On the charge of forgetting history, 44 Japanese lawmakers and a contingent of “professors, journalists, [and] political commentators” plead, “Uh, what are we on trial for again?” At least, that seems the message of a full-page ad in the Washington Post, claiming to present the facts about comfort women (h/t: Global Voices):

“No historical document has ever been found by historians or research organisations that positively demonstrates that women were forced against their will into prostitution by the Japanese army,” the ad said under the title, in bold letters, “THE FACTS”.

“The ianfu (comfort women) who were embedded with the Japanese army were not, as is commonly reported, ’sex slaves’,” it said.

“They were working under a system of licensed prostitution that was commonplace around the world at the time,” the ad said.

Many of the women made more money than field officers “and even generals”, it said.

The ad acknowledged there were cases of “breakdowns in discipline”.

“Criticism for events that actually occurred must be humbly embraced,” the ad said.

“But apologies over unfounded slander and defamation will not only give the public an erroneous impression of historical reality but could negatively affect the friendship between the United States and Japan,” it said.

The Marmot’s Hole in South Korea is all over this, giving a point-by-point rebuttal. Lee Yong-soo might have her own facts to add. The 78-year-old Korean woman was hardly a volunteer or an entrepreneur, as she recounted to AFP earlier this year:

Lee said she was snatched as a teenager from her house in Korea, then a Japanese colony, and taken first to Pyongyang, then to Dalian and finally to Taiwan, where she was raped and tortured for around three years.

“I cried, ‘Mother, Mother,’ but they never stopped. They used electric shocks to torture me. They kicked me. They cut me,” she said tearfully in broken Japanese.

“After I returned home after the war, I did not tell anyone about what happened to me,” she said.

She said she has been staging protests for 16 years outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul to demand an apology.

“Japan forcibly took me away. I am a living witness. I will tell my story wherever,” she said. “I demand the prime minister of Japan apologize.”

That was after Shinzo Abe’s memory failed him. He recovered, but the condition seems to be spreading:

‘No massacre in Nanking,’ Japanese lawmakers say
About 100 Japanese governing party lawmakers denounced the Nanjing Massacre as a fabrication on Tuesday, contesting Chinese claims that Japanese soldiers killed hundreds of thousands of people after seizing the Chinese city in 1937.

…

Toru Toida, another member of the group, demanded that photographs portraying the Japanese military in a negative light be removed from Chinese war memorials. “We are absolutely positive that there was no massacre in Nanking,” Toida said.

So much for a spring thaw in Sino-Japanese relations. Seriously guys, what are you thinking here? This kind of thing makes otherwise sane Chinese students want to kill you.

Murrow had it right: This just might not do anybody any good.

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