McGraw-Hill cautioned by Prof. Hata on an erroneous article in its textbook for high schools.

(Please note "Letters in Times" are my words and "Letters in Verdana" are quoted words from the booklet which was distributed to the attendees of the press conference at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan in Tokyo on March 17, 2015. )

Professor Hata, who is a renowned historian, delivered a speech at a press conference held by the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan ("FCCJ") on March 17, 2015.  The speech content is in the following video clip.

https://youtu.be/e2SK9GziuH0

I attended the press conference as one of the staff members of Prof. Hata, and took a video. I edited and added English subtitles to it.

McGraw-Hill is a very famous and prestigious publishing company, which published a world history book for high schools in the US. Very surprisingly a tiny article in the book which has more than 900 pages had many errors on "so called comfort women", the issue of which has been widely argued by anti-Japan people especially in South Korea, the US and Japan. 

The article in question was written by Prof. Herbert F. Ziegler of University of Hawaii. 

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan ("MOFA") requested to McGraw-Hill to alter errors. Then, 19 American historians jointly with prof. YOSHIMI Yoshiaki made a complaint to the MOFA, saying, "the Japanese government is suppressing academic freedom" without mentioning errors in the particular article in the textbook. 

As soon as Prof. Hata came to know this unreasonable accusation against the MOFA by 19 historians, he determined to have a press conference at the FCCJ to explain the true figure of this issue to foreign correspondents by distributing booklets to the attendees including foreign correspondents living in Japan. 

The booklet is also a request to McGraw-Hill to alter errors, 


Prof. Hata and the other 18 historians jointly made a statement as follows.
                

==================================================

                                         　　　　　

On February 11, 2015, Sankei Newspaper reported that last November and December, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan (“MOFA”) requested to McGraw-Hill and Prof. Ziegler of University of Hawaii who is the author of an article relating to comfort women in the world history textbook for American high schools published by McGraw-Hill, to correct inaccurate expressions in the book. The Daily Toa (Korea) and the Washington Post also reported the similar write-up on February 7^th and February 10^th respectively in their newspapers.

 

After an annual general meeting of the American Historical Association took place on January 2^nd, 19 historians led by Prof. Alexis Dudden of the University of Connecticut made a joint statement to protect the publisher and the author from “censorship” by the Japanese government, and the statement was published in the monthly journal of Perspectives on History issued on March 2^nd. 

 

While we were not informed of the content of the request made by the MOFA, we studied the article on “Comfort Women” in page 853 of Version Five McGraw-Hill textbook, Traditions and Encounters, and we found many inappropriate expressions. Among other things, by focusing on the following eight points from (1) to (8) which were factual errors, we advise McGraw-Hill to correct them spontaneously.

 

==================================================

 

Prof. Hata and the other 18 historians pointed out the following eight critical errors as underlined in the article in question as is quoted below.

 

(Tradition & Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past, McGraw-Hill, 2011, p.853)

 

Comfort Women　Women's experiences in war were not always ennobling or empowering. The Japanese army (1) forcibly recruited, conscripted, and dragooned (2) as many as two hundred thousand women (3) age fourteen to twenty to serve in military brothels, called "comfort houses" or "consolation centers". The army presented the women to the troops (4)as a gift from the emperor, and the women came from Japanese colonies such as Korea, Taiwan, and Manchuria and from occupied territories in the Philippines and elsewhere in southeast Asia. The (5) majority of the women came from Korea and China.

　　Once forced into this imperial prostitution service, the "comfort women" catered to (6)between twenty and thirty men each day. Stationed in war zones, the women often confronted (7) the same risks as soldiers, and many became casualties of war. Others were killed by Japanese soldiers, especially if they tried to escape or contracted venereal diseases. At the end of the war, soldiers (8) massacred large numbers of comfort women to cover up the operation. The impetus behind the establishment of comfort houses for Japanese soldiers came from the horrors of Nanjing, where the mass rape of Chinese women had taken place. In trying to avoid such atrocities, the Japanese army created another horror of war. Comfort women who survived the war experienced deep shame and hid their past or faced shunning by their families. They found little comfort or peace after the war.

 

(1) forcibly recruited, conscripted:　The group of 19 historians made a statement where only the real name of Yoshimi Yoshiaki was quoted. He wrote in his book, “Cases of women being deceived and led off are much more common among those rounded up in Korea”. (Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Comfort Women, p.103, Columbia University Press, 2000)

 

Yoshimi said in a discussion broadcast on TV in Japan that there was no evidence of forced recruitment in Korea. When comfort women were recruited in the Korean Peninsula, many people involved in recruiting were Koreans.

 

According to Prof. Hata, most Korean comfort women were abandoned by their parents to Korean comfort women brokers in return for money, and they went to comfort stations via the owners of brothels. Some Korean women applied for the jobs advertised in local newspapers in Korea.

 

COMFORT WOMEN URGENTLY REQUIRED

Age: 17 - 23

Work Place: Comfort Station at Rear Troop

Monthly Salary: 300 Yen min. (Advanced payment up to 3,000 Yen)

If interested, come for an interview anytime from 08:00 to 22:00:

Imai Recruit Services

4-20 Shin-machi, Keijo

Telephone: East (5) 1613

Advertisement in Keijo Nippo (or Seoul Daily, Japanese language Newspaper published in Keijo, the colonial capital of Korea) on July 26, 1944

MILITARY COMFORT WOMEN URGENTLY REQUIRED 1. Work Place: XX Troop comfort place 2. Qualification: Age 18 to 30 with good health 3. Application period: October 27 - November 8 4. Departure date: Around November 10 5. Contract/reward: Determined at once after an interview 6. Number of persons required: a few dozen 7. If interested, come for an interview at the following place.   Chosen Inn   195 Paradise Street, Shoro, Keijo   Telephone: Hikari (3) 2645 (Mr. Ho) Advertisement in Mainichi Shinpo (Japanese and Korean language newspaper published in Korean) on October 27, 1944.

 

(2) as many as two hundred thousand women:   This figure is too large. Hata estimates it to be around 20,000 as is shown in (5) below. Yoshim wrote “at least around 50,000” (Rekishi-no Kenkyu. No. 849, 2008, p.4). Also refer to the comment on (6)

 

(3) age fourteen to twenty:  According to the research cards of 20 comfort women (11 Japanese, 6 Koreans, 3 Taiwanese) who were captured by the US Forces in the Philippines in 1945, 19 persons were over 20 years old. (US National Archives, RG 389-PMG) The word “twenty”, therefore, should be corrected to “twenties”.

 

(4) as a gift from the emperor:　This is a too impolite expression for a school textbook, which defames the national head. 

 

In my words, this expression is outrageously rude, humiliating and insulting. I totally can't believe that a historian can write such words based on false information. The author, Prof. Ziegler, defamed the Japanese Emperor. I doubt his personality as well as his academic professionalism. He would understand my anger if he read the following words.

 

"The American Army presented the Korean women to the American troops in South Korea combating North Korea during the Korean War as gifts from President Harry Truman."

 

Many young Korean comfort women were abducted by the South Korean government during the Korean War. They were sent to the killing fields to serve American soldiers, who were very happy to have sexual intercourse with Korean comfort women.

 

Japanese academic people contain themselves so as not to write a sentence which I wrote above, because they are trained to be polite to any people whether they are academic or not.  This self-containment habit is taken as commonsense by majority Japanese scholars.

 

However, Prof. Ziegler, has easily succumbed to the evil voice in his mind, and wrote such a sentence to accuse, humiliate and insult the Japanese Emperor based on unconfirmed information. He should have checked it up by himself through researching many war documents at the Japanese National Diet Laboratory in Tokyo and/or the National Archives in Washington. At least he would have been able to find the record on the comfort women who were captured by the US Forces in Burma: http://texas-daddy.com/comfortwomen.htm

 

We can see clearly a big difference in the expressions between Prof. Hata and Prof. Ziegler. Even though Prof. Hata is protesting to the erroneous and insulting expression, he used the words, "too impolite", which are very modest. It is because he has contained his inner anger so as not to become irrational and emotional. This is the proper attitude of an academic scholar, and he showed it with dignity. On the other hand, the expression written by Prof. Ziegler is, in my word, moronic. 

 

(5) majority of the women came from Korea and China:　In Hata’s estimation, the total number of comfort women was around 20,000 in which Japanese amounted to around 8,000 as the single largest number, followed by Koreans amounting to around 4,000 half the Japanese. Chinese and others amounted to around 8,000.

 

(6) between twenty and thirty men each day:　The numbers in 2) and 6) are greatly inflated, thereby self-contradicting. If (2) as many as two hundred thousand women had catered to (6) between twenty and thirty men each day, Japanese soldiers could have had sexual intercourse with them 4 million to 6 million times a day. The number of Japanese army men abroad was around 1 million in 1943. According to the textbook, all of them could have visited the comfort stations 4 to 6 times a day, meaning they had neither enough time to be engaged in combat nor for daily life activities.  

 

 

19 Japanese Historians who jointly made a statement are as follows.:

 

HATA, Ikuhiko                   秦 郁彦 Nippon University

                                ***

AKASHI, Yohji                   明石 陽至 Nanzan Uniｖersity

ASADA, Sadao　                麻田 貞雄 Dohshisha University     

CHUNG, Daekyun　            鄭 大均 Tokyo Metropolitan University  

FUJIOKA, Nobukatsu          藤岡 信勝 Takushoku University

FURUTA, Hiroshi　             古田 博司 University of Tsukuba   

HASEGAWA, Michiko          長谷川 三千子 Saitama University  

HAGA, Tohru                     芳賀 徹 The University of Tokyo

HIRAKAWA, Sukehiro         平川 祐弘 The University of Tokyo

MOMOCHI, Akira　             百地 章 Nippon University

NAKANISHI, Terumasa　    中西 輝政 Kyoto University

NISHIOKA, Tsutomu　       西岡 力 Tokyo Christian University 

OH, Sonfa　                      呉 善花  Takushoku University  

OHARA, Yasuo　                大原 康男  Kokugakuin University 

SAKAI, Nobuhiko　            酒井 信彦 The University of Tokyo

SHIMADA, Yohichi　           島田 洋一  Fukui Prefectural University 

TAKAHASHI, Hisashi　       高橋 久志  Sophia University

TAKAHASHI, Shiroh　        高橋 史朗  Meisei University  

YAMASHITA, Eiji　             山下 英次 Ohsaka-City University

(In alphabetical order)