US GIs also used "comfort women"--I KNEW IT.

US GIs in occupied Japan took advantage of official Japanese brothels.

This doesn't surprise me in the slightest, but it's nice to finally start getting some documentation to tarnish the US's reputation in WWII. All the outcry around Asia about comfort women, which is then echoed by the US, and it turns out that Japan had to set up brothels for the GIs.

I don't have a lot of time to go on about this just now, but here's the deal: Soldiers are assholes. That's what we pay them for. We pay the military to take normal, everyday guys, and turn them into murderous animalistic assholes. What's weird is that usually they turn back into normal guys in not too many years after.

So all this blathering about Japan's use of prostitutes in WWII, which I see as a very thinly-veiled method of extorting money from Japan, is just plain ridiculous. I'm not saying they didn't abuse women, or that doing so is okay. I'm saying that everyone does it. That doesn't make it right, but let's just be honest here. Prostitution and war have always gone hand-in-hand. Get over it. It's just another reason why war sucks and should be avoided.

I am very interested in this period of Japanese history. We all know about the atrocities Japan committed in WWII, but... I just can't accept that we didn't do similar things and just didn't get caught. I think a lot of the shock and horror over awful shit like Abu Ghraib is just because we never realized that kids from Iowa could do things like that, because the victor writes history, and that was always us. Now anyone can write history, and does write history, as it happens, regardless of who wins. And sure enough, it turns out the US is not the paragon of virtue it believes itself to be. And articles like this prove that it never really was.

So now, I'd like everyone yelling at Japan to just shut up, and I'd like the US to start being honest with themselves. We're just as bad as everyone else, so let's stop pretending we're above it all, okay?