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Japan Denies Role in Sex Slavery

Jill

Again.

Japanese “comfort women” have testified that they were forcibly recruited by the Japanese government to sexually serve soldiers during WWII. Now in their 80s, the women are speaking out and hoping for acknowledgment and apology before they die. This is what they got from Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe:

Mr. Abe said, “I express my sympathy for the hardships they suffered and offer my apology for the situation they found themselves in.”

“For the situation they found themselves in”? Isn’t it a shame when you trip, fall, and find yourself forced into prostitution in an Asian brothel?

To add insult to injury:

His denial of state coercion has drawn charges of hypocrisy, since Mr. Abe won his earlier popularity by championing the cause of 17 Japanese allegedly abducted by North Korea.

Japan has said it will not give North Korea fuel or other assistance, in accordance with the recent six-nation nuclear agreement, unless all abduction cases are resolved.

But Mr. Abe told reporters that the abductions were “a completely different matter” from the comfort women.

“The issue of the abductees is an ongoing violation of human rights,” he said, adding: “The ‘comfort women’ issue is not ongoing.”

Not ongoing. Sure. Just tell that to the elderly women who have mustered up the courage to speak out about the war crimes they suffered, and are not seeing justice from the country that victimized them.

It’s stories like this that make me glad we added the “assholes” tag.

5 thoughts on Japan Denies Role in Sex Slavery

  1. Isn’t it a shame when you trip, fall, and find yourself forced into prostitution in an Asian brothel?

    Oh yeah, I hate it when that happens.

  2. Abe is a right-wing nationalist goon who keeps showing his true colors. He visited the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, which is a strong signal as to where a politician stands in terms of nationalist views, and despite internal and external condemnation he might do it again on August 15. And even before he became prime minister he was involved in trying to scrub mention of military-sanctioned rapes out of textbooks. He’s also a slippery, prevaricating politician of course, and went back and forth about whether he agrees with the official apology and admission of wrongdoing that was made by Japan back in the 90s. The LDP (conservative party in Japan) just continues to act like they can get away with more and more “signals” that they have no problem with unapologetic nationalism, militarism, and erasing the boundaries between church and state (ugh, sound familiar at all?)

    What really sucks is that this probably continues to move the whole debate away from where it was starting to go in the mid-90s — which is when, after some historians dug up some more solid evidence of official involvement, the prime minister actually apologized (it was Miyazawa, best known for getting thrown up on by Bush sr.) and perhaps most importantly, the Asian Women’s Fund was set up to try and pay reparations, but with no public funds involved. I remember there used to be pressure to actually put substantial government funds in there, so that real reparations could begin — but now they’re back to revisionism and denials again, at least from the PM.

  3. It’s probably also worth mentioning the role of the US military in keeping the “comfort women” system going in Japan during the US occupation there as well as during operations in mainland Asia, and how for some women the conditions became even worse under the US military, which was much more interested in using the prostitution system for its own soldiers than ending it or helping women in it. This is not, of course, intended as some sort of “shifting the blame” to the US military as opposed to the Japanese military, but it’s another pretty horrifying chapter of the story that you don’t see much in the press.

  4. There was a brilliant, touching film made about this very subject in the 70’s. It is called “Sandakan 8” (japanese title) or “Brothel 8” (US title), among others.

    I highly recommend it to anyone wishing to gain a glimpse of the human impact of this historic fact. It is scarcer than hen’s teeth, but it is out there.

    Here is the link to it on IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073654/

  5. Holly, generally the “comfort women” offered to Americans stationed in Japan were Japanese, not Korean. Dower has a good discussion of the subject in “Embracing Defeat”. The Japanese government established a brothel system for the benefit of the Americans out of fears that American soldiers would otherwise commit mass rapes. Further, while it is indisputable that the Japanese Imperial Army did force Korean women into sex slavery, the system established in Japan, while coersive and vile, was not based on kidnapping women and enslaving them. Different orders of evil.

    As a student of Japanese history, I’d like to observe two things regarding Abe and his idiotic statements.

    The first is that all statements from the PM on the subject of the events of WWII are scripted purely from the standpoint of how they will play with the Japanese right wing. And the Japanese right wing is composed of people who think that Ann Coulter is a fuzzy liberal. The Liberal Democratic Party (which is neither liberal, nor democratic, nor a party) is about to fracture after holding a solid majority in the Diet since the end of the American occupation. Abe is a figurehead, even more than Bush is, and his speeches are written by a power group increasingly desperate to try and hold the LDP together.

    Don’t see this as an excuse of his asshole statements, it isn’t. But it is an explanation.

    Japanes politics has a long history of using foreign policy to influence domestic policy, thus speeches about Japan’s actions during WWII, visits by the former PM to Yasukuni Shrine [1], etc are all spurred by a need to appease the Japanese rightists.

    The other thing to remember is that many otherwise intelligent Japanese have a habit of thinking that no one outside Japan can understand what they are saying. There’s a belief in Japanese exceptionalism that must be experienced to be believed, and this includes a belief that Japanese is an exceptionally difficult language, so difficult in fact that foreigners simply can’t really learn it. Naturally this is BS, Japanese is a difficult language to learn but no more so than Russian, Arabic, etc. But this belief often results in Japanese politicians saying things intended purely as red meat thrown to their domestic interests that, surprise, are heard and understood by us gaijin.

    One thing I regret is that while in Tokyo I didn’t get a chance to talk to many women about their thoughts on the subject of the Korean sex slaves. In “Senso” (a collection of letters on the subject of WWII and its aftermath), as well as Honda’s “The Nanjing Massacre” there are several accounts of Japanese women turning (in one case violently) against returning soldiers when they learned about the sex slaves, rapes, and other attrocities commited against women by the Japanese Imperial Army. I’d venture to guess that many modern Japanese women are not pleased with Abe.

    [1] Yasukuni Shrine is the memorial for Japan’s war dead. Think of it as every war memorial the US has rolled into one. The problem is that it isn’t a secular memorial, but an independent Shinto shrine, and a shrine run by a rather viruluntly right wing group of Shintoists at that. What incenses most of the other East Asian governments about the visits to the shrine is the fact that seven class A war criminals are enshrined there.

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