加えて、問題をより混乱させることとして、Korean Council of Women Drafted for Sexual Slavery by Japan (Korean Council挺対協)の名に明らかに現れているように、工場における挺身隊労働と慰安所における売春サービスとの意図的な混用がある。この韓国の団体の日本に対する誹謗中傷活動への熱意は既に狂信的レベルに達している。挺身隊労働は、日本または朝鮮内における工場労働であって、売春ではない。該当する法律は海外における売春サービスを許可・規定していない。従って、かかる韓国の運動団体の名前そのものが、ウソの種を撒くためのイカサマなのである。
サラ・ソー教授がナヌムの家で取材した元慰安婦の1人は、「韓国で生存している元慰安婦の80％は以前から売春婦であった」と述べている。そして、挺対協は、この元慰安婦の証言をシリーズものの元慰安婦の証言集に含めないようにした」（P97, C. Sarah Soh 著 “The Comfort Women” Chicago Press） のである。
From: The Coalition of Three Parties for Communicating Historical Truth
To: The honorable members of the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women
Subject: Paragraphs 28 and 29 of the “Concluding observations on the combined seventh and eight periodic reports of Japan,” pertaining to the “Comfort Women”
We find above-mentioned paragraphs highly offensive, contemptuous, and downright rude. The contents trample on our sacred mission to clear the name of our forefathers, falsely accused of crimes they never committed.
Firstly, these paragraphs lacked any comment on the remarks by Mr. Shinsuke Sugiyama, head of the Japanese delegation, and merely enumerated the Committee’s singularly one-sided recommendations. What follows are the remarks of Mr. Sugiyama, cited from the Committee’s own “Summary record of the 1375th meeting.”
Paragraph 36:
“The full-scale fact-finding study on the issue of ‘comfort women’ conducted by the Government of Japan in the 1990s had not found confirmation of the widespread belief that such women had been forcibly removed from their country by Japanese military personnel or Government agents. The testimony to that effect contained in the 1983 memories of Japanese novelist Seiji Yoshida had been disputed and subsequently disproved by Japanese scholars. Moreover, in 2014, a leading Japanese newspaper had issued a corrigendum to several articles which had relied heavily on Yoshida’s fabricated testimony and had issued an apology to its readers. There was no evidence to support the claim made by a leading Japanese newspaper that as many as 200,000 women had been recruited as comfort women during the Second World War, and that had subsequently been recognized by the newspaper itself. The figure could well be the result of a conflation of the number of women recruited as comfort women and the number recruited by the Women’s Volunteer Labour Corps. The Government of Japan also rejected the unfounded claim that the comfort women had been akin to sex slaves.”
After Mr. Sugiyama made this statement, a committee member stood up and hysterically shouted, “History is history!” Perhaps the truth is unimportant to some of your esteemed colleagues so as long as they are able to freely brand the entire Japanese people as “Rapists and Murderers” with hot red iron.
To support this observation, the aforementioned paragraphs do not contain any mention of our refutation to the 1996 Coomaraswamy Report. We will not reiterate our claims in detail here but, in brief, in addition to the full-scale investigation made by the Japanese Government, the U.S. Nazi War Crimes & Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group Report produced nothing to substantiate the claim of the criminal nature of the “comfort women”. In addition, the government of the Republic of Korea has not presented any evidence of forced recruitment. Professor An Byong-jik of SeoulUniversity has pointed out the highly dubious nature of the testimonies of former “comfort women.”
An effort to confuse the issue is the intentional mix-up of “Conscripted labor” and Comfort Station prostitution, as clearly manifested in the name “Korean Council for Women Drafted for Sexual Slavery by Japan,” or “Korean Council,” a fanatical Korean activist group with a zeal for disparaging Japan. Conscripted labor was merely assignment to industrial work within either Japan or Korea—and not prostitution. No law or regulation either permitted or mandated overseas prostitution. Therefore, the name of this particular Korean activist group is fraudulent, designed to sow falsehood.
One of the former comfort women Professor C. Sarah Soh interviewed at a “House of Sharing” told her that “80 percent of South Korean comfort women survivors had been prostitutes…” However, the Korean Council declined to include her testimonial in its multivolume series of collections of survivors’ testimonials. (p.97, The Comfort Women by C. Sarah Soh, Chicago Press)
Given these facts, how can you be so sure that former comfort women are not making false allegation without examining whether they are telling the truth or not?
The combined evidence, including newspaper articles published during the Korea-Japan Annexation era and “Report No. 49: Japanese Prisoners of War Interrogation on Prostitution” prepared by Unites States Office of War Information, entitle Japan and the Japanese people to a presumption of innocence until proven otherwise.
Nonetheless, the current Committee claims that “some comfort women have died without obtaining an official unequivocal responsibility by the State party for the serious human rights violations that they suffered” and urged “the State party to provide full and effective redress and reparation, including compensation, satisfaction, official apologies and rehabilitative services.”
Does this not constitute a modern-day lynching?
Has the United Nations ever “provided full and effective redress and reparation, including compensation, satisfaction, official apologies and rehabilitative services” to Korean comfort women (Yungcon-ju) forcibly mobilized to provide sexual services for U.N. military personnel, as Class V Supplies, during the 1950-53 Korean War?
Inaction by the UN, a champion of human rights, on flagrant violations of human rights is the apex of hypocrisy. Perhaps the real name of the current Committee is the “Committee to Promote Discrimination against the Japanese Race.”
In addition, we cannot overlook the comment in Paragraph 28 on Japan’s recent bilateral agreement with the Republic of Korea, that it “did not take a victim-centered approach.”
What, in fact, are the demands of the former “comfort women” living in the House of Sharing? They demand that “Prime Minister Abe or current Emperor Akihito come to the House of Sharing to kneel down and beg for their mercy.”
Who created these monsters with over-inflated egos? The responsibility squarely rests with your colleagues, those who disregard historical facts and ignore the rights of women and children suffering today in war-torn countries, who spend all of their time writing pure nonsense merely for the sheer joy of chastising the good people of Japan.
We consider that the current Committee’s recommendations are disrespectful to the nation and people of Japan and we Japanese have absolutely no intention on succumbing to the bizarre and uncouth demands of so called former “comfort women”.
COMMENTARY / JAPAN Challenging the ’20 American historians’
BY EIJI YAMASHITA (a professor emeritus at Osaka City University)
I organized “the 50 Japanese academics’ rebuttal of the 20 American historians’ statement,” which was announced last September and published in the December issue of Perspectives on History of the American Historical Association (AHA). This is the same periodical that published the 20 American historians’ statement last March. Our rebuttal was reported on in the Dec. 10 edition of The Japan Times and the December issue of Inside Higher Ed, an e-magazine on education based in Washington. I would like to take this opportunity to clarify the main aim of our rebuttal.
We said the 20 American historians would never find a single Japanese academician with whom they could stand, even though the title of their statement was “Standing with historians of Japan,” because there are at least eight factual mistakes in 26 lines about “comfort women” in the McGraw-Hill textbook at issue. Furthermore, we questioned their fairness since their statement had no reference to the report by the Interagency Working Group in the United States in 2007.
However, a more important reason for why we wrote the rebuttal is that we were concerned about the 20 American historians’ basic stance as scholars and educators, beyond the immediate comfort women issue. We were confident that our arguments could lead to better education for American youths, and hence were inherently beneficial to the U.S. as well as to the rest of the world in the longer perspective.
I think our concern was right. Several scholars, such as professor Alexis Dudden (University of Connecticut), professor Andrew Gordon (Harvard University) and others out of the 20 American historians were interviewed by The Japan Times or Inside Higher Ed, but none of them seemed to be worried about the education of young Americans. Moreover, it seems to me that American historians are still refusing to address the major factual errors in the McGraw-Hill history textbook.
Many English-language media outlets, including The Japan Times, refer to the comfort women as “sex slaves.” But such terminology is factually incorrect and runs counter to the Japanese government’s position. I hereby introduce the latest two examples. On Jan. 18, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe replied to a question raised by Upper House member Kyoko Nakayama in the Upper House Budget Committee that the phrases “sex slaves” and “200,000 comfort women” run counter to the facts. Moreover, on Feb. 16 Deputy Foreign Minister Shinsuke Sugiyama replied to a question raised by the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in Geneva that there was no evidence proving the forcible removal of comfort women from their homes by the Japanese military and government authorities.
There is a widespread misunderstanding among the Western world that the Abe administration is somehow suppressing the media. It seems to us that the situation is precisely the opposite. In fact, the reach of the Abe administration’s efforts is rather limited by both the domestic and foreign media. Japan is among the highest ranked countries in the world in terms of freedom of speech. On the contrary, freedom of speech in the U.S. is obviously lower than that of Western European countries or Japan, because there are so many social taboos there. To take just one prominent example out of many, the U.S. government actively oppresses denunciations by former governmental staff members. Given all this, it would seem that Americans are not in a position to lecture other mature democracies on the finer points of freedom of speech. Instead, the 20 American historians should be more concerned about the free speech situation within their own country.
Upon its commencement in October 1998, the research objective of the IWG Report was limited to Nazi war crimes. Thereafter, though, Japanese Imperial government records were added to the objectives of the IWG Report in December 2000 in response to a request from the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia, a group led by people of Chinese descent based in San Francisco. After very extensive research lasting seven years, the IWG could not find any documentation to show that the Japanese government committed war crimes with respect to the comfort women. In the IWG Final Report to the U.S. Congress, a document stretching 155 pages, there is no language clearly indicating that any record of Japanese war crimes vis-a-vis comfort women had been uncovered. Instead, the report contains reams of unimportant passages, presumably with the aim of camouflaging an inconvenient truth.
But despite no evidence of war crimes by the Japanese government in the IWG Report to the U.S. Congress, on July 30, 2007, the U.S. Congress still passed House Resolution 121 on the comfort women, demanding that the Japanese government apologize for “crimes” for which no evidence had been produced. The whole process in the U.S. Congress at that time was extremely unfair — or worse — to Japan.
Today, American fairness is in serious question almost everywhere in the world, although most Americans may not know this or do not wish to know. This broad lack of trust in American fairness is one of the major factors in the failure of American foreign policy on so many fronts in the past decades. Under such circumstances, is it wise for the U.S. to show apparent unfairness to the Japanese public, too, especially given that Japan is one of the closest American allies in the world? If the U.S. wishes to see its foreign policy succeed, it should begin with a reassessment of its fundamental fairness. The safety of Americans and of the rest of the world depends on it.
It is often said that we cannot acquire a clear picture of any given era of history until at least a century has elapsed. Since we are now 71 years past the end of World War II, it is natural that new evidence or interpretations will emerge in the years to come. Not only newly found historical facts but also new historical interpretations should be respected and subjected to academic discussion and debate. Incidentally, this year marks the 102nd anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, but we still lack a coherent historical evaluation of even that conflict.
And yet, these same Americans who have striven to fashion a consensus regardless of where the evidence leads them are quick to call us revisionists. But isn’t it always important for open-minded scholars to seek revisions when they are appropriate? Those who cry “revisionism” are unscientific; they do not behave like intellectuals. Perhaps it is time for us to return the favor and label them the “bigoted old guard.”
On this note, it is also important for us to begin to discuss the meaning of the latest world war, the Cold War, particularly in connection with World War II. It is indispensable to correctly recognize why the Cold War began soon after the end of World War II in order to clarify the characteristics of the “hot war.” It is also very important to review how we in the free world won the Cold War.
Finally, to return to our original point, McGraw-Hill Education in New York should sincerely address the major factual defects in its history textbook for the future generation of the U.S. and the rest of the world as well.
【 コラム 著者 ミロスラフ・マリノフ(Miroslav Marinov) 】
カナダ在住のライター・フリーランスジャーナリスト。ブルガリア出身。ソフィア大学哲学科を卒業後、ブルガリア科学アカデミー哲学研究所にて博士課程修了。北米の政治を中心に執筆活動中。
近著は Lynched:The Media War against Rob Ford
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★ 英語版 Bokov Family ENGLISH PDF
ブルガリア共産党に対する徹底した忠誠心を表明し続けたゲオルギは、地元の党委員会で短期間働いた後、1946年にプラウダのブルガリア版と言える共産党機関紙（Rabotnichesko Delo (Workers’ Action)）に職を得ることができた。ジャーナリストとして相応しくない経歴であったにもかかわらず、ゲオルギは1958年には党機関紙の編集長となり、更には1960年、ブルガリアのジャーナリスト労働組合委員長に就任し1976年までの16年間その役職を務めた。また、ブルガリア共産党中央委員会のメンバーにも選出された。しかし、ゲオルギは1976年に突然全ての党役職を解任され、早期退職をしてしまった。その理由は、未だに明らかにされていない。
イリナがユネスコの事務局長として選出された後のことであるが、アメリカン・スペクテイター誌(The American Spectator)が、1980年にブルガリアから亡命した元外交官から聞いた話としてイリナのニューヨーク駐在時代のスキャンダルを暴露している。その元外交官は、イリナは筋金入りの共産党路線のプロモーターではあったが、彼女の行動は「優れた」共産党員の倫理からは程遠いものだったと回想していた。当時、イリナは最初の夫であるジャーナリストのルブミア・コラロフ(Lyubomir Kolarov)と一緒に暮らしていたが、夫が大酒飲みだったために二人の関係はうまくいっていなかった。そのうえ、イリナは同僚の外交官カリン・ミトルフ(Kalin Mitrev)と密かに付き合い始めていたのである。アメリカン・スペクテイター誌に掲載された記事は、イリナとカリン・ミトルフの不倫騒動を面白おかしく次のように述べている。
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参考資料: http://www.24chasa.bg/Article.asp?ArticleId=236668
Бокови – от “Работническо дело” до ЮНЕСКО (The Bokov Family – from Rabotnichesko Delo to UNESCO)
http://www.blitz.bg/article/26650
Майката на Георги Боков убила баба на булевард (Georgi Bokov’s Mother Killed an Old Woman on a Boulevard)
http://www.168chasa.bg/Article/1007325
Георги Боков не се виждал с родителите си, искали да се откажат от него (Georgi Bokov Had no Communications with His Parents, They Wanted to Abandon Him)
http://spectator.org/articles/40776/familiar-new-face-unesco
A Familiar “New Face” at UNESCO: A former colleague recalls the Bulgarian ex-Communist recently named, with Obama administration backing, to head this key UN agency, by Rossen Vassilev
