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The Democratic Party-dominated US House of
Representatives has passed a resolution pressing the Japanese
government to apologize officially to Asian women forced to become
sex slaves by the Japanese military during World War II. These are
the so-called comfort women.
The United Nations, recognizing
the claims of Asian NGOs, accepts the fact that some 200,000 young
women—13 years old and older—from mainland China, Taiwan, Korea,
the Philippines, Malaysia and other East Asian countries were
abducted or forced to serve in officially sanctioned, established
and managed houses where they were systematically abused by Japanese
soldiers in need of sexual release.
In the post-WWII war-crimes
trials of the Tokyo tribunal, forcing women to perform sexual
congress with Japanese soldiers was not among the charges against
the Japanese. As a result, the “comfort women” issue never came
up. It was not until the 1990s when the complaints of the, by then,
dwindling group of Japanese military victims, became widely known.
Silence on the issue allowed the
Japanese government to ignore the comfort women’s call for justice
and demands for compensation.
The Japanese authorities argued
that rape was not a war crime until the 1949 when the Fourth Geneva
Convention was adopted.
They also tried to deflect the
complaints against the Japanese military authorities by claiming
that it was civilians, not military officers, who had gathered the
women to serve in the soldiers’ bordellos.
Korea was Japan’s colony from
1910 to 1945. The 1965 Japan-Korea agreement required a payment of
US$800 million to the Korean government in loans and grants. In
return the Korean government agreed not to demand further
reparations.
Japan claims that the agreement
disallows private claims because the Korean government has been
paid. The Korean government denies that claim and has declassified
the agreement to prove to Koreans that the Japanese statement is
false.
But in Japan, no private WWII
Korean victim is allowed to sue the Japanese government unless Tokyo
declassifies the agreement. In March lawyers of Korean victims went
to court petitioning for the declassification of the agreement.
Also last March, Japanese Prime
Minister Shinzo Abe had obscenely stood firm on the protestation
that the World War II Japanese military authorities were not guilty
of forcibly using Filipino and other Asian women in official sex
houses. “There was no coercion such as kidnappings by the Japanese
authorities. There is no reliable testimony that proves
kidnapping,” Abe said. He even added that economic reasons and the
persuasiveness of pimps made these Asian women choose to become
whores to Japanese soldiers.
That Japan’s military
authorities were involved in putting up and managing these brothels
for soldiers was substantiated by six official documents from
Japan’s National Institute for Defense Studies. These were found
and then published by Prof. Yoshiaki Yashimi of Chuo University.
In 1993 the Japanese government
at last began to admit that sex slavery had happened in the Second
World War. And in 1994, Japanese Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama
announced that the private Peace and Friendship Exchanges Foundation
had been founded to deal with the comfort-women issue.
International, including
Philippine, associations of victims refused to cooperate with the
organization. They knew it was again an effort of the Japanese
government to avoid responsibility and liability. The victims
declared: “We want our honor back, not charity.”
UNCHR’s recommendations
THE UN Commission on Human Rights
has recommended a list of measures the Japanese government should
take to solve the problem:
It should acknowledge that the
Japanese military violated international law; it should make a
public apology to all the women; it should pay each victim a cash
compensation; it should change the Japanese schoolbooks and
curricula so that the true facts of history are taught; it should
publish all the documents relevant to this issue and ferret out and
punish those involved in this crime.
It was only in 1996 when the
Chinese delegate to the UN officially spoke of the need for Japan to
pay compensation to the comfort women or sex slaves.
Preparing for the 60th
anniversary of the end of WWII, women’s groups in Asia, Europe and
North America formed a united front in publicizing the demands that
the Japanese government apologize and pay compensation to the sex
slaves.
The Japanese authorities had
tried to prevent the US House of Representatives from passing its
resolution. Tokyo instructed the Japanese ambassador in Washington
to say that the resolution would not be beneficial to
Japanese-American relations.
Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary
Yasuhisa Shiozaki also made his displeasure publicly known when he
said that, “The Prime Minister personally informed the United
States of our position during his visit to that country in April. We
regret to say that the resolution was approved despite that.”
Meanwhile, human rights and
women’s organizations in Japan are launching a campaign to demand
apologies and payment to the comfort women from their government.
We Filipinos should support these
movements in every way we can.
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