Wednesday, November 02, 2011

Oh, How Inconvenient!

Former Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro, fresh from annointing Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko a worthy successor with an excellent chance of surviving a long time in office, must not be feeling too pleased with The Asahi Shimbun. It seems that the long lost records of the comfort station Nakasone set up as a Navy paymaster in Indonesia have finally come to light -- and contrary to his claims, there is now direct evidence that the comfort station had more than game boards inside as the answer to the the frustrations of the 3000 member 2nd Construction Division, Yabe Unit -- that indeed local women were recruited serve in the comfort station (ja).

Oh, how inconvenient!

Then again, given the former prime minister's advanced age, there is probably something of an inverse power law in effect as to how much of a hoot he gives at the discovery of the actual records of his having recruited comfort women.

Later - Ooooh! Akahata reported on this story last week (ja). So the records were found in Kochi Prefecture.

Who knows what other interesting records are to be found outside the confines of the Kanto Plain?

1 comment:

Armchair Asia said...

Actually, the records were found by researchers from The Peace Museum in Kochi in the archives AT the National Institute for Defense Studies in Tokyo. The documents directly mentioned "the comfort station was built thanks to Lieutenant Paymaster Yasuhiro Nakasone." He apparently recruited native talent to "play" checkers with the boys.

Of course, it is always possible that with a unit of 3,000 soldiers there could be two Lt. Yasuhiro Nakasones...

See:
Page1
http://fujihara.cocolog-nifty.com/tanoshi/2011/10/post-191b.html
Page2 (picture of the map)
http://fujihara.cocolog-nifty.com/tanoshi/2011/10/post-4383.html