The following is from the book review column of today's Sankei Shimbun.
It is a must-read not only for the Japanese people but for people worldwide.
Red Wednesday: 30 Years of Lies of the Comfort Women Movement by Kim Byung-hun, translated by Kanemitsu Hidemi (Bungeishunju, 1870 yen)
It is a courageous verification by a Korean researcher.
The "red" in the title refers to the complete lie, and "Wednesday" refers to the Wednesday demonstrations that comfort women support groups have held in front of the Japanese embassy in South Korea since 1992.
In other words, former comfort women have been telling a complete lie for 30 years.
The author, Kim Byung-hun, is a researcher who has been criticizing South Korean history textbooks for being too anti-Japanese.
Surprised by textbooks that describe the forced removal of comfort women by the Japanese military without any historical support, he has made the issue of comfort women the subject of his research.
In this book, the author examines the process of change in the testimonies of former comfort women published by "The Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan," a support group for comfort women.
It turns out that none of the former comfort women fall into the category of "victims of Japanese military comfort women" as legally defined in South Korea.
All of the former comfort women were paid an "advance" and became consenting "prostitutes" in the war zone.
The author also argues, through the testimony of the comfort women themselves, that their employers violated them; however, the comfort women were eventually referred to as "sex slaves."
The author says that the essence of the comfort women issue is poverty.
The main actors are "the parents who sold their children like objects in a poor country, the agents who treated them like commodities and got introduction fees, and the owners who used them as commodities and received money from soldiers and many men," and that "the comfort women issue is a problem that we Koreans should solve, and we should never put the responsibility for it on other countries. "
(Takumi Matsuzaki, Bungeishunju Nonfiction Publishing Department)
