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Japan Offers Reparation to Korean 'Comfort Women'
Dec 29, 2015
The Japanese government recently agreed to pay $8.7 million to dozens of Korean women who were forced to become prostitutes serving Japanese soldiers. The payment is meant as compensation for their suffering. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe expressed his "deepest regrets" and "contrition" deep in his heart to the victims.
Among the estimated 100,000 to 200,000 women recruited from different countries to serve Japanese soldiers, 80 to 90 percent were from Korea. Girls as young as 11 years old were forced to serve between 5 and 40 soldiers a day and almost 100 soldiers on weekends. Those who resisted were often beaten, burned, or wounded. The abuse was such that many women took their lives. During the Japanese retreat, many were left to starve or were executed to eliminate any trace of the atrocities the Japanese military subjected to them.
After the end of World War II, the Japanese government insisted that the "comfort stations" were private brothels administered by private citizens. Only in 1993 did the government admit that the Japanese military had been "directly or indirectly" involved in establishing and operating the "comfort stations" and transporting the women.
The first Korean former comfort woman to tell her story was Bae Bong Ki in 1980. Another comfort woman, Kim Hak Soon, who died in 1997, related in 1991 how she was abducted by Japanese soldiers when she was 17 years old and forced to carry ammunition by day and serve as a prostitute by night. Her testimony sparked several other testimonies by women who were obliged to work as sexual slaves in military comfort stations. Evidence of such stations has already been found in Korea, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar, New Guinea, and Okinawa.
Illustrative of the ordeal comfort women went through is the testimony of Chung Seo Woon in the book titled "Making More Waves" (Beacon Press, Boston, 1997). Chung was an only child born in Korea to the family of a wealthy landowner. Because of his activities against colonial rule, her father was sent to prison and badly tortured. When she was 16, she was allowed to visit her father. The Japanese official who allowed her to see her father later visited her house. He told her that if she went to work in Japan for two years, her father would be released. Despite strong objections from her mother, she agreed to do so.
Chung was placed on a ship with many other girls and women. She was hopeful that at the end of the two years, her father would be released from prison, as the officer had told her. After being taken to Japan, the women were sent to several other countries,s and a group of them left in each country. After reaching Jakarta, the group that included the young Chung was taken to a hospital where she was sterilized.
The group was then taken to Semarang, a coastal city in Indonesia, and placed in a row of barracks. From then on, they were obliged to perform sexual intercourse every day with dozens of soldiers and officers. In the process, she was forced to become an opium addict. Chung attempted to commit suicide by swallowing malaria pills.
Two of her friends reported her to the authorities, she was revived; and she remarks, "It was then that I made up my mind to survive and tell my story, what Japan did to us." When the war ended and she returned home, she found her house deserted. From neighbors who came to help her, she learned that her father had died while in prison. Her mother, humiliated by the Japanese soldiers' attempt to rape her, committed suicide.
Chung decided to rid herself of her opium addiction. She could do this after eight months, and she worked hard to regain her dignity. She was never able to attain a normal sex life but found companionship and care from a physician who had had a nervous breakdown after serving in the Japanese Army. In 1993, the Japanese government apologized to the comfort women, although it didn't admit that the military coerced the women into serving against their will.
In November of 1994, an International Commission of Jurists stated that "It is indisputable that these women were forced, deceived, coerced and abducted to provide sexual services to the Japanese military . . . [Japan] violated customary norms of international law concerning war crimes, crimes against humanity, slavery and the trafficking in women and children . . . Japan should take full responsibility now and make suitable restitution to the victims and their families."
Japan has made the right decision by apologizing and financially compensating the remaining victims of abuse by Japanese soldiers. However, the gesture only renders partial justice to the Korean "comfort women." There are tens of thousands of Korean women who are not alive to claim it.
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Japan's 'War Laws' Provoke Skirmish in Parliament, Protests in Streets
With U.S. backing, the ruling party is aggressively pushing the legislation despite mass public opposition
Sep 17, 2015
While protests raged in the streets outside, a scuffle broke out inside Japan's parliament on Thursday when opposition lawmakers sought to physically prevent the ruling Liberal Democratic Party from passing a series of widely unpopular bills derided as "war legislation" that would allow the country's soldiers to participate in the foreign wars of the United States and other allies.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been aggressively pressing for the rapid passage of the 11-bill package, which already sailed through the lower house in July.
On Thursday night, upper house lawmakers in Tokyo opposed to the bills attempted to block a vote by physically preventing the committee chairperson from accessing his microphone. When ruling party politicians surrounded the chairperson, a scrum broke out, with punches thrown and some politicians even piling on top of the melee.
Despite the skirmish, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party ultimately passed the bills, which are next headed to the full upper house for what could be the final vote. Abe is aiming to drive the legislation through during parliament's current session, which ends September 27.
"If bills can be passed in a violent way like that, then our country's democracy is dead," Tetsuro Fukuyama, committee member of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan, told the New York Times.
Ruling party lawmakers advanced the legislation in defiance of tens of thousands of protesters who have rallied from Tokyo to Osaka to Kyoto against the package, which many worry will further militarize Japanese society. On Thursday night, massive crowds braved heavy rain to gather outside of parliament chanting: "Scrap the war bills now!" A protest led by students, union members, and peace advocates in late August drew over 120,000 people to Tokyo, followed by a rally of at least 45,000 earlier this week.
Backed by the United States, the bills would permit the country's military, known as the Self-Defense Force, to participate in overseas wars and combat operations--even in cases where Japan is not directly attacked--for the first time since World War II. The political move comes amid the country's deepening military ties with the United States which is orchestrating a "pivot" to Asia in an effort to hedge against China.
The package is widely unpopular in Japan. According to polling information released Monday by the Japanese publication The Asahi Shimbun, 68 percent of voters in the country hold that the security legislation in the current parliamentary session is unnecessary and 54 percent oppose to the bills. Just 29 percent of Japanese voters said they support the package.
But concerns extend far beyond the "war legislation" to include anger at the government's push to restart the country's nuclear reactors and a controversial state secrets law passed last year.
Aki Okuda, a student at Tokyo's Meiji Gakuin University and founding organizer with Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy, recently told Japan Times: "No matter what happens with these security bills, the people who are now standing up and raising their voices will not stop."
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In Japan, Tens of Thousands Anti-War Protesters Reject Return to Militarism
'Instead of enacting such pro-war bills,' said one demonstrator, 'I want Japan to exert leadership roles in facilitating world peace.'
Aug 30, 2015
Tens of thousands gathered outside the Japanese parliament building on Sunday to reject plans by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that would see an aggressive expansion of the nation's armed forces despite a long-standing constitutional mandate for a "defense only" military posture.
| Tweets about Japan protest |
The enormous crowd--estimated by organizers as more than 120,000 people--is opposing a set of bills moving through the country's legislature which would allow the country's military to engage in overseas fighting and ratchet up spending on new weapons systems. Despite loud public protests against the plan, Abe has continued to defend the plan. Demonstrators carried banners reading "Peace Not War" and "Abe, Quit!"
"Sitting in front of the TV and just complaining wouldn't do," Naoko Hiramatsu, a 44-year-old associate professor in French and one of the Tokyo protesters, told Reuters. Holding his four-year-old son in her arms, she continued, "If I don't take action and try to put a stop to this, I will not be able to explain myself to my child in the future."
As the Asahi Shimbum reports:
In one of the largest postwar demonstrations in Japan, tens of thousands of protesters swarmed in front of the Diet building in Tokyo on Aug. 30 to oppose the Abe administration's contentious security legislation.
Following a wave of weekly protests near the Diet building in recent months, rally organizers had worked to mobilize 100,000 participants from across the nation.
Amid the gloomy and rainy weather, protesters held up placards and banners and chanted slogans against the legislation, which is being pushed through the Diet.
A huge banner hanging from dozens of balloons read: "Abe, Quit!"
Opponents blasted the security bills on concerns that they would drag Japan into unwanted conflicts overseas.
Organized by a union of three different anti-war citizens' groups, the Japan Times reports Sunday's rally was arguably the most massive in a string of similar protests in recent months.
The Times spoke with several people in the massive crowd who rejected Abe's arguments that Japan must return to a war footing more than half a century after the carnage that resulted from the Second World War:
Yamada, who at 5 years old witnessed the Great Tokyo Air Raid in 1945, said he was still haunted by the horrifying scene in which his neighbors in the Ryogoku area of northeast Tokyo jumped into the Sumida River in a desperate bid to escape the deadly blast and ensuing inferno.
"With the advance of technologies (over the past seven decades), war is likely to be more deadly than it used to be," Yamada said. "In this age of nuclear weapons, you will never know how massive a death toll is going to be. The danger is far bigger than before. "We should never let it happen again," he added.
A 38-year-old mother, who only gave her first name, Naoko, said she was worried about possible consequences of the bills that her children would have to face.
The bills, which she said ran counter to the pacifist policies Japan has adhered to over the past 70 years, could see her children embroiled in wars.
"Instead of enacting such pro-war bills, I want Japan to exert leadership roles in facilitating world peace as has done (since World War II)," she said.
Translator Hiromi Miyasaka, 49, said she resented the way the government was trying to steamroll the bills into enactment despite widespread public concerns.
"The way the government brushes aside public worries . . . it's as though Japan is slipping back into its pre-World War II state," she said.
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Despite Majority Opposition, Japan About to Hit 'Go' on Nuclear Restart
Fukushima 'exposed the myth of safe and cheap nuclear power, which turned out to be dangerous and expensive. Why are we trying to resume nuclear power?'
Aug 10, 2015
Despite widespread public opposition and lingering safety concerns, Japan will turn on a nuclear reactor on Tuesday for the first time since the 2011 Fukushima disaster.
The restart of Reactor No. 1 at the Sendai nuclear plant, about 620 miles southwest of Tokyo, comes four and a half years after an earthquake-triggered tsunami caused a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, leading to the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chornobyl in 1986. In the aftermath of the Fukushima crisis, which led to more than 100,000 people's displacement, 43 of the country's operable commercial nuclear reactors were taken offline.
Last fall, the Sendai reactors became the first to clear safety hurdles imposed by a revamped Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA), established after Fukushima. More than two dozen other reactors have applied for a restart. All are now subject to the NRA's safety checks before they can come back online.
Tuesday's restart represents a victory for pro-nuclear Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who insists that the Japanese economy needs nuclear energy to supplant expensive oil and gas imports. Earlier this year, the Japanese government set a goal for nuclear power to provide more than 20 percent of the country's energy needs by 2030.
But Abe, whose general approval rating has plummeted, has yet to convince his constituents. A public survey published this month by Japan's Mainichi newspaper showed that 57 percent of respondents weren't in favor of restarting Sendai, while 30 percent supported it.
According to the Associated Press:
On Monday, dozens of protesters, including Naoto Kan, prime minister at the time of the Fukushima crisis, rallied outside the Sendai plant in a last-ditch effort to stop the restart, shouting "We don't need nuclear plants."
The Fukushima disaster "exposed the myth of safe and cheap nuclear power, which turned out to be dangerous and expensive. Why are we trying to resume nuclear power?" Kan told the crowd.
Other news reports had the number of protesters on Monday ranging from 100 to 400. Another demonstration was held on Sunday, with about 2,000 protesters marching around the heavily guarded Sendai plant to voice their opposition to the reactor restart.
"Past arguments that nuclear plants were safe and nuclear energy was cheap were all shown to be lies," said writer Satoshi Kamata, one of the demonstration organizers.
Local activists say the plant operators--Kyushu Electric--and local authorities have yet to explain how they would quickly evacuate tens of thousands of residents in the event of a Fukushima-style meltdown. As the Guardian reports, a recent survey by Japan's Asahi Shimbun newspaper found that only two of 85 medical institutes and 15 of 159 nursing and other care facilities within a 20-mile radius of the Sendai plant had proper evacuation plans.
"There are schools and hospitals near the plant, but no one has told us how children and the elderly would be evacuated," Yoshitaka Mukohara, a representative of a group opposing the Sendai restart, told the Guardian. "Naturally, there will be gridlock caused by the sheer number of vehicles, landslides, and damaged roads and bridges."
There are concerns, too, about restarting such a large fleet of mothballed reactors. Bloomberg reports:
Mothballed reactors have been turned back on in other parts of the world, though not on this scale--25 of Japan's 43 reactors have applied for restart permits. One lesson learned elsewhere is that the process rarely goes smoothly. Of 14 reactors that resumed operations after being offline for at least four years, all had emergency shutdowns and technical failures, according to data from the International Atomic Energy Agency and regulators in the U.S. and Canada.
As Allison Macfarlane, a former U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman, told Bloomberg by e-mail: "If reactors have been offline for a long time, there can be issues with long-dormant equipment and with 'rusty' operators."
But such worries have been eclipsed by corporate interests. "Utilities that have poured billions of dollars into constructing a nuclear plant are going to fight very hard to operate them," Princeton University professor M.V. Ramana told Bloomberg. "Even in the face of overwhelming public opposition."
The 31-year-old Sendai No. 1 reactor is expected to reach full capacity next month, while a second reactor at the facility will likely be restarted in October.
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A Century of Women Working for Peace
Apr 30, 2015
THE HAGUE, Netherlands--One hundred years ago, more than 1,000 women gathered here in The Hague during World War I, demanding peace. Britain denied passports to more than 120 women, forbidding them from making the trip to suppress their peaceful dissent. Now, a century later, in these very violent times, nearly 1,000 women have gathered here again, this time from Africa, Asia and Latin America, as well as Europe and North America, saying "No" to wars from Iraq to Afghanistan to Yemen to Syria, not to mention the wars in our streets at home. They were marking the 100th anniversary of the founding of WILPF, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. Dr. Aletta Jacobs, a Dutch suffragist who co-founded the group a century ago, said the purpose of the original gathering in 1915 was to empower women "to protest against war and to suggest steps which may lead to warfare being an impossibility."
Among the women here were four Nobel Peace Prize winners. Shirin Ebadi was awarded the prize in 2003 for advocating for human rights for Iranian women, children and political prisoners. She was the first Muslim woman, and the first Iranian, to receive a Nobel. Nevertheless, she has lived in exile since 2009, and has only seen her husband once since then. "Had books been thrown at people, at the Taliban, instead of bombs, and had schools been built in Afghanistan," Ebadi said in her keynote address to the WILPF conference this week, "3,000 schools could have been built in memory of the 3,000 people who died on 9/11--at this time, we wouldn't have had ISIS. Let's not forget that the roots of the ISIS rest in the Taliban." She was joined by her sister laureates Leymah Gbowee, who helped achieve a negotiated peace during the civil wars in Liberia; Mairead Maguire, who won the peace prize in 1976 at the age of 32 for advancing an end to the conflict in her native Northern Ireland; and Jody Williams, a Vermonter who led the global campaign to ban land mines, and who now is organizing to ban "killer robots," weapons that kill automatically, without the active participation of a human controller.
These four world-renowned Nobel laureates were joined by nearly a thousand deeply committed peace activists from around the globe. Madeleine Rees, the secretary-general of WILPF, recalled the history of the first gathering in 1915, and how it was organized: "It wouldn't have happened, but for the suffrage movement," she told me, "because you don't just start a mass movement. You actually have to have an organizational structure to make that happen. That had started with the suffragette movement. ... Every single one of those women who went to The Hague ... were demanding the right to vote. They saw, quite rightly, that the absence of women in making decisions in government meant a greater likelihood of war."
Kozue Akibayashi is WILPF's new president. After World War II, the U.S. required that Japan's Constitution explicitly forbid it from pursuing war to settle disputes with foreign states. "The majority of people in Japan support the peace constitution," Akibayashi explained. President Barack Obama, however, like George W. Bush before him, is pressuring Japan to eliminate the pacifistic Article Nine from the Japanese Constitution. He hosted Japan's prime minister, Shinzo Abe, in Washington this week, celebrating Abe as he works to restore Japan's military to its former offensive capacity. Akibayashi and thousands of others also are protesting the planned expansion of the U.S. military presence on Okinawa.
Africa activist Hakima Abbas was also in The Hague. I interviewed her hours after mass graves were reported in Nigeria, containing victims of the militant group Boko Haram. The story of Boko Haram, she told me, "is an intersection with violent Islamist fundamentalisms, with global capitalism and with militarization ... fundamentalisms, though, don't start and end with Islamic fundamentalisms in Africa. We've seen Christian fundamentalisms in Uganda, and the persecution of LGBTQI people." She then made a connection to the street protests in Baltimore this week: "In your own country," she told me, "the white supremacist and Christian right fundamentalisms are exacerbated by the gun culture and the promotion of an armed police force, which is killing black women, men, trans people and children. ... So fundamentalisms is really something that we have to address globally."
I asked Shirin Ebadi if she had advice for the people of the world. She replied with a simple yet powerful prescription for peace, laying out the work for WILPF as it enters its second century: "Treat the people of Afghanistan the same as you treat your own people. Look at Iraqi children the same as you look at your own children. Then you will see that the solution is there."
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
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