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What true legal mind tells us is ...
Posted in AtsushiEno in imeem on Mar 12, 2007 at 9:05 PM

This guy - one of very popular economists in Japan, talking much about open source, and media, has lots of imprtant posts on his blog - is recently extraordinary interested in recent American movement on "Ianfu" issue:
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/ikedanobuo/e/ab4e9f4e372098e706c47ba5c5d032a2

In this post he points out that
- all LA Times, Washington Post and Economist affirm that the existence of comfort women is the historical truth, while there is actually no evidence,
- all of those posts says 200,000 women, which seems from the translation of Yoshiaki Yoshimi's literature (吉見義明), while there were only 170,000 official (probably "registered" here) women, and
- Even Yoshiaki Yoshimi admits that there is no evidence for the "fact" that the army brought them by force.

... and a lot of misled information found in American resources.

Also:
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/ikedanobuo/e/56c1b3873ea7cf5ad9680d6cbf754a9e

He points out that Wikipedia has/had a lot of incorrect information on this issue. For example some quotes are from the translation of Seiji Yoshida's book (in Japanese 吉田清治, which was incorrectly written as Kiyosada Yoshida), while Yoshida himself admitted that the content he wrote was fiction.

The reason why this kind of misunderstanding happened is because there are lots of non-English resources on this matter (since most of those who has such resources primarily translated them into Asian languages for their "frontline"). Nobuo Ikeda (the author of the blog) represents this situation as "the American selfish nationalism which respects only English literature".

What is problematic Ikeda points out is that Abe the prime minister should not admit something without evidence. Ikeda is not saying that he denies every kind of responsibility that the goverment has. It is very important to exactly scope *what* should be condemned. And more importantly, it should be evidence-based.

There are some evident things, like the army "helped" transporting those who called "ianfu". Some of them were brought in reflection to the payments to their parents, so the women themselves were likely to have felt "forced". That is force by non-government entities.

That is (part of) what we (those who learned laws) say "legal mind".

This story reminded me another American nationalism expressed in "Moyashimon" (もやしもん), a comic book about alcohol and bacteria. The author strongly criticized the fact that American scientists keep saying that Aspergillus oryzae, which is used to ferment sake, is harmful. It used to be regarded as identical to harmful Aspergillus flaves in the most authoritative book "the Aspergillus", and thus regarded as harmful. According to the comic, American scientists do not admit their fault even after Fennell, the inherited author of that book, admited the fault.

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