JAPAN: Still No Comfort for Wartime Sex Slaves

By Suvendrini Kakuchi Reprint | | Print |

Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO, Jun 25 1995 (IPS) - Neither indignant statements from neighbouring governments nor heartfelt talks made by the ageing victims themselves have moved Tokyo to grant compensation to the women forced to become the sex slaves of Japanese soldiers more than 50 years ago.

But an international human rights delegation will be visiting Japan next month, and activists now say this might just make the Japanese government finally change its stance.

“International pressure is very important to force the Japanese government to accept its war guilt,” says Professor Yoshiaki Yoshimi of Chuo University. “The scheduled seminar is a preliminary step to taking the ‘comfort women’ case to international courts.”

It was Yoshimi who in 1992 stumbled upon secret documents in the Defence Studies Library that incriminated the highest officers of the Japanese military in the setting-up of wartime brothels in which tens of thousands of women were forced to work.

The discovery forced Tokyo, which had hitherto denied state involvement in the apparent sex slavery of the women, to accept the military’s role in the embarrassing issue.

The International Commission for Jurists (ICJ) headed by Senegalese lawyer Adama Dieng will be in Tokyo during the first week of July to conduct a seminar on ‘comfort women’, Japan’s euphemism for the women who served at least 30 men a day in the brothels organised by the now defunct Japanese Imperial Army.

The conference will re-examine the government’s refusal to pay compensation to these women.

The highlight of the seminar, to be held at the United Nations University in Tokyo, will be a report the ICJ compiled on comfort women that was completed last year and presented to the Japanese government.

After conducting several fact-finding missions that took the international team to many Asian countries including South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines, the ICJ concluded that the system of military-organised brothels during the Pacific War was a gross violation of the women’s rights.

The final report called on Tokyo to pay four million dollars to each surviving victim of the brutal system, but the Japanese government has yet to make such a move.

Instead, last week, Tokyo outlined a plan to have a fund of up to one billion yen (about 11.9 million dollars) that will come partly from donations from the public, plus government subsidies amounting to 600 million yen (7.14 million dollars).