As we have discussed before, the erased history of the hardships faced by comfort women during WWII, has recently come into the focus of the international media. Some of these women recently spoke out about the atrocities done to them at Shanghai Normal University. Recent attacks on these women include a full page ad in the Washington Post demanding that comfort women were licensed prostitutes that were better paid than the Japanese military. For some reason, I am thinking this is not true.
For the survivors of the system of sexual slavery at Japanese military bases, the latest denials have added a deep insult to a horrific injury."I was very angry when I heard such news," Ms. Lin said. "The Japanese government is still denying it. But it really happened. It happened to me in Hainan. And I'm still suffering from the violence they did to me."
An estimated 200,000 women - mostly Chinese and Korean - were forced into sexual servitude under Japanese wartime occupation. Of the Chinese victims, only 47 are still alive and willing to speak out. Every year, more of the survivors are dying.
There is a lot of debate over whether Shinzo Abe has apologized enough, including a US House Resolution. But the reality of what these women lived through doesn't change. And as they get older, they lose more of the people that are telling these stories. Will they be remembered?
(Warning: Content gets a little graphic after the jump)
Ms. Lin was a peasant woman, working in a rice paddy, when she was abducted by Japanese soldiers and taken to a military base in 1943.
"We were treated worse than pigs and dogs," she said. "We were not given clothes. We were violated in the daytime and the nighttime."
As she told her story to the Canadian students, Ms. Lin spoke in a weak and trembling voice. At first she was expressionless, but later she wept repeatedly. Many of the students cried, too, as they listened.
"When they raped me, I resisted strongly, but they were too strong," she said. "They beat me and burned my face with cigarettes. My whole face and body was swollen. I wanted to run away, but there was no way to escape. I cried all day."
After she had survived five months in captivity, her parents managed to bribe some Chinese security men, giving them chickens in exchange for their help in obtaining their daughter's release from the military base.
Even two months after her release, she was still seriously ill, with blood in her urine. But her ordeal was not over. Japanese soldiers often came to her village, and some of them raped her again.
After the war, it was many years before she was able to marry. "I felt very ugly, because of the violence against me," she said. "I felt that I could not think of love."
When she eventually married, she became pregnant but miscarried and was never able to have a child, though she adopted a son. "My womb was never able to recover from the trauma of what was done to me," she said. "I still feel the pain today, physically and emotionally. My whole life was destroyed by what I suffered. I still feel very bad. I feel that no man can ever like me."
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Is there a link that we could see that shows how the fuck the Washington Post thinks this shit is justified? I feel like writing a fiery letter. This is atrocious!
This issue makes me really angry. I don't know if a state-sponsored apology would really make the past less painful for the women who survived such brutality, but at the very least they deserve the basic recognition that a true, honest apology would entail. But what the Japanese and American governments have done falls far short of even that miniscule attempt at reconciliation; it's not an apology until you can name the entity/people who perpetrated the offense, and it's not an apology until you can actually say, in non-bull-shit terms, what the offense was. Euphemizing about "women who were put through extreme hardship" by some unnamed entity is bull shit.
The Washington Post ad is even more so... it's a second ful-fledged assault on these women.
YES i agree. i cant call upon anyone who can do such a horrific thing and it be forgotten and get away with it. these women have been so wronged-look at how she is STILL affected! grr washington post! fuck their ads.
The Washington Post ad is a travesty as Andrea has noted. Despite the fact former Comfort Women have been providing public accounts and testimony since the early 1990's and a historian uncovering incriminating documentary evidence of the Japan's culpability in the Japanese Defense Agency archives in 1992, the Japanese government continues to use obfuscation and politically motivated non-apologies to divert attention away from the crimes committed for the sake of empire.
There is previous discussion on this where I attempted to provide some background historical information about the Comfort Women and Japan's colonial legacy in this previous feministing posting here:
http://feministing.com/archives/007271.html
Al Jazeera English had a documentary report on it and you can find more here. Some is difficult reading.
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/69764E50-EF4D-4A24-BAAC-19EBF8C42B89.htm?search=true&SearchText=comfort%20women&PageIndex=1
I understand that al jazeera is censored in the U.S. It's too bad because it is about the best TV news channel available.
I would also like to point out to readers that Al Jazeera English links to Feministing.
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/689CB78E-EFE4-423B-BA6F-0533FEE6D7F2.htm
As regards the issue of comfort women being paid, US army interrogations after the war confirmed this:
http://www.exordio.com/1939-1945/codex/Documentos/report-49-USA-orig.html
(the report is short but the interrogators` language is pretty nasty).
The interrogation given in this link makes it pretty clear that the comfort women in Burma were treated very differently to Ms. Lin. I wonder if she was actually abducted as part of the comfort women system, or if she and the other women (the "we" in her report) were abducted extra-judicially, as it were, and kept separately to the system. If so I don`t know whether they should be treated as comfort women, per se, when it comes to apologies and restitution, or if they should be treated as, well, victims of rape in war. How that affects the calculus of apologies and reparations is beyond me, but there is a UN body established for the purpose of conducting those calculations. It certainly seems to me that the issue of prostitution in war vs. rape in war should be kept separate. (But I suppose that this depends upon one`s view of prostitution).