The Comfort Women Hoax: A Fake Memoir, North Korean Spies, and Hit Squads in the Academic Swamp

Both of the authors found themselves savagely "canceled" by their peers in Japanese studies programs in the U.S. for refusing to follow the Woke line on the World War II "comfort women." Contrary to the party line in American humanities departments, the women were not slaves. They were prostitutes. And the notion that they were anything but prostitutes owes itself to a hoax perpetrated by a Japanese communist author in the 1980s. Any serious Japanese intellectual (of any political perspective) understands this, and many intellectuals in South Korea understand it as well. It is a mark of the intellectual bankruptcy of the hyper-politicized humanities departments that they continue to cling to this 1980s-vintage hoax.

Through its "comfort women" framework, the Japanese military extended its licensing regime for domestic brothels to the brothels next to its overseas bases. Through that regime, it imposed the strenuous health standards it needed to control the venereal disease that had debilitated its troops in earlier wars. These "comfort stations" recruited their prostitutes through variations on the standard indenture contracts that the licensed brothels had used in both Korea and Japan. Some women took the jobs because they were tricked by fraudulent recruiters. Some took them under pressure from abusive parents. But the rest seem to have taken the jobs for the money.