This text is a part of a Ladies and Management particular report highlighting girls who’re charting new pathways and preventing for alternatives for girls and others.
When Gil Gained-ok, a Korean lady, died just lately on the age of 96, the worldwide group misplaced an outspoken warrior within the effort to make Japan accountable for its apply of sexual slavery throughout the early a part of the twentieth century.
Ms. Gil was considered one of about 240 so-called consolation girls from South Korea who had publicly spoken out about their abuse by the hands of the Japanese navy from the Nineteen Thirties by means of World Battle II, and her dying left only a handful of survivors to proceed the trigger.
However Mina Watanabe, a Japanese lady who was born years after the warfare ended, and who had no direct relationship to the apply or its victims, has continued to press for fuller acknowledgment and reparations from Japan. As director of the Women’s Energetic Museum on Battle and Peace (WAM) in Tokyo, she and the museum concentrate on sexual violence towards girls in warfare and battle conditions — with additional consideration targeted on her homeland’s historical past.
Ms. Watanabe stated she had been fascinated with girls’s rights since her faculty days in Tokyo. When a few of the survivors of Japan’s navy sexual slavery system lastly got here ahead within the Nineteen Nineties, her encounters with them “modified my life,” she stated in an interview in Tokyo.
She co-founded the museum in 2005 with donations from folks in Japan and overseas, and has been campaigning internationally for the rights of survivors since.
Activists for consolation girls are sometimes subjected to criticism or left remoted by their fellow Japanese. The interview was edited and condensed.
Who’re the ladies known as “consolation girls”?
That refers back to the victims who had been put into the sexual slavery system for Japanese troops from the Nineteen Thirties as much as 1945 within the Asia-Pacific area. Whereas “intercourse slaves” is a extra correct time period to precise the important nature of many alternative types of sexual exploitation they had been subjected to, we retain the time period “consolation girls” as a result of it has a historic significance, because it was the euphemism utilized by the Japanese navy on the time.
The Japanese authorities admits that women and girls suffered, however denies proof that they had been taken towards their will throughout wartime. They’ve stated that with the settlement reached on the Japan-ROK Overseas Ministers’ Assembly in December 2015, the difficulty was “resolved lastly and irreversibly.” What are you continue to searching for?
The difficulty will not be how they had been taken, however that they had been held towards their will and raped for months or years below navy management. With out clear rationalization, the federal government nonetheless denies that it was sexual slavery. What the survivors needed was for the Japanese authorities to completely acknowledge what had occurred to them and to cross their tales on to the following era to stop recurrence. It’s not nearly a bilateral settlement with South Korea. Though many survivors have handed away, we proceed to work to make the federal government acknowledge the crimes its personal navy forces dedicated. I really feel it’s my duty as a girl in Japan.
Has any progress been made?
As for reparations, nothing has progressed. The federal government claims it has apologized, however what harm it has apologized for has by no means been clear. It’s our remorse and disgrace that the Japanese authorities doesn’t settle for the survivors’ testimonies as proof even now.
The overall perceptions of “consolation girls,” nonetheless, have modified dramatically on the earth group. Worldwide regulation now explicitly acknowledges wartime rape and sexual slavery as crimes towards humanity. Folks have listened to the survivors’ tales with compassion and respect them as human rights defenders.
You will have stated that the legacy of Japan’s remedy of consolation girls influences the remedy of ladies in immediately’s society in Japan. Might you give us some examples?
It’s nonetheless widespread that victims face difficulties in bringing perpetrators of sexual crimes to justice anyplace on the earth. Nevertheless, in Japan, I discover a form of “tolerance” exists for sexual violence dedicated by navy forces. There have been many rapes by U.S. troops in Okinawa, the place U.S. bases in Japan are concentrated, however they usually go unprosecuted. One well-known Japanese politician even recommended U.S. navy officers make the most of the intercourse trade. The concept sexual violence by troopers is inevitable should be deeply ingrained in Japan.
(Requested to reply, the U.S. Forces Japan stated in an announcement: The usual of conduct for U.S. Forces Japan is unwavering professionalism and 0 tolerance for felony conduct. U.S. personnel who commit felony acts are held accountable below each Japanese and U.S. regulation, per the Standing of Forces Settlement. Acts of sexual assault undermine the values of respect and dignity which can be basic to service. These incidents overshadow the friendship and professionalism we exhibit each day. They don’t mirror the optimistic actions of the overwhelming majority of U.S. service members who serve honorably on this nation.)
How did you grow to be concerned with the Women’s Energetic Museum on Battle and Peace (WAM)?
I bought concerned within the girls’s motion within the mid-1990’s and met the late Yayori Matsui, a distinguished journalist and main activist in Japan. She proposed the Women’s Worldwide Battle Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Army Sexual Slavery be held in 2000 in Tokyo, a folks’s tribunal to carry these accountable to justice primarily based on proof and the regulation. I used to be concerned from the preparation interval. After the judgment was delivered in 2001, nonetheless, Yayori handed away in 2002. Her final will was to ascertain a museum in Japan to cross on the testimonies and paperwork gathered for the Women’s Tribunal. To indicate the total image of the “consolation girls” system in our restricted exhibition house, we now have held a dozen particular exhibitions in these 20 years specializing in completely different nations and areas of the Asia-Pacific.
What work have you ever been doing to enhance the remedy of ladies in Japanese society?
As considered one of our concerted efforts, WAM, along with activists and students from eight different nations, has submitted the applying associated to “consolation girls” to the UNESCO Recollections of the World Register as a novel and uncommon documentary heritage to be preserved. The Japanese authorities has tried to stop this and withheld its contribution to UNESCO as soon as, however the pending process is to begin once more this 12 months.
There are folks in Japan, too, who help our efforts to reply the decision of those brave survivors for justice and nonrepetition. That offers me hope.
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