Documents back sex slavery claims
Print Edition
FIVE former victims of Japan’s wartime sex slavery and their supporters have submitted hundreds of official documents to the Japanese government proving the Japanese military was complicit in the wartime system of sex slavery.
They are demanding Prime Minister Shinzo Abe face Japan’s past atrocity and formally apologize.
The 12th Asian Solidarity Conference said it had more than 500 papers — many from the Japanese government — supporting Tokyo’s 1993 apology, in which it said it was sorry for the coercive brothel system.
Historians say as many as 200,000 Asian women were forced to work in military brothels catering to Japanese troops during World War II.
Despite the apology to the so-called “comfort women,” the issue continues to mar relations.
While many Japanese accept the country’s guilt, some senior politicians on the right ‚ including Abe — have suggested that the issue has been overblown, and claim that there is no reliable evidence of official involvement or complicity in the sex slavery system.
Last week, Abe’s government said it would set up an expert team to review how the 1993 statement was drawn up and the historical facts it was based on.
The conference said Tokyo needed to be open and honest about its guilt and there should be no backtracking on the 1993 apology, called the Kono Statement.
“We hereby submit 529 items of official documents, researched and discovered by academics and civilians at home and abroad to further expose the facts behind the Japanese imperial military’s ‘comfort women’ system,” the group said in a letter addressed to Abe.
The documents discovered over the past two decades include one that indicates wartime brothels were maintained as official military facilities, the group said.
Another document showed a chief military police officer used his official budget to cover up the fact that he had recruited “comfort women,” it said.
Five former comfort women — from South Korea, the Philippines and Indonesia — and the daughter of another from China, appeared at a press conference in Tokyo yesterday, calling on the Japanese government to officially and sincerely atone for the wartime sexual slavery.
Neighboring countries have criticized Japan over its review, particularly a re-examination of interviews with former Korean victims as an attempt to discredit the women.
“I’m living proof,” said Estelita Dy, an 84-year-old victim from the Philippines who was kidnapped by Japanese soldiers in 1943 when she was 12. “I feel outraged every time I hear people say we were not forced into this. That’s why I have to keep telling my story.”
She said she was taken forcibly by the Japanese Imperial Army from her hometown and was imprisoned as a sexual slave for the next three weeks.
Dy said during a meeting of the Asian Solidarity Conference that she was the very evidence that Abe had denied many times — that there is no material to prove the Japanese military forced women to be enslaved as “comfort women.”
She said the Japanese army committed monstrous crimes against Filipino women and she demanded the Abe government make a formal apology, write the crimes into history textbooks and compensate the victims.
Despite the establishment of the review, Abe’s spokesman Yoshihide Suga has ruled out the possibility of revising the apology. It’s unclear what will happen if the probe’s findings are at odds with the 1993 statement, which was largely based on testimony from 16 Korean former comfort women, many of whom have since died.
Cao Jin’ai, representing her late mother Zhao Runmei, said she and her mother could not accept the Japanese government’s attitude of “pleading not guilty, no apology and no compensation.”
Zhao, who died in 2008, was raped by Japanese soldiers in 1941 in Shanxi Province and held captive for long time in cave dwelling as a sexual slave.
Zhao, in 1998, along with other nine plaintiffs filed a compensation lawsuit against the Japanese government but lost the suit several years later.
What the Japanese government wants is to wait the victims pass away, said Lee Yong-soo, a South Korean victim. She said she needs to strive to live to witness the Japanese government’s confession and compensation.
Nearly 190 of the 529 documents came from Japan’s Defense Ministry archives, the others from other countries. Court documents from Japan are also included.
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