South Korea Has Its Own Comfort Women Problem with Vietnam
Maybe Mike Honda can put a Vietnamese comfort women statue next to the Korean one that was put up in San Francisco:
But for a significant number of children fathered as a result of rape by South Korean soldiers, it was the start of a living hell.
Mr Nhat recalled: “Before April 1975, I had been treated well by the South Korean troops who lived on the base near my home in Phu Yen Province, central Vietnam. I was still too young to have any real sense of my identity and hadn’t yet questioned my mother about why I looked different to other Vietnamese children.
“But when the Communists declared victory, everything changed for me. Suddenly, I knew I was dangerously different.”
A period of painful bullying ensued in school. Mr Nhat said: “I was bullied repeatedly. The other children kept asking who my father was and called him a ‘dog’. I just kept suffering in silence.
“I was 18 when my mother finally sat me down and told me she had been raped by Korean soldiers – not once but three times. My two sisters are also mixed blood or Lai Dai Han as we are known in Vietnam.” (…..)
South Korean troops were not alone in their exploitation of civilian women but their country has never acknowledged the allegations or taken steps to investigate. (…..)
Mrs Ngai felt confused in the fog of war but now she is very clear about what she wants now. “I think the South Korean government should apologise for everything they did to women in Vietnam. [The Independent]
You can read more at the link.
“I was 18 when my mother finally sat me down and told me she had been raped by Korean soldiers – not once but three times. My two sisters are also mixed blood or Lai Dai Han as we are known in Vietnam.”
No doubt, this story is composed of multiple layers of tragedy…
…but if given a choice of believing this woman was “rāped” three times and had three pregnancies…
…or was a prostítute who got pregnant three times out of three hundred…
…well…
I know where my money is.
There was enough voluntary prostitution for Korean soldiers that it calls into doubt any “comfort woman” model… except for that run by Vietnamese pimps.
Bonus: Vietnamese prostitute of that era didn’t care for Korean customers.
Double Bonus: some things never change.
“Mrs Ngai felt confused in the fog of war but now she is very clear about what she wants now.”
Not exclusive to this particular case, but I wonder how often false memory syndrome occurs in these types of situations?
http://www.salon.com/2010/09/20/meredith_maran_my_lie_interview/
From the article I linked to:
“Why write this book now?
In 2007, I was out for a walk with someone I wasn’t even that close to. She asked me if I’d ever done anything I was ashamed of and had never forgiven myself for. And without hesitation I said, yeah, when I was in my 30s I accused my father of molesting me, and then I realized it wasn’t true. She stopped walking and stood still, just staring at me and she said, “The same exact thing happened to me.” When I came home from that hike I started calling people I had known back then and speaking to some of the therapists I had seen during that period. With the exception of my ex-lover, every other person I talked to who had accused her father in the ’80s and early ’90s now believed she had been wrong. Being a journalist, you realize there’s a story there.”
A significant number of Vietnamese women were fraternizing with South Korean contractors. Unlike the exaggerated claims of most mixed births happening after rapes by South Korean soldiers, most of those mixed births happened between South Korean men and Vietnamese women who were boyfriend-girlfriend, many of them live-in’s. The women gave birth, the Korean men left the women when the war was over, and went back to Korea. If you want to see what could have happened, look at the Philippines where a Filipina’s are complaining that their Korean boyfriends left them and their kids and went back to Korea to forget about their family in the Philippines.
Okay, this is disturbing. Not the article, but these comments.
Some of them were prostitutes? Yeah, they probably were. That does not take away the historical *fact* that ROK servicemembers raped Vietnamese women. Are there false claims? You bet your ass there are. So, what is the right thing to do? Since there are false claims you just shrug it off as bogus? No, you investigate and get to the bottom of it.
This certainly shouldn’t take away the work Sen. Honda has done to promote the issues of Imperial Japanese Army sex slaves; if anything, if South Korea wants to keep arguing that Japan has to acknowledge and apologize to the victims directly, it is on South Korea to voluntarily investigate what took place in Vietnam and apologize for what it has to.
Believe it or not, I am speaking out of support for ROK government as our ally. We sure as hell don’t do a good job of admitting where we fucked up so we have less of a say in this, to be honest. However, if ROK wants to seem legit in making its diplomatic claims.
Globalhogu,
Based on the information given and my understanding of rápe/sèx/pregnancy statistics, I believe there is a much higher chance that the woman in the article was a prostitute rather than a thrice-pregnant ràpe victim.
If this is the best example a “journalist” can find of some sort of Korean-government-sponsored-soldier-in-Vietnam rápe epidemic, perhaps it is more manufactured controversy than actual event.
If you disagree, I am willing to accept any other examples you can give of a woman who was ràped three times and had three pregnancies.
I know this post is older, but it remains relevant. I would also echo Globalhogu’s comment that a lot of these comments are MASSIVELY messed up and horrible.
Let’s look at the hypocrisy and failure to explain from Chickenhead. “Based on the information given and my understanding of rápe/sèx/pregnancy statistics”. Based on what? Based on what statistics? Chickenhead cited NOTHING. Chickenhead cited nothing about global statistics. Chickenhead cited nothing about Vietnamese statistics. Chickenhead citeed nothing about Vietnamese statistics specifically during this time period. So…why should anyone believe Chickenhead over the words of this person?
By literally the exact same logic as Chickenhead, we could say the same thing about Korean history. They’re lying about it. That’s literally what Chickenhead justifies. Hear that? Chickenhead is calling Koreans liars about being comfort women.
Holmes et al (1996): chance of pregnancy from rape = 5%
Wilcox et al (2001): chance of pregnancy on any day = 3.1%
So… the odds of being pregnant 3 times from 3 rapes range from .0125% to .00298%.
Not impossible.
Now, we factor in:
– the odds of actually being raped 3 times without learning anything over the minimum 27 months
– the odds of all being Korean without learning anything over the minimum 27 months
– the odds of not learning anything over the minimum 27 months
This seems like a bit of a unicorn.
But, of course, people still believe they will win it big in the lottery… so I grasp not everyone understands the dark arts of math.
They said there’d be no math!
Also, math is white supremacy (https://www.newsweek.com/math-suffers-white-supremacy-according-bill-gates-funded-course-1571511)