"Comfort women" statue removed in Berlin due to pressure from Tokyo

[drspouse]

This is a really disturbing story

ellyarrow.wordpress.com/2020/10/11/comfort-women-statue-to-be-removed-in-berlin-due-to-pressure-from-tokyo/amp/?fbclid=IwAR2t82wnuZpqt3fC7xQQGiqDwE8xny1uh4m3VC8ATN_xbjBBxCGW1CbOQ4k&__twitter_impression=true

There are routes that English speakers can follow but if you are a German or Korean speaker you may be able to help more.

This is awful! Thank you for sharing.

Where was the ‘comfort’ for those poor, poor women.

God it’s just horrific what those women and girls had to go through, and to have this statue removed is just a kick in the teeth.
Rape as a war crime is so often overlooked, and this statue would bring some sunlight to the awful crimes perpetrated towards women in war torn areas.

Truly horrific. I am shocked at how the German authorities have caved, especially given their WW2 history.
My uncle was a prisoner of war of the Japanese which destroyed his health and the Japanese have never apologised in any meaningful way for the way they behaved in WW2.
All those who were so cruelly treated by them, women, children and men should be remembered.

Erasing the history of this is wrong but I'm puzzled why Berlin felt the need to erect a statue to Japanese atrocities given there would have been no German women involved.

It seems to me more appropriate for these statues to be located in the countries of origin of the victims and Japan.

Germany can erect statues in memory of the Russian and Polish women kept prisoner in German military brothels.

I don't know about German women, but there were several hundred "comfort women" of European origin, mostly Dutch.

Germany and Japan were allies - that's not exactly news.

@DreadPirateLuna

I don't know about German women, but there were several hundred "comfort women" of European origin, mostly Dutch.

Yes, there would have been European women as a hangover from colonial times and latterly simply ex- patriot workers.

BBC News - The forgotten women of the 'war in the East'
www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29665232

I'm still puzzled why Germany wants to erect a statue in Germany to commemorate non German victims of Japanese atrocities. Are there similar statues to commemorate women kept in German military brothels?

Why would the UK want a Holocaust memorial, the Holocaust didn't take place here?
I imagine the idea is just the same as any other effort to learn from history and not forget it, even the evil bits.

Just when I think nothing else can shock me. I had no idea about "comfort women". What a horribly inept term for them. These poor women and what they have endured.

My late Dutch MIL was a prisoner in a Japanese camp for four years during WW2. She only avoided being taken as a “comfort woman” to a military brothel because a fellow prisoner could speak Japanese, realised what the officers were there for, and hid (the then teenage) MIL under a pile of sacking. Her brother died in the men’s camp.
The Japanese government refused compensation to the comfort women for decades, finally paying a derisory sum when most of the possible claimants had already died.
It is beyond shameful that they are now trying to erase this from history.

@drspouse

Why would the UK want a Holocaust memorial, the Holocaust didn't take place here? I imagine the idea is just the same as any other effort to learn from history and not forget it, even the evil bits.

It's not the same at all as (a) the UK didn't put women into military brothels and (b) the UK has many Jewish citizens who escaped Nazi Germany and /or who lost family during that period.

Were there German women in Japanese military brothels? I doubt it. There were 1000s of Polish and Russian women and probably other nationalities in German military brothels. You refer to "not forgetting evil" - where are the statues in Germany to them?

I would have sympathy with the point you are making if Japan were telling the Dutch or Korean governments to remove similar statues.

@CoolYourBeansMySon

Just when I think nothing else can shock me. I had no idea about "comfort women". What a horribly inept term for them. These poor women and what they have endured.

You've never heard of Joy Division?

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_Division_%28disambiguation%29?wprov=sfla1

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_military_brothels_in_World_War_II?wprov=sfla1

There's been one removed in the Philippines too, if you read down.
Saying "I won't support the existence of this statue until there are statues commemorating German atrocities too" is really whataboutery, frankly.
What the Japanese did was awful.
There are memorials in other places as well and Japan wants them to come down too.
www.scmp.com/news/world/europe/article/2077424/first-comfort-women-statue-europe-unveiled-germany
www.dw.com/en/japan-fumes-over-comfort-women-statue-in-south-korea-said-to-resemble-abe/a-54357341
www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/11/13/563838610/comfort-woman-memorial-statues-a-thorn-in-japans-side-now-sit-on-korean-buses?t=1602602138180

It is rather as if there were a memorial to victims of the Holocaust in Germany, set up in other countries, and the German government told other governments to remove them.

On the one hand it's whitewashing an atrocity that my grandmother (Babdoc's MIL) was nearly subjected to and her friends suffered, on the other Germany doesn't really have a leg to stand on here while it has decriminalised johns and pimps, and women and children are still regularly trafficked into the brothels from war zones and destabilised parts of the world. It reminds me of reading the "comfort women's" testimonies in the Resistance Museum in Amsterdam, and then walking a mile into the centre of town and seeing Dutch and tourist men committing those same crimes. The IJA committed some of the most horrific war crimes in the last century, and now very similar crimes are just part of the sex industry today. There's even a whole subgenre of refugee porn and soldier rape porn. Japan needs to compensate the surviving victims and acknowledge its past (and present, with its own tolerance of pimping and punting today) and we need to do the same in the West and stop commodifying and tolerating rape. The Nordic model works well for that, punish the johns and pimps and decriminalise and support the victims.

Part of the problem is that Shinzo Abe is losing popularity and courts the far right for votes, so he's not likely to give ground on this. It's much like Thatcher and Chirac courting the NF and FN to get re-elected. He's been pushing to remilitarise Japan too, a lot of left wing Japanese people are worried.

I think the Germans would do well to perhaps examine their own super brothels, and the wretched experiences women are expected to endure to satisfy men.

Why is it we’re so quick to point the finger at the sexual abuse and exploitation of women and girls at other cultural groups? It doesn’t make us better when we’re still doing it.

@Dervel

I think the Germans would do well to perhaps examine their own super brothels, and the wretched experiences women are expected to endure to satisfy men.

Why is it we’re so quick to point the finger at the sexual abuse and exploitation of women and girls at other cultural groups? It doesn’t make us better when we’re still doing it.

I agree.

"I won't support the existence of this statue until there are statues commemorating German atrocities too" is really whataboutery, frankly

Frankly the "what aboutery" here is the OP's refusal to acknowledge Germany's participation past and current in the exploitation of women.

Japan needs to compensate the surviving victims and acknowledge its past

Absolutely. The erection of this statue is sheer hypocrisy on the part of Germany and does nothing to achieve that end.

Saying "I won't support the existence of this statue until there are statues commemorating German atrocities too" is really whataboutery, frankly.

And a particularly pernicious one coming from a British audience.. AFAIK, we have no monuments to the Boer War camps, the Amritsar Massacre, the Black and Tans, the Mau Mau gulags, or a variety of other attrocities. Does this mean we cannot have monuments to any attrocities, anywhere?

The erection of this statue is sheer hypocrisy on the part of Germany and does nothing to achieve that end.

The statue was not erected by Germany. It's not an endeavour by any German authorities and its purpose is not to lecture Japan or anyone else in some sort of finger-pointing exercise.

The article linked to by the OP makes that abundantly clear.

The statue was gifted to the city of Berlin following work by the Korea Verband, an organisation which seeks to promote Korean culture, teach Korean history and further good relations between the Korean people and the German people.

The actual statue was created by two Korean artists and gifted by the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan. Such statues were also gifted by this NGO to Australia, Canada and the US.

Its purpose is twofold:

• to raise awareness of the 200,000 women from 14 nations who were held in sexual slavery by Japan during WWII, who still have received neither acknowledgment of the injustice and pain they suffered nor apology from Japan and

• to condemn sexual violence used against all women in war, wherever it happens, but especially government sanctioned atrocities of this kind. Which all nations, including Germany, engaged in throughout history.

As a result of the campaign by surviving Comfort Women, like those active in the Korean Council I mentioned above, the crime of holding women in sexual slavery as a wartime tactic has now been recognised as a human rights violation and a war crime at international level.

Oh, and just to add, the statue has not been removed today. The matter has been referred to the local court and until the verdict is delivered, the statue will remain where it is.

Oh that's good news @CharlieParley.