Japan insults the victims of its military sexual slavery… again!

On January 29, the New York Times ran an obituary of Kim Bok-dong, a 92-year old Japanese military sexual slavery survivor who became a global leader of the redress and education movement.  Grandma Kim has visited Glendale twice to help building the Peace Monument dedicated to the victims of the Japanese military sexual slavery in the 1930s and WWII.

The NYT article pointed out how Grandma Kim never saw justice until the day she died despite her decades of activism and struggle, but left a legacy of helping other women who fell victims of sexual violence during wartime.

On February 7, the press secretary for Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded in the letter to the editor claiming that the Japanese government has apologized numerous times and the “comfort women” issue has been “finally and irreversibly” resolved through a deal struck with the South Korean government in 2015.

Please watch 8 min video by CUNY about the 2015 deal between the Japanese and the South Korean government.

The problem is that Japanese government – again – fails to recognize the following three very important points:

1. The “comfort women” system was a government-run sexual slavery (the victims were not willing prostitutes);

2. The Japanese government bears legal responsibility for this war crime/crime against humanity; and

3. The victims are not just Koreans, but women from more than a dozen different countries that this issue cannot be resolved by a bilateral deal with any single government.

The letter to the editor conveniently ignores the fact that many survivors rejected the “atonement money” from the Asian Women’s Fund, because it was rather a hush-money, not an official government reparation. Also, the survivors and supporters around the globe strongly denounced the 2015 Japan-South Korea backdoor deal. 

After the 2015 deal was struck, UN bodies including CEDAW and the Committee Against Torture criticized Japan’s continuing denials and its attempt to evade the responsibility.   

The Japanese government is waging a “History War” in the United States. 

= Japan’s Ambassador to the US, Mr. Sugiyama told the press in early 2018 that one of his first priorities is to visit all the cities with the “comfort women” memorials to persuade them to remove them.  He hasn’t been successful. 

= The Japanese government lobbied the California Department of Education to block the inclusion of the “comfort women” history in the 10th Grade History/Social Science Framework in 2016. This attempt failed. 

= In 2017, the Japanese government submitted an amicus brief to the US Supreme Court in support of the history deniers’ lawsuit against the City of Glendale, to remove the Peace Monument dedicated to the “comfort women” victims. The Court refused to review the case and Glendale won. 

= Japanese city Osaka’s Mayor severed a 60-year old sister city relationship with San Francisco over SF’s “comfort women” statue.  San Francisco stood her ground. (Who’s loss is this?)

= The Japanese government is pressuring UNESCO from adopting the “comfort women” documents from 8 countries in the Memory of the World Register. 

Now, none of the Japanese textbooks include any mention of the “comfort women.”  Journalists and scholars in Japan who speak the truth about the “comfort women” lose jobs and receive death threats.  An activist group who advocates justice for the “comfort women” received bomb threat.

However, the harder the Japanese government tries to hide and distort the truth, the more attention it draws, resulting in even greater awareness among the public.

Is the Prime Minister Shinzo Abe the only one who doesn’t know he is a naked king?