I am responding to this excerpt from worldmeets.us:
South Korea media have reported that their government is prepared to replace the term “comfort women” – the term used for women who were forced into prostitution by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II – with “sex slaves.” Some South Korea media report that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has issued a similar directive.
However, what Secretary Clinton has done in regard to sex slaves has not been verified. Furthermore, some cast doubt about whether there were “comfort women forcibly coerced into prostitution,” and Japanese Web sites featured a number of cynical responses. One user commented that “choosing an even more humiliating phrase doesn’t make sense.”
According to the Japanese online edition of South Korea’s influential JoongAng Ilbo, Trade and Foreign Minister Kim Sung-hwan told a parliamentary committee on July 13 that he was “ready to change the wording to ‘sex slaves.’” Reportedly, he felt that a description more in accord with reality was preferable. Unconfirmed reports say that Secretary Clinton told State Department staff to use the phrase “enforces sex slaves” rather than the euphemistic “comfort women.”
This is my response to anyone [wrongly] re-naming the women, when in fact a spade ought be called a spade as follows:
The venerable elder Japanese women ought not be called ‘comfort women,’ nor ‘sex slaves.’ They are women, often very young women who long ago were threatened and forced to have sex with men who had lost their humanity.
This is not called ‘comfort woman’ or ‘sex slave.’ It is called menacing, kidnapping, sex trafficking, false imprisonment and a host of other words that describe criminal acts.
They are women, they are survivors of war crimes. They are souls who somehow stayed alive under egregious conditions. They are mothers and grandmothers now who were kidnapped when they were young. They are human beings who were used in the most base of ways.
In war, and I come from a family of refugees, the Red Army, the Nazis, the criminal African warlords, the Mexican criminals, the men from many many nations not only forced and raped and imprisoned women under threat of death, but also left them with children they fathered on the women, and when the mens’ troop, platoon, squadron withdrew, the men abandoned their own offspring also.
To say war is hell would be wrong. To say that some human beings devolve in war to lower than animals in terms of harming and degrading others, is a hell brought on by criminal choices visited upon the innocent. Especially Asian women of that time but some of our time too who still live in a feudal layer of Japan yet, would rather kill themselves than not submit to orders, no matter what harm might come to the women.
The women are human beings. And the egregious bitter offal thrown at the women survivors by some who dare to say, the women ‘volunteered’ and other insults… let me just say, we’re past that point, we’re way past the point of automatically believing the base idea that one can force a women into months of captivity– and threat to her life if she doesnt capitulate– in order to use her genitals as receptacle and breasts for arousal… because she really really really ‘wanted it.’
¡Ay Dios, y Basta!
CODA
I’d also mention the article saying the women were forced into ‘prostitution’ would not be accurate either. To be forced under fear of death or maiming, to do anything against one’s life principles, is not prostitution. It is a travesty, a horror, a long series of criminal acts against the innocent.