Tag Archives: Michael Yon

What is “comfort women” denialism? Holocaust denial and “comfort women” denial

When confronted, “comfort women” deniers like Tony Marano often attempt to deflect the label “denier” by arguing that they do not “deny the existence of comfort women.”

But like “Holocaust denial,” the phrase “comfort women denial” refers not just to the complete denial of the existence of “comfort women” altogether, but also to the denial of important aspects of the historical events that are established as facts. A casual look at the claims made by known Holocaust deniers reveal eerie similarities between Holocaust denial and “comfort women” denial (and this comparison between denialisms stands even if, as some contend, two atrocities themselves should not be compared to each other).

Mark Weber, the long-time director of the Holocaust denial organization Institute for Historical Review has said in a 1992 interview:

If by “holocaust” you mean the political persecution of Jews, some scattered killings, if yo mean a cruel thing that happened, no one denies that. But if one says that the “holocaust” means the systematic extermination of six to eight million Jews in concentration camps, that’s what we think there’s no evidence for.”

The IHR also posted on its website the following until at least 2009:

The Institute does not “deny the Holocaust.” Every responsible scholar of twentieth century history acknowledges the great catastrophe that befell European Jewry during World War II. All the same, the IHR has published detailed books and numerous probing essays that call into question aspects of the orthodox Holocaust extermination story, and highlight specific Holocaust exaggerations and falsehoods. IHR publications have devoted considerable attention to this issue because it plays an enormously significant role in the cultural and political life of America and much of the world. As a number of Jewish scholars have acknowledged, the “Holocaust” campaign is a major weapon in the Jewish-Zionist arsenal. It is used to justify otherwise unjustifiable Israeli policies, and to extort enormous sums of money, especially from European countries and companies.

Another denier, Christian pastor Herman Otten wrote in an IHR publication:

There is no dispute over the fact that large numbers of Jews were deported to concentration camps and ghettos, or that many Jews died or were killed during World War II. Revisionist scholars have presented evidence, which “exterminationists” have not been able to refute, showing that there was no German program to exterminate Europe’s Jews, and that the estimate of six million Jewish wartime dead is an irresponsible exaggeration.

“Comfort women” deniers frequently make similar arguments denying important aspects of the historical consensus.

The author does not deny the occurrence of isolated cases such as the Semarang Incident in the Dutch East Indies in which Ms. Jan Ruff O’Herne was involved. It was an apparent “war crime” in Indonesia committed by military personnel. […] However, this was an isolated case and should not be used to characterize or to generalize the state-managed Comfort Women System.
Hiromichi Moteki, Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact (Source)

It is more than funny how some strident activists in the US are depicting me as “Comfort girls denier”. That’s hilarious. Nobody in Japan denies them OMG! (((o(*゚▽゚*)o))) Neither do I.
Yujiro Taniyama, film producer of Scottsboro Girls (Source)

These guys on the photo are saying “there was no “military” comfort women forced by Japanese army but not denying the existence of the comfort women.
Shunichi Fujiki, Texas Daddy Japan Secretariat (using pseudonym, Source)

I am labeled “comfort women denier,” but it should be “comfort women = sex slaves” denier to be accurate. Language must be used precisely. False premises lead to confused arguments.
Kiyoshi Hosoya, Japan Family Values Society (translated from Japanese, Source)

Similarities between Holocaust denial and “comfort women” denial do not end here. For example, they both often promote conspiracy theories that those who are preserving historical memory are operating under nefarious geopolitical or financial motives:

As a number of Jewish scholars have acknowledged, the “Holocaust” campaign is a major weapon in the Jewish-Zionist arsenal. It is used to justify otherwise unjustifiable Israeli policies, and to extort enormous sums of money, especially from European countries and companies.
– Institute for Historical Review (Source)

It’s important to note that the countries that are making a big fuss over this are China and South Korea […] This is not about human rights or sex-slavery. This is about politics, money, and racism towards Japanese. In other words, this issue is a geopolitical tool that China uses to attack Japan.
Michael Yon, “journalist” (Source)

The Comfort Women Mafia has been successful in placing plaques and a statue memorializing their version of the Comfort Women story in communities all across the United States. Why? […] Very simple: The Comfort Women Mafia’s one area of motivation is to bash Japan. Their goal is to tarnish the image of Japan among the populace in the USA.
Tony Marano, video blogger (Source)

There are many other similarities, but that is not really the point here. The point we are trying to make is that “comfort women” deniers are those who deny important aspects of established historical facts about the Japanese military “comfort women” system, just like Holocaust deniers are those who deny important aspects of established historical facts about the Holocaust, whether or not they concede that the Holocaust may have taen place in some form.

“Comfort women” denier Michael Yon attacks facts without providing any counter-arguments or evidences

“Journalist” and “Comfort women” denier Michael Yon posted a link to our article, “Debunking the Japanese ‘Comfort Women’ Denier Talking Points” on his blog and on his Facebook page, suggesting that “feminists” are now forced to respond to specific “facts,” presumably because of Mr. Yon’s work exposing the “lies” of “comfort women.”

Mr. Yon writes:

The sex slavery revisionists are now reacting to facts, rather than conducting their blind assaults against Japan and our alliance. The feminists know that the sex slavery narrative is a grand fabrication. The feminists are getting cornered up. Their arguments are collapsing and they know it.

It is curious that Mr. Yon thinks that our article represents a new development in the decades-old debate over “comfort women.” In reality, we merely summarized what actual historians have been saying for many years, and is common knowledge among people who are working toward redress for the victims and survivors of Japanese military “comfort women” system.

If our article seemed like a new development, it is because Mr. Yon is ignorant about the work of Japanese historians and the hundreds of historical documents that they have studied and analyzed. It is understandable that Mr. Yon is completely clueless about the topic because he does not speak or read Japanese, but perhaps he needs to realize that and get out of the business of propagating historical revisionism.

It is telling that while Mr. Yon claims that feminists’ “arguments are collapsing,” he does not dispute or refute any of the facts we presented. Come on, Mr. Yon, give us concrete rebuttal on any and all of the facts we raise! You can’t, can you?

Does 1944 U.S. Military Report Prove “Comfort Women” Were “Just Prostitutes”?

When Japanese politicians visited Glendale and tried to “convert” Japanese American leaders who had supported the city’s peace memorial dedicated to the victims of Japanese “comfort women” system of enforced military prostitution, the politicians presented a copy of a U.S. military report from 1944 that they believed would “prove” their position that “comfort women” were simply prostitutes who followed Japanese military for business. Their American apologists Tony Marano (a.k.a. “Texas Daddy”) and Michael Yon both cited the same document when they descended on our facebook page to argue the same thing. Clearly, they view this U.S. report as their strongest evidence absolving Japanese military of wrongdoings.

The report is based on interviews with 20 Korean “comfort women” as well as two Japanese civilian “house masters” held by the U.S. military as prisoners of war in Burma. Because it was written by the U.S. Army that was still fighting against the Japanese Empire at the time, right-wing nationalists argue, it cannot be challenged as being biased in favor of Japan. Unfortunately, however, both Japanese and American military can still be biased against Koreans or women, and especially against Korean “comfort women.”

POW Report No. 49 (1st page)

Indeed, the report does contain passages that seem to uphold right-wing nationalists’ view that “comfort women” were prostitutes making good money doing business with the Japanese military. The right-wing nationalists selectively quote passages such as “a comfort girl is nothing more than a prostitute or ‘professional camp follower’ attached to the Japanese Army for the benefit of the soldiers,” or “they lived in near luxury… they had plenty of money.”

The right-wing nationalists cannot help also quoting parts of the document that do not actually help their argument that the author was an objective third party, but are too pleasurable for them to ignore. For example, they like to quote the report’s description of Korean “comfort women” as “uneducated, childish, whimsical, and selfish” and “not pretty either by Japanese or Caucasian standards” (this is why Marano decided to place a paper bag over the Glendale memorial, according to his own article published in Japan). While Japanese nationalists may be quoting these passages to amuse their racist and sexist selves, they clearly show that the author’s prejudice toward Korean “comfort women.”

Some of the Japanese right-wing nationalists cite this report as if it is a newly uncovered historical evidence, but it has been known among scholars of “comfort women” for more than 20 years. In fact, it was part of the supporting documents compiled by the Japanese government when then-Cabinet Minister Yohei Kono released the famous statement in 1993 in which Japanese government acknowledged responsibility for its direct involvement in the trafficking and exploitation of “comfort women” for the first time. While right-wing nationalists believe the report to be the “silver bullet” proving their case, scholars actually consider it one of many documents that prove Japan’s culpability.

Right-wing nationalists are correct that the U.S. military report describes a “comfort woman (girl)” as “nothing more than a prostitute.” But in the next paragraph, the report details how “comfort women” were taken from Korea under false pretense (offer of a good job) and placed in a situation that they could not escape from due to debt. Also according to the report, most “comfort women” were never involved in prostitution prior to arriving at Japanese military “comfort stations,” and many were considered “underage” under the International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children of 1921, which Japan had signed.

“House masters” took 50-60% of the fees paid by Japanese soldiers, depending on the amount of money the women owed. Women also had to purchase food and other necessities from the house masters, which “made life very difficult for the girls” because house masters often charged excessively high prices for these necessities. We find these descriptions believable because they are very similar to how contemporary human trafficking cases look like.

The report also states that women had the freedom to refuse customers, for example when a soldier was extremely drunk. But even if it were true, they obviously did not have the freedom to refuse the “job” altogether and leave because they were taken far away from home in a foreign land and had to repay their debt, which was made difficult by the fact that they had to pay excessive prices for food and other necessities in order to survive.

To understand why the report seems to contain such contradictory information (did “comfort women” lived in near luxury, or had difficult life due to economic exploitation?), we need to understand the context and purpose of the report itself. The report’s author is Alex Yorichi, a Japanese American soldier working for the U.S. Army’s Office of War Information, Psychological Warfare Team. Yorichi was tasked with finding out the effectiveness of Japanese-language leaflets that the Psychological Warfare Team had distributed in Japanese-occupied territories in Burma, and interrogated “comfort women” and their “house masters” as part of that investigation.

In other words, it was never Yorichi’s intention to investigate the “comfort women” system itself. As such, he simply recorded testimonies of the “comfort women” and their “house masters” without verifying any particular claim about the “comfort women” system. Because the interview was likely conducted in Japanese (after all, the unit was interviewing Japanese prisoners of war), and many Korean “comfort women” did not receive Japanese education (most “comfort women” could not read the propaganda leaflets distributed by Yorichi’s colleagues), it would be natural to assume that the voices of the two Japanese “house masters” are disproportionately represented over the voices of Korean “comfort women” in the final report. Even then, the report details policies, structures, prices, and schedules at “comfort stations” that clearly prove the active involvement of Japanese military in managing or administering the everyday operation of “comfort stations.”

A copy of the U.S. military report is available for download here.