Comfort women

Comfort women (pronounced as "ianfu" 위안부/日帝慰安婦) refer to young females of various ethnic backgrounds, who were forced to offer sexual services to the Japanese troops during the Second World War. In July, 2012, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton referred to the comfort women drafted as prostitutes for the Japanese military during World War II as "enforced sex slaves."

Come close to the end of the Japanese occupation, Korean youngsters were forced by the Japanese rulers to make a choice from three options: a Japanese military service man, forced laborer at Japanese factories, or comfort woman, if female.

As the Japanese government declined its responsibility toward comfort women survivors, it has caused diplomatic issues between Korea and Japan. The following is the excerpt from Prof. Soh's article posted on the Japan Policy Research Institute (JPRI) Website.

Key words
comfort women, Japanese occupation, forced recruitment, Korea-Japan Treaty

Brief History
The question of the wartime forced recruitment of Korean women as comfort women was first raised in the Japanese National Diet in June 1990 as a result of the women's movement in South Korea. The first class-action suit by Korean ex-comfort women was filed against the Japanese government in December 1991, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. Since 1992, Korean and Japanese women leaders, as well as ex-comfort women and legal experts, have persuaded international organizations, including the United Nations, to conduct a series of hearings and formal investigations into the matter.

Legal scholars such as David Boling believe that "due to both substantive and procedural obstacles," the plaintiffs in Korean and Filipina litigations are unlikely to win, and he has therefore suggested that concerted international pressure on Japan by Western nations, especially the United States, will be needed to achieve state compensation. Indeed, in the latest court decision on March 26, 2001, the Hiroshima High Court overturned a 1998 district court that had ordered the Japanese government to pay three Korean former comfort women 300,000 yen ($2,272 as of April 1998) each.

The Japanese government has steadfastly maintained that the San Francisco Peace Treaty and various bilateral agreements between Japan and other nations have settled all postwar claims of compensation. Nonetheless, in response to mounting international pressure to compensate former comfort women, the government has acknowledged its moral responsibility for the suffering imposed on them and it helped establish the Asian Women's Fund (AWF) to express "a sense of national atonement from the Japanese people to the former comfort women, and to work to address contemporary issues regarding the honor and dignity of women." AWF is nominally a non-governmental organization.

Regrettably, the issue of comfort women as a war crime did not emerge until the AWF became controversial because its projects were factually under the control of the Japanese government. But the issue of Japan's legal and moral responsibility also involves the attitudes of the Western nations that defeated Japan in World War II. So the issue of comfort women as a war crime took nearly half a century in the international community in the 1990s.

Postcolonial Disputes Between Japan and Korea
The transnational redress movement for comfort women survivors originated in South Korea as a women's movement against sex tourism by Japanese male visitors. It developed into a post-colonial dispute between Japan and Korea. The two countries hold diametrically opposed views regarding the legitimacy of Japan's colonization of Korea.

The 1982 history textbook controversy in Japan, which began as a domestic squabble and expanded into an international incident involving primarily China and Korea, epitomized Japan's nationalist view of its colonization of Korea and the imperialist war as an "advance" instead of "aggression" into its neighboring countries. Such nationalist views continue to serve as a fundamental source of tension and disagreement over Japan's postwar responsibility for Korea's colonization in general and for comfort women survivors in particular. It should be noted, however, that the issue of comfort women remained a non-issue for both Japan and South Korea during the fourteen years (1952-1965) of negotiations to normalize bilateral relations.

Although the Japanese government did not formally express its apology for or regret over colonial rule in Korea until 1992, a very small number of progressive intellectuals in Japan have repeatedly called on their government to confront the issues of colonial domination since the 1982 textbook controversy. A public statement made by eight Japanese intellectuals on August 14, 1982, called on both government and people to recognize and apologize to the Koreans for Japan's aggression and colonial injustices, including former comfort women who were recruited under the guise of the "volunteer labor corps" (정신대/挺身隊) and who perished in the South Seas.

The Korean Women's Movement
It is largely the Korean women's movement that spearheaded the international effort to obtain recognition and compensation for the comfort women survivors. In 1991, two landmark events galvanized the Korean women's movement. In August, Kim Hak-sun testified in public about her suffering as a former comfort woman, and in December a class-action suit was filed against Japan by thirty-five Koreans, including three former comfort women. Kim's personal appearance in Tokyo as a former comfort woman and a plaintiff in the lawsuit riveted the attention of both Japan and the world community.

Contrary to Japan's official position up until then, the newly discovered documents revealed that the imperial army was involved in both establishing and operating the comfort stations. As a result, the Japanese government could not help but acknowledge its wartime involvement in the comfort women issue; and on January 13, 1992, it issued an apology. Four days later, Prime Minister Miyazawa formally apologized to the Korean people during his visit to Korea. In March 1992, a South Korean non-governmental organization, The Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (한국정신대문제대책협의회, "Korean Council" for short) appealed to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights to investigate the comfort women issue.

In December 1992, the Korean Council conducted a nationwide fund-raising drive to help the survivors. In March, 1993, South Korean President Kim Young Sam announced that Seoul would not seek material compensation from Japan for former comfort women, but he urged Tokyo to investigate the issue thoroughly and make public the truth. Kim's policy was designed to stake out a position of "moral superiority" for Korea in forging a new relationship with Japan in the future. The Korean government passed a special bill granting each former comfort woman a one-time payment of five million won (approximately US$6,250) plus an additional monthly sum. Between 1996 and 1997 there were two further Korean fund-raising campaigns in order to counter the temptation of the survivors to accept money from the Japanese AWF. During this period, seven Korean survivors accepted AWF money, causing outrage and sharp criticism among Korean activists. In April 1998, at the request of the Korean Council, the Kim Dae Jung government approved the payment of a further 31.5 million won in support money to about 140 survivors, who were required to pledge not to accept AWF money.

A National Fund a.k.a. Asian Women's Fund
After acknowledging the involvement of the military in the comfort system in January 1992, the Japanese government conducted two formal investigations into the matter before it admitted in August 1993 that there had been coercive recruitment in some cases. Prime Minister Miyazawa indicated that the government would come up with some vague gesture in lieu of compensation for the survivors.

Moreover, there arose a wave of strong resistance among conservative Japanese to compensating Korean comfort women survivors.

When Tomiichi Murayama, the leader of the Socialist Party, became prime minister in June 1994, progressive intellectuals and movement leaders had high hopes for achieving a satisfactory resolution to the comfort women issue. But Murayama, as a leader of a coalition cabinet, was caught between the conservative resistance and the progressives' clamor for state compensation. In June 1995, his cabinet came up with the proposal to establish the Asia Peace and Friendship Fund for Women (여성을 위한 아시아평화우호기금).

The Japanese government has authorized the fund to operate as a non-profit foundation and regularly reiterates that it supports AWF projects out of moral responsibility and that legal compensation issues have been settled. The meaning of the expenditure of state funds is thus fudged by the state's double-talk. Moreover, with its insistence on moral responsibility, the government has sidestepped the issue of whether the comfort system was a war crime. This is the fundamental reason why supporters of state compensation will continue to reject AWF funds.

Another important issue in the AWF controversy is the state's formal apology to the survivors. When the AWF delivered the first "atonement money" to four Filipina survivors in August 1996, they also handed over letters of apology from both Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto and the President of the AWF, Bunbei Hara. Hashimoto's letter included phrases such as "apology and remorse" and "women's honor and dignity," but without any reference to the war of aggression or colonial domination. Activists for state compensation also found fault with the phrase "my personal feelings" in Hashimoto's letter, pointing out that it conveyed the feelings of one individual and not of the government of Japan. It is not known why the term "personal" was added in the official English translation of the Japanese phrase "watashi no kimochi" (기분/氣分, my feeling). From 1998 on, when Keizo Obuchi succeeded Hashimoto as prime minister, the letter in English no longer contained the term "personal." Furthermore, Obuchi's letter in the official Korean translation contains the crucial term "sajoe" (사죄/謝罪). The English word would be "apology," but it is a stronger term than "sagwa" (사과/謝過), another term for apology: sajoe, in contrast to sagwa, implies the admission of a crime, rather than just a mistake. However, except for a few undisclosed recipients of the AWF atonement money, practically no one in Korea is aware of this terminological change because the AWF projects cannot be implemented publicly, owing largely to the strenuous objections raised by the Korean Council and the survivors. In any case, in comparison to Hashimoto's 1996 letter, which was designed primarily to evade the issue of state compensation, AWF president Hara's letter of apology recognized the involvement of the Japanese military in establishing comfort stations as well as acknowledging coercion and dissimulation in the recruitment of comfort women, some of whom were teenage girls. Both letters do not fail to mention Japan's "moral responsibility," and the phrase, "in cooperation with the Government of Japan," appears multiple times in Hara's letter.

Since the AWF is a compromise measure to deal with the issue of compensating comfort women survivors, the organization is composed of supporters from opposing camps ranging from conservative neo-nationalists to progressive intellectuals. The tensions among them have resulted, among other things, in personal confrontations on the AWF Committee on Historical Materials on "Comfort Women." For example, Ikuhiko Hata, a conservative historian and a member of the committee, has publicly criticized, in a 1999 essay, fellow committee members Soji Takasaki and Haruki Wada, calling them "termites" (shiroari) and accusing them of having a secret agenda eventually to turn AWF activities into state compensation. A primary reason why even some supporters of state compensation-- such as Wada and Takasaki -- back the AWF is their desire to take some concrete action before elderly survivors die without receiving any tokens of atonement, let alone legal compensation. For his decision, Wada has been subjected to vitriolic name-calling by his former friends and allies.

National Interest v. Healing Truth
At the legal level, the Japanese government seems to regard it in its national interest to ward off the possible domino effect that accepting the claims of comfort women survivors to state compensation could have on other types of non-Japanese war victims. Such a concern by a state is not unique to Japan.

Accordingly, contemporary Japan is deeply divided over the comfort women issue. Some progressive lawyers and grassroots activists are campaigning for legislation that would authorize an investigation into the comfort women issue, an apology, and compensation. In contrast, conservative neo-nationalists, who feel neither a moral nor a legal responsibility for the comfort women survivors, believe that Japanese supporters of the international redress movement display an egregious lack of "awareness of national interests" (국익의식/國益意識).

Some Japanese perceive the comfort system as having been a necessary evil, placing them at odds with feminist and anti-Japanese critics who regard the comfort system as a form of sexual slavery. It is in this social context that prominent politicians and cabinet secretaries in Japan have asserted that comfort women were nothing more than licensed prostitutes engaged in business, causing outraged responses among movement activists and survivors alike. To be fair, one of the official aims of the comfort system was to prevent soldiers from randomly raping the women of occupied territories. Survivors' testimony reveals, however, that some comfort stations degenerated into "rape centers" (to use Gay McDougall's term) in the final years of the war).

Nonetheless, one must distinguish between rape used as a genocidal weapon of war (such as in Bosnia and Kosovo) and the comfort system with its official, intended purpose of regulating prostitution and providing R& R. Beyond this lies the problem of ascertaining operational details of the comfort system, such as the issue of forced recruitment, payment, and working conditions, which varied widely depending on the particular locale and period. There is, moreover, the problem of how one defines being "forced," which is one of the major bones of contention in the compensation issue, even after the Japanese government's admission that some comfort women were forcibly recruited. Apparently, the only evidence that anti-comfort women conservatives in Japan will acknowledge as an exceptional case of forced recruitment is that of Dutch women from civilian internment camps. By contrast, some feminist and human rights activists argue that not only military comfort women in the colonies and occupied territories but also women sex workers in Japan's licensed prostitution system were victims of sexual slavery.

During Japan's fifteen-year war in the Asia Pacific theater, the comfort system evolved as a complex social, sexual-cultural, and historical institution for the military, from urban centers of sexual entertainment provided mostly by Japanese women into facilities of authorized gang rape and sexual enslavement of women of the colonies and occupied territories. The uncompromising search for gender justice in terms of state compensation and a proper apology clashes with a humanitarian desire to take some concrete action on behalf of the aging survivors during their lifetime. It is a difficult choice for sympathetic supporters of the redress movement.

Recent Legal Developments in Korea
It is well-known that representatives of comfort women survivors and their sympathisers hold a rally every Wednesday for nearly 20 years in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. A few years ago they found fault with the Korean governmnt's failure to settle the disputes for the state compensation between Korean victims and the Japanese government. They filed such arguments with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and, later with the Constitutional Court.

In August 2011, the Constitutional Court held that the governmnt's failure to get started necessary measures to solve the dispute whether the claims of comfort women survivors have been extinguished or not pursuant to Article 2(1) of the Korea-Japan Treaty Concerning the Properties and Claims-related Problem Solving and Economic Cooperation (대한민국과 일본국간의 재산 및 청구권에 관한 문제의 해결과 경제협력에 관한 협정, the "Korea-Japan Treaty") executed on June 22, 1965 amounts to the violation of fundamental rights of the petitioners. The Constitutional Court pointed out that the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade is required by the Preamble, Article 2(2) and Article 10 of the Constitution to proceed to the dispute solving negotiations provided for in Article 3 of the Treaty, and it is the Constitutional responsibility to support and protect Korean people, victimized by the organized and continuous brutal activities of Japanese people during the war resulting in the serious damage to human dignity and values, which is mandated by the law in a concrete manner so as to restore and exercise their claims for compensation. The Constitutional Court said it is the government mistake to use a comprehensive term, "all claims" while negotiating and executing the Treaty. Accordingly, such government inaction amounting to infringement upon the fundamental rights of the petitioners is deemed as unconstitutional.