The Japan Times

Opinion

December 26, 2015

Criticism is always fair game. When it borders on make-believe it is worth correcting. In his Dec. 20 letter to the editor regarding the article “50 Japanese scholars fire back in McGraw-Hill sex slave row” in the Dec. 12 issue, Jason Morgan’s intentionally misreads my words to create scurrilous fantasy.

Morgan asserts that I compare Imperial Japan to Boko Haram. I do nothing of the sort. Instead, I state that, “I think of Boko Haram and (the Islamic State group’s) current use of sexual slavery as a weapon of war critical to why denying away historical evidence is so deeply retrograde.”

The history of Japan’s state-sponsored militarized system of sexual slavery is an international history. Learning from past wrongdoings — which a majority of Japanese and the world community hold the awful “comfort women” system to be — is precisely how societies (including the historians among them) can endeavor to make our current and future worlds more just.

The denialists among us aim otherwise.