No one's ever accused the LDP (Liberal Democratic machine Party) of being high on humanitarianism, but even that dim rep went down a notch when Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said there was no proof that so-called "comfort women" had been forced into prostitution during the war. In other words, they were all in fact whores and all their complaints lies. The LDP is more like a party in big denial, running a country that claims to be democratic.
Abe asserted his wishfully gossamer belief before addressing an LDP group of about 120 rightist lawmakers who were meeting to plan a retraction of Japan's 1993 apology to the comfort women. The group's position was clarified by its chairman Nariaki Nakayama, another LDP master of tact, who clarified the wartime government's involvement in the brothels by comparing it to a kind of simple business situation – no big deal.
"Some say it is useful to compare the brothels to college cafeterias run by private companies, who recruit their own staff, procure foodstuffs, and set prices," he said, probably smiling and jingling the change in his pocket.
"Where there's demand, businesses crop up... but to say women were forced by the Japanese military into service is off the mark," he said (that "into service" says a lot more). "This issue must be reconsidered, based on truth... for the sake of Japanese honor." What type of honor is he talking about, I wonder. Clearly the type of honor that is blind to base wrongdoing. Ah yes: honor among thieves, of course.
This all flies in the faces of the hundreds of thousands of women who, even in their old age, often bringing shame on themselves and their families through their public quests for justice, nevertheless go to court in Japan year after year, and have for decades. They are turned away unacknowledged and now are even scorned by alleged lawmakers in quest of the same dark honor under which still unrepentant crimes were perpetrated.
Article comments
1 - Aku
I agree with the post although there is an angle perhaps unexplored here.
After the surrender of Japan and before the Americans landed, the Japanese government set up brothels for the Americans (segregated ones none the less), thinking that "comforting" these men from afar would make them more merciful to the Japanese. Perhaps Abe mistakenly thought most Asians thought this way when the Japanese came.