From Truth about Japan
“Sex slave” sounds shocking, but it isn’t so rare as it sounds. For example, ISIS has sexual slavery, according to the Daily Beast. Even NYT doesn’t say Japanese people have such kind of slavery today. But they claim that Japanese Army had such slavery.
In ISIS’s case, it is obvious that ISIS is responsible for its slavery because they abducted women by force. Is there any evidence that Japanese Army did such coercion? Ms. Hiroko Tabuchi of NYT said no (at least she didn’t know).
@HirokoTabuchi Do you mean “Japanese military did human trafficking”? What’s the evidence?
— 池田信夫 (@ikedanob) 2014, 9月 13
She didn’t answer.
.@naokis: “Comfort woman was a profession. It wasn’t slavery.” This is what I mean by Japan being stuck in an intellectual and moral vacuum.
— Hiroko Tabuchi (@HirokoTabuchi) 2014, 9月 13
She refused to call comfort women “profession” , but admitted that there was no evidence of the Army’s abduction, as the Asahi wrote in their article. So it was private business to make them slaves. The Army managed it.
She is free to criticize the “moral vacuum”, but does it make sense? If somebody employed prostitutes in the US Army base, the US Army should be responsible for it 70 years later? Does she support the comfort women in Korean War who accused Korean government?
This case is not similar to that of ISIS but the case in Angola, in which a woman was taken from Zambia after she had been promised a maid’s job and turned into a sex slave by her “benefactor”. It was the benefactor that was prosecuted, not Angola government.
Of course slavery is illegal in Angola as it was in WW2, so the government is responsible for its legal enforcement to forbid enslavement. Japanese government is responsible in this respect, so it apologized in 1992 and 1993. But South Korean government claimed the women were abducted by the Army. It is the source of confusion.
Professionals such as Mike Mochizuki are more logical. They maintain that there was military abduction in Indonesia. It makes sense, but not grounded by proof. Even in Indonesia, no document of military coercion was found except for the case of Jan Ruff O’Herne, who couldn’t prove it was a military order. In fact, there are documents that the 16th military headquarter in Jakarta banned the abduction.
So they are left with the inconsistent claim that the Army should be responsible for the private business of slavery. How do they resolve the contradiction?
