Japan claims to have fulfilled its responsibility towards the tens of thousands of women, euphemistically called “comfort women,” whom it forced to work in military brothels during WWII. The rest of the world begs to differ, and on March 1st, South Korean President Park called the Land of the Rising Sun out on it, telling Japan to apologize to and to provide for these women. Despite the passage of 75 years since the end of the war, Japan has yet to satisfactorily atone for the atrocities it forced on Korean, as well as Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, Filipino, Burmese and Indonesian, women. Japan should give up its belief that it has fulfilled its responsibility and do as President Park demands.
The first step Japan must take to accept its continued legal and moral responsibility is to understand why the treaty it signed, the organization it founded and the statement it issued didn’t resolve the conflict. The treaty mentioned here, the 1965 Treaty on Basic Relations, required Japan to pay 364 million dollars to South Korea in war reparations as compensation for the conscription of Korean laborers under the boot of Japanese imperialism. The flaw is that the treaty only addressed forced labor, omitting forced prostitution. It simply never took these women into account because the issue of comfort women wasn’t even a blip on international or national radars until the 1970s. A treaty that predates the recognition of an issue cannot redress it and Japan should stop believing that this 50 year old treaty ended its legal responsibility.
As for the organization which Japan founded to address its moral responsibility, it was called the Asian Women’s Fund (AWF) and it operated from 1994 to 2007. Japan lauds it for being a joint collaboration between the government and the public to financially compensate former comfort women with a combination of private donations and government funding. And while the AWF itself wasn’t perfect (because of the mix of private and public funding, it wasn’t official government redress), its biggest flaw was that it closed.
During its 14 years of operation, the AWF only awarded direct compensation to a mere 285 women from South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines and built some medical facilities in Indonesia. Considering that 50,000 is the conservative estimate of how many comfort women existed during the war, 285 is a dismally small number. Japan didn’t even give women in North Korea and China the opportunity to apply for compensation because their governments and Japan’s weren’t cooperating at the time. Moreover, many South Koreans who could have been awarded money refused to accept it because it wasn’t official government redress. When the fund closed in 2007, many known comfort women were still uncompensated, leaving Japan’s responsibilities unfulfilled. As with the case of the 1965 treaty, Japan should realize that the AWF did not lay the matter to rest.
Last is the deficiency of the statement the Japanese government issued in regards to comfort women, called the Kono statement. Issued in 1993, the Kono statement was an explicit victory for comfort women by recognizing and apologizing for Japan’s crimes during the war. However, despite the sincerity with which it was originally given, recent political changes call into question whether or not it continues to apply. The current Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and other revisionists promote a whitewashed version of WWII where Japan was not an aggressor and comfort women were regular prostitutes, thereby undermining the statement’s validity. Japan must recognize that the statement in its current easy-to-ignore state can’t contribute to Japan’s atonement.
Closely linked with this first step of acknowledging continued responsibility is the second step of actively doing something about it. The most basic and immediate way this should happen is the reopening of the AWF to work ceaselessly at identifying and compensating former comfort women. Even if they meet with very little success, either for diplomatic or social reasons, it is vital to show at least symbolically that Japan is trying to make amends. Moreover, when it is reopened, the AWF should be made a part of the Japanese government so as to meet the demand that the money it awards is official government redress. In order to counter the views of revisionists like Prime Minister Abe, the Kono statement should be given more political weight and the role of the AWF should also be expanded to include advocating for the truthful and fair education of the history of comfort women. Burying the hatchet doesn’t mean Japan is free to forget about their wrong-doing. It means learning from the past to make sure the hatchet stays in the ground.