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英語版はこちら

抗議文

日付：2016年3月11日

発信：歴史の真実を伝える三者連合

宛先：国連人権委員会・女子差別撤廃委員会各位

 

件：第７回・第８回合同定期報告会・慰安婦に関する最終見解第28及び29項

 

残念なことに、上述の項の文章は極めて不快、傲慢であり、父祖に着せられた濡れ衣の汚名を雪がんとする我々の神聖な使命を踏みつけにする無礼そのものであると思料する。

 

第一に、これらの文章は、日本派遣団の長である杉山晋輔氏の発言についての貴委員会の見解を記載していない。次の文章は、貴委員会自身の「2016年2月16日付第1375回会議の概要記録」から引用した杉山氏の発言である。

 

「第36項

日本政府が1990年代に行った慰安婦問題に関する徹底調査では、日本の軍または官憲が婦女子を彼女らの母国から強制連行したという、広く信じられている事情を確認できるものはなかった。日本の小説家・吉田清治が1983年に表明した同じ趣旨の証言は論争を呼んだ挙句、日本の研究者により誤りであることが証明された。更に、日本の主要紙は、2014年、吉田の作り話しに大きく依拠した記事についての正誤表を発行し、読者に謝罪した。第二次大戦中、20万人の婦女子が慰安婦にされたとする日本の主要紙による主張を裏付ける証拠は存在しない。そのことは当該主要紙自身が認めている。その数字は、慰安婦として募集された女性の数と女子挺身隊として募集された女性の数とが合わさったものであろう。日本政府はまた、慰安婦が性奴隷に近いものであったする根拠なき主張を拒絶している。」

 

杉山氏の発言の後に貴委員会の１人が立ち上がり、「歴史は歴史です！」とヒステリックに叫んだ。多分、貴委員会のうち何人かは、歴史などどうでもよくて、日本の国家と民族に焼きごてで「強姦魔・人殺し」の烙印さえ押せれば満足なのであろう。

 

これを証明することが、既述の項が、1996年のクマラスワミ報告に対する我々の反論書について、貴委員会が何らの見解も記載していないことである。詳細は繰り返さないが、その大要は、日本の徹底調査に加えて、米国政府によって行われたIWG報告でも慰安婦の犯罪性を確認できるものは発見されず、韓国政府も強制連行を示す証拠を提示したことはない。元慰安婦らの証言はソウル大学の安ビョンジク教授が指摘するように極めて疑わしい、ということである。

 

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。

 

このような状況下で、元慰安婦が誣告をしていないと、その証言を検証することなしに、どうして確信を持てるのか。

 

これらの諸事情と、日韓併合時代に発行された新聞紙面および米軍情報戦争局作成の売春婦尋問報告49号を含む証拠の数々から、日本の国家と国民には推定無罪の権利が適用されるのである。

 

それでも貴委員会は、「何人かの慰安婦が、彼女らの苦しみが日本国による深刻な人権侵害であったとする日本国の明確な認知を受けられないまま死亡したこと」を遺憾とし、日本国が「賠償、満足、公式の謝罪、復帰サービスを含む有効かつ本格的な是正措置を講じる」よう求める。

 

これは現代の集団リンチではないか。

 

国連は、朝鮮戦争で第５補給品として国連軍兵士に性サービスをするよう強制動員された（「洋公主」と呼ばれる）朝鮮人慰安婦に対して、「賠償、満足、公式の謝罪、復帰サービスを含む有効かつ本格的な是正措置」を講じたことがあるか。

 

人権を専売特許にする国連が、このように人権をないがしろにするようでは、偽善のそしりは免れないであろう。貴委員会の本当の名前は「日本民族に対する差別推進委員会」であろう。

 

 

前述の項において、我々が見過ごすことのできないもう一つの文言は、最近の日本の韓国との二国間合意が「被害者中心のアプローチを充分に採用していない」というものである。

 

ナヌムの家の元慰安婦らが、日本に対して、どのような要求をしているのか。彼女らの要求は、「安倍首相または今上明仁天皇が、ナヌムの家に来所し、跪いて彼女らから許しを請う」というものだ。

 

このように増長慢した化け物を誰が創り出したのか。それは、歴史の事実を軽んじ、今の世界で戦争により疲弊した国々で苦しむ女性や子供らのことは無視して、日本の文明人をサデスィックに糾弾するため、朝から晩まで埒もないことを書くために時間を費やしている、あなた方とあなた方に類する人々だ。

 

貴委員会の要求及び勧告は、日本の国家と国民に対する侮辱である。我々日本人は、中世時代のような元慰安婦らのばかげた要求に屈する意思はない。

 

以上

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Japanese version 日本語版

Follow-up Information

of

Coalition of Three Parties for Communicating Historical Truth

for

CEDAW 63rd Session Japan

regarding

Comfort Women (Paragraphs 28 & 29)

of

the Concluding Observations

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Letter of Remonstration

 

Date: March 11, 2016

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 1375^th 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”.

 

Regards,

 

-End of the Letter-

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「慰安婦は性奴隷が社の公式見解と宣言」しているのがジャパンタイムズです。

そのジャパンタイムズがマグロウヒル社に抗議する50人の日本の学者を批判する記事を掲載しました。
2015.12.11
Fifty Japanese scholars attack McGraw-Hill, U.S. academics on ‘comfort women’ issue

これに反論する山下 英次氏（大阪市立大学）のコラム「Challenging the ’20 American historians’」がジャパンタイムズ2016.3.9付（ペーパー版3.10付）で掲載されましたのでご紹介します。

日本語版はこちらをクリック

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Japan　Times
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2016/03/09/commentary/japan-commentary/challenging-20-american-historians/#.VucbL5yLTIV

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.

(End)