These past few weeks, I have been highlighting Japan’s Holocaust in my posts and the atrocities it committed against the people under its Imperial rule from 1927-1945.
As a scholar of the Wehrmacht and the Third Reich, I am horrified by the extent of the mass-murder of the Japanese during the Second World War and how little is known in “educated” circles about what Hirohito, Tojo and Imperial Japan did while in power (Japan slaughtered at least 22 million people!!).
When I was a professor at Southern Methodist University, I would ask my students before the semester began basic questions about military history and the Nazi Holocaust.
Usually around 50% would get basic questions about the Shoah right and that Hitler murdered 6 million Jews and millions more Europeans (i.e, Gypsies, Homosexuals, Communists, Poles, Jehovah Witnesses, etc.).
However, almost none of my students ever got any of the questions about Japan right?
All they knew was that Japan attacked us at Pearl Harbor, but none of them knew about the Rape of Nanking, Unit 731, the massacre at Manila, the Bataan Death March, etc.
For today’s post, I wanted to share a chapter of human history that probably marks the high-water mark of atrocities committed against WOMEN—the Japanese “Comfort Women” system (institutionalized rape centers).
Just this past week, Harvard Law School professor, Mark Ramseyer, published an article saying that the Comfort Women were willing prostitutes in the service of the Empire of Japan! What?
How can a professor at Harvard say such idiotic things? While there were indeed a few Japanese prostitutes in these brothels, and/or, local women who were already professional prostitutes in the regions Japan took over, the vast majority, especially when one considers South Korean scholarship on this subject matter, were forced into these Japanese military brothels and sexually brutalized daily, and often, in the end, murdered. Here is a short history on this disturbing subject matter.
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