English post follows after the Japanese message.
近年では、San Francisco State Uの教授でご自身が韓国出身でもあるProfessor Chunghee Sarah Soh の2008年に出版された著書 "The Comfort Women:
Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan"
でも明らかにされています。
こういう事実を無視して、全てがあたかも強制された状況だったかのように故意に解釈・吹聴し、そうした不公平なプロパガンダ的な認識を流布するのみならず、米国の多くの都市の公園等に従軍慰安婦像を建立するなどという行為は、故意に間違った歴史を人々の認識に刷り込もうとする卑劣な行為であり、決して放置されるべきではありません。
私 自身には数人の韓国人或いは韓国系の友達や知り合いがいますが、彼・彼女達個々人は心優しい素晴らしい人たちです。しかし、どこの国でも個々人と政府は別 物。韓国政府の場合は前政権から特に現政権にかけて、その言動は「醜い」を通り越して殆ど「狂気の沙汰」の域に達している気がします。
関連するリンク: 以下blogも参照させていただきました。
[Message in English]
Dear Readers of this message,
I posted this message on December 23, 2013 to request you to sign up for the petition at the U.S.
White House on its web site here in order to remove the “comfort woman/girl” statue,
which seemingly masquerades as a peace statue while in essence, after reading
the inscription, it intends to promote hate towards the people and nation of
Japan based on intentional misinterpretation of history surrounding Korean
comfort women.
As for Glendale California, more than 100,000 have signed up as of January 3, 2014, and the petition is now considered successful.
While one probably cannot
say that there was no comfort woman who was not forced into prostitution, it is
clearly not based on facts for one to say as if all or most of them had been
forced into the situations, as demonstrated in publicly available documents and researches. Some
comfort women/girls had their parents arranged them into the situations for the
reasons such as poverty, family debts, or other complicated family situations, and
some voluntarily opted to be professional prostitutes to earn money.
One research conducted as
early as in 1944 by the US Army Forces on 20 Korean comfort women, who went to
Burma (now Myanmar), “Japanese Prisoner of War Interrogation Report No.49” is
available from National Archives in the US., and I am sharing the public
document here (by courtesy of Mr. Tony Marano in Texas, US who made this
available on the web).
One recent
well-researched book "The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial
Memory in Korea and Japan" (University Of Chicago Press, 2009)
written by Professor Chunghee Sarah Soh, who was born and raised
in Korea, at San Francisco State University, also discusses the
matter in broader historical and cultural contexts by refusing to yield to
knee-jerk responses or politically correct narratives.
Ignoring many-faceted nature
surrounding the issue and painting it in just one color as “having been forced
into prostitution” by the Japanese brutal regime back then, and not only
intentionally using such one-sided story as a political propaganda, but also
even going as far as to build a statue in public part masquerading wishing for
peace is utterly a shameful, discreditable behavior, which would only undermine
their integrity and credibility. Due justice has to be done.
Not to be misunderstood,
I have more than a few Korean friends in Korea, the US, and elsewhere, and they
are individually wonderful and caring persons and I love them all. However,
unfortunately the Korean government does appear to be far from it, and
especially it has been so under the former President Lee Myung-bak and even
more so with the incumbent President Park Geun-hye. Their outright
anti-Japanese attitude does not only look extreme and unwarranted but also it effectively
appears to portray them almost insane to me and I am deeply concerned about it.
