Letter: Brookhaven should be proud of ‘comfort women’ memorial
I am a scholar in Washington, D.C., who advises members of Congress and others about World War II history.
In my 2014 New York Times op-ed “The Comfort Women and Japan’s War on Truth,” I tried to make clear that the comfort women (and boys) used as sex slaves for Imperial Japan were emblematic of the larger crime of sex trafficking and sexual violence in warfare.
The memorial unveiled in Brookhaven is a timeless symbol of this unending wartime tragedy. The fact is that Imperial Japan during WWII had a unique state-sanctioned and -managed system of sexual slavery in wartime maintained outside of legal prostitution.
Nearly all the opposition you hear is from people coordinated by Japanese right-wing, anti-Korean groups. They are fueled by a toxic combination of racism and delusions of Japan’s wartime glory. These groups and their funders are also the political base of Japan’s prime minister and his party.
This is why you have Japanese diplomats humiliating themselves by denying history as cravenly as Holocaust deniers. And this is why the focus is only on Korea and not on the Dutch mothers, the German missionaries, the Filipino farm girls, the Taiwanese Aboriginals, the Indonesian villagers, the Vietnamese schoolgirls, the wives of Tamil laborers, the Australian shipwreck survivors, and even the French and British prostitutes in brothels requisitioned in Shanghai.
No one knows how many people were swept up in the comfort women system. None were willing, whether they were handed over by a village elder for protection, were trading their body to feed their children or grabbed off the street. The number, if you count the thousands of “opportunities” through the Pacific Islands, China and the internment camps for Westerners, is far in excess of 200,000.
The majority of the women “trafficked” to war zones were likely Korean. But the basic fact remains that young officers in the Japan’s Imperial Navy and Army were trained to establish “comfort stations” and requisition “supplies.”
It should be with pride that Brookhaven is willing to host a memorial to WWII crimes that not only happened in Asia (and not just to Asians), but also mostly to girls and women. This is rare. And the community should not succumb to the racism of Japanese right-wing groups any more than it would to an organization objecting to a Holocaust memorial.
This is not racist; it is American to honor and learn from the past of all its citizens.
Mindy Kotler
Director of Asia Policy Point
Washington, D.C.
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Steven GoldmanReply
July 26, 2017 at 3:13 am
Ms. Kotler plays fast and loose with the facts, and her appeal to emotion isn’t very convincing.
It was not her that broadened the appeal to a general human sex traficking narrative, but Ms. Park as part of the 121 Campaign back in 2007. Mindy was so focused on her anti Japanese campaign that she was getting no where as lead of Mike Honda’s scheme.
Ms. Park was the one who understood that hiding the Comfort Women lie behind a genuine need to stop human sex traficking and wartime rape would get traction in the US and mask the real intent.
Mindy Kotler just tries to take credit after the fact.
In addition, Mindy has omitted her deep ties to communist China and support for that brutal regime which is the number one violator of womens rights among the G8. No mention by her of the hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asian women kidnapped and forced to sexual service the Chinese men in Bachelor Villages across that nation to satisfy the need of the 30-40 million excess males due to the female genocide (one child policy) that saw forced abortions on females creating todays demographic time bomb.
Finally, Mindy uses the same tactics that anti-Semites used in the blood libel nonsense this issue parallels so closely. Many anti-Semitic campaigns such as blood libel cloaked the intent in “saving the Christian children’s safety” in order to push a lie through by an emotional appeal.
Mindy is far from an unbias scholar and is a long term anti-Japananist in the same mold as anti-Semites. I thought the Atlanta area was far beyond falling for this racial based lie.
And I am as far from a “Right Wing Japanese” as you can get. I am a very progressive Jewish American thank you very much, who hates to see a “lashon hara” or evil tounge that was used against Jews in the last century used against anyone in this century.
http://www.webcitation.org/6sd2iS2iX
https://web.archive.org/web/20170811100100/http://www.reporternewspapers.net/2017/07/23/letter-brookhaven-proud-comfort-women-memorial/
Reporter Newspapers 2017.7.23
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