Author: GIKorea

Professor Ramseyer and his views on the comfort women are back in the news:

A Harvard professor has claimed that Japan did not force Korean and other women into sexual slavery during World War II, renewing his much-denounced claims that the victims were actually prostitutes.

J. Mark Ramseyer of the Harvard Law School made the claim in the preface to a recently published book on the victims, saying Japan’s military did not need to forcibly mobilize what he characterized as prostitutes and had little room to do so.

Authored by Tetsuo Arima, a social science professor at Waseda University, the book was published on July 30 ahead of South Korea’s Aug. 15 Liberation Day that marks the country’s liberation from Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule, long a source of historical animosity between the neighboring countries.

In the Japanese-language preface, Ramseyer also said that it was only after Seiji Yoshida, a Japanese novelist, published a book entitled “My War Crimes” in 1983 that damage claims by former sex slaves started to emerge.

The book included Yoshida’s claim that he took Korean women from the island of Jeju for sexual service.

Ramseyer then claimed that women, who worked at the military brothels to make money or due to pressure exerted by their fathers, started to claim that they were forced into sexual servitude by the Japanese military.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but like I have long said, the comfort women controversy is one of these issues where facts do not matter, how people feel about the topic is what matters.

The Korean public likes to think that all the comfort women were girls sleeping in bed and kidnapped by evil Japanese soldiers while the Japanese rightists like to think they were all willing prostitutes.  Both historical narratives are untrue if one really looks at the history.

What Professor Park writes about is the same historical narrative that Sarah Soh wrote about in her book “The Comfort Women“.  In the book Soh provides documented evidence that most of the Korean women put into the comfort women system were sold by Korean brokers.  The actual kidnapping of Korean women by Japanese soldiers would be a very rare occurrence when the broker system made so many of these women readily available.  This does not absolve the Imperial Japanese from responsibility since they ran the comfort woman system that provided the demand for the Korean brokers to meet.  To make even worse is that many of these girls were teenagers when sold into prostitution.  I see no way that a young teenager should be considered a willing prostitute.  Especially when many girls were sold by their families into prostitution for money due to the extreme poverty.  This was actually a practice that was going on well into the US military era in South Korea.

It is pretty clear that the comfort women issue is not black and white, but ultimately the Imperial Japanese government was responsible for the actions of the Korean brokers that supplied the majority of the Korean girls that were underage.  There is no need to create a false narrative of what happened to the comfort women when the truth is bad enough.

Interesting read for ROK Drop favorite Robert Neff about the liberation of Seoul at the end of World War II:

On Sept. 8, 1945, American soldiers began arriving in Incheon. Everett Shipley informed his parents in a letter home that his unit arrived in the port at about 3 p.m. and were greeted by the Japanese who provided them with trucks and other logistical support to off-load their equipment. 

The following morning, American soldiers were transported by train to Seoul, where, upon arrival, they marched in silence to their positions at Bando Hotel and the Japanese headquarters in Yongsan. Donald Clark, in his book “Living Dangerously in Korea,” notes that while the soldiers marched in silence, American “planes roared overhead ‘providing striking demonstrations of power that could hardly have failed to impress both Japanese and Koreans.'” 

Later that afternoon, at around 4 p.m., General Hodge and Admiral Kincaid arrived at the Government-General Building and, after a short speech ― “listened glumly to by the Japanese” ― Hodge accepted Japan’s surrender. 

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

It looks like another member of the ROK military is about to go down for sexual harassment:

A Navy court on Saturday issued an arrest warrant for a senior chief petty officer suspected of having sexually harassed a female subordinate who was found dead in an apparent suicide earlier this week.

The issuance of the arrest warrant for the officer, whose identity was withheld, came after a pre-trial detention hearing held at the Navy’s general military court in Pyeongtaek, 70 kilometers south of Seoul. The suspect was immediately imprisoned at a detention facility of the Navy 2nd Fleet.

The victim, known only as a female chief petty officer, was found dead at her residence in Pyeongtaek on Thursday after reporting days earlier that she had suffered sexual harassment from the suspect in May.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but this incident happened shortly before the ROK Air Force sexual harassment suicide case back in early June.

Here is a surprising topic North Korea has decided to weigh in on:

North Korea on Friday denounced the expiration of a pandemic-related U.S. government ban on residential evictions, saying Washington should address its own human rights issues before “poking its nose” into other countries’ affairs.

A U.S. government ban on evictions for residents that have failed to pay rent during the COVID-pandemic expired at the end of last month in most parts of the country, putting millions of vulnerable residents at risk of losing their homes.

“Before talking impudently about the ‘human rights issues’ of other countries, the U.S. should address the human rights problems of its own society, which are daily getting worse, owing to its anti-popular policies,” the North’s foreign ministry said on its website.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but with all the helped wanted signs across the country my sympathy meter for people facing eviction has definitely lowered significantly since the beginning of the pandemic.

Please leave anything you want to discuss in the comments section.

This ROK soldier just came short of earning a mandatory military service exemption:

A South Korean high jumper hoping to win a medal at the Tokyo Olympics and qualify for an exemption from his country’s mandatory military service may earn some extra vacation days instead.

Pfc. Woo Sang-hyeok, 25, of the Korea Armed Forces Athletic Corps, placed fourth in the men’s high jump category after clearing a 2.35-meter bar. That performance broke South Korea’s previous record of 2.34 meters, or 7.7 feet, set in 1997.

Higher jumpers from Qatar, Italy and Belarus edged out Woo with their 2.37-meter jumps in the final round. The Olympic record for the event is 2.39 meters and was achieved by American Charles Austin in 1996, according to the International Olympic Committee’s website.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.