Japanese press chides Tokyo officials for comfort women comments

Posted on : 2007-03-29 14:31 KST Modified on : 2019-10-19 20:29 KST
More mainstream and right-of-center press join in the criticizm

Several Japanese media sources on March 28 criticized high-ranking government officials’ recent remarks that their country never forcibly recruited so-called comfort women.

The Asahi Shimbun, NHK, Nihon Geizai, and Nikkei newspapers printed articles disparaging recent remarks by government officials regarding the comfort women issue. This represents a notable move, as center-right NHK and Japan’s leading financial newspaper Nikkei, which until now had restrained from expressing their views on the issue, chose to criticize the government. In contrast, on the previous day conservative Yomiuri Shimbun and Sankei Shimbun continued their support of the Japanese government’s position.

As many as 200,000 foreign "comfort women" were used as sex slaves for the Japanese military during World War II. Despite increased international pressure, the current Japanese government has refused to issue an official apology.

Asahi Shimbun’s editorial said that Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Hakubun Shimomura’s comments that some Korean parents actually sold their daughters into the life of a comfort woman undermined Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s repeated apologies - which themselves came after much international pressure and were vague and conditional. The editorial continued to say that, just as the 1993 statement of apology by then-chief cabinet secretary Yohei Kono, "it is clear that the Japanese military was involved in establishing and managing comfort stations and in transporting comfort women. We can’t deny that the life of comfort women was very painful under forced situations. No matter how Japan clings to the issue of whether or not the women were forced to become sex slaves, such facts don’t change."

The Asahi went on to say, "The current problem is how sincerely the Japanese prime minister can face the historical fact that Japan in the past inflicted deep wounds to the dignity of women and to human rights," a statement aimed at Abe’s response to a critical March 24 Washington Post editorial, when Abe said "the abduction of Japanese citizens by North Korea is a human rights violation which is still happening, but the comfort women problem is a bygone fact."

NHK reported from Washington that the comfort women issue has been emerging as a concern in U.S.-Japan relations. NHK quoted Michael Green, former advisor of the U.S. National Security Council, as saying that pro-Japanese figures in the United States will eventually come to not support Japan’s position on the issue any longer.

The Nikkei reported from Washington that the U.S. political world, which places a great deal of value on human rights, tends to place the abduction of Japanese citizens by North Korea and the comfort women issue in the same category of violations. The U.S. Congress has been showing a gradually more negative reaction to the current Japanese government’s stance on the issue, with so far more than 50 lawmakers signing on to propose a nonbinding resolution to the U.S. House of Representatives that would ask Tokyo to apologize officially for the comfort women program, the newspaper said.



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