New 'comfort woman' memorial unveiled in Manila

A shame, but hopefully this one will stay.

Filipinos suffered tremendously during its occupation by Japan.

Yet, for the most part relations have been very cordial between the two countries.

Whenever incidents of natural disasters occurred, Japan has always lent a hand there. An example of how two countries can work together, unlike a country that shall go unnamed in this topic.

I look forward to the usual crowd denigrating even this and blaming the victims. Unbeknownst to them, this isn't going to end anytime soon seeing as they're clueless about the Streisand effect.

Just pointing out a little known fact, but there were also British, Dutch, and American Comfort Women. Not as many, but it did happen. The choice was between that, and starving to death.

The German government would never pressure Poland or Israel from erecting a WWII memorial or statue.

I spoke to many people from Korea and asked them about the current situation. They reminded me that Moon had less than 50% of the vote in the election due to a third party candidate and not even all of his supporters agree with his handling of relations with Japan. While most Koreans dislike Abe for his whitewashing of history, they like Japanese people and want good relations.

Disappointing. I thought Duterte was a good leader and very close friend of Japan by ordereing the statues removal before. Is he being paid by Korea or PRC to allow it now?

In no way diminishing the crime of rape, it must be remembered that the IJA did much worse things like the atrocities committed in the "Battle of Manila" where up to 100,000 men, women and children were indiscriminately killed or maimed. The comfort women statues will no doubt continue to sprout along the slime trail left by the IJA.

Oh, here we go, all the usual memes; "Good Germany, Bad Abe" etc etc.

Does anyone have any links for recent academic studies of the claims, eg how many were "abused" and how many made a fortune?

I'm presuming the dynamics were the same as in Korea, with Koreans running the business and the army just contracting out to local suppliers?

Note stated in the article, Kaisa Para sa Kaunlaran is a Chinese-Filipino organization.

The first one was sponsored by Manuel O. Chua, a Chinese man, the only invited media outlets were Chinese, such as Xinhua News Agency, the official press outlet of the Chinese government in Beijing. 

Donors included a Chinese guerrilla who fought against the Japanese during the occupation period, and Tulay Foundation, Inc a street children charity ... which appears bizarre until you discover they have had recieved from China.

A Chinese group recruited a Philippines human rights organization in secretly working to have this statue erected without the knowledge of the foreign ministry, and with little detail given to the host city government.

Wai Ming Charitable Foundation Fund Company Limited, a Hong Kong-based organization whose founder has supported comfort women relief on the Chinese mainland as well as the demanded for reparations from Japan.

The Department of Foreign Affairs was not informed about it, the Japanese embassy was also prevented from knowing about the statue and registering any protest until after the statue had been installed.

Lila Pilipina is the same group that brought South Korean comfort women activism to the Philippines in the 1990s.

Does that stink enough for you?

Try,

"China driving a new wedge into the friendly postwar relations between Japan and the Philippines’ biggest partner in trade".

@1glenn

Just pointing out a little known fact, but there were also British, Dutch, and American Comfort Women.

There were actually some Dutch prostitutes in Indochine during the colonial period they had been serving the Dutch imperialists since before the war, however, it appears that you are confusing prostitutes - as in "Comfort Women" - with victims of sex crimes here.

As it appears these Chinese activists are doing.

The two are entirely separate matters.

it appears that you are confusing prostitutes - as in "Comfort Women" - with victims of sex crimes here.

It appears that in your head, this was a simple, clear situation.

The documentation that we have shows that some "comfort women" were prostitutes and others were not. Can we finally do away with thissimplistic fanaticism and acknowledge that it was a large and complicated picture?

Come up with some figures to substantiate whatever it is you are claiming.

And be very specific about which parties were involved with doing what.

We should all be fanatical about demanding evidence and only accepting objective truths.

@ Zichi:

Countries can have whatever memorials they want. In Poland, the German death camp sites remain.

Thats fine. But if those memorials are funded by a third country (for example PRC) with an political agenda to attack another, or if the memorial hurts the feelings of another nation (in this case Japanese), no, they should not be permitted.

Rather than "can have" it might be better to say "it's hard to stop them", but what's at question is the intention, accuracy and sincerity behind them.

And they can be removed too.

Wasn't it in Poland where the Polish Communists built fake gas chambers three years after the war for the sake of tourism?

I know that's going to have the site censors reaching for their delete button, but it is a fact and worth noting (we can quibble over fake, rebuilt or whatever) as it was not made public for decades, and they had to officially tone down the claimed figures.

Same too with these campaigns.

These are not sincere memorials of innocent victims in the past, they are insincere and aggressive campaigns against innocent victims in the present.

In the Phiipinnes, the "Red House" (Bahay na Pula) pretty much remains.

It could be turned into a memorial. It still exhibits what a comfort station looked like. It was a mansion house.

Japanese has it's own war memorials like the Yasukuni Shrine which hurts the feelings of other nations like the Chinese and Korean. You think it would be removed/demolished then?

Every country has the right to decide what to do within its own borders.

Exactly. Those who defend Yasukuni use the argument that countries shouldn’t have the right dictate what goes on internally in other countries. A defensible argument.

I wish some people would show consistency.

Why are these countries persistently doing this now? Who is orchestrating this? As for Philippines, have they made statues of comfort women for the US or Spain? Something doesn't add up.

So many Japanese politicians in the present day refute past history yet surprisingly here are the memorials to Japanese cruelty...

@ pacificwest

The Japanese army forced teenage Dutch civilian prisoners of war to serve as 'comfort women'. They were not prostitutes but the Japanese government still refuses to apologize or offer compensation, to any but the Koreans.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-17/jan-ruff-oherne-comfort-woman-wwii-japanese-government-apology/7174174

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/11/01/national/media-national/uncomfortable-truth-comfort-women/

pacificwest, yes I dislike the way this topic is always presented in ways most damaging to Japan without any care about context. Do people know that records exist by the US military of the situation (I tried to google some up but am not having luck, but I've seen them before). Do they know that these same comfort women (the ones in South Korea) were most likely servicing US troops during the Korean War? Do they know that during the occupation, the Japanese military set up similar facilities where Japanese girls serviced the US military men? (Google "Recreation and Amusement Association")? To say nothing about the rapes that we of course happened in all corners of the world, including by the "good guys" (us).

The amount of selective forgetting of information when it pertains to your own group. The idea that 100% of girls in the sad comfort women were enslaved is nonsense. The fact that none were enslaved is also clearly incorrect. The fact that any army, including British or US, did not participate in the same system, likely with the same girls, is also false.

The monument could well have a dual service---as well as the "comfort women " of WW2,it could be commemorating the tens of thousands of women (mostly young) who are providing sexual services to the many visitors to the Philippines today. These women are no less forced to engage in these activities to make a living because of the abject poverty that pervades the Philippine nation. As probably many of the Comfort Women were.

Historical facts cannot be proved only by the testimony of former comfort women.

@ Ganbare Japan!

Disappointing. I thought Duterte was a good leader and very close friend of Japan by ordereing the statues removal before. Is he being paid by Korea or PRC to allow it now?

If you bothered to read the story you would know that the statue is now in a church where he has no jurisdiction

Concering the differnce to WWII memorials in e.g. Poland, that was a country badly beaten so putting up those memorials is just fine but how if it was for Poland to make and sponsor memorials to other countries not for the fact of memorizing but for putting Germany in a bad light. This is how the comfort women statues are used and as we recently (almost) all learned, there is no interest in solving that issue since the statues have such a wonderful, not want to give up, blaming effect.

The big difference between the Korean CWs and those of other nationalities is that nationals of those countries were not known to be widely complicit in securing the women and they did not run the comfort stations, unlike Korea. Furthermore, none of those countries make anti-Japan sentiment an official diplomatic policy vis-a-vis modern Japan.

zichiToday  07:30 pm JST

There were Comfort Women from the Philippines, Taiwan, China, Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) and Australia.

If you want to call all the female sexual victims at the battle fields " comfort women", go ahead. It sounds like

as if those who got raped and kidnapped to some sort of " station" with roofs and foods were unluckier in worse conditions than those who got gang raped around and then assassinated and dumped in ways almost impossible manners to describe here. 　If mods allow us to discuss what happened in Vietnam for example.

zichiToday 08:40 pm JST

showchinmono,

It’s well documented on sites like the Japanese site, Asian Women’s Fund that not all of the Comfort Women were Korean and others came from the countries I posted in my previous post. So go and spend sometime on that site and do some reading, You might learn something.

I don't expect you to get my point. and no need to inform me of the site for AWF　I know well enough.

In short, I meant there's no big diff between all the female sex crime victims east and west all times and places

and what you call CW who were from other countries than the peninsula, unless you want specifically to stress IJA's deeds.... like how Koreans trying to cut it out to imprinted as peculiar phenomenon by Japanese in world history.

It not a question of comfort woman memorial statues, it is the manner in which political activists/politicians have weaponised these frail old ladies plight, in certain respects there dignity and cynically used that to further there own political agenda.

@Zichi

Not only German Nazi、but British, French, Dutch, American, Korean Taiwan KMT, all had military brothels. And those military brothels in the battlefields were officially recognized and actively utilized by each government. Besides, wartime sex crimes like the ones by Soviet soldiers as in Rape of Berlin, Rape of Manchuria were notorious and nothing but atrocities. So were the ones done by Koreans soldiers in Rape of Vietnam. What is the point to cut out only Japanese CW as a symbol of evil deeds?

Ｚichi

https://www.france24.com/en/20141212-france-military-brothels-hidden-history-first-world-war-prostitution

Bordel militaire de campagne

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bordel_militaire_de_campagne

https://ww1.habsburger.net/en/chapters/sexual-relief-soldiers

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%85%B0%E5%AE%89%E5%A9%A6

I guess you don't need evidence for Korean/US military CW.

And you are embossing Japan as if it is a symbol of evil deeds

Just as an aside, Jan Ruff o'Herne died this week, although I would not categorize her as a comfort woman but just a victim of an unofficial sex crime that was actually shut down and punished by the IJA at the time. She was 21.

A few more years and all this malice and vitriol will be laid to rest and then perhaps all the "concerned" parties can focus their attentions on today's young women who for the very same reasons are being sucked into the industry.

It's not as if much worse isn't happening in the Philippines right at this moment; same people, same dynamics.

Sex trafficking of children in the philippines - ECPAT International

https://www.ecpat.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Factsheet_Philippines.pdf

Just to put it into context, it is currently estimated that between 60,000 to 100,000 children, and an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 women trafficked for sex in the Philippines today. After a recent typhoon caused by the Climate Crisis, the United Nations Population Fund estimated that 5,000 women were victims of sexual violence in the month following, described as a ‘feast for human traffickers.’

https://thegroundtruthproject.org/philippines-sex-trafficking-climate-change/

Until there is some kind of socialistic universal basic income (UBI) and welfare for everyone on the planet, it is always going to happen.

And the Chinese activists in Manilla are worried about events that may or may not have happened as reported 75 years ago.

And the Chinese activists in Manilla are worried about events that may or may not have happened as reported 75 years ago.

It’s weird when people think that because some issue exists, some other issue should be left and not addressed. I don’t get that.

zichiAug. 26  08:50 pm JST

The big difference between the Korean CWs and those of other nationalities is that nationals of those countries were not known to be widely complicit in securing the women and they did not run the comfort stations, unlike Korea. Furthermore, none of those countries make anti-Japan sentiment an official diplomatic policy vis-a-vis modern Japan.

I think that implies the Japanese Imperial Army were more involved in obtaining the women. It’s not like the women suddenly decided to go off and be battlefield prostitute and would have still needed to be placed in a brothel with a brothel master which today we would call a pimp.

Of infinitely greater credibility than the speculative opinion of an internet poster would be the 7 year Interagency Working Group study carried out by the U.S. Government at at cost of USD 30m which found no evidence of such IJA involvement.

"The US government, under the Clinton and Bush administrations, spent 7 years and 30 million dollars to look into Nazi and Japanese war crimes.

The report was published in the spring of 2007. Out of millions of pages of newly declassified material, much of it related to Japan, and they were unable to find evidence of forced prostitution. "

You're correct, the issue being the damaging of today's Japan and Japanese, who are entirely innocent of any events from a past that was over before they were even born by racists and foreign nationalists.

But the real reason we should be concerned about issues that we can change (tomorrow's trafficking victims), versus issue we can't change (historical events) is because there's a finite amount of attention, concern, proactive efforts and resources in the world and they should be spent wisely; not wasted in pursuing situations that cannot be changed, or having to defend one self and one's nation against those who seek to exploit and misconstrue the past to do damage in the present.

Something I stated more than once here is that the vast majority of the Japan Hate Mobs that frequent places like this and elsewhere, don't give a damn about women's rights and the victims of trafficking and sexual violence which is what the issue is really about.

In fact, I'd even take a bet that a significant proportion of them have even indulged in the sexual exploitation of women therefore they need to be called out over it.

@zichi

It isn't about military prostitution ... It's also about whether countries have the right to erect their own war memorials

Except that it's not a war memorial.

It's a weapon on a current propaganda war with false intentions.

BTW, even using your unsubstantiated figures

1,700,000 / 30 (days) / 5 (men a day) = 11,333 which is actually closer to the current estimated figure that pretty much correlated with the number of "Attack Champions" distributed. You raise the claimed number of men, and the number of women drops.

However, even that suggests that 'every' member of the military 'had' to, and none were married and loyal to their wives etc.

So remove a fair estimate for them, kids too young and too shy, people with morals who found it distateful or below their dignity (as noted in numerous officers' journals), men stationed at home with partners etc - say 40% - and you're down to, say, approx 6,000. Which is probably realistic.

https://japan-forward.com/estimates-based-on-facts-200000-comfort-women-defies-math/

Or try again, 1,700,000 / 200,000 / 30 = (4 women per man)

It's so obviously ridiculous.

As you probably know, the 200,000 figure originated from a confusing from the number of women in the women’s volunteer corps (factory workers etc). At one point, Korea claimed its 200,000 and the Chinese claimed their 200,000. Then the Burmese, then the Filipinos ... it's a wonder the IJA had any time and energy to fight a war while organizing the biggest and longest sex party in the history of mankind.

The "IJA destroyed tens of thousands of military documents to cover up their crimes" is also a bit of a myth and betrays an ignorance not just of the IJA, the records that exist, but also military logistics on its own.

Where are the logistical records of moving and supply an army of 200,000 to 400,000 women?

Do you think that some clerk sneaked around behind MacArthur's back, removing every invoice he could find for 1,000,000 sanitary towels per month and shipping them to the frontline?

There are copious amounts of records, it's just no one as researched them all. It took the Asahi Shinbun reporter years of research to find any "evidence" and when he did, what it prove was that the army was aware of abuses by Korean agents and made orders to stop them.

No one said the IJA were "not involved". Of course they were. But Korean middlemen recruited Korean women and Koreans ran the comfort stations. What the IWG study proved was that the IJA did not forcibly obtain the women.

The Korean narrative that "200,000 women were kidnapped by the IJA" is an outright lie. South Korean scholars who openly disclose this truth are persecuted (and prosecuted).

@zichi

One Korean girl who was with us once demanded why we had to serve so many, up to 40, men per day.

It's important to break this down so you and others can see what it going on.

You choose a website that quotes Seiji Yoshida then goes off on Iris Chang (who they sponsored) and Unit 731 and uses all the since debunked photographs. I am afraid that blows its credibility out of the water straight away, and raises question about your own. 

Actually, it says they "had to serve up to 70, 80 or even 100 men" so it sounds like they are just making up big and bigger numbers, as they do with Nanjing.

The so called "Alliance for Preserving the Truth of the Sino-Japanese War"/Global Alliance For Preserving The History Of WW-II In Asia is Ignatius Y Ding, a Chinese engineer whose grandfather was a founding member of the Chinese Nationalist Party, a close friend of Chang's, and is behind the statues, reparations demand movement and even "Defend Diaoyu" and campaigning against Japan's Permanent Seat in UN's Security Cuncil.

He has been one of the leading anti-Japanese activists on the West Coast since the 1990s. 

You could say, he almost wrote the script.

http://www.cnd.org/mirror/nanjing/NMDing2.html (1995)

When, after 7 years of research done by the US government (“Researching Japanese War Crimes”) and expenditure of 30 million dollars, the US government did not find any information about the Nanjing Massacre as well as the forced prostitution of comfort women Ding actually campaigned against the opening of the Pacific War Memorial Hall because - based on there being no evidence - "it will become harder to amend any misunderstandings of history".

The so called "Global Alliance" isn't about "Preserving The History" it's about perpetuating the myth and portraying Japan as "showing no remorse and no contrition".

He's the connected to Michael Honda and the Chinese spy/mole of 20 years, Russell Lowe, who worked for Rep. Dianne Feinstein. Lowe now works with the so called "Education for Social Justice Foundation" which is "focused on educating the public on the Japanese military’s “comfort women”’ system" including developing curriculums for high school students. 

https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/item/29774-new-info-on-feinsteins-chinese-spy-media-fbi-complicit-in-cover-up

https://keywiki.org/Russell_Lowe

The Wai Ming Charitable Foundation Fund, who funded this statue, is also involved in the Senkaku Island debacle, fund international ad campaigns for it, and a fund in support of Chinese forced laborers willing to attempt claims on Japan.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2012/12/04/2003549330

@zichi

... the memorial to them and the many thousands of Filipino women raped during the occupation during by the IJA.

The fact is, we simply don't know what is true any more, and the individuals responsible are no longer alive therefore they can only, unfortunately, be dismissed.

On one hand, the issues have become so poisoned by other interests - as I have shown above; and, on the other, they have become a kind of addictive atrocity pornography reinforcing people's prejudices.

The question is one of who is responsible for what happened and if anyone replies "Japan", let alone Japan of Today, I would have to reject it as missing the real target. For sure, Today's Japan is the easy target but it's unfair to do so.

The collective of individuals' response are the military or military-industrial complexes involved.

If the alleged events happened during the final stages of the war in the taking of Manilla, I'd hold MacArthur and the USA equally responsible for the violence of his egoism in having to take it back (he was deeply humiliated twice there). As one author recently wrote,

“it was hard to tell who had done more damage — the Japanese defenders or the American liberators.”

Frame it as memorial for all women who are victims of all militaries, and I'd have no problem with it.

Nationalize it, politicize it and its becomes racist junk.