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Nariaki Nakayama is an elite politician in Japan. He studied law at Tokyo University and served as an official at the Ministry of Finance. In the Koizumi administration, he was Minister of Education, Science and Technology. Yet despite his education and lofty positions, he is infamous for his ridiculous claims. Two years ago when he was Education Minister, he said this:
"In the first place, the term 'comfort women' didn't exist at the time (of World War II). What didn't exist is carried in history textbooks. In other words, what is wrong is in the textbooks. Now I think it proper to see this (description) removed from the textbooks." His statement failed to cause much political shock simply because it was so nonsensical. By his preposterous logic, there were no comfort women simply because the Japanese soldiers called them something else, like barmaids, waitresses or prostitutes. This type of reasoning is the sort that a buffoonish character on a TV sitcom might employ, but the sad fact is this topic is never funny.
Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has uttered some ridiculous words of his own. He recently took pains to define the type of coercion that the soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army used to force innocent women into sex slavery. According to Abe, there is coercion in a strict sense, such as when military officers raided civilian homes and abducted women. And there is coercion in a broad sense, such as when businessmen, under the instruction of Japanese troops, forced women to serve as sex slaves. Abe claimed that since there is no evidence to prove the strict sort of coercion, it must follow that Japanese soldiers never coerced women into sex slavery.
Of course, numerous victims have testified that there certainly was coercion in the strict sense. The resolution on Japan's sex slaves recently presented to the U.S. Congress was based on such testimony. But the Japanese prime minister denies the validity of that testimony, saying there is no evidence to back it up. He would like the victims to provide evidence -- evidence, of course, that the perpetrators destroyed. Furthermore, he contends that coercion by businessmen under the direction of the Japanese military isn't really coercion. What sort of logic is this?
We must ask ourselves why we call for the Japanese to use good sense. After all, we are asking only that Japan never return to the way it was before and during the war, when it was a worse rogue state than North Korea is today. Maybe they cannot understand how Korea feels because they never suffered the same abominable persecution. It may be very unpleasant for them to be compared with North Korea, which they consider a barbarous state.
To provoke the Pacific War, Japan killed Zhang Zuolin in a bomb attack and blew up the Liutiaohu Railway. It also destroyed the proof of its war crimes and blamed China for what happened. The Japanese fell for the propaganda and swore vengeance. Considering these moves, it seems only logical that Japan would have destroyed any and all records of comfort women. And now Japan is ramping up the propaganda again, claiming that comfort women never existed because there is no evidence to prove otherwise. We are not enraged, but concerned.
Nakayama is currently chairman of the "Fraternity of Lawmakers Who Are Concerned about the Future of Japan and History Education," a Japanese political organization aimed at making the Kono statement a mere scrap of paper. In 1993, then Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono, issued an official statement acknowledging that Japanese soldiers abducted women to be sex slaves. Nakayama's wife is an assistant to Prime Minister Abe in charge of the issue of Japanese abductees by North Korea. She is an influential person in the government and enjoys the full trust of Abe.
Mr. Nakayama denies that Japan abducted women into sex slavery, while his wife is bent on publicizing North Korea's abduction of Japanese people. The rest of the world is looking at Japan now and seeing this twisted logic. It seems that only Japan's leaders are unaware of it.
This column was contributed by Son-U Jong, the Chosun Ilbo's correspondent in Tokyo.
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