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Seeking truth for 'comfort
women'
By Christine
Ahn
Jun 26, '14, Asia
Times
On June 9,
outside of Seoul, 91-year old Bae Chun-hui took her last gasp of air at the
House of Sharing, a communal home established for former "comfort women" in
South Korea to live out their remaining years in peace.
Bae was
kidnapped at the age of 19 and taken to Manchuria, where she was forced into
sexual slavery until the end of the Second World War.
Not only did Bae
die without achieving justice. In her final days, she also witnessed Japan's
shameful efforts to wring its hands of
war crimes its military committed
against an estimated 200,000 women and girls from throughout Asia during the
Pacific wars of the 1930s and '40s.
Bae was among the Korean women who
spoke out after the former comfort woman Kim Hak-sun broke her silence in 1991
and publicly recounted her abduction and sexual torture by Japanese soldiers. In
her testimony, Kim painfully recalled: "A commissioned officer took me to the
next room which was partitioned off by a cloth. Even though I did not want to go
he dragged me into the room. I resisted but he tore off all of my clothes and in
the end he took my virginity. That night, the officer raped me twice."
Kim lifted the floodgates for other Korean women to come forward.
Burmese, Chinese, Japanese, Filipina, Taiwanese, Vietnamese, and Pacific
Islander women also verified that their experiences were not isolated, but were
the outcome of a systematic, well-organized government program to establish
"comfort stations" for Japanese soldiers throughout Asia and the Pacific.
The Japanese government has vigorously resisted calls to repent for its
actions. But a growing global movement is ensuring that if Japan won't hold
itself to account for its grievous crimes against these women, then history
will.
Coming forward
In 1991, three Korean comfort women filed a lawsuit in Tokyo
demanding an official apology from the Japanese government, to which Japan
responded that there was no proof verifying their stories. These women, many of
whom had lived their entire lives in shame and in isolation from their families,
had risked everything to challenge the state's official narrative.
They
were finally vindicated when Japanese historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi scoured the
Japanese Defense Ministry's library and uncovered documents bearing the personal
seals of Imperial Army officers that outlined the military's direct management
of the so-called comfort stations.
The groundswell of testimonies and
official historical evidence forced the Japanese government to respond. In 1993,
following an official review, Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono
acknowledged his government's role in organizing military brothels and forcing
women and girls into sexual slavery - an admission that became known as the Kono
Statement. "Comfort stations were operated in response to the request of the
military authorities," he said. Women and girls "were recruited against their
own will" and "lived in misery at comfort stations under a coercive atmosphere".
The statement hinted at a pending formal apology and reparations for the
former comfort women who had risked so much to come forward. "We shall face
squarely the historical facts as described above instead of evading them", it
promised, "and take them to heart as lessons of history".
In 1995,
however, the Japanese government endorsed the Asian Women's Fund, a private
effort that collected money from ordinary citizens to compensate comfort women.
Many of the women refused the money, which did not come from the government and
was not accompanied by any formal apology.
Revisionist
history
Fast forward to 2014.
Not only has Japan failed to
compensate the surviving comfort women, but Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
has led a nationalist campaign to adamantly deny Japan's shameful criminal past,
has revised history textbooks that previously contained information about
Japan's military sex slaves and is also threatening to revise the Kono
Statement.
The issue is playing out on the international stage. The
South Korean government is demanding that Japan formally apologize, as it
promised in 1993, and directly give reparations to Korean survivors. But the
Japanese government claims that reparations for colonial and wartime atrocities
were resolved in a treaty signed between Japan and South Korea in 1965,
complaining that Seoul "moves the goalposts" for domestic reasons.
In
March 2014, a key aide to Abe suggested that the Abe administration would water
down the Kono Statement "if new findings emerge". The Abe government alleges
that the Kono Statement was issued under pressure from South Korea and that more
research was needed on the testimonies of 16 South Korean comfort women
interviewed in the Japanese study that helped produce the statement. A revised
statement would almost certainly dilute Japan's culpability or challenge the
veracity of the comfort women, most of whom have since passed away.
Abe
is in denial of the growing, indisputable evidence documenting Japan's direct
management of the brothels. Since 1993, Professor Yoshimi and other historians
have compiled 529 documents - 30% of them from the Japanese Defense Ministry -
containing proof that the Japanese military and government trafficked girls and
women from Asia into sexual slavery.
According to Japanese historian
Tessa Morris-Suzuki, a large body of information has been gathered by the
Japanese government, UN inquiries, researchers, and NGOs and substantiated by
testimonies from comfort women, brokers, military records, and postwar memoirs
by Japanese soldiers. "This information", Suzuki concludes, "unequivocally
documents the existence of a vast network of 'comfort stations' throughout the
empire and including the front lines of battle".
Monuments to the
truth
In 1992, on the eve of the Kono Statement, there were 237
living South Korean comfort women registered with the government. Today there
are just 54 survivors, with an average age of 88.
As the number of
survivors dwindles, activists have taken to installing more permanent memorials
to preserve their history. Since 1992, at noon on every Wednesday, irrespective
of rain or snow, Korean comfort women and their supporters have stood across the
street from the Japanese embassy in Seoul, calling upon the Japanese government
for justice and reparations.
On December 14, 2011, to commemorate the
1,000th protest, they installed Pyeonghwa-bi, or the Peace Monument - a
golden bronze statue of a barefoot teenaged girl sitting in a chair with her
hands gently resting on her lap. on her left shoulder rests a small bird
symbolizing the innocence of the young girls and women forced into sexual
slavery.
The following year, in July 2012, the Korean-American community
organized to have a comfort woman statue installed in the Central Park of
Glendale, a suburb of Los Angeles. Despite tremendous opposition from the
Japanese-American community and the Japanese consulate, the Glendale City
Council voted in favor of erecting the memorial in tribute to the comfort women.
"Despite the pressure that we had not to install this monument," said Glendale
City Councilwoman Laura Friedman, "I know that the city is doing the right
thing. We stand on the side of history, we stand with the truth, and we stand
with the Korean population."
And just last month, in a suburb outside
Washington, DC, a comfort woman memorial was erected behind government buildings
adjacent to a 9/11 memorial in Fairfax, Virginia.
"The comfort women
issue is one of the earlier examples of mass performed human trafficking
organized by a military and government," says Jung-shil Lee, an art history
professor at the Corcoran College of Art and Design and the vice president of
the Washington Coalition for Comfort Women. "We wanted to honor their endurance
and bravery - especially under a Confucianist society - because many women
wanted to kill themselves from the shame."
The memorial, a granite
stone, includes language from House Resolution 121, a nonbinding statement
organized by Representative Mike Honda (D-CA) urging Japan to apologize for
forcing women into sexual slavery. "For the women still alive, and for the
countless who have passed, official recognition and acknowledgment is the only
way to bring proper closure to this terrible chapter of World War II history,"
Honda said in a statement." As comfort women die one by one, Lee adds, the story
will be forgotten. "The purpose of the memorial is to remember" and to provide
"a starting point for public awareness for future generations."
In
response to vocal protests from Japanese groups, Japanese government officials,
and Japanese residents in Fairfax, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors
Chairwoman Sharon Bulova countered that the memorial made a symbolic stand
against human trafficking happening in Fairfax. And in a letter to the editor of
The Washington Post, Siyoung Choi wrote from Seoul: "Korean Americans are the
largest minority group in Fairfax County (where I lived from 2002 to 2005). They
may have had a particular interest in erecting the memorial. However, it is for
every peace-loving soul who cherishes the intrinsic values of humanity. Such is
the case with the Holocaust memorials and museum that are scattered widely
throughout the United States."
In addition to Glendale and Fairfax, New
Jersey also is home to a plaque honoring the comfort women survivors.
Bringing women together
In recent weeks, activism on behalf of comfort women has
ramped up.
From May 31 to June 3, survivors and their families and
supporters gathered in Tokyo from Korea, the Philippines, China, Taiwan,
Timor-Leste, Indonesia, and the Netherlands for the 12th Asian Solidarity
Conference on the Issue of Military Sexual Slavery. Its resolution concluded:
"The Japanese Government now has the duty to respond immediately to the voices
calling for justice for the aging survivors, as well as voices from the
international community calling for Japan to take legal responsibility through
an apology and compensation for the victims."
This month in Geneva,
87-year old former comfort woman Gil Won-Ok-affectionately known as "Grandma
Gil"-delivered 1.3 million signatures urging the Secretariat of the UN Human
Rights Council to act on behalf of the hundreds of surviving comfort women
throughout the Asia-Pacific. And on June 13, Beijing announced that UNESCO's
World Memory program had accepted China's documentation of comfort women and the
1937 Nanjing Massacre.
The comfort women issue has played a significant
role in bringing women together across the Asia-Pacific to bring justice to the
survivors and to challenge the further militarization of their countries and
region. "Through the action for justice for the 'comfort women' survivors, the
women in victimized countries and women in Japan have worked together," Mina
Watanabe of the Women's Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM) in Tokyo wrote in
an e-mail. "At the same time, if we can make the Japanese government accountable
for the grave human rights violations of women in the past, it would become a
big precedent to make any government accountable for past sexual crimes in
conflict, even after half a century."
In Within Every Woman, a
forthcoming film by Canadian filmmaker Tiffany Hsiung, the lives of three
comfort women from South Korea, the Philippines, and China are woven together.
In the trailer, Hsiung travels with Grandma Gil to Tokyo to deliver 680,000
petitions gathered worldwide to the Japanese Parliament. As Grandma Gil and
another Korean comfort woman in a wheelchair approach the government building,
Japanese men - old and young - curse and shout at the elderly women, "Go home
Korean whore! Don't you feel ashamed! Get out old bitch! You're just
prostitutes!"
Hsiung also had the rare chance to document the meeting of
North and South Korean women this spring in Shenyang, China to discuss how they
could strengthen efforts to work together for comfort women justice. It was
particularly emotional for Grandma Gil, who could hardly summon enough strength
to deliver her testimony, because she was born and raised in North Korea but was
unable to go home after the war due to the country's division.
US
pressure
With geopolitical tensions on the rise throughout East Asia,
many activists now hope that the US government will pressure its allies to make
peace over their historical grievances. "Politically the United States is now
playing a bigger role between Japan and South Korean relations," says Hsiung.
"It takes a US president to intervene for Japan to possibly respond to South
Korean demands regarding the 'comfort woman' issue."
On his trip to Asia
in April, President Barack Obama said in Seoul: "I think that any of us who look
back on the history of what happened to the comfort women here in South Korea,
for example, have to recognize that this was a terrible, egregious violation of
human rights. Those women were violated in ways that, even in the midst of war,
was shocking. And they deserve to be heard; they deserve to be respected; and
there should be an accurate and clear account of what happened."
In a
recent letter to Obama, US Senators Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Tim Johnson (D-SD),
and Mark Begich (D-AK) urge him to help resolve the issue. They affirmed the
president's statement that the comfort women deserved "to be heard and
respected" and that this issue was critical to improving trilateral relations
with Japan and South Korea.
"The survivors' longstanding efforts have
kept the issue alive and put the issue in the international concern," WAM's
Watanabe writes, but "the role of the US is very important". Watanabe credited
US pressure with Shinzo Abe's preservation - thus far, at least - of the Kono
Statement, but said she hoped that Washington would do more. Since the Japanese
government does not listen to the governments of South Korea or China, Watanabe
says, "It was regrettable that the US did not push the government to make a
formal apology when Obama visited Japan." She said that 17 foreign embassy staff
participated in the 12th Asian Solidarity Conference, including two ambassadors
from Africa, but that neither US Ambassador Caroline Kennedy nor any of the US
embassy staff accepted invitations to attend.
Despite Abe's shameful
efforts to deny Japan's criminal past, he will not be able to shut down a global
movement that is uniting to secure justice for comfort women. Steadily and
persistently, surviving comfort women are telling their story to millions of
people around the world before they die. Their allies are documenting this
tragic history through film, by erecting memorials in cities around the world,
and having their records preserved by UNESCO's Memory of the World Program,
placing their testimonies alongside the Magna Carta and the Diary of Anne
Frank.
With or without an apology, comfort women are having their
truth recorded around the world. "All of us are over 80 and 90 years old," says
Grandma Gil. "After we're all dead and gone, the Japanese think it's all going
to end, but it won't."
Foreign Policy In Focus columnist Christine
Ahn is a Senior Fellow of the Oakland Institute and Co-chair of Women
De-Militarize the Zone (DMZ).
(Posted with permission from
Foreign Policy in Focus)
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