Page 12 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • September 25, 2013 The comfort women & the uncomfortable truth As you read this, thousands of young Korean women and girls are being coerced into lives as prostitutes and con- cubines. The perpetrators this time are Chinese. Hannah Song, a graduate of Northern Highlands Regional High School is now the president and CEO of LINK (Liberty in North Korea), a group based in Califor- nia that helps rescue and resettle North Koreans who flee to northern China and find themselves confronted with prostitution of one type or another. The alternative is being sent back to North Korea for torture, execution, or prison camps that have lasted, in Song’s own words, twice as long as the Soviet Gulag and five times as long as the Nazi death camps. How do the Chinese cope with Song and her one-woman onslaught of honesty, backed by a number of other Korean- Americans and sympathetic white Yalies? They dug up and dusted off a Japanese outrage that took place in the middle of the last century and promoted it as typical of the culture that gave the world Pearl Harbor along with Hello Kitty, Totoro, Midori, and half of Alan Gilbert. Around Bergen County and in various places in Califor- nia, pressure groups are asking that monuments be autho- rized to the “comfort women,” Korean and other Asian women coerced into military brothels by the Japanese during World War II. The comfort women are generally described as “sex slaves.” The idea generated is that Japanese soldiers swooped down on villages and carried off young girls for a life of prostitution, probably followed by murder. This is hokum. The Japanese did recruit women as prostitutes, but the prime booking agents were the Korean National Police and the debt-ridden families of the girls. Bruce Cumings, an American college professor at the University of Chicago is married to a Korean woman. Cumings is a critic of both North and South Korea, and gave the comfort woman issue three pages in his book, “Korea’s Place in the Sun.” Cumings, no friend of Japan, alluded to the fact that no Korean woman was handed over to Japanese custody without the compliance of fellow Kore- ans. Contract prostitution for family debt was an old, ugly part of Asian culture in China and Japan in the years before the Japanese annexed Korea. The Koreans circa 1910 were not as familiar with pros- titution as the Chinese or the Japanese were. In traditional Korea, family contract marriage generally conferred mar- riageable daughters on mature men of any age who seemed respectable and offered financial inducement to the girls’ parents. Men with no money were out of luck, while rich men sometimes had any number of lawful wives. Independent Korea had many harems and not many brothels, though both existed before the Japanese arrived. The Japanese outlawed polygamy in 1880, and the ban for- mally fell on Korea in 1910, though it was widely ignored in both countries. The ban and its aftermath -- more brothels and fewer harems -- was part of the Japanese colonization of Korea that also opened the first hospitals, banks, and public schools Korea had ever seen. The Koreans sang sad songs about the brothels, but studied hard in the schools. What was the life of a comfort woman like? A U.S. Army technical corporal named Alex Yorichi interviewed 20 comfort women at the Ledo Stockade in Burma in 1944 after they were captured while serving with the Japanese Army. The report is available online. Yorichi was a Japa- nese-American, but the fact that he joined the U.S. Army when 110,000 of his fellow Japanese-Americans were behind barbed wire in American Relocation Camps shows whose side he was on. “The majority of the girls were ignorant and uneducated, though a few had been connected with ‘the oldest profes- sion on earth’ before...the contract they signed bound them to Army regulations and to the ‘house master’ for a period of from six months to a year depending on the family debt for which they were advanced...They lived well because their food and material (were) not heavily rationed and they had plenty of money with which to purchase desired articles...They were able to buy clothes, shoes, cigarettes, and cosmetics to supplement the many gifts given to them by soldiers who had received ‘comfort bags’ from home... While in Burma they amused themselves by participating in sports events with both officers and men, and attended picnics, entertainment, and social dinners. They had a pho- nograph, and in the towns they were allowed to go shop- ping.” The girls soon learned what they were there for, and the conditions were arduous. “The girls were allowed the prerogative of refusing a customer,” Yorichi wrote. “In the later part of 1943 the army issued orders that certain girls who had paid their debt could return home…The interrogations showed that the health of these girls was good...There were numerous cases of proposals of marriage and in certain cases mar- riages actually took place.” How did an ugly fact of life in most Asian countries get recycled into the kidnapping, rape, and murder of a whole nation of innocents? Some contemporary Japanese newsmen discovered that most Koreans they spoke to in California were rather apathetic about the whole thing. The organizational support came from a Chinese-supported organization known in English as The Alliance for Pre- serving the Truth about the Sino-Japanese War. This group apparently came to life shortly after the Chinese suffered the international embarrassment of Tianamen Square. The first fruits of Tianamen in terms of Chinese pro- paganda was the revitalized interest in the 1937 Japanese Rape of Nanking, a staple of U.S. propaganda during World War II which Iris Chang, a Chinese-American, described as “The Forgotten Holocaust of the Pacific.” The Alliance for Preserving the Truth about the Sino-Japanese War takes pride in having provided Chang with much of her information. Since much of the source material was either in Japanese or German, and Chang could not read those languages, they essentially took over her literary life. The Chinese numbers for murders and rapes are impossible. The Nanking Safety Zone Committee of American, Brit- ish, German, and Danish humanitarians who were there - - the Chinese Nationalist generals ran for it and abandoned their own soldiers -- signed off on 360 rapes and 25,000 deaths either from battle or the massacre of soldier pris- oners caught out of uniform. Chinese figures are 300,000 murders -- not battle deaths -- and 20,000 to 80,000 rapes. There were 200,000 people in Nanking, and most of them lived. Do the math. Chang claimed the Japanese never apologized for Nanking and that Nanking had never been mentioned in Japanese schoolbooks. A couple of Japanese reporters sleuthed into a public gathering where Chang was speaking to hundreds of Chinese-American admirers and showed everybody present a number of Japanese middle-school schoolbooks that mentioned the Nanking Massacre in con- siderable detail. Japan apologized four times and the offi- cer deemed responsible was hanged. One of the confessed Japanese Nanking rapists shortly turned out to have been an eccentric leftist drafted in 1940. He was still in Japan when Nanking fell. A key Japanese historian who supported the Nanking story was demonstrably anti-American and called the U.S. war in Vietnam an act of genocide. Some of the Nanking atrocity photos in the book were taken elsewhere and others were obvious fakes. After having an autistic child and suffering from over- work on another Japan-bashing book, Chang, who probably initially believed what her communist Chinese handlers told her, shot herself. The current comfort woman imbroglio is more of the same. The Japanese outrage should never have happened, but it was consistent with Asian culture at that time. Kore- ans were widely complicit. The details and the numbers are simulated. The stimulus is probably the widespread Chi- nese sexual mistreatment of North Korean refugees and the general dissatisfaction many thinking Chinese feel for their government. A recent PBS show depicted two Chinese freelance newsmen, “Temple Tiger” and “Zola,” who use cell phone cameras and texting to produce honest news reports about environmental catastrophes and abuse of citizens. These two risk evictions, beatings, and “disappearance” to do so. They are real heroes. People who want to bring comfort to the modern “com- fort women” stranded in China should support LINK, not build monuments to dubiously reported events that took place 75 years ago in another country. Finger-pointing, like finger-painting, is best outgrown -- especially when the “facts” come from foreign propa- gandists. Watch out for one-sided atrocity stories. Only one side needs them. Instructors exhibit work A reception will be held Sunday, Sept. 29 from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Ridgewood Art Institute to launch the Instructors Exhibition. Paintings will be on display until Oct. 14. Artists are encouraged to come by and view a class in session, and pick up a schedule. This show will feature the artwork of the Ridgewood Art Institute instructors, including Kate Hall, John Philip Osborne, Joel Popadics, Lorraine Minetto, Laura Paray, Danielle Wexler, Rebecca Leer, Joe Hing Lowe, Basil Baylin, Charles Brandenburg, Charlotte Sullivan, Diana Gibson, William Brown, Edwin Broussard, and Peggy Dressel and artwork from Life Model Class Monitor John Henderson and Class Monitor Celeste Manfredini. Pictured: ‘Lillies Pads’ by John Osborne.