This text is a part of a Women and Leadership special report highlighting girls who’re charting new pathways and combating for alternatives for ladies and others.
When Gil Received-ok, a Korean lady, died recently on the age of 96, the worldwide group misplaced an outspoken warrior within the effort to make Japan accountable for its follow of sexual slavery throughout the early a part of the twentieth century.
Ms. Gil was one in every 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 way of World Warfare 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 struggle ended, and who had no direct relationship to the follow 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 concentrate on sexual violence towards girls in struggle and battle conditions — with further consideration targeted on her homeland’s historical past.
Ms. Watanabe mentioned she had been occupied with girls’s rights since her college days in Tokyo. When among 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 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 have 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 specific the important nature of many various types of sexual exploitation they have 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 have 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 looking for?
The problem isn’t how they have been taken, however that they have been held towards their will and raped for months or years underneath navy management. With out clear clarification, 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 go their tales on to the following era 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 girl in Japan.
Has any progress been made?
As for reparations, nothing has progressed. The federal government claims it has apologized, however what injury 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 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 might have mentioned that the legacy of Japan’s therapy of consolation girls influences the therapy of girls in at this time’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. Nonetheless, 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 prompt U.S. navy officers make the most of the intercourse business. The concept that sexual violence by troopers is inevitable should be deeply ingrained in Japan.
(Requested to reply, the Pentagon mentioned in a press release: The usual of conduct for U.S. Forces Japan is unwavering professionalism and 0 tolerance for prison conduct. U.S. personnel who commit prison acts are held accountable underneath each Japanese and U.S. legislation, per the Standing of Forces Settlement. Acts of sexual assault undermine the values of respect and dignity which are elementary 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 Girls’s Energetic Museum on Warfare and Peace (WAM)?
I acquired 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 Girls’s Worldwide Warfare Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Navy Sexual Slavery be held in 2000 in Tokyo, a individuals’s tribunal to convey these accountable to justice based mostly 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 determine a museum in Japan to go on the testimonies and paperwork gathered for the Girls’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 totally different nations and areas of the Asia-Pacific.
What work have you ever been doing to enhance the therapy of girls in Japanese society?
As one in every 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 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 yr.
There are individuals in Japan, too, who help our efforts to reply the decision of those brave survivors for justice and nonrepetition. That provides me hope.
