This text is a part of a Women and Leadership special report highlighting ladies who’re charting new pathways and combating for alternatives for girls and others.
When Gil Gained-ok, a Korean lady, died recently on the age of 96, the worldwide group misplaced an outspoken warrior within the effort to make Japan accountable for its observe of sexual slavery in the course of the early a part of the twentieth century.
Ms. Gil was one in all about 240 so-called consolation ladies from South Korea who had publicly spoken out about their abuse by the hands of the Japanese army from the Thirties by World Conflict II, and her dying left only a handful of survivors to proceed the trigger.
However Mina Watanabe, a Japanese lady who was born years after the conflict ended, and who had no direct relationship to the observe or its victims, has continued to press for fuller acknowledgment and reparations from Japan. As director of the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM) in Tokyo, she and the museum concentrate on sexual violence in opposition to ladies in conflict and battle conditions — with further consideration centered on her homeland’s historical past.
Ms. Watanabe mentioned she had been concerned about ladies’s rights since her college days in Tokyo. When a few of the survivors of Japan’s army sexual slavery system lastly got here ahead within the Nineties, her encounters with them “modified my life,” she mentioned in an interview in Tokyo.
She co-founded the museum in 2005 with donations from individuals in Japan and overseas, and has been campaigning internationally for the rights of survivors since.
Activists for consolation ladies are sometimes subjected to criticism or left remoted by their fellow Japanese. The interview was edited and condensed.
Who’re the ladies known as “consolation ladies”?
That refers back to the victims who had been put into the sexual slavery system for Japanese troops from the Thirties as much as 1945 within the Asia-Pacific area. Whereas “intercourse slaves” is a extra correct time period to specific the important nature of many alternative types of sexual exploitation they had been subjected to, we retain the time period “consolation ladies” as a result of it has a historic significance, because it was the euphemism utilized by the Japanese army on the time.
The Japanese authorities admits that women and girls suffered, however denies proof that they had been taken in opposition to their will throughout wartime. They’ve mentioned that with the settlement reached on the Japan-ROK Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in December 2015, the problem was “resolved lastly and irreversibly.” What are you continue to in search of?
The problem will not be how they had been taken, however that they had been held in opposition to their will and raped for months or years below army management. With out clear rationalization, the federal government nonetheless denies that it was sexual slavery. What the survivors wished was for the Japanese authorities to completely acknowledge what had occurred to them and to go their tales on to the following technology to stop recurrence. It’s not nearly a bilateral settlement with South Korea. Though many survivors have handed away, we proceed to work to make the federal government acknowledge the crimes its personal army forces dedicated. I really feel it’s my duty as a girl in Japan.
Has any progress been made?
As for reparations, nothing has progressed. The federal government claims it has apologized, however what harm it has apologized for has by no means been clear. It’s our remorse and disgrace that the Japanese authorities doesn’t settle for the survivors’ testimonies as proof even now.
The final perceptions of “consolation ladies,” nevertheless, have modified dramatically on the planet group. Worldwide legislation now explicitly acknowledges wartime rape and sexual slavery as crimes in opposition to humanity. Individuals have listened to the survivors’ tales with compassion and respect them as human rights defenders.
You’ve gotten mentioned that the legacy of Japan’s remedy of consolation ladies influences the remedy of girls in as we speak’s society in Japan. Might you give us some examples?
It’s nonetheless widespread that victims face difficulties in bringing perpetrators of sexual crimes to justice wherever on the planet. Nevertheless, in Japan, I discover a sort of “tolerance” exists for sexual violence dedicated by army forces. There have been many rapes by U.S. troops in Okinawa, the place U.S. bases in Japan are concentrated, however they usually go unprosecuted. One well-known Japanese politician even advised U.S. army officers make the most of the intercourse trade. The concept that sexual violence by troopers is inevitable should be deeply ingrained in Japan.
(Requested to reply, the Pentagon mentioned in a press release: The usual of habits for U.S. Forces Japan is unwavering professionalism and 0 tolerance for prison habits. U.S. personnel who commit prison acts are held accountable below each Japanese and U.S. legislation, per the Standing of Forces Settlement. Acts of sexual assault undermine the values of respect and dignity which can be basic to service. These incidents overshadow the friendship and professionalism we exhibit every day. They don’t replicate the constructive actions of the overwhelming majority of U.S. service members who serve honorably on this nation.)
How did you change into concerned with the Girls’s Energetic Museum on Conflict and Peace (WAM)?
I received concerned within the ladies’s motion within the mid-1990’s and met the late Yayori Matsui, a distinguished journalist and main activist in Japan. She proposed the Girls’s Worldwide Conflict Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Army Sexual Slavery be held in 2000 in Tokyo, a individuals’s tribunal to carry these accountable to justice primarily based on proof and the legislation. I used to be concerned from the preparation interval. After the judgment was delivered in 2001, nevertheless, Yayori handed away in 2002. Her final will was to ascertain a museum in Japan to go on the testimonies and paperwork gathered for the Girls’s Tribunal. To indicate the total image of the “consolation ladies” system in our restricted exhibition house, we now have held a dozen particular exhibitions in these 20 years specializing in completely different nations and areas of the Asia-Pacific.
What work have you ever been doing to enhance the remedy of girls in Japanese society?
As one in all our concerted efforts, WAM, along with activists and students from eight different nations, has submitted the applying associated to “consolation ladies” to the UNESCO Reminiscences of the World Register as a novel and uncommon documentary heritage to be preserved. The Japanese authorities has tried to prevent this and withheld its contribution to UNESCO as soon as, however the pending process is to begin once more this yr.
There are individuals in Japan, too, who help our efforts to reply the decision of those brave survivors for justice and nonrepetition. That provides me hope.
