Customer Reviews

Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military : Includes New United Nations Human Rights Report (Science and Human Rights Series, 1)

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This is a painful book to read. Everytime I heard the victims' voice I trembled. But the review from Hiromo is THE MOST shockingly inhumane voice/action since the end of the war - which according to her didn't kill millions, nor did it raped tens of thousands, angered a whole Asia and its people for the past half century. The more denial of the unthinkable crime, the longer it takes to forgive. I am the third generation of Japanese war victim and I am shooting a film about comfort woman, or the denial of it, right this moment. I don't want my grandchild to fight for the same justice 50 years later, and you may not want your grandchild to defend it as you did on all major Amazon Japanese war crime books, which by the way, thanks to you, now I know what books to get for my film research.

Shame for those of you who found all the denial reviews "useful", while considered all the praise ones "Not helpful". The other day at my library in San Francisco one of you people stole all my comfort women topic books but left the rest untouched. COMFORT WOMEN SPEAK is one of them. So for serious reader, definitely read this book and see what the "patriotic Japanese" are defending for/or scared of.

Another book to help you understand the issue in depth is YUKI TANAKA's Japan's Comfort Women. It tackles the US occupation and their own use of the "comfort station" system. Again, just like to deny that Atomic Bombing in Hiroshima ever happened, Japanese women never raped by Allies soldiers or the ordinary Japanese don't deserve peace, dignity and fairness would be unthinkable, to deny the value of voices from the last victims of the War is to deprieve the right to redemption of young Japanese generations to come.

This

Stark and moving. The sheer numbers of women dragged into sex slavery, the extreme youth of many, and the brutality of their experience... That a handful of courageous women were allowed to tell their story is the first step to justice for the comfort women. It demands our attention.

I'm curious, what in Japanese society prompted them to establish such an "institution"? Even today, Japanese sex culture is problematic, to say the least, with its manga and Lolita fetish.

The sad thing is the American government has opposed the suit against Japan brought by some comfort women in the California courts, based on what it claims is the settlement of all claims in the 1951 treaty. I'll bet no Koreans and Filipinos were represented there.

The reviewer below should be ashamed at his atrocity denial. Elsewhere on Amazon he denies the Nanking incident. Civilized people would not tolerate such unreconstructed behavior from a German, and the same standard should apply to Japanese.

Contrary to Hiromi's assertions, the Japanese government apologized not to save Korean face, but its own. Imagine the national shame if this controversy kept appearing in the headlines, and Japan had to pay reparations. Ishihara is hardly a bleeding-heart liberal, if he was party to such concessions the truth must have been damning.

"They had picnic, sports-day, fun evening and diner [sic] party with Japanese soldiers"? This lame attempt at justification makes me ill. He doesn't refute the kidnapping, the 11-year-old sex slaves, nor the frequency of debasement these women faced.

"...there are unbelievable amount of propaganda spreaded by so-called anti-Japanese Japanese out there." So if a person questions the actions of his government, past or present, we should not believe him? I can see Hiromi would have made a good life during the fascist era. False patriotism - the last refuge of a scoundrel.

Comfort Women is one of the most heinous crimes committed by Imperial Japan, and yet it does not receive the international scrutiny and condemnation that it rightly deserves. This book goes a long way toward exposing the horrific nature of Imperial Japan's crimes through chilling personal accounts.

My only reservation with this book is that I also have read the Korean version of the testimonies by many of these women, and the English versions appear to be heavily abridged. I am not sure why that was done.

Having lived in Japan for twenty-three years, I have seen too much
whitewashing and denial by the Japanese government whenever there's any
attempt by outside scholars or journalists to report on wartime atrocities
carried out by the Japanese Imperial Army against its former colonial or
imperial subjects. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe prevented Japan's national
television station NHK from broadcasting even a one-hour documentary about
the heinous comfort stations and Japan's brutal wartime system of sex
slavery and serial rape. The sex slaves were twice victimized. First by
Japanese soldiers in the field who looked upon these enslaved women and children as nothing more than "masturbation machines", the diseased or broken "machines" were taken out and disposed of with a gunshot to the head. After Japan's half-hearted surrender in l945, the thousands of
'liberated' sex slaves were victimized again by the total whitewashing or denial of these atrocities by postwar Japan. Shinzo Abe and his ilk are no better than those Europeans who deny the Holocaust when they deceitfully suggest that the women forced into Japan's wartime hell of sex slavery were just "common prostitutes", which I have heard in Japan a number of times. Abe is certainly just a very common politician, bought
and paid for. Part of the problem has also been America's Eurocentric
focus for far too long. The crimes against these former sex slaves were
all but ignored during the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal in the late l940's.
Justice delayed is justice denied. Thankfully the U.S. House of Representatives saw fit to offer the last surviving sex slaves some measure of justice by passing the sex slave Congressional Resolution this
past week (Aug. 1st, 2007). The Resolution soundly condemns Japan's
wartime involvement in mass serial rape and sex slavery on a scale that
has never before been seen in the annals of mankind's inhumanity. The
Resolution states in no uncertain terms that Japan must make a very formal apology to the last surviving sex slaves for the suffering and
inhumane brutality inflicted upon them during the long war years (Japan
began invading Asia in l931!). And most importantly, the Resolution wants
Japan to include accurate accounts of the sex slave atrocities in the
nation's Ministry of Education high school history textbooks. High school students in Japan learn little or nothing about WWII, except
Hiroshima. This is by design. The government wants all Japanese to think
of themselves as victims of "white man's colonialism" and that Japan
fought WWII to "liberate" all of Asia from the yoke of western imperialism. Korea, China, the Philippines, Malayasia, Indonesia, and
even Vietnam are fed up with Japan's revisionist lies and self-serving
distortions. I am a former English teacher at Japan's elite Waseda University. Students at that school admitted to me that they never learn
about "greater East Asian War" because there is no time during the academic year to include such information on the university entrance exams! Japanese professors at both Tokyo University and Asia University
completely deny the Rape of Nanking as just communist Chinese propaganda.
Many Japanese prefer the revisionist version of WWII and feel that this
is the best way to deal with the past. The rest of Asia is fed up.
And many Americans too with such denials. The same Japanese leaders
who deny the atrocities at Nanking or the suffering of the sex slaves
enjoy paying homage to 14 Class A war criminals, including Tojo Hideki, at Tokyo's now infamous Yasukuni Shrine. Please read the
book "Comfort Women Speak". Just as survivors of the Holocaust have given
testimony to the world so that the world will know and never forget, so
we owe it to the victims of Japanese wartime racism and aggression to
never forget their "season in hell" either. Read also "Silence Broken:
the Korean Comfort Women". The euphemism "comfort woman" was introduced
by the Japanese to avoid dealing in an intellectually honest way with the
horrors of sex slavery, prison camps, and serial rape. Based on this sort of deceitful historiography, Auschwitz concentration camp was just a "holiday work camp".
The Japanese love to dissemble and lie about past atrocities. But the world is beginning to wake up to the truth. I wrote a letter to Sen.
Edward Kennedy in l987 to protest Japan's whitewashing of the sex slave
atrocities. Finally after twenty years the U.S. government responded.
Read "Comfort Women Speak" and find out why Mike Honda urged his fellow
Congressional representatives to pass the resolution. In time even the
Japanese might see the wisdom of such a resolution. Review by Naomi's husband, Robert McKinney.

It is true that the Secretary-General of the Cabinet of Japan, Yohei Kono, admitted that there were evidences that show the Japanese Army kidnapped women to force them into "sex-slaves" and apologized to the ex-comfort women. Nevertheless, it is also true that, in fact, Kono had no evidences that substantiate the accusation and the ex-comfort women were never cross-examined. Later, the vice-Secretary-General, Nobuo Ishihara, admitted to a journalist that there was a "deal" between the South Korean government and the Japanese government to make the apology for saving South Korea's face so afterwards South Korean would never demand compensations as the government.
Many Japanese scholars and researchers on this issue examined the ex-comfort women's testimonies and concluded that none of them were reliable and substantiated.
Let us look into other testimonies made by comfort women and recorded by the U.S. force. Those women's photo is shown in this book at the page opposite of "contents".
They confided in those American soldiers that they lived comparatively "luxurious" lives thanks to the good money the Japanese soldiers paid for the "comfort" they provided. They had enough money to go to shopping in larger cities and the Japanese always gave them presents. They had picnic, sports-day, fun evening and diner party with Japanese soldiers. The Japanese Army tightly controlled traders who run the comfort stations so that the women would never be physically or financially abused.
This document is found in the book called "Documents of the Comfort Women" edited by Yoshiaki Yoshimi, a leading proponent of the accusation of kidnapping and forcing those women to the sex-slave state by the Japanese Army. On the contrary to the accusation, The women were paid three times more of average Japanese soldiers and some of them went home after working for a few years and built a big house. Most Japanese soldiers were always thankful to them. Some even married to the comfort women. However different those facts are from what you had believed, it is true and, actually, well documented.
Still, you may think the report of Ms. Radhika Coomaraswamy to the United Nations in this book (p112) authentic, but it is based on those invalid testimonies and a sole testimony of an ex-Japanese soldier, Seiji Yoshida who claimed that he was working in woman hunt operations which was later debunked and he publicly admitted it was a lie. Another book Ms. Coomaraswamy relied on is G.Hicks's "Comfort Women" which had already debunked by many scholars and researchers. Furthermore, Ms. Coomaraswamy's academic consultant is above-mentioned Yoshiaki Yoshimi, who also debunked and admitted in a TV debate programme that he had no evidences at all. So, now you know even a Special Rapporteur for the United Nations is not free of prejudice.
I urge everyone who are interested in this issue to know that there are unbelievable amount of propaganda spreaded by so-called anti-Japanese Japanese out there. And works of scholars are no exception.