User:LA4Sooners/sandbox

I reworded the first sentence in the second paragraph under the establishment section, to remove the passive phrasing which was in place. The original sentence read: "Given the well-organized and open nature of prostitution in Japan, it was seen as logical that there should be organized prostitution to serve the Japanese Armed Forces.^[18]".

The edited version reads: "Since prostitution in Japan was an accepted and established business, with which Japanese solider at home were accustomed, the Japanese government and military developed a similar program to serve the Japanese Armed Forces.^[18]".

LA4Sooners (talk) 05:03, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

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I edited the "Establishment of the comfort women system" section of the "Comfort Women" article (up to the end of the "Number of comfort women" subsection). I have noted my edits below, which were as follows: Changed “Japanese Imperial Army” to “Imperial Japanese Army” for uniformity and correctness.  Removed unnecessary words, and added new words and punctuation to improve sentence structure.

Establishment of the comfort women system[edit]

Japanese military prostitution[edit]

Military correspondence of the Japanese Imperial Imperial Japanese Army shows that the aim of facilitating comfort stations was the prevention of rape crimes committed by Japanese army personnel and thus preventing the rise of hostility among people in occupied areas.^[17]

Given the well-organized and open nature of prostitution in Japan, it was seen as logical that there should be organized prostitution to serve the Japanese Armed Forces.^[18] The Japanese Army established the comfort stations to prevent venereal diseases and rape by Japanese soldiers, to provide comfort to soldiers and head off espionage. According to Japanese historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi, however, the comfort stations did not solve, but aggravated the first two problems. Yoshimi has asserted, "The Japanese Imperial [this one not changed because it is part of an original quote] feared most that the simmering discontentment of the soldiers could explode into a riot and revolt. That is why it provided women".^[19]

Outline[edit]

The first comfort station was established in the Japanese concession in Shanghai in 1932. Earlier comfort women were Japanese prostitutes who volunteered for such service. However, as Japan continued military expansion, the military found itself short of Japanese volunteers, and turned to the local population to coerce women into serving in these stations, or abducted them.^[20] Many women responded to calls for work as factory workers or nurses, and did not know that they were being pressed into sexual slavery.^[21]

In the early stages of the war, Japanese authorities recruited prostitutes through conventional means. In urban areas, conventional advertising through middlemen was used alongside kidnapping. Middlemen advertised in newspapers circulating in Japan and the Japanese colonies of Korea, Taiwan, Manchukuo, and China. These sources soon dried up, especially from Japan.^[22] The Ministry of Foreign Affairs resisted further issuance of travel visas for Japanese prostitutes, feeling it tarnished the image of the Japanese Empire.^[23] The military turned to acquiring comfort women outside mainland Japan, especially mostly from Korea and occupied China. Many women were tricked or defrauded into joining the military brothels.^[24] The Japanese forced Hui Muslim girls in China to serve as sex slaves by setting up the "Huimin Girls' school" and enrolling Hui girls into the school for this purpose.^[25]

The situation became worse as the war progressed. Under the strain of the war effort, the military became unable to provide enough supplies to Japanese units; in response, the units made up the difference by demanding or looting supplies from the locals. The military often directly demanded that local leaders procure women for the brothels along the front lines, especially in the countryside where middlemen were rare. When the locals were considered hostile, especially Chinese, Japanese soldiers carried out the "Three Alls Policy" which included indiscriminately kidnapping and raping local civilians.^[26][27][28]

In 1944, the United States Office of War Information reported on interviews with 20 Korean comfort women in Burma which found that the girls were induced by the offer of plenty of money, an opportunity to pay off family debts, easy work, and the prospect of a new life in Singapore. Many girls enlisted for overseas duty on the basis of these false representations, and were rewarded with an advance of a few hundred yen. Only some of these girls who had paid their debt were allowed to return to Korea.^[29]

Later archives[edit]

On April 17, 2007, Yoshiaki Yoshimi and Hirofumi Hayashi announced the discovery of seven official documents in the archives of the Tokyo Trials, suggesting that Imperial military forces - such as the Tokkeitai (Naval military police) - forced women whose fathers attacked the Kenpeitai (Army military police) to work in front-line brothels in China, Indochina, and Indonesia. These documents were initially made public at the war crimes trial. In one of these, a lieutenant is quoted as confessing to having organized a brothel and having used it himself. Another source refers to Tokkeitai members having arrested women on the streets and putting them in brothels after enforced medical examinations.^[30]

On May 12, 2007, journalist Taichiro Kajimura announced the discovery of 30 Dutch government documents submitted to the Tokyo tribunal as evidence of a forced mass prostitution incident in 1944 in Magelang.^[31]

The South Korean government designated Bae Jeong-ja as a pro-Japanese collaborator (chinilpa) in September 2007 for recruiting comfort women.^[32][33]

In 2014, China produced almost 90 documents from the archives of the Kwantung Army on the issue. According to China, the documents provide ironclad proof that the Japanese military forced Asian women to work in front-line brothels before and during World War II.^[34]

In June 2014, more official documents were made public from the government of Japan's archives, documenting sexual violence and women forced into sexual slavery, committed by Imperial Japanese soldiers in French Indochina and Indonesia.^[35]

A 2015 study examined archival data which was previously difficult to access, partly due to the China-Japan Joint Communiqué of 1972 in which the Chinese government agreed not to seek any restitution for wartime crimes and incidents. New documents discovered in China shed light on the facilities inside comfort stations operated within a Japanese army compound, and the conditions of the Korean comfort women. Documents were discovered verifying the Japanese Army as the funding agency for purchasing at least some comfort women.

Documents were found in Shanghai that showed in details of how the Japanese Army went about opening comfort stations for Japanese troops in occupied Shanghai. Documents examined included the Tianjin Municipal Archives from the archival files of the Japanese government and the Japanese police during the periods of the occupation in World War II. Municipal archives from Shanghai and Nanjing were also examined. One conclusion reached was that the relevant archives in Korea are distorted. A conclusion of the study was that it is conceivable that the Japanese Imperial government, and the colonial government in Korea, tried to avoid revealing traces of recording the illegal mobilization of comfort women., as far as possible, and It was concluded that they burned most of the records immediately before the surrender; . Bbut the study confirmed that some documents and records have survived.^[36]

Number of comfort women[edit]

Lack of official documentation has made estimatesing of the total number of comfort women difficult., as vVast amounts of material pertaining to matters related to war crimes, and the war responsibility of the nation's highest leaders, were destroyed on the orders of the Japanese government at the end of the war.^[37] Historians have arrived at various estimates by looking at surviving documentation, which indicates the ratio of the number of soldiers in a particular area to the number of women, and as well as looking at replacement rates of the women.^[38] Historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi, who conducted the first academic study on the topic which and brought the issue out into the open, estimated the number to be between 50,000 and 200,000.^[39]

Based on these estimates, most international media sources quote about 200,000 young women were kidnapped by Japanese soldiers to serve in Japanese military brothels. The BBC quotes "200,000 to 300,000", and the International Commission of Jurists quotes "estimates of historians of 100,000 to 200,000 women."^[40] The Asahi Shinbun apologized in 2014 for stating the number of Korean comfort women at 200,000, Korean comfort women which, on reconsideration, was regarded as inaccurate and the result of a conflation with an unrelated factory program.^[41]

LA4Sooners (talk) 09:00, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

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I edited the introduction section of the "Comfort Women" article. Original text is shown below with the changes I made identified by words crossed out, link information in brackets, and citation information in brackets. Changes on Wikipedia page are shown in proper Wikipedia format.

Comfort women were women and girls who were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army in occupied territories before and during World War II.^[1][2][3]

The name "comfort women" is a translation of the Japanese ianfu (慰安婦),^[4] a euphemism for "prostitute(s)".^[5] Estimates vary as to how many women were involved, with numbers ranging from as low as 20,000 (by Japanese historian Ikuhiko Hata^[6]) to as high as 360,000 to 410,000 (by a Chinese scholar^[7]); the exact numbers are still being researched and debated.^[8] Most of the women were from occupied countries, including Korea, China, and the Philippines,^[9] although women were used for military "comfort stations" from Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan (then a Japanese dependency), Indonesia (then the Dutch East Indies), East Timor (then Portuguese Timor),^[10][11] and other Japanese-occupied territories. Stations were located in Japan, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, then Malaya [added link to https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Monarchies_of_Malaysia], Thailand, Burma, New Guinea, Hong Kong, Macau, and French Indochina.^[12] A smaller number of women of European origin were also involved from the Netherlands [added citation to:  http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/10/07/national/documents-detail-how-imperial-military-forced-dutch-females-to-be-comfort-women/#.WLdzKRiZM19] and Australia.

According to testimonies, young women were abducted from their homes in countries under Imperial Japanese rule. In many cases, women were also lured with promises of work in factories or restaurants; once recruited, they were incarcerated in comfort stations both inside their nations and abroad.^[13]

Changes made:

1)         First sentence (removed “who were” to improve sentence structure).

2)         Changed “Malaya” to “Malaysia (aka British Malaya; the Malay States), and [inserted link: https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Monarchies_of_Malaysia]

3)         Added link next to “Netherlands” which would take the reader to an article about how Dutch women were forced to be comfort women.

LA4Sooners (talk) 07:38, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

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Here is a portion of the "Comfort Women" article that I would like to update.

Memorials

Korea

Wednesday Demonstrations

Main article: Wednesday Demonstration

Every Wednesday, living comfort women, women’s organizations, socio-civic groups, religious groups, and a number of individuals participate in the Wednesday Demonstrations in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, sponsored by “The Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (KCWDMSS)”. It was first held on January 8, 1992, when Japan’s Prime Minister, Miyazawa, visited the Republic of Korea. In December 2011, a statue of a young woman was erected in front of the Japanese Embassy to honor the comfort women on the 1,000th Wednesday Demonstration. The Japanese government has repeatedly asked the South Korean government to have the statue taken down, but it has not been. On 28 December 2015, the Korean and Japanese governments agreed that the statue will be removed. As of 3 September 2016, the statue was still in place due to a majority of the South Korean population being opposed to the agreement. At the end of 2016, the statue was removed from the original location in Seoul, and reerected in front of the Japanese consultate in Busan, South Korea. As of 6 January 2017, the Japanese government is attempting to negotiate the removal of the statue.

LA4Sooners (talk) 10:49, 22 February 2017 (UTC)

I plan to discuss how the comfort women were also casualties of World War II, but in a much more long-lasting way than the people who were killed during the war - soldiers and civilians alike.  Many of these women are still alive today, still struggling with their past of forced-prostitution, and are finally being heard by the world and their pain acknowledged in profound ways worldwide.

Bibliography (in progress)

Atran, Scott. "The Devoted Actor: Unconditional Commitment and Intractable Conflict across Cultures." Current Anthropology 57, no. S13 (June 2016): S192-201. Accessed February 6, 2017. doi:10.1086/685495.

Blakemore, Erin. ""Comfort Woman" Statue Stokes Old Tensions Between Japan and South Korea." Smithsonian.com. January 3, 2017. Accessed February 06, 2017. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/comfort-woman-statue-stokes-old-tensions-between-japan-and-south-korea-180961628/.

Kotler, Mindy. "The Comfort Women and Japan’s War on Truth." New York Times, November 14, 2014, Opinion sec. Accessed February 6, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/15/opinion/comfort-women-and-japans-war-on-truth.html?_r=0.

Luu, Chieu. "Japan Recalls Diplomats from South Korea over 'comfort Woman' Statue." CNN. January 6, 2017. Accessed February 06, 2017. http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/06/asia/japan-diplomats-south-korea/.

Oral Histories of the “Comfort Women”. Columbia University. Asia for Educators. Accessed February 6, 2017. http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/ps/korea/comfort_women.pdf.

Sabatini, Joshua. "San Francisco Expected to Grant Final Approval for ‘Comfort Women’ Memorial." San Francisco Examiner, February 06, 2017, City sec. Accessed February 6, 2017. http://www.sfexaminer.com/san-francisco-expected-grant-final-approval-comfort-women-memorial/.

Yoshida, Takahashi. "The Nanjing Massacre. Changing Contours of History and Memory in Japan, China, and the U.S." The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 0th ser., 4, no. 12 (December 2, 2006). Accessed February 02, 2017. http://apjjf.org/-Takashi-YOSHIDA/2297/article.html.

* Is each fact referenced with an appropriate, reliable reference?  They seem to be.

• Is everything in the article relevant to the article topic? No, everything was not relevant. “For the war between Chile, Bolivia, and Peru in 1879-84, see War of the Pacific” has no bearing on the information in this article about World War II. which took place approximately 60 years later.

• Is there anything that distracted you? No

• Is the article neutral? Yes and no. The article appears neutral, since it displays similar opinions about the different nations involves; but, the fact that there are opinions scattered throughout does not give one the impression that the author(s) was detached, as one would expect.

• Are there any claims, or frames, that appear heavily biased toward a particular position? I did not see any bias in my scan of the article.

• Where does the information come from? Are these neutral sources? If biased, is that bias noted? The sources appear to be valid and neutral.

• Are there viewpoints that are overrepresented, or underrepresented? Not that I could see in my scan of the article.

• Check a few citations. Do the links work? Is there any close paraphrasing or plagiarism in the article? The links work. It’s possible that there is close paraphrasing or plagiarism, but it would be difficult to tell for sure without reading the sources linked to the article.

• Is any information out of date? Is anything missing that could be added? Not that I could see with the scan of this article; but, I’m sure I will find some as I do more of the course readings, and learn more about this topic.

LA4Sooners (talk) 05:22, 30 January 2017 (UTC)