Seoul Searching: No Comfort

AN STYLE="font-size: 75%; color:#990000; font-weight:bold">Wednesday, May. 16, 2001 Almost every Wednesday since 1992, elderly women once forced to provide sex to the Japanese Imperial Army have gathered to protest in front of the Japanese embassy in downtown Seoul (one exception was Jan. 18, 1995, the day after the Kobe earthquake). It is a lonely and perhaps hopeless rendezvous the comfort women keep -- their stories are horrific but the world has heard them and moved on. Didn't Japan settle this already? No, it didn't.

During the 1930s and '40s, Japan forced thousands of Korean, Chinese, Dutch and other women to work as assembly-line prostitutes for its soldiers. When the war ended, it abandoned the women on the front lines and buried their memory, until survivors started to step forward in the early 1990s to tell the world their unimaginable tales. Japan could no longer deny what happened. But Tokyo has declined to admit legal responsibility, pay reparations or try to punish the guilty. After committing the crime, Japan is perpetuating it by stonewalling the victims. Instead, it has focused its efforts on public relations and legal wrangling aimed at avoiding taking responsibility. Apparently with some success -- the U.S. government is now taking Tokyo's side in this tragic affair.

After years of getting nowhere in Japanese courts, a group of comfort women from Korea and other Asian countries last year filed a class-action lawsuit in the United States against Japan. The suit was filed under the Alien Tort Claims Act, a law that gives foreigners the right to U.S. courts to sue over violations of international law. Now the Bush administration is trying to help Japan get the case thrown out. It has filed a "statement of interest" with the court, essentially arguing that Japan has immunity as a sovereign nation. It also cites treaties signed decades ago settling war claims against Japan. If those arguments sound familiar, it is because they are the same ones Tokyo has been making for years.

The problem is that Japan has never paid a penny in reparations to the comfort women. The sex slaves were not even on the agenda at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, the equivalent of the Nuremberg trials for Nazi war criminals. The money Japan paid South Korea, where the majority of the comfort women came from, when diplomatic ties were normalized in 1965, went to build highways and steel mills, not to help former sex slaves.

Ashamed, the women didn't start coming forward until after husbands and other family members had died. In 1995, Japan set up a fund for the comfort women. But it mostly used private donations from individuals and companies, not public money. It served to create the fiction that Japan had done something. But Tokyo still refused to admit any legal responsibility, so the money didn't constitute "reparations" in the real sense of the word. Many of the women desperately need the money, but often they need to hear Japan admit responsibility even more -- infuriated, many comfort women in Korea refused to accept money from the fund. (Then Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto sent a letter of apology to women who took money from the fund. But instead of "shazai," the strongest Japanese word for apology, the letter used the unsatisfactory and vague term "owabi.")

Since shortly after the war ended, Washington has been more interested in building up Japan as a reliable military ally, than prodding the country to pay its debts. With U.S. connivance, some of the most notorious Japanese war criminals have escaped punishment, in particular the men who ran Japan's chemical and biological weapons programs. Now the cold war may have ended, but Japan's military importance hasn't. U.S. servicemen who worked as forced laborers in Japanese mines and factories during the war, have been stonewalled by Washington for years. Now it is the turn of the old women gathering in front of the Japan's embassy in Seoul.