Granddaughter of comfort woman: they were never forced and they were all paid very well
The Korea Times has run an opinion piece by a person who claims to be the granddaughter of a comfort woman who served the Japanese military during the Pacific War. Here’s an excerpt:
Korea was not the only country that Japan occupied during the Second World War. China, and most of Southeast Asia, from the Philippines in the West to Burma (now Myanmar) in the East were also occupied and women from these nations also provided sexual favors to the Japanese soldiers but these “comfort women” don’t seem to have any problem with the Japanese government now.
Only the people of Korea seem to be unable to come to grips with the reality that there never really was a “hellish situation” for these women. My grandmother, who made lots of money from her work as a prostitute servicing Japanese soldiers, and her friends (yes, they are Koreans, too) all say they never were forced and they were all paid very well.
Here in Korea it’s more fashionable to blame things on the Japanese instead of the Park Chung-hee government, where the real blame lies. The Japanese government does not need to wait until all the comfort women are dead.
The treaty of 1965 is evidence enough of their compensation. I remind everybody who is still under the silly impression that Japan still owes favors to Korean victims, that in the treaty of 1965 the Japanese government did indeed offer to deal with each and every individual who claimed compensation was owed to them, but that the South Korean government declined the offer.
Don’t believe me? Read the treaty for yourself; it’s available for public scrutiny since it’s now an official public record.
So I say to the editorial staff at The Korea Times, read the treaty, and after having read and understood it, please be kind enough to tell the readers exactly who it is that has this so-called “historical amnesia.”
The Korea Times editorial staff even ran it in their print edition. According to the Marmot’s Hole, it has since been pulled from the Korea Times website (the above link in this post goes to a cached version). It appears this may have been a case of epic trolling by somebody pretending to be a well-known contributor to the opinion page of the paper.
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