Comfort women: A final solution
By Yu Bin (Chinadaily.com.cn) Updated: 2014-09-24 10:06Some modest proposals
After having perhaps digressed a bit too far into intellectual reasoning, it is time to offer practical solutions to resolve the comfort women issue.
First, as I have already observed, Japan's "rationality of irrationality" should be seriously considered as the basis for reciprocity between various parties. Instead of criticizing Japan's wartime policy, one should not ignore the outcome of Japan's comfort service: hundreds of millions of Asian women may have avoided being randomly and brutally raped.
For Japan's contribution to the safety and wellbeing of Asian women, intentionally or not, efforts should be made to identify and award those who planned, executed, managed and utilized the wartime comfort system. Sixty-nine years after 1945, this is still possible, thanks to Japan's extraordinarily long life expectancy (almost three years more than that of South Korea).
Based on the 3636:1 ratio for the surviving Korean comfort women (200,000:55) at this moment, there should be about 1,000 World War II veterans still alive in Japan out of 3.5 million stationed abroad in August 1945. Given the ubiquitous comforting services, most of these veterans should have had some experience of the wartime comfort stations.
In case veterans are hesitant to come forward, role models can be used to energize the coming - out process. For example, former Japanese prime minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, then a first lieutenant in the Japanese Navy in the Philippines, claimed in his memoir that he "took great pains to set up a comfort station after Japanese soldiers began "assaulting (indigenous) women". [21] Prime Minister Abe, whose family has broad and deep connections with the wartime government, should be able to facilitate this process.
For those "coming-out" veterans, assistance should be provided by psychologists, historians and family members for overcoming any sense of shame in order to reconstructing their wartime experience with comfort women. Their personal accounts will provide more accurate estimates for the frequency that soldiers visited the comfort stations.
This scientific effort can be aided enormously by Japan's perfectionist culture and attention to details: be in the areas of home electronics, automobiles, sushi, or whale killing, AV, ritual suicide (seppuku), kamikaze bombing, biological warfare (by its notorious Unit 731 in China), etc. In the comfort women issue, more scientific data may test the validity of Japan's one-visit-per-month claim, which seems too low for majority of those young men in their prime sexual age. Indeed, the more frequently they visited comfort stations, the fewer local women they would rape; hence greater contribution for peace and wellbeing in those areas Japan "entered", or "liberated" from Western imperialists. [22]
As soon as some veterans start to come forward, actions should be taken to reunite former comfort women with their former clients. Social media outlets, such as Facebook, should be utilized in case of physical difficulties of these seniors. This may help dispel misunderstandings and overcome lingering bitterness, if passage of time is not enough to neutralize such feelings.
