A Public Betrayed: An Inside Look at Japanese Media Atrocities and Their Warnings to the West
Adam Gamble, 2004
This book covers the subject of the Japanese media, usually in a rather negative light. A couple chapters pertain to the other material in this portion of my web site, and that's a chapter on the Nanking Massacre and a chapter on Comfort Women, so that's the two chapters I'll review here.
Chapter 7 is called "Whitewashing the Nanjing Massacre and Attacking a Genuine Journalist." (Nanjing is another way of saying Nanking.) The author's position on the subject is made immediately clear: "The size and brutality of the massacre make it one of the most important stories of the century, not simply for the Japanese or the Chinese but for all people. It represents one of the most horrendous examples of human barbarity ever recorded."
The author writes that just after the event the Japanese government put a blackout on information about what happened. The blackout lasted around a decade, so those left in Japan while the war raged on were unaware of what their own soldiers were doing in China.
The author then writes that even today right-wing Japanese publishers and writers try to downplay what happened or even say the entire event was fictitious. The attack itself happened in 1937 during the Japanese invasion of China. The raping and the violence were not limited to the city itself, of course, but included what happened on the way there and near there. The author says "...the soldiers indulged in a campaign of mass murder, rape, torture and exploitation," some of which was due to the racial prejudice of the Japanese against the Chinese.
The Japanese soldiers were led to believe that the Chinese were on the level of animals (something which many Americans believed applied to the Japanese soldiers themselves once our war with Japan started.) Another reason for what they did was the way the soldiers themselves were treated, often beaten, and a "transfer of aggression" happened- the slightly stronger beat on the slightly weaker and so on down the line.
The author says that the Japanese military "ran amok" in the city from December 13 through February of the next year. One thing that complicated matters was that many Chinese soldiers took off their uniforms and tried to blend in with the civilians, something which the Japanese used as an excuse to execute large numbers of the men.
(As far as evidence from the event goes, there are diaries, personal witnesses and even video footage so the fact that the event did occur is not something that is really open to debate. The book has a lot of the diary information and it does not make for pretty reading, to say the least.)
The author talks about how some reporters/writers material on the massacre was attacked by right-wing groups in Japan that hold to a revisionist view of history. (Even some established political figures question the history of the massacre).The people who make such attacks are not always hack writers, either, as the author points out one of the people includes a professor at Tokyo University.
The author then talks about the argument over exactly how many Chinese were killed by the Japanese soldiers during the massacre, and how some revisionists try to claim the number was 10% or less of the generally accepted figure. The result of all the controversy, the author notes, is that many Japanese today believe the entire issue of the Nanking massacre is one that is still subject to scholarly debate rather than something that has pretty well been solidly established.
The author says that there is a growing nationalism in Japan, and that writers, scholars, etc, who hold views that the far right doesn't like can end up being harassed, ranging from having sound trucks part near their homes or work and blasting out right-wing slogans to even being killed.
Chapter 8 of his book is entitled "Attacking Former Sex Slaves: A Second Rape" and deals with the issue of comfort women. The author starts by saying there were 80,000 to 200,000 young girls involved in the comfort woman program and that it is still a very emotionally charged issue today.
The author makes a clear designation between "brothels" and "comfort stations", point out that, in a brothel, mostly it's women doing something voluntarily, where in the comfort stations it was almost entirely women being forced to have sex with the soldiers.
80% of the sex slaves were Korean and others came from Taiwan, China and the Philippines. 80% were between the ages of 14 and 18. The soldiers targeted the poorest and least-educated girls that they could because their disappearance would cause the least problems.
One of the main reasons the comfort stations were established was to try to control the spread of STDs among the soldiers which could have an adverse effect on their ability to fight. It was also done to help soldier morale. The military had an idea that soldiers who were sexually satisfied fought better. Racism against peoples of countries that the military invaded was another contributing factor to the comfort stations. The system was supposed to help control the number of rapes of civilians (although raping them where they lived and raping them after they had been captured and brought to a comfort station is an incredibly fine line of difference).
Although most Japanese military records were destroyed at the end of the war, those that exist listed the women as "war supplies." The author also notes that many of the sex slaves were beaten, bled to death, suffered miscarriages, caught diseases or committed suicide. If they survived they were sometimes left abandoned when the Japanese military pulled out of an area.
The author notes that various prime ministers themselves have apologized for what happened, but the Diet (Japan's version of a Congress) has apologized. Some money through a non-government group has been paid as compensation, but the author holds that it's more a publicity stunt than any real attempt to make up for what was done.
The author does point out that the U.S. itself did not take up the issue of comfort women at the end of the war or in the war trials. (The U.S. also covered up the Unit 731 offenses and other information).
Various conservative groups in Japan downplay the comfort women issue just as they downplay or deny the Nanjing Massacre.
Finally, the author points out that sex slavery is quite alive in the U.S., involving major cities and under-age girls and young women from dozens of countries in Eastern Europe, Latin America, etc. The number brought into this country as sex slaves runs around 20,000 per year or more.
The rest of the book deals with matters not related to the World War II Japanese military so I've not commented on those parts of the book.
Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page
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