WW II-Era Sex Slaves Sue Japan

Fifteen Asian women, forced into sex slavery by the Japanese army during World War II, sued the government of Japan Monday, seeking unspecified but substantial damages for years of rape, beating, starvation and other forms of mistreatment that continue to haunt them into old age.

Lawyers in the case said that it is the first suit filed in U.S. courts directly against the Japanese government for war crimes. Previously, suits were brought against Japanese companies for their use of slave labor during the war.

It was also the first U.S. suit on behalf of former sex slaves, euphemistically called “comfort women” by the Japanese imperial army, which seized them and forced them to service as many as 40 or 50 soldiers a day in battlefield brothels.

In addition to the 15 named plaintiffs whose stories were set forth in graphic detail in the legal complaint, the suit sought “class-action” compensation for all other “comfort women.” It estimated that as many as 200,000 women were victims from 1931 through the end of the war but that only about 1,000 are still alive.

The vast majority of the women either died of disease and mistreatment or were murdered by Japanese troops during the war. Many of those still held in 1945 as the Japanese war effort collapsed were either killed or abandoned in jungle battlefields by the retreating forces.

Barry Fisher of Los Angeles, one of the six attorneys handling the suit, said that the Japanese army transported “hundreds of thousands” of women to military brothels, making it “the biggest slave ship operation” since the slave trade of the 18th century.

The suit was filed under the Alien Tort Claims Act, a law passed by Congress in the 18th century, which gives foreign citizens the right to sue other foreign citizens, foreign entities or U.S. citizens in U.S. courts for abuses of international law. None of the 15 named plaintiffs has ever lived in the United States.

The act was recently invoked by 15 Bosnian women who sued Bosnian Serb warlord Radovan Karadzic for war crimes including rape and genocide. The U.S. District Court in New York awarded them $745 million last month.

The Bosnian women are unlikely to collect because Karadzic has no known assets in the United States. But the Japanese government has substantial property that could be attached if the court rules against it.

The 15 named plaintiffs in the “comfort women” suit include six Koreans, four Chinese, four Filipinas and one Taiwanese.

Although the plight of the “comfort women” was rumored since the end of the war, it was not until 1991 that the first former sex slave came forward to describe her treatment. Since then, about 190 women--including the 15 plaintiffs in the U.S. suit--have identified themselves. Forty of those have died since they gave their public testimony, according to the lawsuit.

All of the women reported physical and psychological trauma that continues to this day. Although the women were clearly victims, many said that they were ostracized by rigid communities that did not differentiate between wartime sex slaves and prostitutes.

According to the legal papers, the majority of the comfort women were from Korea, a country colonized by Japan before and during the war. The rest were from countries that the Japanese army overran and occupied.

The court papers offered harrowing personal stories of each of the named plaintiffs. For instance, Lola Tomasa Salinog, now of Antique, Philippines, related that in 1942, when she was 13, two Japanese soldiers broke into her family’s home in the occupied Philippines and orderedher to accompany them. When her father protested, he was beheaded by one of the soldiers.

“The soldiers took her to a large house near the Japanese garrison,” the court document related. “Many other women were already in the building. . . . The next morning, before dawn, Capt. Hirooka and another Japanese soldier came into the room and demanded sex.” The document said that when she resisted she was knocked unconscious. After that, “she was continuously raped from afternoon until late at night. Sometimes soldiers waited on vacant beds for their turn while she was being raped by another.”

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Times staff writer Paul Richter contributed to this story.