Chinese Comfort Women (30 page)

On 4 August 1993, the Japanese government published its second report, presenting the results of further investigations. Based on this report, Chief Cabinet Secretary Kōno Yōhei stated that the Japanese imperial forces had been involved, directly or indirectly, in the establishment and administration of comfort stations and that there had been cases in which women had been gathered against their will. He also indicated that these women had been forced to live under miserable conditions.
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The Kōno statement was welcomed as a step toward the recognition of the Japanese military’s involvement in the victimization of comfort women, but its careful wording was criticized for enabling the government to avoid its legal and political responsibilities. Yoshimi Yoshiaki found three aspects of the Kōno statement particularly unacceptable. First, the statement implied that the main perpetrators of comfort station atrocities had been private traders and that government involvement was largely tangential. Second, while acknowledging that a large number of comfort women had been taken from the Korean peninsula, the Kōno statement paid little attention to comfort women of other ethnic and national backgrounds (except for those from Japan). In fact, Yoshimi observed that the Japanese government had conducted no hearings that took into account the voices of surviving victims in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia-Pacific areas. Third, although it expressed “a feeling of apology and reflection,” the report failed to recognize the matter as a war crime and as constituting a violation of international law; nor did it specify any government plans for further investigation and compensation.
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In Japan, in the years following the publication of the Kōno statement, public opinion concerning government responsibility became more divided. While many Japanese researchers, journalists, legal experts, and ordinary citizens urged their government to assume responsibility for its war crimes, the conservatives opposed the redress movement. In 1995, a group of Liberal Democratic Party legislators sponsored a research association that issued publications that disputed the historical veracity of accounts of the Japanese military’s wartime atrocities, including the Nanjing Massacre. At the same time, the anti-redress activists insisted that comfort women were mostly prostitutes and that the Japanese military had not forced them into the comfort stations. They also claimed that, at the time, the way in which the women were treated did not violate international law. For these reasons, they concluded that Japan bore no responsibility and that it had no reason either to apologize or to offer compensation.
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With regard to compensating former comfort women, the Japanese government maintained that Japan had settled all claims of compensation through the San Francisco Peace Treaty and various bilateral agreements with other nations. However, under increasing international and domestic pressure to compensate former comfort women, in July 1995 the coalition cabinet of Socialist Murayama Tomi’ichi announced the establishment of the Citizens’ Asia Peace Fund for Women (
Josei no tame no Ajia heiwa kokumin kikin
), often referred to as the “Asian Women’s Fund,” or AWF, to raise funds through private donations for surviving comfort women. This initiative, as Philip A. Seaton points out, was overshadowed by a series of statements made by government officials around that time. Seaton cites that in May 1994, newly appointed justice minister Nagano Shigeto called the Nanjing Massacre a “fabrication” and said that Japan had had no “aggressive intent.” On 12 August 1994, the director general of the Environment Agency, Sakurai Shin, stated that Japan had not fought with the intention of waging an aggressive war and that, thanks to Japan, Asia could now “throw off the shackles of colonial rule.” On 8 November 1995, the director general of the Management and Coordination Agency, Etō Takami, told his press club “off the record” that he believed that Japan had also done good things during its colonial rule in Korea.
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These statements evoked protests from neighbouring countries as well as doubts about the sincerity of the Japanese government’s apologies.

According to the AWF’s records, during its twelve years of operation, from 1995 to 2007, it had raised about 565 million yen from citizen donors to fund compensation, in addition to the approximately 750 million yen given by the government to fund medical welfare and support. Reportedly, 285 former
comfort women in the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan received payments from the AWF, and each of seventy-nine women in the Netherlands was provided medical welfare support worth three million
yen
.
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However, the AWF failed to enter into official discussions with either the Government of China or the Government of North Korea, even though vast numbers of women from these countries had been victimized by the military comfort women system. Since its formation, the AWF has been criticized both by Japanese nationalists (for paying “compensation in practice”) and by progressive intellectuals (for not paying “official compensation”); many believe that the murky nature of the AWF creates “more confusion than resolution.”
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Takemae Eiji commented, “By limiting its campaign to corporate and private donations, the government purposely sidestepped the question of state responsibility for the sex-slave programme.”
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He notes that “Japan’s efforts pale beside the efforts of Germany to compensate Jews and Eastern Europeans for Nazi depredations”: under a 1956 federal relief law, Germany contributed a total of 6 trillion
yen
($50 billion) to Jewish and non-German war victims.
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From the viewpoint of the advocates who are demanding state redress, the AWF was simply a device designed to enable Japan to evade its legal responsibility.
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In 1997, in order to support the surviving comfort women who declined the AWF payment, the Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation organized a fundraiser. Li Ao, a renowned writer and critic, donated a large portion of his antique collection to this fundraiser. Ma Yingjiu (mayor of Taipei at the time), Wang Ching-feng (who has played a leading role in the redress movement in Taiwan), and many other public intellectuals and celebrities also made generous donations for the event. The association raised over 40 million new Taiwan dollars, from which the foundation provided each of the surviving Taiwanese comfort women who had declined the AWF payment with 500,000 new Taiwan dollars in financial aid. This amount was matched by the Government of Taiwan, providing a substantial amount of money to improve the living conditions of these women.
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In 2000, the AWF informally contacted Su Zhiliang, director of the Research Centre for Chinese “Comfort Women,” about the possibility of providing AWF payments to Chinese victims. After consulting with the survivors, Su declined the AWF offer. Yuan Zhulin, one of the Chinese survivors who sought an official apology and compensation from the Japanese government, said to the centre’s Chen Lifei: “My young daughter died because I was forced into the Japanese comfort station, and I lost the ability to ever have children again because of the torture. I will never accept this kind of settlement even
if I die of starvation. If I accept the money from the AWF, that will be a grave disgrace to my country.” In this regard, Yuan Zhulin’s opinions were shared by Jan Ruff O’Herne, a Dutch woman who had been taken into a Japanese military comfort station from central Java, and other survivors, all of whom viewed the AWF as “an insult to comfort women.”
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As the Japanese government continued to maintain its stance against state compensation for individual civilian victims, leaders of the redress movement as well as the surviving comfort women and legal experts sought international support; they urged the United Nations to investigate the issue. On 4 January 1996, Special Rapporteur Radhika Coomaraswamy submitted her investigative report to the UN Commission on Human Rights, confirming that the comfort women system constituted both military sexual slavery and a crime against humanity. In its response to Radhika Coomaraswamy’s report, the Japanese government based its denial of legal liability on a number of substantive grounds, the most significant of which include:

(a) that recent developments or advances in international criminal law may not be applied retroactively; (b) that the crime of slavery does not accurately describe the system established through the “comfort stations” and that the prohibition against slavery was not, in any event, established as a customary norm under applicable international law at the time of the Second World War; (c) that acts of rape in armed conflict were not prohibited by either the regulations annexed to the Hague Convention No. IV of 1907 or by applicable customary norms of international law in force at the time of the Second World War; and (d) that the laws of war would only apply, in any event, to conduct committed by the Japanese military against nationals of a belligerent State and would not, therefore, cover the actions of the Japanese military with respect to Japanese or Korean nationals, since Korea was annexed to Japan during the Second World War.
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On 22 June 1998, Special Rapporteur Gay J. McDougall submitted to the UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities her final report, which contained the results of further investigations and presented a rebuttal to the Japanese government’s arguments. The appendix of the report detailed the findings regarding Japan’s guilt and liability, including, in particular, the following points:

(a) Japan’s military comfort women system falls under the international definition of slavery at the time. “By 1932, at least 20 international agreements suppressing the slave trade, slavery or slavery-related practices had been concluded” and “the 1926 Slavery Convention, which was developed by the League of Nations and provided a definition of slavery as ‘the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised,’ was clearly declaratory of customary international law by at least the time of the Second World War”; (b) Rape (including forced or coerced prostitution) was a war crime at the time. “Several early authoritative sources on the rules of war, most prominently the 1863 Lieber Code [and the Hague Convention Regulations of 1907, and article 27 of the Fourth Geneva Convention], explicitly prohibited rape or the mistreatment of women during war”; (c) “The widespread or systematic enslavement of persons has also been recognized as a crime against humanity for at least half a century.” In crimes against humanity, the nationality of the victim is irrelevant; therefore, the Japanese government is liable for these offenses whether the crimes were committed against its enemies’ citizens or its own.
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The report points out that, even relying exclusively on the facts established in the Japanese government’s own review of the involvement of Japanese military officials in establishing, supervising, and maintaining the rape centres during the Second World War, it is clear that the Japanese government should be held legally liable for these crimes:

Under customary international law, the Government of Japan must provide redress for the atrocities perpetrated against the “comfort women.” Redress should take the form of individual compensation to the former “comfort women” by the Government of Japan. Alternatively, compensation could also be sought by States on behalf of their citizens who were former “comfort women.” These States must then establish mechanisms to distribute those funds to the aggrieved victims. In addition, as indicated above, government and military personnel must also be prosecuted for their culpability in establishing and maintaining the rape centres.
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Although the UN report sets out the legal framework for individual criminal liability, state responsibility, and liability for compensation, the Japanese government has not followed the UN’s recommendation to punish those responsible for the comfort women system and to compensate its victims.
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Beginning in the early 1990s, the Japanese government’s denial of its responsibilities to its victims prompted Chinese legal scholars and activists to re-examine the postwar international legal practices and the treaties between China and Japan concerning war compensation. On 25 March 1991, Tong Zeng, a leading redress movement activist trained in international law at
Peking University, submitted a memorandum – “Demanding War Compensations from Japan Is of Great Urgency to China” (Zhongguo yaoqiu Riben shouhai peichang keburonghuan) – to the Administrative Office of the National People’s Congress. In this document he traces how, in international legal practice, the concept of war compensation was changing, and he calls for legislators to distinguish the war indemnity paid by the defeated state to the victorious state from compensation paid to individual victims. He points out that, although, in the Sino-Japanese Joint Communiqué of 1972, which was concerned with restoring a normal diplomatic relationship between the two nations, the Chinese government relinquished its claim for war indemnity from Japan, China never waived the individual victim’s right to claim such compensation. If Japan denies the historical truth of its wartime atrocities and permits the revival of militarism, then this would be a violation of the principles established by the Joint Communiqué and the 1978 Sino-Japanese Peace and Friendship Treaty. And, in that case, China would have the right to reclaim war compensation from the Japanese state.
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