False Testimony?

Brendon Carr is in the Stars & Stripes talking about the possibility of people lying in court because they feel that the cause warrants the crime. Although he is talking about Americans (GI’s specifically), I wonder if the same could be true about issues taken up with Japan/Japanese in Korea.

There is very little social disapproval of making false official statements in order to achieve an objective for your friend or relative or for a tribemate. “Once it breaks down to ‘those Americans’ versus ‘us Koreans,’ many, many Koreans will perceive it as their duty to make sure that the Korean is the winner of the dispute. So there’s a lot of lying when witnesses come forward,” Carr said.

One could easily break down the issue of Comfort Women to ‘us Koreans’ versus ‘those Japanese’, and I think that it has already come to that point. The question is, are women that testify they were abducted from their homes lying solely because that’s what a good Korean would do? The conflicting testimony that can be found would lead anyone to believe that there is at least some fudging of the truth going on.

The general agreement seems to be that Koreans human beings and just like everyone else are capable of lying. That’s why I thin it’s important we look for evidence to support the claims of elderly women who say they were abducted out of their homes while their parents slept right next to them in the same room without being awaken, rather then just taking their testimony for face value. That’s the way it would work in a court of law anyways, just not in the court of blog.

Unless of course the concept of lying is one of those moderately new ideas to Korea that the Japanese brought with them — after all, that’s how people explain Korean Comfort Women for UN troops during the Korean War — but at least one editorial author would say that lying is a big problem for Korea, something that is harder to come by in Japan (at least as of 2005).