Vol. 71/No. 14      April 9, 2007

Government officials in China, north Korea, and south Korea promptly condemned Abe’s statement.

“Testimony to the effect that there had been a hunt for comfort women is a complete fabrication,” Abe stated. He further claimed that the placing of these women into brothels was undertaken not by Japanese government and military officials, but by contractors used by Japan’s military.

Abe was responding to a nonbinding resolution being circulated in the U.S. House of Representatives. The document calls on Tokyo to “formally acknowledge, apologize and accept historical responsibility… for its Imperial Armed Forces’ coercion of young women into sexual slavery.” Several of these women, now in their 70s and 80s, testified in Congress about their ordeal.

One of them was Lee Yong-soo, 78, from Korea. Yong-soo said she was kidnapped by Japanese soldiers at age 16 and raped repeatedly at an army brothel. At a news conference in Tokyo she described how Japanese soldiers dragged her from her home, covering her mouth so she could not call to her mother, reported a March 6 New York Times article.

“I want Japan and the Japanese prime minister to apologize,” she told the Times. “As a victim who was forcibly taken, as someone who lived through those events, I’m a living witness.”

Many of these women remain active in the fight to win redress from the Japanese government. Shortly before Abe’s comments, an international conference for Japan’s former sex slaves was held in Sydney, Australia.

Japanese officials forced many women to be sex slaves from Korea—a colony of Japan from 1910 to 1945—and China. Tokyo invaded Manchuria in 1931 and then the rest of China in 1937, occupying Chinese territory until the end of World War II. When U.S. soldiers began their postwar occupation of Japan, similar brothels were also set up across the country with Japanese women forced into prostitution for U.S. soldiers.

In 1993 Tokyo issued an apology that acknowledged the government had a role in forcing women into sexual slavery, but this statement was never approved by Parliament. A private fund was then set up to compensate these women, but many refused to accept any of this money. They demanded instead that Tokyo take responsibility and apologize directly to them. Only 285 women accepted funds, the payment of which is being terminated at the end of March.

In response to criticisms by conservative legislators about the 1993 government statement, Abe also told the media that the Liberal Democratic Party, which he heads, will conduct its own review of the validity of the admissions it made.

In an effort by Washington to take the moral high ground against its imperialist competitor, U.S. deputy secretary of state John Negroponte described on March 9 Tokyo’s treatment of women sex slaves as “most deplorable.”

Negroponte, however, failed to mention the similar treatment of women organized around U.S. military bases worldwide. According to the Asia Pacific Research Network, before U.S. bases were closed in the Philippines in 1992 there were 2,182 “rest and recreation” facilities involving 50,000 to 55,000 women prostitutes in Angeles and Olongapo cities, where the bases were located.

During the Vietnam War, similar brothels were set up in Thailand under a 1967 pact Washington made with Bangkok. About 700,000 U.S. soldiers visited these brothels each year from 1967 to 1976, the Asia Pacific Research Network reported.
 
 
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