Gavan McCormack: The Comfort Women, the Asian Women’s Fund and the Digital Museum
INTRODUCTION
Six decades have passed since the end of the Pacific and East Asian War and the collapse of the Japanese colonial empire, but responsibility for colonialism, war, and their accompanying atrocities, continues to agitate Japan and East Asia. It is widely believed that Japan refuses to apologize or face the truth of history, much less compensate victims. Such a belief is, however mistaken, although it is true that it took five decades before any such steps were taken and the adequacy of the steps taken has been debated and continues to be debated.
In 1995, the Murayama government expressed its “deep remorse” over colonialism and aggression, apologized in particular to the victims of the imperial Japanese forces so-called “Comfort Women” system of sexual slavery, and set up a fund, the Asian Women’s Fund, through which between then and 2007 it offered apologies, monetary compensation, and health and welfare support by way of atonement to the surviving victims, now elderly women in their 70s and 80s. The Asian Women’s Fund formula did involve apology and compensation, but it did not satisfy those who insisted that the Japanese state had to admit its criminality, apologize unequivocally, and provide compensation direct from the Japanese state. The Fund was a joint project of the “people of Japan” and the Government, and it assumed moral, but not legal responsibility. Many therefore denounced it as a devious attempt to evade full and proper legal responsibility, and rejected the solatium or “sympathy” payments as an inadequate substitute for full compensation by way of legal right.
Proponents of the Fund, prominent among them the author of the following introduction to the digital archives, Wada Haruki, did not disagree with the principle of the criticism, but made a two-pronged response. First, they argued that an imperfect resolution was all that was possible under the political circumstances. Far better to provide compensation and apology while the surviving comfort women were still alive, than to fail to act. Second, they insisted that responsibility should anyway, in principle, be shared between government and people, since the imperial Japanese Army soldiers could not escape or shift their personal responsibility for the crime onto the state. Wada stresses the unique character of the Fund as a joint act by state and people. In response to a national appeal, substantial funds were contributed by ordinary people, former soldiers undoubtedly among them, and the payments to individual victims were made from those funds, while administrative costs and the costs of the welfare and health support fund were paid from government coffers.
Within Japan, Wada and his associates were the butt of anger on the part of many of their hitherto allies among progressives in general, feminists in particular, for the inadequacy of their efforts, and simultaneously on the part of many right-wingers for whom it was outrageous that any responsibility at all was conceded, many of them continuing to insist that there never was any state-run “Comfort Women” system. In the region, especially South Korea, criticism on the former of these grounds forced the Comfort Women support groups to reject the Fund and the government to establish its own support fund instead.
In 2007, with the winding-up of the Fund, its resources were preserved in the form of the Digital Museum introduced in the following note by Wada Haruki, its original proponent and executive managing-director. By gathering, translating, and publishing the key documents, Fund organizers have opened their work to scrutiny while making available a valuable resource for the study of the comfort women and Japan’s wartime military.
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Read entire article at Japan Focus
Six decades have passed since the end of the Pacific and East Asian War and the collapse of the Japanese colonial empire, but responsibility for colonialism, war, and their accompanying atrocities, continues to agitate Japan and East Asia. It is widely believed that Japan refuses to apologize or face the truth of history, much less compensate victims. Such a belief is, however mistaken, although it is true that it took five decades before any such steps were taken and the adequacy of the steps taken has been debated and continues to be debated.
In 1995, the Murayama government expressed its “deep remorse” over colonialism and aggression, apologized in particular to the victims of the imperial Japanese forces so-called “Comfort Women” system of sexual slavery, and set up a fund, the Asian Women’s Fund, through which between then and 2007 it offered apologies, monetary compensation, and health and welfare support by way of atonement to the surviving victims, now elderly women in their 70s and 80s. The Asian Women’s Fund formula did involve apology and compensation, but it did not satisfy those who insisted that the Japanese state had to admit its criminality, apologize unequivocally, and provide compensation direct from the Japanese state. The Fund was a joint project of the “people of Japan” and the Government, and it assumed moral, but not legal responsibility. Many therefore denounced it as a devious attempt to evade full and proper legal responsibility, and rejected the solatium or “sympathy” payments as an inadequate substitute for full compensation by way of legal right.
Proponents of the Fund, prominent among them the author of the following introduction to the digital archives, Wada Haruki, did not disagree with the principle of the criticism, but made a two-pronged response. First, they argued that an imperfect resolution was all that was possible under the political circumstances. Far better to provide compensation and apology while the surviving comfort women were still alive, than to fail to act. Second, they insisted that responsibility should anyway, in principle, be shared between government and people, since the imperial Japanese Army soldiers could not escape or shift their personal responsibility for the crime onto the state. Wada stresses the unique character of the Fund as a joint act by state and people. In response to a national appeal, substantial funds were contributed by ordinary people, former soldiers undoubtedly among them, and the payments to individual victims were made from those funds, while administrative costs and the costs of the welfare and health support fund were paid from government coffers.
Within Japan, Wada and his associates were the butt of anger on the part of many of their hitherto allies among progressives in general, feminists in particular, for the inadequacy of their efforts, and simultaneously on the part of many right-wingers for whom it was outrageous that any responsibility at all was conceded, many of them continuing to insist that there never was any state-run “Comfort Women” system. In the region, especially South Korea, criticism on the former of these grounds forced the Comfort Women support groups to reject the Fund and the government to establish its own support fund instead.
In 2007, with the winding-up of the Fund, its resources were preserved in the form of the Digital Museum introduced in the following note by Wada Haruki, its original proponent and executive managing-director. By gathering, translating, and publishing the key documents, Fund organizers have opened their work to scrutiny while making available a valuable resource for the study of the comfort women and Japan’s wartime military.
***