From: yeonwook@hardy.u.washington.edu (Mark Choi)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.japan
Subject: Re: Comfort girls?
Date: 1 Jan 1993 10:19:29 GMT
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: hardy.u.washington.edu

In article <11646.9212301418@csparc12.scs.leeds.ac.uk> ross-c@scs.leeds.ac.uk writes:
>In article <1hng6mINNbga@shelley.u.washington.edu> you write:
>>>In article <1992Dec28.143403.8912@cbnewsh.cb.att.com> bgt@cbnewsh.cb.att.com (barbara.tongue) writes:
>>>
>>>According to certain estimates approximately 300,000 Ameriasian
>>>children were produced as a result of the Vietnam War, and most

I said:

>>Although the statistics are correct, you must also remember the 
>>case is very different in this case. The forced sex slaves of the
>>Japanese military are charging that the Japanese government was 
>>in charge of overseeing such operations.
>
>>I hardly think that the U.S. government encouraged forced prostitution.
>							   ^^^^^^^^^^^^

*.ac.uk says:

>According to a '60 Minutes' documentary I saw *some years ago*, many of the
>amerasian children in Vietnam were not born to prostitutes. This was explained
>as a common misconception (no pun intended). 

I do not disagree with your statement. However, my point was made well and
clear: difference between Japanese and American handling of various peoples
in times of war was drastically different. While it is true that more children
were born to American service men during the Vietnam war than compared to 
Japanese wars with Japanese service men, it is incorrect to say that those
two situations are similar (as the first writer sighted when she said 
something on the lines of "the Americans, not the Japanese are the ones who
have committed the most sexual offenses"). What is at the center of the 
argument in Japan is whether or not the Japanese government was involved in
overseeing such military brothel operations. On the other hand, it is known
for a fact that the American government didn't encourage the use of sex 
brothels in Viet Nam. Therefore, I must think that your statement, although
point well stated, is irrelevent to the previous thread. The thread wasn't
an argument about who Amerasians were born to, prostitutes or not, but 
whether the American government has committed more crimes of sexual offense
during times of war than the Japanese government.

Perhaps my use of the term "forced prostitutes" was slightly general.
In any case, I am certain that it was very clear what I was trying to
say (if you hadn't erased the latter half of the previous post). Your
response obviously weighed my perceived argument that Vietnamese 
prostitutes were to blame for the amount of Amerasians against the
60 Minutes episode. This argument is nothing more than irrelevencies
to the original thread. My use of "forced prostitues" meant "women 
forced into sexual acts not by their own will". I agree that those two
words contradict each other, however, I was using the tongue of the media,
however inaccurate or accurate it might be (in this case, inaccurate). 
So I apologize for following media terms that were slightly general.

>A large number (possibly most) of these children were born to girlfriends
>and wives of US servicemen. The programme claimed that most of the prostitutes
>knew how not to get pregnant. 
>
>The US military had been informing servicemen that it would not recognise 
>any marriages with Vietnamese, and many legal (in Vietnam anyway) wives were
>abandoned upon the fall of Saigon.
>
>I therefore see no logical connection between the two cases. The existance
>of a large number of abandoned children (which is a bad thing in itself)
>cannot be used to reliably estimate the level of prostitution. And to assume
>that the two are directly related is incorrect.

This is irrelevent. I never assumed that the large number of Amerasians 
was due to Vietnamese prostitutes during the war. This was your perception,
however, because I believe you failed to follow the entire thread. My response,
which you responded to, clearly stated that the American government shouldn't
be considered a larger criminal of forced sexual acts during times of war than
the Japanese government. My response also stated that the two governments,
American and Japanese, shouldn't be compared on similar terms, because,
although many single American servicemen committed sex crimes in Vietnam,
their actions were not sponsored by the American government. This, however
is at the center of the issue in Japan, where the government constantly 
denies involvenment in WWII sex crimes. 

I hope you will re-read the entire thread, instead of putting together
the words "prostitute" in my post to the response to a post that had the
word "Amerasian children", without reading everything in between.

						mywc