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Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary

By Gil Yun-hyung, Tokyo correspondent and Kim Kyu-won, staff reporter

Is the Japanese government on the verge of opening Pandora’s box?

On Feb. 20, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said that “from an academic point of view, further review is needed” of the testimony of the 16 Korean former comfort women that served as the basis of 1993's Kono Statement.

In the Kono Statement, the Japanese government admitted that the Japanese imperial army was involved in forcing women to become sex slaves. Interest is growing about whether the Japanese government will actually investigate the veracity of these women’s testimonies.

The South Korean Foreign Ministry issued a response to this on Feb. 21. “The remarks by the Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary - who speaks for the Japanese government - about reviewing the option of assembling a team to assess the testimonies of the former comfort women is an attempt to retract the Kono Statement, which would undermine the foundation for a proper understanding of history,” the ministry said. “The South Korean government cannot accept the Japanese government raising questions about the compulsory nature of the recruitment, transportation, and management of the comfort women, which it itself acknowledged in the Kono Statement.”

“The women who formerly served as comfort women for the Japanese army put up with indescribable shame in coming forward to testify in order to set the historical record straight,” the ministry said. “We strongly urge the Japanese government not to rashly force these women to once again endure such unbearable pain and anguish.”

Suga’s remarks came after former deputy chief cabinet secretary Nobuo Ishihara, who was directly involved in preparing the Kono Statement, testified before the budget committee of the House of Representatives that the government did not verify the accuracy of the testimonies of the former comfort women.

When Hiroshi Yamada - a lawmaker with the Japan Restoration Party who supports retracting the Kono Statement - responded to this revelation by saying that the government should investigate the issue, Suga concurred with the necessity of this.

However, Suga denied requests to release the women’s testimonies themselves. In response to calls for setting up a team to investigate the issue, he said that the government would review this option while keeping the testimony classified.

It is likely that Suga responded ambiguously to Yamada’s request because of concern that the diplomatic fallout from altering the Kono Statement would be too great. The moment that the Kono Statement is revised, Japan’s relations with South Korea could be ruined, and its relationship with the US could be severely damaged as well. The US has been pushing Japan to find a solution for the comfort women issue, which it links with women's rights.

This is why Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has continued to affirm the statements made by previous administrations since becoming prime minister, despite saying in an interview with the Sankei Shimbun newspaper after he was chosen as the head of the Liberal Democratic Party in Aug. 2012 that the Kono Statement should be revised.

In Mar. 2007 - during Abe’s first stint as prime minister - his cabinet announced that no documents had been found in the government archives in which a government official gave direct orders for women to be forced to serve as comfort women. While this did not directly contradict the Kono Statement, it did make clear that there were differing opinions about the compulsory nature of the recruitment process, which was the crux of the statement.

The Abe administration appears to feel no need to bring on international criticism by upsetting the delicate balance between accepting the Kono Statement in theory while effectively rejecting its central point.

Through statements by Chief Cabinet Secretary Koichi Kato in 1992 and Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono in 1993, the Japanese government acknowledged that the Japanese imperial army was involved in setting up and managing the comfort stations and that it had coerced women into working there. These statements also offered the former comfort women an apology and an expression of regret.

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