The joint statement by the Japan-Korea alliance for the truth, fighting against lies related to the comfort women issue

The joint statement by the Japan-Korea alliance for the truth, fighting against lies related to the comfort women issue

Comfort women were licensed prostitutes administered by the Japanese Army. Those women worked as prostitutes in order to pay back the advance money their desperately poor parents received for their living expenses. The contemporary Japanese and Koreans were fully aware of this fact.

A Korean communist from the southern labor party residing in Japan once said, “Back at my home village in Jeju, a woman who had become a widow at a young age, ran a comfort station in China, employing young women from her village and earned a lot of money. Most villagers wanted to have their daughters work at the woman’s lucrative comfort station and many women became comfort women to make money.”

Therefore, the Syngman Rhee administration, while promoting anti-Japan policy, did not demand compensation for the comfort women during the negotiation to normalize the diplomatic relationship.

We held a Japan-South Korea joint symposium over the comfort women issue in Tokyo last year and this year we just held another symposium in Seoul. We have confirmed the historical fact as it was just mentioned.

Why, then, is it that a lie saying that comfort women were not licensed prostitutes but were forcibly abducted by the Japanese Army and forced into sexual servitude was widely spread and worsened the relationship between Japan and South Korea?

The villainous perpetrators were a group of liars propagating the false theory of forced abduction and sexual slavery in Japan and South Korea. The leading Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun repeatedly and widely reported the story told by a “professional” liar named Yoshida Seiji. Some Japanese activists searched for former comfort women and filed lawsuits against the Japanese Government. Former comfort-women plaintiffs did not say that they were forcibly abducted, but the Asahi Shimbun fabricated those women’s statements.

And the two major anti-Japan bodies, the Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan and the Bereaved Families Society, spread this lie, which originated in Japan, widely in South Korea. And this lie was reported widely in Korean newspapers and on television as if it were a second independence movement. And we can never overlook the fact that Japanese and Korean liars keep in close touch with North Korea. Quite symbolically, a former director general of the Korean Council for Justice and member of the Korean Parliament together with the present director general attended an event held by the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, an accomplice of North Korea, in Tokyo.

However, those seeking the truth in Japan and South Korea separately failed to cooperate with each other due to difference in ethnic sentiments and other factors. In Japan, the truth seekers kept fighting for thirty years and now made the Asahi Newspaper admit Yoshida’s lie and cancel their related reports in the past. In South Korea, since 2019, fighters for the truth started their counterattack, claiming that “comfort women were prostitutes,” and demanding the removal of comfort woman statue, right next to the statue of a comfort woman in Seoul. And finally, last year and this year, the Japan and South Korea Alliance for the Truth held a joint symposium in Tokyo and Seoul.

Hereby, we declare that Japanese and South Korean truth-seekers must join hands and reveal the conspiracy and plot attempted by liars in Japan, South Korea and North Korea and seek to strictly hold them responsible for their lies. We resolutely have to make them remove comfort woman statues, the symbol of their lies, in South Korea and all over the world.