I don’t know what to make of this. There’s probably more going on here than meets the eye, but this story is worth bringing up if only because it appeared in the Chosun Ilbo, a South Korean newspaper.

Here’s the first sentence in an English language article titled, Military Critic Reaps Whirlwind with Comfort Women Claims:

The controversial military commentator Ji Man-won has come under fire again after saying that claims by some women to have been drafted into sexual slavery as “comfort women” by the Japanese Army were fraudulent.

He then goes on to say that only 20% of the comfort women were forcibly conscripted into the Japanese army during the war. Here’s the rest of the story in English.

The Japanese version of the article adds some information. That source reports Ji has classified comfort women into three groups. The first are the military comfort women. The second group are called “jugun comfort women” in Japanese. In this context, the term “jugun” roughly translates to camp follower. The third group are called “teishintai“.

This third group requires some explanation. It literally means volunteer corps. The term was used to refer to Japanese women at home who volunteered to work in factories and other locations for the war effort. At first they were simply volunteers, but they were given legal status in 1943, and by 1944, when the situation in Japan deteriorated, they were conscripted. The name “volunteer” was kept, but the Japanese have always had a taste for euphemism, as the term “comfort women” itself indicates.

In Korea, they seem not to have been volunteers at all. The female “volunteer corps” in Korea were conscripted into the war effort at the same time as the Japanese women. Some of these women were as young as 12 years old. One Japanese language website quotes a newspaper report from 1992 that states school records indicate girls aged 12-14 were removed from one school and taken to Toyama Prefecture as laborers. One of the students testified they had to work 14 hours a day with insufficient food. (It is unlikely that Japanese women working in factories had sufficient food at that time, either.) The photograph of these female laborers is taken from this website.

Thus, if I understand this correctly, Ji is stating that South Korean authorities are lumping comfort women, prostitutes, and conscripted female laborers into the category of comfort women, and that the actual comfort women were just 20% of this total.

The Japanese report also includes the information that Ji plans to write three articles. One is titled, “The Shame of South Korea: End the Comfort Woman Game”. Here’s the link in Japanese.

As you can imagine, many South Koreans are not happy with Mr. Ji. One group has threatened legal action, and he’s probably set himself up as a target for flaming arrows, too.

The Choson Ilbo calls Ji controversial, so there’s no telling from this distance what the rest of his agenda is, and I also don’t know the particular slant of the Choson Ilbo. But reporting the issue in itself is important: if Ji is a moonbat, the faster he’s exposed the better, and if he’s not, it’s worth knowing about the internal debate in South Korean society.