Support the US sex-slave resolution
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.
