As it prepares to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, Abe’s conservative government is pushing to put a gloss on Japan’s wartime history and, in turn, to loosen some of the postwar constraints on its military.
“We stand with the many historians in Japan and elsewhere who have worked to bring to light the facts about this and other atrocities of World War II,” says a letter signed by 19 academics from American University as well as Princeton, Columbia and others, referring to the “comfort women” who were coerced into working in Japanese military brothels during the 1930s and 1940s.
“As historians, we express our dismay at recent attempts by the Japanese government to suppress statements in history textbooks both in Japan and elsewhere about the euphemistically named ‘comfort women,’ ” says the letter to be published in the March issue of the American Historical Association’s magazine, Perspectives on History.
The comfort women, many of whom were Korean, have become a major source of contention between the Japanese and South Korean governments. Many Japanese conservatives say the women were simply prostitutes, while Seoul accuses Tokyo of trying to whitewash history.
The Comfort Woman statue stands beside an empty chair symbolizing survivors who have reached old age without having yet witnessed judgement in Glendale, Calif. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images)Both governments have turned up the volume in their efforts to sway international opinion, most recently with a Japanese attempt to get McGraw Hill, the American publishing house, to remove two paragraphs about comfort women from a college textbook.
The book, “Traditions and Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past,” says the Japanese army “forcibly recruited, conscripted, and dragooned as many as 200,000 women aged 14 to 20 to serve in military brothels, called ‘comfort houses.’ ” It also says that the Japanese imperial army “massacred large numbers of comfort women to cover up the operation.”
