work in Japanese factories₂. The assertion that the women were taken forcibly stems from the testimony of a Japanese man who claimed to have been involved in the seizure on the Island of Jeju. His testimony, however, was totally discredited by facts that contradicted it and by his inability/unwillingness to produce any evidence to support it. These matters had become widely known by the late 1990s, but Asahi had remained silent until it conclusively rejected them in its report.

Where does this leave the Kono Statement? I continue to believe that it is within the range of acceptable renditions of what occurred or is likely to have occurred. It is certainly appropriate for some of the things that the Japanese military did in China and Southeast Asia. And if what we see and hear even today of the sexual trade held true then as well, then many of the Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese women, the younger ones in particular, and some of their families, should not have been aware of what was befalling them until it was too late; some of them would have surely have left their stations had the military and/or the police not been there to maintain order₂.

How then, does the rejection of the Women’s Volunteer Corps-as-comfort women and forcible taking of the women from the Island of Jeju change the circumstances? Well, they were both held up as key elements of the Japanese government’s involvement in the recruitment. Take them out, and much of the power of the narrative disappears. Moreover, advocates of the comfort women assert numbers, the bigger the better, with conviction, while detractors prefer smaller numbers, if any, and emphasize uncertainty. Take the Women’s Volunteer Corps off the table, and the largest estimate disappears.

By remaining silent, Asahi allowed the related assertions to maintain a degree of legitimacy that Koreans could use to give the undeniable story of victimhood a power and Korean uniqueness that it otherwise would not have lacked. For Korea as a nation never fought imperial Japan; it never had the chance. It was seized, then subsumed, with minimal resistance. Then WW II came and went, with only tangential consequences until the release at its conclusion, again at the hands of others. The comfort women, embellished by a misunderstanding and a falsehood, became an indispensable symbol for Korea’s alignment with the victims and eventual victors in Japan’s war of aggression in Asia and the Pacific.

Now that the Korean narrative has lost much if not most of its uniqueness, where does the world go from here? In an ideal world, Koreans would adapt to the new narrative, align with the Japanese, most of their elderly and recent forebears, who felt victimized by the misadventures of the Japanese government and military, while the kind of Japanese who experience schadenfreude at the lawsuits recent brought against the South Korean government by “comfort women” for the US troops stationed there wake up to the fact that this was almost surely another case where the South Koreans had learned well from the example of their erstwhile colonial masters in the archipelago to the east and likewise accede to the new narrative when they have exhausted themselves from flogging the Asahi for its belated admission₃. But I am probably grown too old and too cynical to expect that to come to pass or to advocate in the hopes that they will listen.

1. My assertion of “not quite separate, not quite equal” for military service and forced labor held true for the comfort women as well, since only the Japanese women had a minimum age limit of 21.

2. Bruce Cumings’s Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (2005) had a photo of two or three girls in school uniforms surrounding a middle-aged man in a chair, all looking solemn, even dignified. With no provenance, Cumings states that the girls were comfort women. The photo had no provenance, but an armband indicated that the man was an executive at Nakajima Aircraft, the producer of the Zero Fighter among other things. My deceased mother went to a school not that far away, in Gifu and inevitably wound up as a member of the Women’s Volunteer Corps. It is now too late to ask if their paths might have crossed.

3. Yes, it would be nice if the Asahi accounted for what had transpired during its silence. It would be nice if Asahi set out its position as an editorial. (The other major dailies have spoken on it, from predictably Sankei, Yomiuri and Mainichi perspectives.) But self-reflection is not one of the Japanese media’s strong points, Asahi or otherwise. Let it suffice that Asahi has decided to clear the air on the facts at all.

Around My “Crazy Talk” Comments on the Abe Decision to Put the Kohno Statement on Hold

It’s been days since I received some comments on this post; here are my answers.

From sigma 1:

“Will the "academic" process be a real one with apolitical figures involved, or will it be one like his collective self-defense committee in Abe 1.0 which while "academic" was clearly going to tell Abe what he wanted to hear due to personnel selection.”

I see two meaningful repercussions from the collective self-defense issue: it 1) Komeito is not pleased, 2) China sees its preconception of Japan as US sock-puppet confirmed. The first point is the more serious one because the LDP needs to keep Komeito in the tent to win in July and stay afloat long-term. However, Komeito’s ultimate pain threshold in this matter should be pretty high since it would have no one else to turn to here. The Communists, Social Democrats, and possibly the Ozawa folks? A coalition of the willing, maybe, but unable, for sure. The long-standing administrative interpretation of Article 9 will be used by opponents, but will the outcry reach beyond the Asahi-Mainichi crowd, particularly as tension ratchets up in the East China Sea. Which brings us to the China question. I believe that it’s useful to reinforce a security alliance when there’s a neighbor under an authoritarian regime that has a very different take on important national security questions, in this case overeignty issues and North Korea. (I can also argue the point in the other direction, but someone will have to promise that they’ll print an op-ed before I interview both my thumbs.) More important, I believe that the kind of people who are inclined to vote for the LDP/Japan Restoration Party/Your Party think that way too. Even more important, I believe that Abe believes too, in which case he would see that bringing across-the-board opponents of collective defense to the commission serves no purpose. Instead, he would want the kind of people who can talk meaningfully about the options available.

I see very different repercussions from the comfort women issue. Repudiating it—even revising it—at this point would bring down the wrath of the entire Western world on Abe’s head. He does not need that. He needs to build a credible picture of the case from the ground up that supports a credible alternative to the South Korean narrative that has built up around the testimony of the South Korean women who came forward (and with which it is not entirely consistent). It is only then that what can be said over and beyond the Kohno Statement. And it certainly will not be something to the effect that “they were highly-paid professionals earning more than the Japanese generals.” What Abe actually believes is unknowable and is beside the point. What I’ve seen of him so far leads me to believe that he is at least aware that a whitewash job will only serve to set his case back. For that, he needs people who have the credibility to bring together and examine the available evidence—contemporary and current testimonies, historical documents and artifacts, and the economic, social, and cultural backdrop—and come to a defensible conclusion, or conclusions, before he can begin to determine the next step forward. Right now, most people with any degree of interest in the matter are wedded to one of two extreme narratives. Abe cannot move forward until he breaks these spells, and I think that he realizes it. Of course, he could turn out to be as dense as his detractors like to think, and I may be overcompensating because I underestimated him before. But I don’t think so.

From Brian B:

“Could you give a link to your past conjecture on the comfort women issue?

Here.

From Fernando:

“Given all his talk about the economy, the last thing Abe wants is South Korean boycotts of Japanese goods as a trade off for pleasing the narrow segment of the Japanese population (in my understanding) that resents the Statement.”

The Kohno Statement is probably not a hot button issue for most Japanese, but it is as much a matter of “pleasing” himself as your “narrow segment”. And I for one don’t resent it but do see the need to revisit it because it has not served its purpose and was both incomplete and flawed to begin with. That aside, I would say that a Korean boycott that went mutual would be as damaging, if not more so, the South Korean economy. The relative size and composition of the traded goods and services and the legal constraints on government actions in a liberal democracy mean that South Korea has far less leverage over Japan than China does.

“It was Yohei Kono, not Taro, by the way.”

Yeah, you’re right. I did that with the Fukudas too. My excuse? Seen one turkey,…Yeah, you’re right. I did that with the Fukudas too. My excuse? Seen one turkey,…

So Much for Crazy Talk on Abe and the Comfort Women

From Yomiuri online, Prime Minister Abe stated in the January 31 plenary session of the House of Representatives that the Kohno Statement regarding the comfort women issue that it “should not be made into a political issue, a diplomatic issue.” He went on to state that it “was issued by [Taro] Kohno, the chief cabinet secretary at the time, and it is appropriate that I as prime minister refrain from saying anything more about this matter and that it be taken care of by Chief Cabinet Secretary ([Yoshihide] Suga). Later in the day, Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga stated in his regular press conference that “it is desirable to have [the matter considered] from an academic perspective.”

Unsurprising, I’m sure, at least to Yoshi Kawasaki (see here, at 00:54:44 for his broader take on Abeplomacy) and anyone else who has actually been following the action instead of jumping all over context-deficient comments that reinforce ones preconceptions. Kawasaki hedges his views on Abeplomacy with the all-too-convenient “at least until the House of Councillors election in July” caveat, but I’ll put ten of my dollars against one of anyone’s that an honest and thoroughgoing academic undertaking and any comments—forward-looking,  according to an earlier Abe comment—by the chief cabinet secretary at its conclusion will leave committed advocates on both sides (or rather, ends, since it sometimes feels as if there were no middle ground, where I put forward my own conjecture a few years ago) highly disappointed.