Comfort Women Issue
The Japanese government just want to delay and wait till all comfort women have died so no further actions could be taken. They then would put all this issue behind them like it never happened in history. Sickening."
No comfort for Abe
Mar 8th 2007
From The Economist print edition
Japan's prime minister picks a shameful fight over the organised rape of thousands of women
APSIX months ago Japan, whose leaders have often been dull political ciphers, celebrated an unaccustomed transition: the handover of power from a confident, reforming prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, to an assertive, seemingly capable successor, Shinzo Abe. Mr Koizumi had pulled the economy out of its slump, and built up respect abroad. Japan may have failed last year to win the permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council that it covets, but its diplomats, aid workers and (in modest but useful numbers) its soldiers, sailors and airmen are now ever more routinely deployed-and appreciated-in troublespots and disaster zones from Asia and Africa to the Middle East. Mr Abe has talked about his fellow citizens taking new pride in their “beautiful country”.
So they should. But sadly for those who expected better from Mr Abe, he seems to think he can build pride in the future on untruths about Japan's past.
Mr Abe started promisingly enough. By adopting a more subtle approach towards China and South Korea he undid much of the damage Mr Koizumi had caused by his stubborn visits to the Yasukuni shrine honouring Japan's war dead (where the souls of some convicted war criminals have also been “enshrined” at the request of their families). Then last week he squandered all the goodwill. Planting his own feet in the mire of imperial Japan's wartime history, he questioned whether the 200,000 or so “comfort women” (from Korea, the Philippines, China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Burma and elsewhere) herded into the system of brothels run by the Japanese Imperial Army had really been coerced into their sexual servitude. Strictly speaking, Mr Abe said, there was no evidence of that.
Is he deaf? The first-hand evidence has mounted since some of the women courageously started breaking their silence, after decades of shame, in the early 1990s. More testified recently at hearings in America's House of Representatives, where efforts are under way to pass a resolution calling on Japan to make a full apology, and where some of the victims explained, painfully, just how wartime sex slavery was for them. There would be more evidence too, if successive Japanese governments had not buried it in closed files or destroyed it.
Why pick this shameful fight? Other blunders have left Mr Abe dependent on his party's noisy ultra-conservatives (see article). Resentful even of Japan's past carefully parsed apologies for its wartime aggression, a group is now campaigning to overturn a 1993 statement by a cabinet official, noticeably unsupported by the parliament of the day, that for the first time accepted the army's role in setting up the brothels.
The past is your country too
What the brothel survivors want is that full apology from Japan; they refuse to be fobbed off with offers of money instead from a private fund. By questioning their testimony-in effect, calling them liars-Mr Abe has instead added modern insult to past injury. But the damage goes wider. It revives distrust among Japan's neighbours. And it belittles the efforts of those admirable Japanese working alongside others in the world's dangerous places to help rebuild communities where people have sometimes suffered the same wartime traumas as the “comfort women”-victims of organised rape, in any other language than prime-ministerial Japanese.
Japan is not unique in its reluctance to confront a grim past. Though China lambasted Mr Abe for his statement, its Communist Party has never accepted responsibility for the 30m deaths from Mao's self-inflicted famines of the 1950s, for example. But six decades on, deliberate amnesia is unworthy of modern, democratic Japan. Shame on you, Mr Abe.