Japan Apology Goes to WWII Sex Slaves

Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama apologized Tuesday to all women who were forced into prostitution to serve Japan’s armed forces during his nation’s warfare decades ago in Asia.

“I wish to deeply apologize to all those who . . . suffered emotional and physical wounds that can never be healed,” Murayama said in a statement he issued as supporters inaugurated a private fund to atone to the victims, who were called “comfort women.”

Japan’s actions in the period just before and during World War II, which “seriously stained the honor and dignity of many women, cannot be excused,” Murayama said.

Murayama’s declaration came as the government appointed nine prominent Japanese as executors of a special fund and 20 others as “petitioners” to collect donations from the public to compensate victimized women from Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, China and the Netherlands. Of an estimated 200,000 women forced into prostitution, about 1,000 are believed still alive.

No details were announced Tuesday. But earlier, officials said they hoped that executors of the fund can collect at least 2 billion yen ($22.7 million), or enough to pay each sex slave 2 million yen ($22,700). That sum is close to the compensation that both the United States and Canada paid their citizens of Japanese descent whom they interned during World War II.

Although the plan to collect donations was carefully structured as a private initiative, the move marked the first time that Japan has taken steps to pay compensation to individuals for its wartime acts.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Kozo Igarashi, in a meeting with foreign correspondents last week, repeated the government’s position that all claims against Japan had been settled by peace treaties. “But it is impermissible to say we don’t need to do anything about these problems,” he added.

Separate from the new fund, the government itself will make welfare and medical care payments directly to women victims, Igarashi said. Murayama also will send a letter of apology to each woman when the atonement payments are made from the new fund, he added.

“The word apology --not a euphemism--will be used,” Igarashi said.

Just last month, when the lower house of Parliament enacted a resolution on the war, Murayama’s Socialists were unable to persuade their coalition partners in the Liberal Democratic Party to use the word apology for “inflicting unbearable suffering on the peoples of other countries, particularly in Asia.” Instead, the resolution stopped with the Japanese expressing only “deep self-reflection.”

Igarashi acknowledged that the measures to offer atonement to the women victims were insufficient but said the traditionally anti-war Socialists felt compelled to act now, while they remain in the ruling coalition. “I can’t help but have great unease about what the next Cabinet might do,” he said.

Igarashi refused to spell out how the government would deal with a plethora of other demands for individual compensation, including lawsuits filed by both Chinese and Korean men who were conscripted into forced labor during the war.