Chinese Comfort Women (34 page)

In December 2000 another major event brought the issue of Japan’s military sexual slavery to international attention. Organized by Asian women and human rights organizations, and supported by international NGOs, the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery was held in Tokyo from 8 to 12 December. More than sixty survivors from the Asia-Pacific region gathered at the tribunal. Four legal experts of international renown served as judges: Gabrielle Kirk McDonald (United States), former president of the International War Crimes Tribunal on the Former Yugoslavia; Carmen Maria Argibay (Argentina), president of the International Women’s Association of Judges; Christine Chinkin (United Kingdom), expert on gender and international law; and Willy Mutunga (Kenya), president of the Commission on Human Rights. Patricia Viseur Sellers, legal adviser for gender-related crimes in the Office of the Prosecutor for the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the Rwanda Tribunal, and Ustinia Dolgopol, professor of law, Flinders University, Australia, acted as the chief prosecutors. Specialists in the fields of history, post-traumatic stress disorder, and sexual violence served as expert witnesses.
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Eight regional teams of prosecutors presented cases on behalf of the surviving comfort women. Headed by Su Zhiliang, the delegation from Mainland China consisted of thirty-five members, including six surviving comfort women (Wan Aihua, Yuan Zhulin, Yang Mingzhen, He Chuangshu, Guo Xicui, and Li Xiumei)
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and eight prosecutors (Zhou Hongjun, Gong Bohua, Su Zhiliang, Guan Jianqiang, Zhu Chengshan, Kang Jian, Chen Zuliang, and Chen Lifei).
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During the first three days, testimonies were given by survivors, scholars, and two former Japanese soldiers who had committed sexual violence against women during the war. Because the Japanese government did not respond to the invitation, three Japanese lawyers acted as
amicus curiae
to explain its position. On 12 December 2000, the tribunal issued its preliminary judgment based on the evidence and testimonies presented before it, finding both the State of Japan and Emperor Hirohito guilty of war crimes
and crimes against humanity. As the judgment was announced, lasting applause from the audience filled the meeting hall.

The Final Judgment of the tribunal was issued on 4 December 2001 in The Hague. The two-hundred-page judgment details the factual findings of the tribunal, citing laws applicable to the case, and finds the defendants accused in the Common Indictment guilty. Although the tribunal does not have the authority to execute the judgment, it expressed the unified voices of the survivors and their supporters, and it established the comfort women issue as a contemporary international human rights issue.
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Scholars and legal experts also stress that the tribunal highlighted the demand to punish those responsible for the crimes of the Japanese military, including sexual slavery, something that had not been addressed by Japanese courts. As the McDougall Report reiterates, the cycle of impunity with regard to crimes of sexual violence committed during armed conflicts ensures that similar crimes recur today; the prosecution and punishment of those responsible for such crimes are essential both for the healing of the victims and for the prevention of similar incidents in the present and the future.
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The tribunal’s judgment, based on the principles of humanitarian law, contributed significantly to the development and application of humanitarian law in international legal practice. It has been referred to as the voice of the “international community” – a voice that, from the position of “universal justice,”
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speaks against the Japanese government.

11 International Support

The Women’s International Tribunal effectively increased the visibility of the issues related to comfort women as an item on the international political agenda. Since 2001, resolutions or recommendations urging the Government of Japan to accept full responsibility for its enslavement of comfort women have passed a number of parliaments of different countries and regions, including: the British Parliament, the South Korean National Assembly, the Philippine House of Representatives, the US Congress, the Dutch Parliament, the Canadian House of Commons, the European Parliament, and the Legislature of Taiwan. Yet Japanese government officials have continued their denial. When, in a clear and unequivocal manner, Michael Honda of the US House of Representatives proposed House Resolution 121 in January 2007 to urge Japan to accept historical responsibility for the comfort women issue, Prime Minister Abe Shinzō asserted that private agents, not the military itself, had coerced the women.
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His foreign minister, Asō Tarō, also attacked the US resolution, saying that it was “not based on the facts.”
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The Japanese government’s denial served to enflame the worldwide movement for justice for comfort women. In the past decades activist organizations supporting the comfort women’s redress movement have been formed in many countries and regions, including Korea, Japan, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, Taiwan, the Marshall Islands (and other Pacific Islands), Guam, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States.
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International networks have also been established, including the Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues,
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the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of WWII in Asia,
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and the International Solidarity Council Demanding Settlement of Japan’s Past.
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In commemoration of the 101st anniversary of the 1907 Hague Convention, the International Solidarity Council held its fifth conference in The Hague, Netherlands, from 2 to 4 October 2008. The members of the delegations included victims of Japanese wartime atrocities, activists, researchers, and lawyers from the Netherlands, South Korea, North Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the United States, Germany, Canada, England, and Ireland. In urging the
Government of Japan to follow the example set by Germany in officially compensating both the countries and individuals victimized during the war, the resolution adopted by the conference also expressed deep concerns about the attitude of the Japanese cabinet members who would not recognize the past.
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Figure 24
Chen Lifei (second from left), of the Research Centre for Chinese “Comfort Women,” attending the funeral of “comfort station” survivor Lu Xiuzhen, who died on 24 November 2005.

In the absence of appropriate action by the Japanese government in response to the voices of the international community, supporters among Japanese legal experts and National Diet members sought legislative solutions to the issue. The proposal to seek a legislative solution was first raised in 1995 by the delegation of the Japan Federation of Bar Associations headed by Tsuchiya Kōken at the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. Tsuchiya Kōken later served as the president of the Association Seeking Resolution of the Comfort Women Issue through Legislation (Ianfu mondai no rippō kaiketsu o motomeru kai). Following this proposal, Motooka Shōji and a group of Democratic Party, Communist Party, and Social Democratic Party members of the National Diet jointly proposed to enact A Proposed Law for the Timely Resolution of the Issues Concerning the Victims of Wartime Forced Sexual Slavery (
Senji seiteki kyōsei higaisha mondai no kaiketsu no sokushin ni kansuru hōritsu [An
]) in March 2001. The bill is based
on two earlier proposals put forward by the Japanese Democratic Party and Communist Party members, respectively, the previous year. Since 2001, the proposal has several times been resubmitted to the Upper House. The 2008 version of the bill contains thirteen articles and an appendix. It recognizes Japan’s responsibility as a state to restore the dignity of the women who were victimized by organized and continual military sexual violence, and it requires the government to take immediate and effective action to apologize and to compensate the victims. It urges the Japanese government to consult with the governments of the relevant nations and to conduct thorough investigations of the issue. Furthermore, it requires the government to set up a special legislative body and committee to oversee the process of policy making and enforcement, to make regular progress reports to the National Diet, to respect the human rights of the victims, and to make an effort to obtain the understanding and support of the people of Japan.
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However, due to the opposition of conservative members, the proposal has been shelved and has not received any serious consideration in the Upper House.
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Two thousand and eleven marks the twentieth year since surviving Korean comfort women filed the first lawsuit against the Japanese government, and nearly half of the survivors who came forward to testify have since died (see
Figure 24
).
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As the survivors die one by one, the Japanese government has been criticized for waiting for “what it calls a ‘biological solution to the Comfort Women problem.’”
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As of May 2012, only nine of the self-identified former Taiwanese comfort women are still alive, with their average age being eighty-seven. The Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation has continued to provide services and care for the aged women, including regular home visits, referrals to medical subsidy and homecare services, and group therapy workshops. The foundation is also working on the second documentary project to record the survivors’ lives and is preparing for the opening of a comfort women’s museum in Taiwan in 2014.
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Racing against time, researchers and activists in Mainland China have been working on improving the lives of the survivors and documenting their wartime experiences. Since its establishment in 1999, the Research Center for Chinese “Comfort Women” has coordinated the efforts of NGOs nationwide as they research the lives of, and provide financial aid to, former Chinese comfort women. In order to increase international awareness of the Imperial Japanese Military’s victimization of Chinese women, the centre hosted a series of international symposiums, the first of which was held in 2000. Beginning in 2000, the centre has been distributing monthly financial aid and medical assistance to individual survivors. Funding has been provided by private donors. From 2001 to 2007, a large
portion of monthly aid was made possible through the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of WWII in Asia, a non-profit worldwide federation formed in 1994 and comprising over forty grassroots organizations. A total of fifty-seven Chinese comfort station survivors have received aid since 2000; as of 2013, only twenty-six are still alive. The aged survivors are all in poor health and are living in poverty. Unlike the survivors in Korea and Taiwan, who received financial aid from their own governments,
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the former comfort women in Mainland China have received no special aid from the government, although a few of them receive a small amount of money from local welfare programs or pensions. Currently, since large donations are difficult to secure, the centre has relied on a small number of donations and on the savings of Su Zhiliang and Chen Lifei to continue to provide a small amount of monthly financial aid to each comfort station survivor in Mainland China.

Figure 25
“Comfort station” survivor Tan Yuhua (sitting second from left) with history teachers from North America after giving a talk in July 2008 about her experience during the Japanese occupation.