‘Comfort Women’: No Comfort or Justice : Japan’s changing approach on its wartime aggression avoids the forced-prostitution issue

Aug. 15, 1995, will mark the 50th anniversary of Japan’s surrender to the Allies in World War II. Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama’s government says that by then it hopes to have launched a 10-year, $1-billion program created to show that Japan is ready to “face squarely” the implications of its aggression in Asia in the first half of this century, beginning with its brutal colonization of Korea in 1910 and extending through its military conquests of the early 1940s.

Details of the plan are vague. All that’s known for now is that there are to be scholarly exchanges with other Asian countries and financing of vocational training centers for women in the Philippines and maybe elsewhere. But, on a matter that is becoming a test of Japan’s ability to frankly face its militaristic past, nothing is planned to directly compensate those survivors from among the estimated 200,000 women taken from Korea, the Philippines and other occupied lands who were forced to become sex slaves for Japan’s army.

The Foreign Ministry indicates that a compensation fund for the women might be raised from donations made by individuals and companies. This approach seeks to satisfy what the government now, years after the existence of the euphemistically named “comfort women” program first became known, acknowledges to be a terrible wrong. But at the same time it continues to insulate the government from official responsibility for the crime. That’s fully in keeping with the earlier official response, which tried to portray the sex slave industry as being run by private business. Only when a Japanese historian released documents from military archives showing that the brothels were in fact run by the military did the Foreign Ministry finally acknowledge the government’s role.

A refusal to consider direct compensation is justified on the ground that various financial agreements made with other Asian countries since the war have settled the issue. But few if any of the women who suffered so greatly received any money because few if any entered a claim for compensation. Until recently, in fact, a deep sense of shame led the surviving victims to keep silent about what they had endured. Now, with the truth exposed and responsibility for what happened clearly established, simple justice demands compensation for the victims.

Any step taken by Japan to improve relations with countries that were its wartime victims is welcome. At the same time Japan’s continuing, government-fostered refusal to honestly examine and openly discuss the full record of its wartime behavior remains deeply troubling. If the approaching 50th anniversary of the war’s end doesn’t at last encourage mature and candid study and public discussion, what will?