Tetsuhide Yamaoka, President, AJCN Inc.
However, this disturbing announcement was flatly ignored by major Japanese media outlets—including even the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, which once ran a lengthy campaign of comfort women articles based on Seiji Yoshida’s lies about having abducted Korean women on Jeju Island under government orders. While a number of Korean newspapers touted the footage as new evidence of a “comfort women massacre,” even left-wing Japanese scholars declined to comment on the video.
Why? The reason for the Japanese media’s and scholars’ reticence is obvious: the film footage is nothing new, and the Seoul University and Seoul city government personnel’s description of what is shown in the footage is blatantly false.
One of the first to counter the fake Seoul narrative with hard evidence was Tony Marano, the popular Youtuber known to many as “Texas Daddy”. On his YouTube channel, Marano released an official document prepared by the US military in 1944 which gives a precise description of what is taking place in the film clip.
https://youtu.be/zbvwHivABzM
Marano was able to retrieve this film contents description card from the American National Archives and Records Administration. In fact, the card is stored in exactly the same place as the video footage itself.
The card attached to the film footage reveals that the dead bodies in the film are actually Japanese soldiers and civilians (women and children), and that the Japanese corpses are being looted and desecrated by a Chinese soldier. The video footage clearly shows a Chinese soldier stripping socks off dead bodies—just as is listed in the descriptive card.
While the video footage may have been newly discovered, the photographic still images taken from the film were known and analyzed by Waseda University professor Toyomi Asano some 20 years ago. In his report, compiled in 1999, Prof. Asano concluded that the victims shown in the images were killed while attempting to escape from a nearby stronghold during a battle, and that their corpses were left unattended for a long time. Prof. Asano recently added a further comment, in response to the Korean release of the video footage, that it would have been both impossible and irrational to take all of those women and other civilians from inside the stronghold and execute them under enemy fire outside the stronghold during the battle.
In fact, the existence of comfort women was common knowledge at that time, so there would have been no reason for the Japanese military to conceal what was already known publicly. And at any rate, even if the Japanese military had tried to execute the comfort women as part of a cover-up operation, would they then have left the corpses piled up like that, exposed in an open pit?
So much for the details, but a much larger question looms. Why do Koreans keep releasing historical “evidence” that is so easily disproven and dismissed? Tony Marano is not a professional researcher, but he was able to retrieve the descriptive card online with minimal effort from the same American National Archives and Records Administration where the Korean group claimed to have discovered the video footage. The Korean group must also have found the same card themselves, and thus known that the video footage clearly did not show a comfort women massacre.
Perhaps Koreans consider their purpose met as long as the general public in South Korea believes the ginned-up comfort women narrative and gets infuriated towards Japan? It has been well recognized in Japan for quite some time that anti-Japan Korean activists have little interest in the truth. Yet aren’t the Seoul municipal government and Seoul University supposed to be slightly more professional than run-of-the-mill anti-Japan demagogues? Or have we reached a point where prejudice runs so deep that it blinds even those at the highest levels of South Korean society to obvious historical fact?
