Congress backstabs US ally; Times lie trashes Abe

WE BOTH KNOW that sticking pins into the head of rattlesnakes, wrote Herbert Hoover to a friend the day after the Pearl Harbor attack, is what got this country bit.

The US cut off the head of that rattlesnake more than a half century ago, so why are the House of Representatives and the New York Times now sticking pins in the voodoo doll they’ve created of contemporary Japan? The House seems poised to pass a maudlin, facile resolution about comfort women during the Second World War, taking at face value the word of a woman who can’t get her story straight and whose testimony may be fraudulent. Meanwhile, the Times has added fuel to the fire by intentionally—and maliciously–garbling a quote from Prime Minister Abe Shinzo.

It’s not clear what they intend to accomplish, but one thing is certain—they are gratuitously offending our staunchest ally in Asia and creating unnecessary difficulties for the Abe administration’s heretofore successful efforts at rapprochement with its Northeast Asian neighbors.

Then again, knowing the New York Times, that may be one of the things they do hope to accomplish—the other being to bring down the Abe government. And considering that it’s the word of the Times and its butchered quote in English against the actual words of Prime Minister Abe in Japanese, they might just get away with it.

The resolution calling for Japan’s prime minister to “formally acknowledge, apologize and accept historical responsibility” for using “comfort women,” is being sponsored by Rep. Mike Honda, a San Jose, CA Democrat, who has used the Japanese as his pincushion before. This is the fifth such resolution introduced in the House, but with the new Democratic majority, the first one to have a real chance of passage. The resolution does not ask the Japanese to compensate the women.

Typical of the American media coverage is this article from the San Jose Mercury:

Elderly and stooped, their voices tremulous with anger, three women Thursday told a hushed congressional committee how they survived systematic rape and enslavement by the Japanese military during World War II, but never received an official apology.
The victims, who were known during the war by the cruel euphemism “comfort women,” pleaded with Congress to adopt a resolution sponsored by Rep. Mike Honda, a San Jose Democrat. It urges Japan to apologize officially for coercing up to 200,000 women into sexual slavery as a matter of policy.
The Japanese government opposes the resolution, and worked to defeat a similar effort in Congress last year. But backers believe it has a better chance this year, in part because of the emotional testimony.

Emotional testimony, indeed, amplified by the emotional language of a news report written by a journalist who hammered down a verdict without making the effort to fulfill the journalistic responsibility of impartiality before investigating what actually happened.

Fortunately, the Australian-based blogger Occidentalism decided to do their work for them. For example, he found that one of the three witnesses, Lee Yong-soo, gave sharply inconsistent accounts of her experience within a matter of days.

On February 15, Lee told the House Committee:

(My friend Kim) Punsun knocked on my window early in the morning, and whispered to me to follow her quietly. I tip-toed out of the house after her. I left without telling my mother. I was wearing a dark skirt, a long cotton blouse buttoned up at the front and slippers on my feet. I followed my friend until we met the same man who had tried to approach us on the riverbank. He looked as if he was in his late thirties and he wore a sort of People’s Army uniform with a combat cap. Altogether, there were five girls with him, including myself.

But earlier CNN reports had her giving a different story in Tokyo:

Lee Yong-soo, 78, a South Korean who was interviewed during a recent trip to Tokyo, said she was 14 when Japanese soldiers took her from her home in 1944 to work as a sex slave in Taiwan.
“The Japanese government must not run from its responsibilities,” said Lee, who has long campaigned for Japanese compensation. “I want them to apologize. To admit that they took me away, when I was a little girl, to be a sex slave. To admit that history.” “I was so young. I did not understand what had happened to me,” she said. “My cries then still ring in my years. Even now, I can’t sleep.”

Well, which story is true? Did the 16-year-old Lee sneak out of the house with a friend in the middle of the night in 1944 to meet a procurer, or was the 14-year-old Lee snatched from her home in 1944 against her will?

In fact, Lee has told six different versions of her story. The variations range from the story above, which she told the House committee, to “Japanese soldiers took me from my home at gunpoint”, which she tells Japanese audiences at conferences sponsored by her local supporters.

Had the media done its basic homework, it would have discovered there are three possibilities for what happened:

Possibility One: They did it for the money

Occidentalism’s Gerry Bevers has produced two advertisements from Korean newspapers in 1944 soliciting comfort women—the precise phrase used in Japanese.

The ad on the left was placed in the Gyeongseong Ilbo on July 16, 1944 and offered women between seventeen and twenty-three years old 300 yen per month to work as “comfort women.” It also offered an advance payment of 3,000 yen. The ad on the right was placed in the Maeil Shinmun on October 27, 1944 and also offered 300 yen per month for “healthy” women between eighteen and thirty.

The advertisements are in Japanese, and as a professional Japanese-English translator, I can vouch for Bevers’s explanation. According to links at this site, 300 yen per month was equivalent to $US 70.00 in 1941. (No figures are available for 1944.) According to this site, that could be equivalent to anywhere from roughly $755 to $6,880 in 2005 dollars, depending on the conversion standards. Multiply by ten, of course, to get the bonus.

So one possibility is that Lee had an idea what she was getting into, and did it for cash on the barrelhead. This is a very important point, because a discussion of this possibility is precisely what the New York Times left out of the Abe statement.

It is also possible–in fact, probable–that in many cases their fathers did it for the money. Though this BBC article supports the cause of comfort women, it also clearly reports one woman’s admission that the Japanese weren’t responsible for her involvement:

Kim Gunja suspects that her foster father, a policeman, sold her for money or a promotion

Keep in mind that this is Asia; men with little or no financial means, who had too many mouths to feed, or who found themselves in debt, sold their daughters for money. Prostitution in those days was not illegal. It doesn’t happen any more in South Korea or Japan, but it still happens today in other parts of Asia.

Possibility Two: They worked in a factory instead of a brothel

As astonishing as it may seem, that is the claim of one South Korean researcher, Ji Man-won. As the English-language edition of the Chosun Ilbo reported in April 2005:

The controversial military commentator Ji Man-won has come under fire again after saying that claims by some women to have been drafted into sexual slavery as “comfort women” by the Japanese Army were fraudulent.
Ji said on his website on Wednesday and Thursday that only 33 women had been confirmed former “comfort women,” or Chongshindae, by Shim Mi-ja, a comfort woman whose painful past was acknowledged by the Japanese Supreme Court. Ji said none of the 33 took part in a protest former comfort women stage every Wednesday in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul…Ji claimed no more than 20 percent of all comfort women were forcefully conscripted by Japan, while the rest were ordinary prostitutes trying to escape from poverty

The Japanese version of the article, which is still on line here, adds some information. That source reports Ji has classified comfort women into three groups. The first are the military comfort women. The second group are called “jugun comfort women” in Japanese. In this context, the term “jugun” roughly translates to camp follower. The third group are called “teishintai“.

This third group requires some explanation. It literally means volunteer corps. The term was used to refer to Japanese women at home who volunteered to work in factories and other locations for the war effort. At first they were simply volunteers, but they were given legal status in 1943, and by 1944, when the situation in Japan deteriorated, they were conscripted. The name “volunteer” was kept, but the Japanese have always had a taste for euphemism, as the term “comfort women” itself indicates.

In Korea, the latter group seems not to have been volunteers at all. The female “volunteer corps” in Korea were conscripted into the war effort at the same time as the Japanese women. Some of these women were as young as 12 years old. One Japanese language website quotes a newspaper report from 1992 that states school records indicate girls aged 12-14 were removed from one school and taken to Toyama Prefecture as laborers. One of the students testified they had to work 14 hours a day with insufficient food. (It is unlikely that Japanese women working in factories had sufficient food at that time, either.)

Thus, Ji seems to be stating that South Korean authorities are lumping comfort women, prostitutes, and conscripted female laborers into the category of comfort women, and that the comfort women providing sex were just 20% of this total.

Possibility Three: They’re telling the truth

The Imperial Japanese Army may well have abducted these women from their homes and forced them into sexual slavery. Every army in war sexually abuses the women of the territory it has conquered. That’s not a justification, but it is a fact.

But if that is the case, one wonders what the women hope to accomplish by making a Federal case out of it when they already have what they want.

Do they want an official apology from the Japanese government? Well, they’ve already got it, here. That’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Kono Yohei, the official government spokesman, talking:

The Government again would like to express its sincere apology and remorse to all those who have suffered indescribable hardship as so-called “wartime comfort women”, irrespective of their nationality or place of birth. With profound remorse and determination that such a mistake must never be repeated, Japan will maintain its stance as a pacifist nation and will endeavor to build up new future-oriented relations with the Republic of Korea and with other countries and regions in Asia.

There’s a longer statement in Japanese, here, from the same Foreign Affairs Ministry website. In that, Kono says the comfort women were obtained “primarily” by independent businessmen, though also admits the army played a direct role at times.

It does not speak well of the Imperial Japanese Army for outsourcing the procurement of comfort women to pimps, but it does show that the Japanese government did look at the historical records, that the Japanese-language newspaper ads Bevers cites were legitimate, and that Lee just might have snuck out of the house at night with a friend to volunteer for duty.

One wonders about the point of this game playing. It makes no difference whether the Japanese Diet says it, the Japanese Prime Minister says it, or the Chief Cabinet Secretary says it—the Japanese have already officially admitted it and apologized for it.

Do they want reparations? As the media reports indicate, the House resolution does not ask for reparations. But the CNN report has Lee asking for compensation.

But if that’s what she wants, compensation is available from the Asian Women’s Fund, which was established with the assistance of the Japanese government. The funds come from private donations, because the Japanese government claims it has already paid war reparations.

In fact, the Japanese government reached an agreement with South Korea about reparations in 1965. Seoul wanted $US 364 million as compensation for the conscripted laborers and comfort women during the period of the Japanese colonization. The agreement instead gave South Korea $800 million in grants and low-interest loans. President Park agreed as part of the deal that South Koreans would relinquish the right to make individual claims against the Japanese government. However, Park paid out only about $251 million to families killed by the Japanese and some more to owners of destroyed property. None of the South Koreans conscripted into the Japanese military or workforce, or the comfort women, received anything. Park spent the rest of the money on the Korean infrastructure. The South Korean public only found out about this deal and Park’s use of the money in January 2005.

Indeed, the reason Park distributed money to property owners and not comfort women may have been because he knew this fact: Many of the comfort women either got involved voluntarily, or because one of their relatives sold them, as we’ve seen by the statements of the women themselves, quoted above. He also likely knew it was not possible to determine the truth in individual cases, and separate those who were perhaps exploited by the Japanese and those who weren’t.

Lee’s had an admission and an apology, money is available from the Asian Women’s Fund, and the Japanese government has already paid compensation to the Korean government. What else is it that she wants, assuming her story is true? To play a role on the world’s political stage? The chance to work off her share of the Korean grudge against Japan? Or to get more money while the getting’s good before the AWF expires later this month?

And what exactly is the point of Honda’s posturing? We all know Mencken’s dictum that the chief occupation of a politician is to create hobgoblins so he can play the hero and slay them, but this isn’t even an American hobgoblin to start with. The meddlesome Congressman doesn’t bother to waste his time and ours with the usual American issues—he has to stick his nose into a bilateral relationship that doesn’t involve the US and risk an international incident. If he wants to get involved in international issues, why isn’t he sponsoring legislation condemning the Soviet Army for raping its way across Eastern Europe in 1945? Does he want to legitimize the segment of public opinion in Japan that complains about victor’s justice? As this report shows, the Japanese are none too happy with his activities.

Prime Minister Abe has said that it’s natural for countries that believe in liberty, free markets, free speech, and the rule of law to be allies. He’s also made it clear that he thinks the alliance with the US is the key to Japanese foreign policy. So what does Honda, an ethnic Japanese, hope to accomplish by what the Japanese could legitimately consider a betrayal of trust?

Not having a degree in psychology, I couldn’t begin to speculate on the motives of these people.

Psychology may not be required with the New York Times, however. In their case, it may just be simple venality.

Again, Occidentalism did the spadework to uncover the Times’s deceit, here:

The original quotes in Japanese were –
「当初定義されていた強制性を裏付ける証拠がなかったのは事実だ」
And –
「定義が大きく変わったことを前提に考えなければならない」
The NYT translates that as –
“There is no evidence to prove there was coercion, nothing to support it,” Mr. Abe told reporters. “So, in respect to this declaration, you have to keep in mind that things have changed greatly.”
The NYT and every other article in English…omitted the main subject of the quote, because Prime Minister Abe is talking about definition of a word. Here is my translation of what Prime Minister Abe said –
“It is a fact there was no proof to support coercion as it was initially defined”

Instead of Occidentalism’s translation of the second, I might say, “We must consider (the Kono statement about comfort women) on the basis that the (initial) definition (of coercion) had greatly changed.” Be that as it may, there should be no question that the New York Times has purposely altered Abe’s statement to eliminate the qualification that he was talking about the definition of coercion, rather than the absence of coercion.

Read Occidentalism’s full post for the context of the statement. During a Diet interpellation with the chair of the Japanese Communist Party last fall, the prime minister went into greater detail by saying there was no proof to support the assertion that “the women were taken out of their houses forcibly” but accepting that in “many cases” the women “wanted to choose to not go but they were in an environment that compelled them to go in the end”. The bickering over the original definition of coercion is what Abe is referring to.

The New York Times knows very well what Prime Minister Abe was talking about. They also know very well that with superficiality being the standard for journalism today, and that because a knowledge of the Japanese language and the details of an arcane exchange are required to understand the real issue, they stand a good chance of tarring Abe with the brush of being a “comfort woman” denier.

We can use the Sherlock Holmes dictum of the dog that didn’t bark to show that the Times did this purposely and maliciously. The Japanese media, for all its faults, is ready to jump on even the slightest misstatement by a Japanese politician. That’s how they knocked Mori Yoshiro (Koizumi’s predecessor) out of office more than five years ago, and that’s how they’ve been holding the Abe Cabinet’s feet to the fire since January after they caught health minister Yanagisawa Hakuo making an off-handed comment that women were “baby-making machines”.

Yet no one in the Japanese media gave Abe’s comment last week a second thought—because they understood the context in which it was made.

Well, all that’s changed now that the Times has rattled the cage. As this article notes:

South Korea later lodged an official protest, accusing the leader of “glossing over the historical truth.” Rights activists in the Philippines also slammed Abe for labeling the slaves as common prostitutes.

That’s no surprise for the government of President Roh Moo-hyun, who has seized every opportunity to demagogue the issue of Japan’s wartime actions as a way to boost his flagging popularity among Korean voters. (Even that hasn’t worked; Koreans are fed up with him.) Yet to be fair, this report by the Choson Ilbo is rather even-handed. It even tries to provide some sense of the context for Abe’s statement, albeit incomplete.

Here’s the link to the story out of The Philippines. This article fails to point out, however, that the Japanese paid compensation to The Philippines of more than $US 500 million from the mid-50s to the early 70s.

Ozawa Ichiro, the leader of the Democratic Party of Japan, finally woke up, saw his chance, and slammed Abe on Sunday as well, even though Mr. Ozawa is aware of what really happened.

The AP joined the chorus, incorrectly reporting from the above story: “The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion,” Abe said on Thursday.”

CNN (from the link above) also parrots the Times’s distortion:

“Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Thursday denied women were forced into military brothels across Asia, boosting renewed efforts by right-wing politicians to push for an official revision of the apology.”
“The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion,” Abe said.
Abe’s remarks contradicted evidence in Japanese documents unearthed in 1992 that historians said showed military authorities had a direct role in working with contractors to forcibly procure women for the brothels.

As more people repeat the errors, and more reporters pump even more lurid quotes out of the East Asians, the story will take on a life of its own in a dimension one step removed from reality—which the New York Times surely counted on.

It is impossible to speculate what motivates that newspaper any more. Yet it is no exaggeration to say that their effort to discredit Abe is just as blatant as the effort of Dan Rather and CBS News to discredit George Bush. But the Times is distorting a statement in a foreign language, so it’s not as apparent to the casual observer.

They know that Abe Shinzo is a man of the Right who is outspoken about his dislike for the media and its biased coverage, and they know he wants Japan to play a more assertive role on the world’s stage. By their behavior, it would seem the Times would welcome the demise of the Abe administration, though why they would want to weaken Japan’s position as the only serious US ally in a neighborhood that includes China, Russia, and the two Koreas is anyone’s guess.

They play a dangerous game by giving ammunition to Japan’s neighbors. For example, Jiang Zemin, former General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and President of the People’s Republic of China, gave a speech in 1998 while still in office to members of China’s diplomatic corps, in which he stated, “We should always emphasize the historical problems with Japan. We must continue to make this an issue for eternity.” The quotation came to light when it was included in a recent collection of Jiang’s writings.

This makes it apparent there is nothing the Japanese can ever do to mollify China about the events of the Second World War because China does not want to resolve the issue–China considers history to be a political weapon to use forever in its dealings with Japan. Note that Jiang made this speech in 1998—three years before Koizumi Jun’ichiro became prime minister of Japan and started visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, and while Japan was paying China hefty amounts of ODA as de facto war reparations.

No one should be under any illusion that the issue of Imperial Japan’s behavior in the war is anything other than a convenient stick for the leadership in China (and both Koreas) to wield in their relations with contemporary Japan, or to cynically stir up domestic anger at the Japanese, deflecting attention from domestic problems.

The New York Times continues to deny Japan the baseline respect it deserves for its nearly impeccable behavior over the past 60 years—better behavior than that displayed by most of the world’s countries over that same span. Anonymous Congressmen can be expected to dig up a hobgoblin and bring themselves some reflected glory. That is what Congressmen do for a living, after all, but they are essentially fungible. By this time next year, no one will remember Mike Honda.

But why is the New York Times so maliciously distorting the facts to manufacture a scandal that could seriously harm a loyal ally that shares our political values and impair its ability to conduct foreign affairs over the long term? Why are they hobbling the Japanese in favor of the Chinese, who most certainly do not share our values, or the South Koreans, whose government continues to distance itself from Japan and the US, putative shared values notwithstanding.

The sad fact of the matter is that few people are capable and willing to call the newspaper to account, and in any event, it may be too late.

Their lie has now become the truth.