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Japanese couple brings comfort women play to San Francisco

August 28, 2015
The Eyes Holds the Truth

The Eye Holds the Truth

By The Korea Times San Francisco staff

A play on atrocities on comfort women, as seen by a Japanese couple, will be staged in three San Francisco locations this week.

“The Eye Holds the Truth” was written and directed by Yoshiji Watanabe and stars his wife, Kazuko Yokoi, who interviewed and researched comfort women for the role.

The play — which has shown in Japan — will open inside the San Francisco Public Library Thursday, the Korean Presbyterian Church Friday and the Visual & Performing Art Center Saturday.

Yokoi and Watanabe began creating plays about wartime crimes in the 1990s.

Watanabe told China Daily that his father was an officer of the Japanese imperial army during World War II and barred as a criminal post-war, suffering from war syndrome and inflicting violence on his family.

“Japan was engaged in the war of invasion and committed crimes as the assailant, in which a lot of innocent people were humiliated and brutually murdered,” Watanabe told China Daily. “There are also survivors who are even now continually suffering from the deep scars they had unreasonably received by the Japanese.”

“Comfort women” were taken from a number of countries, most prominently Korea and China, and used as sexual slaves by the Japanese imperial army during World War II.

For more information on the play, call 415-377-2972.

3 Comments

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  2. Mogro Fuuzo

    September 21, 2015 at 7:55 PM

    Koreans are shameless liars. They tell lies as they breathe.
    False Accusations of Comfort Women
    http://www.howitzer.jp/korea/page03.html

    Reply

  3. Moguro Fukuz

    January 7, 2016 at 3:23 AM

    What follows is the quote taken from the book authored by C.Sarah Soh of San Francisco Univ. It shows how girls were recruited to comfort stations.

    ==============　quote　==============

    In fact, the survivors’ testimonials amply illustrate that during the war Korean men and women actively collaborated in the recruitment of young compatriots to serve the Japanese military and also run comfort stations. For young, uneducated women from impoverished families in colonial Korea,to be a victim of trafficking became “an ordinary misfortune” in the 1930s. Amid widespread complicity and indifference to young women’s plight, the adult entertainment business in Korea began to recover after the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, and it flourished until 1940s.

    When the war effort intensified in the early 1940s, however, many adult entertainment establishments had to close down, and by 1943 it was practically impossible to run such a business. This encouraged some brothel owners to seek their fortune As Song Yon-ok noted, had there not been a “widespread network of traffic in women in the state-managed prostitution system, the mobilization of Korean comfort women would have been a very different process.” Under grinding poverty, working-class families in colonial Korea sold unmarried daughters for 400-500 won for a contractual period of four to seven years. The parents received 60-70 percent of the money after various expenses involved in the transaction had been deducted, such as the mediator’s fee, clothing, documents preparation, transport, and pocket money.

    (P10, The Comfort Women authored by C.Sarah Soh)

    ==============　unquote　==============

    So, it was the parents and brokers who forced the daughters into “sexual slavery” and Koreans are shifting the blame upon Japan . What a shame.

    Reply