US Congressional Testimony of Mindy

Prepared Testimony

Mindy L. Kotler
Director, Asia Policy Point
Before the Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific and
the Global Environment
Of the
House International Relations Committee
February 15, 2007

Protecting the Human Rights of Comfort Women

Mr. Chairman, thank you for the opportunity to testify on Japan‟s contemporary responsibilities for the war crimes of Imperial Japan from 1932 to 1945. I am honored and humbled to be here with Mrs. Jan Ruff O‟Herne, Grandma Kim Koon-ja, and Grandma Lee Yong Soo. Thank you Mr. Honda for your inspiring opening to this hearing. I am director of Asia Policy Point, a nonprofit research center studying the U.S. policy relationship with Japan and Northeast Asia. My personal research focus is how historical reconciliation or lack thereof affects U.S. foreign policy in Asia.

If I may, I would like to first submit, for the record, five supporting documents on Japan‟s involvement in establishing the Imperial Military‟s Comfort Women system.

They are: an excerpt from the 1978 wartime memoirs of former Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone where he states he established comfort stations (iansho) in Balikpapan, Netherlands East Indies (Borneo); the August 4, 1993 “Statement by the Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono on the result of the study on the issue of „Comfort Women‟”; a translation of an October 16, 2006 editorial in the Yomiuri Shimbun dismissing the Comfort Women history; a chart outlining the disappearance of any mention of Comfort Women in Japanese textbooks from 1997 to 2006; a map of “Where ‘Comfort Stations’ Were”; a paper by Professor Alexis Dudden on the December 2000 Woman‟s International Tribunal on Military Sexual Slavery by Japan; and a paper on the Asian Women‟s Fund by Professor Andrew Horvat of Tokyo Keizai University‟s International Center for the Study of Historical Reconciliation.

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