This text is a part of a Women and Leadership special report highlighting ladies who’re charting new pathways and preventing for alternatives for ladies and others.
When Gil Received-ok, a Korean lady, died recently on the age of 96, the worldwide neighborhood misplaced an outspoken warrior within the effort to make Japan accountable for its observe of sexual slavery in the course of the early a part of the twentieth century.
Ms. Gil was considered one of about 240 so-called consolation ladies from South Korea who had publicly spoken out about their abuse by the hands of the Japanese navy from the Nineteen Thirties via World Struggle 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 conflict ended, and who had no direct relationship to the observe or its victims, has continued to press for fuller acknowledgment and reparations from Japan. As director of the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM) in Tokyo, she and the museum give attention to sexual violence towards ladies in conflict and battle conditions — with additional consideration centered on her homeland’s historical past.
Ms. Watanabe mentioned she had been all in favour of ladies’s rights since her college days in Tokyo. When a number of the survivors of Japan’s navy sexual slavery system lastly got here ahead within the Nineties, her encounters with them “modified my life,” she mentioned in an interview in Tokyo.
She co-founded the museum in 2005 with donations from individuals in Japan and overseas, and has been campaigning internationally for the rights of survivors since.
Activists for consolation ladies 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 ladies”?
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 various types of sexual exploitation they had been subjected to, we retain the time period “consolation ladies” 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 mentioned that with the settlement reached on the Japan-ROK Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in December 2015, the difficulty was “resolved lastly and irreversibly.” What are you continue to searching for?
The difficulty is just not how they had been taken, however that they had been held towards their will and raped for months or years beneath navy management. With out clear rationalization, the federal government nonetheless denies that it was sexual slavery. What the survivors wished was for the Japanese authorities to totally acknowledge what had occurred to them and to cross their tales on to the following technology to forestall 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 lady 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 ladies,” nonetheless, have modified dramatically on the planet neighborhood. Worldwide legislation now explicitly acknowledges wartime rape and sexual slavery as crimes towards humanity. Individuals have listened to the survivors’ tales with compassion and respect them as human rights defenders.
You could have mentioned that the legacy of Japan’s therapy of consolation ladies influences the therapy of girls in as we speak’s society in Japan. Might you give us some examples?
It’s nonetheless frequent that victims face difficulties in bringing perpetrators of sexual crimes to justice wherever on the planet. 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 typically go unprosecuted. One well-known Japanese politician even recommended U.S. navy officers make the most of the intercourse trade. The concept that sexual violence by troopers is inevitable should be deeply ingrained in Japan.
(Requested to reply, the Pentagon mentioned in an announcement: The usual of conduct for U.S. Forces Japan is unwavering professionalism and nil tolerance for felony conduct. U.S. personnel who commit felony acts are held accountable beneath each Japanese and U.S. legislation, per the Standing of Forces Settlement. Acts of sexual assault undermine the values of respect and dignity which might be basic to service. These incidents overshadow the friendship and professionalism we exhibit day by day. They don’t replicate the optimistic actions of the overwhelming majority of U.S. service members who serve honorably on this nation.)
How did you change into concerned with the Ladies’s Energetic Museum on Struggle and Peace (WAM)?
I acquired concerned within the ladies’s motion within the mid-1990’s and met the late Yayori Matsui, a outstanding journalist and main activist in Japan. She proposed the Ladies’s Worldwide Struggle Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Army Sexual Slavery be held in 2000 in Tokyo, a individuals’s tribunal to convey these accountable to justice primarily based on proof and the legislation. 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 accrued for the Ladies’s Tribunal. To indicate the total image of the “consolation ladies” system in our restricted exhibition house, we now have held a dozen particular exhibitions in these 20 years specializing in totally different international locations and areas of the Asia-Pacific.
What work have you ever been doing to enhance the therapy of girls in Japanese society?
As considered one of our concerted efforts, WAM, along with activists and students from eight different international locations, has submitted the appliance associated to “consolation ladies” to the UNESCO Reminiscences of the World Register as a singular and uncommon documentary heritage to be preserved. The Japanese authorities has tried to prevent this and withheld its contribution to UNESCO as soon as, however the pending process is to begin once more this 12 months.
There are individuals in Japan, too, who assist our efforts to reply the decision of those brave survivors for justice and nonrepetition. That offers me hope.
