Dezaki Doesn't Listen
Instead of considering the testimony of those he interviewed, Dezaki instead proceeded to reach a peculiar conclusion.
Based on the interviews, his conclusion should have been that one must be careful because there is no basis for the 200,000 comfort women number. Rather than doing so, however, Dezaki gave credence to the sex slave advocates' position.
First, he said the number of comfort women was increased or decreased for political reasons by the two sides. Second, he concluded those he called revisionists did not know how to calculate the number (suggesting the other side did). Finally, he said objective data on the actual number of the comfort women did not exist.
He ignored the patient explanation of those who disagreed with him in the movie and their criticism of Yoshimi's calculation. His argument doesn't make sense, but Dezaki has no intention of listening to what they have to say.
Origins of Alleged 200,000 Comfort Women
The number 200,000 began to appear everywhere on the day after January 11, 1992. On that day, the Asahi Shimbun morning edition published an article saying:
"Military comfort woman: In the 1930's, there were frequent rape cases by Japanese soldiers in China. So, in order to soothe the anti-Japanese sentiment and prevent sexually transmitted diseases, brothels were provided. According to the testimony of former soldiers and former military doctors, at the beginning, about eighty percent of the women in the brothels seemed to be Koreans. After the Pacific War broke out, in the name of women's volunteer corps, many Korean women were gathered and forced to provide sex. Some say the number was 80,000. Others say it was 200,000."
The article confused two very different things – comfort women and the Women's Volunteer Corps which had nothing to do with comfort women – in calculating the number, 80,000 or 200,000.
