If you can read Japanese, please read HATA Ikuhiko's "Ianfu to Senjo no Sei". This book is written two decades ago, but still is the most comprehensive explanation of Comfort woman system. You will find most of English narratives of Comfort woman are false.
さんThere is no way to estimate how many prostitutes worked in the sex industry. Everyone used stage names, and there is no list of any kind. Virtually there is no corroborating contemporary written evidence of testimonies of comfort women. Their testimonies change frequently.
Prostitution exists before, during, and after Japanese administration of Korea. There were literal sex slaves in feudal Korea. The half of Koreans were slaves any way before Japan came. The sex industry was and is a major industry in South Korea, having 300k workers.
There was no need for forceful recruitment of prostitutes. Some comfort women were recruited by advertisements in newspapers. Korean agency advertised in Korean, Japanese in Japanese. Korean brothels were run by Koreans, Japanese by Japanese, because of the language barrier.
The military provided logistics, security, health service, regulations on the battlefields. Prostitutes were highly paid. We know this because Moon Oku Ju sued to recover 20k yen in her postal savings, which was equivalent to 20 houses in Korea at the time.
I also know there are individual war crimes as in the case of O'Herne. War crimes should be punished according to evidence and law. In O'Herne's case, one officer was executed. Those individual crimes are different from the Comfort woman system.
The military provided logistics and security for brothels is exactly as the US did in Viet Nam. Before US, the French brought African prostitutes to Viet Nam. The point is controlling the information leak and spread of venereal disease. Not so great minds think alike.
The forced recruitment of comfort woman cited by the Coomaraswamy report is a lie created by YOSHIDA Seiji. This was settled more than two decades ago, and the left wing newspaper apologized for the fabricated story years ago.
Today, South Korea has 300k sex workers. Prostitution was legal in SK until 2004. After that, they work in SK illegally or come to the US or Japan to work. Japan has been having a very hard time kicking out those Korean prostitutes. This is the opposite of forced recruitment.
Knowing all these, do you honestly think that the Japanese military abducted Korean girls for sex, paid nothing, and killed 75% of them? When there is no way of knowing even exactly how many prostitutes worked?
As far as I know, there is only one comfort woman who has something like a written record. That is recently deceased Kim Bok Dong. We know her name was on the list of a military hospital in Indonesia in August 1945 as "hired". At least she was in Indonesia when the war ended.
I checked the military movement she told in her testimony, which does not match any movement of military divisions. Besides she says she ended up in Singapore when the war ended, which is obviously false.
If the movement does not coincide with military divisions, then most likely she moved independently of the military with the manager of brothels. She returned to SK in 1948, three years later. Nobody asks what she was doing after the war for three years.
She was supposed to be " a slave" of the military, correct? After the military lost the war, what was she doing in Indonesia? There is no explanation whatsoever. There is no explanation of what she ate, who provided food, clothing, and necessities.
Who did she talk with and in what language? This is no trivial matter because she does not seem to speak Japanese. The most reasonable assumption is she does not want to talk about Korean brothel managers because that undermines her narrative.
Was her story verified by her family members? No. You are supposed to be a historian. Why can you say what Kim Bok Dong told is correct when there is hardly any corroborating evidence, let alone generalize the story to "200k estimated comfort women"?
I don't think Kim Bok Dong was lying. This is exactly what "repressed memory therapy" did. Those who "remembered" childhood abuse in America believed what did not happen happened. It was true to them but factually false. Human memory is that fragile.
So tell me why you can believe the gigantic abuse narrative when there is little actual evidence. I sincerely recommend reading the book by HATA Ikuhiko. If you cannot read it, perhaps you don't have enough means to collect and evaluate evidence of this issue at all.
