Dr. Ick-Chong Ju, an economist from South Korea, who published the book “The Final Conclusion on the Comfort Women Issue” (Bungei Shunju), gave a lecture in Tokyo on March 15, saying that the discourse on “forced marriage” and “sex slavery” surrounding comfort women is “fabrication” and that he would like to hold Japanese and Korean researchers and activists “accountable for spreading falsehoods for about 30 years in one generation. He said that those who spread various fraudulent stories over a period of about 30 years and a generation should be held responsible for their actions.
In her lecture, Zhu pointed out that Korean women under Japanese colonial rule who went to comfort stations on the Chinese front required a parental consent form, a copy of their family register, a certificate of seal impression, and other documents that could not be issued without the consent of their families. He explained that abduction and physical force-feeding were “not really possible.
He further explained that comfort women were “indentured laborers” who earned 50-60% of their sales after repaying their advance, that there were comfort women who had saved 100-200 million yen in today’s value, and that they had returned to Korea before the war ended. The theory of sexual slavery is not a viable one,” he said.
Zhu also explained that the comfort women issue “exploded” when the Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported the testimony of a man named Seiji Yoshida, who claimed to have “hunted comfort women” on the South Korean island of Jeju, and that Asahi “finally corrected” its reporting of this story in 2014. He then mentioned the names of Yoshiaki Yoshimi, a professor emeritus at Chuo University, and Etsuro Totsuka, a lawyer, as people who spread the theory of forced marriage and sexual slavery, and asked, “Asahi has admitted its past mistakes, but can they admit mistakes in their past statements and claims?
