By Ellen Goodman
The name is what first grabbed my attention. "Comfort women"?
What a moniker for the sexual slaves who were coerced, confined and
raped in the Japanese military brothels strung across Asia during
World War II.
The very name reduces the women to the sum of their service.
What kind of comfort did they supply? The label is only marginally
more humane than the other words for the women listed on the
procurement rolls: "items" and "logs".
Now comfort women are back in the news. They're back because
California Representative Mike Honda held hearings on a bill asking
Japan to finally "acknowledge, apologize and accept historical
responsibility in a clear and unequivocal manner for its Imperial
Armed Force's coercion of young women into sexual slavery".
They're back because Japanese politicians repeatedly deny that
the women were coerced or that the imperial government was to
blame.
Japanese lawmaker Nariaki Nakayama breezily dismissed the
government's procurement of some 100,000 to 200,000 young women by
describing it as a private enterprise. "Where there's demand," he
said, "business crops up."
These Japanese in effect are saying that these elderly survivors
are lying.
Koon Ja Kim, a Korean, remembers to this day what she was
wearing - "a black skirt, a green shirt, and black shoes" - when as
a 16-year-old girl she was taken to a brothel where she "comforted"
20 or more soldiers a day.
Jan Ruff O'Herne, a Dutch woman taken at 19, remembers systemic
beatings and rape even by the doctor who paid calls to the brothels
checking for venereal disease. Lee Yong-soo left with venereal
diseases and shame for over half a century. Liars all?
This time the denial of history threw Japan's image back 15
years, prior even to the Kono statement, a half-hearted apology to
the women composed in 1993 by a Cabinet member. But it's also a
reminder of the distance the world has come on these issues.
This is women's history month, when attention is often focused
on founding mothers like Susan B. Anthony. But this year, the
comfort women are showing the long way we've come from victim to
heroine.
For millennia, rape was seen as a side effect, even a perk, of
war. As recently as World War II, the Free French gave Moroccan
mercenaries license to rape enemy women in Italy. In the 1990s
there were rape camps in Bosnia, and sexual assault is a grisly
routine in African conflicts.
?
Nevertheless, wartime rape is becoming less a matter of personal
shame and more a matter of international outrage. It's designated
as a war crime by the United Nations. And more than one comfort
woman, like O'Herne, spoke out after seeing stories about the
Bosnian camps.
There are few countries that haven't been complicit in this war
crime. But the Japanese military actually planned and managed a
vast system of forced brothels complete with scheduled "comfort"
appointments for soldiers, visits by doctors, and government-issued
condoms named "Attack No 1".
Undeniable? "There is a right wing in Japan," says Mindy Kotler
of Asia Policy Point, "that we would think of as equivalent to the
Holocaust deniers."
But Japan is not the only country that wants to rewrite history.
If some Japanese leaders talk about the World War II syndrome, some
of our leaders talk about the Vietnam syndrome.
In 2001, a revisionist Japanese textbook excising wartime
atrocities caused a furor across Asia. The revisionists argued that
history should make children proud of their country. Maybe telling
the hard truths would make those children proud.
The Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has backed off his
denial inch by inch. On a Japanese television show he even
expressed formal, if offhand, sympathy for "the injuries of the
heart" of the comfort women.
But as Andrew Horvat, a US professor in Japan, says, "If someone
has to provide sexual services for 20 soldiers a day, she comes
home with more than just 'injuries of the heart.' She comes home
sterile, infected with a stubborn sexually transmitted disease, and
in a state of psychological trauma."
So we have a shrinking, aging cohort of women standing on the
cusp of history. It is long past the time for modern Japan to fully
apologize and claim responsibility for its past. Maybe there is no
final comfort for the comfort women, but there should be
justice.
(China Daily via?Washington Post Writers
Group, March 21, 2007)
