Shi responds to comic attacks

The head of Taiwan's Chi Mei Group (奇美電子), Shi Wen-lung (許文龍) denied yesterday ever having said that comfort women had willingly accepted their work as sex slaves for the Japanese during World War II or used it as a way of raising their social status.

Hsu's response comes in an attempt to calm protest over alleged comments he made in the Japanese comic book On Taiwan (台灣論).

In the cartoon, the author Yoshinori Kobayashi quotes Shi as saying that many comfort women -- used to entertain Japanese troops -- had been willing to accept their role.

While Shi said that he "sympathized with those who had been sold," he added that, as far as he understood, "the Japanese military did not force those women to become comfort women, rather it was their own parents who forced the women."

Shi then went on to say that were the public really interested in what happened to the comfort women they would also look into similar violations by the KMT military on Kinmen and Matsu in the past and the circumstances of the military prostitutes that were employed there by the armed forces.

For decades it was common practice on the outlying island groups of Kinmen and Matsu to provide soldiers with prostitutes. Some women who were employed at such brothels were reportedly forced into their occupation.

The practice was halted some 15 years ago.

Shi also dismissed cries from opposition lawmakers over the past week, calling for him to step down from his post as an adviser to President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁)

"This is nonsense ... the issue of comfort women has nothing to do with politics," Shi said at a makeshift press conference yesterday evening.

Be that as it may, the strongest attacks against the comic and Shi, while ostensibly in the name of comfort women, have been very political.

A book burning ceremony outside of the Tunhwa South Road branch of Eslite bookstore yesterday was hosted by Elmer Feng (馮滬祥) a New Party lawmaker -- widely known for his hatred of the Japanese government. Other aspects of On Taiwan are also likely to attract Feng's ire.

For example, the book casts former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) -- an individual who has never been high on Feng's list of friends -- in a positive light.

It also, controversially, tries to raise some points about Taiwan's independence and identity, a stance indigestible to Feng who has long been a staunch supporter of reunification with China.

Nevertheless, in the name of what comfort women had suffered in the past, Feng and a handful of others burned copies of the book and Japanese flags outside Eslite bookstore yesterday demanding that the store terminate sales of the book.

Eslite has yet to make any definite decision on whether the book should or should not be sold in its stores.

Protests were also held in Taichung and Keelung yesterday where demonstrators protested in front of a chain store appealing to the public not to purchase products from Hsu's food company.

Historians say some 200,000 young women, mostly Koreans but also women from Taiwan, China, the Philippines, and Indonesia, were forced to serve as sex slaves in Japanese army brothels during the Second World War.

At least 2,000 Taiwanese women were forced to work as so-called "comfort women."

Japan has so far refused to pay compensation to the women, saying war-related issues have already been settled by international and bilateral treaties since the end of war.