Thread by @Matt_Twomey

This thread is dedicated to Kim Bok-dong, who was taken from her home in Korea at 14 and made a sex slave by the Japanese military. She was one of hundreds of thousands (estimates vary). She died Monday.
1/18
#comfortwomen #Japan #Korea #JapanTimes #mediacriticism #慰安婦

“On weekdays, I had to take 15 soldiers a day,” Ms. Kim once said. “On Saturdays and Sundays, it was more than 50. We were treated worse than beasts.”
2/18

Ms. Kim later became a leading voice in demanding reparations for wartime sex slaves that Japan euphemistically called "comfort women."
3/18

Japan has struggled to come to terms with its wartime abuses — forced labor, sex slaves, POW torture, and atrocities like the Nanjing massacre — at times making carefully measured concessions and acknowledgments, but rarely to the satisfaction of victims and survivors.
4/18

Central to Japan's coming to terms with its past is in how it has dealt with the language of wartime abuses. Rightwing influences have long pushed a soft-pedaling on the issues, through the use of terms like "comfort women."
5/18

Unfortunately, the newspaper where I used to work, @Japantimes, has fallen under the sway of that rightwing obfuscation.

Here's a Reuters story about that: reuters.com/article/us-jap… …
6/18

And here's the result: The whitewashed obituary of Kim Bok-dong that ran in The Japan Times. It is mostly taken from a Reuters wire story, but note the small yet insidious changes that JT editors made to the copy.
7/18

The Reuters copy: "At 93, Kim Bok-dong died as she had lived for many years: at the heart of the controversy over Japan’s use of forced labor in its wartime brothels."

The JT tweaks it: "... controversy over females pressed to serve in Japanese military wartime brothels."
8/18

The Reuters copy: "Kim was among the two dozen known surviving South Korean ‘comfort women’, a Japanese euphemism for women who were forced into prostitution and sexually abused at Japanese military brothels before and during World War Two."
9/18

The JT edit: "... a Japanese euphemism for women *who worked* in wartime military brothels. *They say* they were forced to provide sex to Japanese soldiers."
(asterisks mine)
10/18

More
Under this rightwing influence, the JT doesn't like to admit that women were "forced" or "sexually abused." The edit also suggests this is a matter still up for debate ("They say...") instead of an accepted historical fact (see the U.N. report et al.)
11/18

"They’re still saying we went there because we wanted to," Ms. Kim is quoted as saying two years ago. She was conscripted by occupying Japanese forces supposedly to work in a garment factory, and instead was made to sexually service soldiers. AT THE AGE OF 14.
12/18

Reuters' stylebook eschews the term "sex slaves" for its own reasons (bit.ly/2CWxzN2 ), though that term is perfectly serviceable in this case, and is used in The New York Times obituary of Ms. Kim, as it was used in a 1996 United Nations report on the issue.
13/18

This is no trivial matter. That is evidenced by the furious efforts by rightists in Japan to control the language about wartime abuses — in textbooks and newsrooms. This is part of a persistent rightward push in Japan, a movement that has now captured The Japan Times.
14/18

The JT is often seen as Japan's world-facing paper. Reuters notes its "outsize impact." But it's a small paper. The import of this editorial shift is more as an indicator of the persistent rightward march toward historical whitewashing and renewed militarism.
15/18

As atrocities are systematically obfuscated, we edge closer to repeating them. 16/18

Words mean things. "Slave" conveys force and brutality. And calling Japan's wartime sex slaves "comfort women" is like calling America's antebellum slaves "farmhands."

Check out the more detailed NYTimes obit of Kim Bok-dong: nytimes.com/2019/01/29/obi… …
17/18

By the way, I ❤️ Japan. I spent 9 fantastic years there, & made many great friends. I'm only troubled by this revisionism and rightward drift, the likes of which in the last century led to such horror and bloodshed. Choose #peace! 18/18

#comfortwomen #Japan #JapanTimes #慰安婦