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Some of these reactions to the column, "Holocaust vs. comfort women," were sent by email and others are from Facebook postings left at the end of the column. We edited these letters to allow more of them to be published. Also we decided not to reveal the last names of those making the contributions. For those who want to participate in the discussion, go to http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/opinion/2017/06/667―230509.html. ― ED.
Let's not embrace ‘get even with'
The case you make is noted. Commiseration is in order.
However, it seems that all concerned (past and present) have thrown the word "forgiveness" out of their vocabulary.
Furthermore, all countries have committed and suffered shameful history, atrocities, misdeeds and tragedies. All people have been victims at one point in history.
I don't say forget about the past, however, I do not embrace "getting even with."
When responsible countries and governments do not do what they ought to do to correct their treatment (and all it entails) of citizens during colonization or war, etc., then, it is the duty and obligation of the mistreated people's government to compensate and assuage their citizen victims.
Constructing memorial statues I do support very much, however, erecting them in front of the offices of a diplomatic residence is simply wrong and has led to only more friction.
I feel that it is governments that continue the strife between nations. Most countries' citizens harbor no ill-feeling toward other peoples. And, yes, the newer generations have no interest in the past; they wish to move forward.
For example, I have no wish to fight the Civil War again. I'm an old Southern Rebel at heart; I don't much care for most Yankees, but I will not get in their face about the past events. Besides, if we were not there on the spot at the time, then you can best bet that provided stories from both sides have been embellished or left out a fact or two.
William
We did suffer like Korea
Indonesia, Southeast Asia. I would like to offer some views after reading your article titled 'Holocaust vs. comfort women' yesterday.
I assume you already know about Japan's colonization of Indonesia soil in the 1940s. We had comfort women or "jugun-ianfu."
I think Indonesians would have the same opinion as yours. The Holocaust was a tragedy but the comfort woman phenomenon was as well. Both were abuse of humanity.
And about education, I think we should raise our awareness about history too, and see it as clearly as possible, as the way it is. To make the future as it should be.
I do not say that Indonesian government is like a saint, we go through our difficult times, too, after declaring independence.
My ancestors had avoided being as comfort women since they lived in the mountains, but my great grandpa still did "romusha" or hard labor.
In my opinion, I forgive what Japan's military did, but I never forget about it. Not because I am could not fully forgive but because I would take it as a reminder. So, we should never allow the same thing to happen again in the future.
Anyway, I should praise you for writing on such a sensitive theme.
Viny
It's numbers ― 6 mil. vs. 200,000
It is about numbers, it is also about intent and it is about what happened. If you think all bad things are the same simply because they are bad, you're wrong. Systematically rounding up people for the sole intent of killing them and wiping their "race" out is the absolute worst thing human beings have ever done.. The Mongols raped one quarter of the women on the planet but that wasn't the worst thing they did. Killing 50 million people was. Being killed is worse than being forced to have sex. Killing 600,000 is a lot worse than 200,000 being raped. Are they both bad? Yes.
Jason
East Asian brothel culture
One egregious problem with equating the Koreans' status as victims of the Japanese with the Jews vs. Germany is that millions on Koreans participated in the colonial project, including in the dark act of procuring the comfort women. It also overlooks the context that selling daughters into prostitution was very common practice in traditional East Asian societies.
Japanese denial of this and other war crimes is a very serious issue, but Mr. Oh does his own cause a great disservice by this continued poorly articulated false equivalence.
Christopher
Harping on comfort women ad nauseum
This op-ed piece does not reflect the majority opinion of most educated Koreans and is at best self-righteously hypocritical, anti-Semitic, if not totally distorted. This individual's inflammatory rhetoric, specifically that "We [Korea] will make peace with Japan, when you [Arabs] make your peace with Israel" is patently ridiculous as it belies the fact that Korea is not currently, nor has it been lately (for the past 500 years or so), in an actual state of war with Japan, as Japan has NOT been our foe for quite some time now.
Also, to keep on harping on the "Comfort Women" issue and Japan's complicity, ad nauseum, is totally hypocritical recognizing the fact that successive regimes from Park Chung-hee, to as recently as the late 1990s, implemented, maintain and upheld a similar system of providing "Comfort Women" ― i.e., legal prostitution in organized brothels ― catering specifically to U.S. troops based in Korea. This system of regulated prostitution catering to U.S. servicemen in various shanty towns and villages adjacent to USFK bases worked hand-in-hand with the Korean government for decades, with concomitant VD checks, medical exams for prostitutes in a system of de facto indentured servitude that would make the Imperial Japanese Army, circa 1944, blush.
The writer doesn't get to lambast an entire nation and put foreign relations with an important economic ally in peril. The fact is that with only a handful of surviving comfort women left over from the occupation era, the rest of the world has ― not surprisingly ― moved on. Instead of harping on those things that cannot be changed, we need to bring attention to the sins and misdeeds of our own government, whose complicity in creating Korea's own cold-war era Comfort Women system has been totally neglected by the Korean government as the victims of that era continue to wither away in obscurity and poverty.
Julie
Holocaust is exaggerated
The Holocaust (6 million were gassed in the camps of the Germans) story is not true. First, the 6 million figure is not true: an Auschwitz memorial plaque revised the 4 million killed down to 1 million killed (and this is still not correct), and the gassing story is not true either.
The only gassing that took place in the camps was to kill the lice that caused typhus. Gassing was a life-saving measure, not a homicidal one.
After release, former camp inmates passed around stories initially that they were executed with electric machines. Other stories passed around were prisoners were executed by brain-bashing machines (operated by pedals), by being thrown into lime pits to be killed by acid and dissolved, by masturbation machines and even by atomic devices. Then they said they were executed by gassings that took place in shower rooms.
This story, unlike the others, took hold and came to be widely quoted, and evolved into the familiar Holocaust story that we know today. However, none of the shower rooms in the camps show Prussian blue (cyanide residues), which would have to be present for the gassing stories to be true.
The only places where Prussian blue staining shows up is in small fumigation cubicles that contained clothing racks where the clothes and other personal belongings of prisoners were treated with cyanide gas to kill lice that caused typhus, a major killer of people in the first half of the 20th century (and earlier). Another name for typhus is "jail fever" and "camp fever". The use of cyanide gas as a disinfectant to fumigate clothes and personal belongings was the standard treatment for kill lice and prevent typhus epidemics in Europe at that time.
Yvette
No tolerance for divisive religions
I have zero sympathy for Jews, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the rest of these hate-filled religions, who have rained down upon humanity unending wars and suffering. Let's not forget Hitler only capitalized on long-simmering resentment caused by Jewish hegemony in the economic condition from WWI and earlier. Hitler was not a one-time event.
Carlos
Korea is not currently at war, cold or otherwise with Japan, whereas Israel is currently committing atrocities in the Middle East. Israel does not equal all Jews, by the way. It's possible to be Jewish, not Israeli and still be appalled at what is happening there. If you published this article in a Western country, any Western country, you would be out of a job by the end of the day.
You start off describing what I assume to be a Westerner's opinion, segue into what people in The Middle East think and then start talking about how Westerners need to be educated about Korean suffering. The world is aware of the Holocaust. The world is also aware of comfort women, Unit 731, the Armenian genocide, Pol Pot's Killing Fields, Stalin's purges and all the other sickening, terrible things that have happened in our recent history. We do not denigrate the victims of atrocities in order to push our own agendas. We do not treat remembrance as a commodity. We do not try to depreciate victims of the Holocaust in order to inflate the suffering of Koreans under Japan.
Matthew
