hankyoreh

UN‘s Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women

The government of Japan communicated to the UN its position that there is no evidence demonstrating that the Japanese military or civil officials forcibly took women away to work as comfort women, sex slaves for the Imperial Japanese Army, the Hankyoreh confirmed on Jan. 31. Since the South Korean and Japanese governments reached a settlement on the comfort women on Dec. 28, Seoul has been careful not to provoke Japan, but Japan seems to have launched a full-fledged campaign to shift international opinion on the issue.

The Hankyoreh acquired a response on the issue of the comfort women that the Japanese government submitted in advance of the 63rd meeting of the UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, which will be held on Feb. 15. “The government of Japan has conducted a full-scale fact-finding study on the comfort women issue since the early 1990s when the issue started to be taken up as a political issue between Japan and the Republic of Korea,” the response said. However, “Forceful taking away of comfort women by the military and government authorities could not be confirmed in any of the documents.”

The response also described the settlement reached by the two governments on Dec. 28, in which they confirmed that the issue of the comfort women had been “finally and irreversibly resolved.”

In March 2007, the Japanese government issued a cabinet resolution stating that the Japanese government could not find any documents directly showing that the military or civil officials were involved in the forcible mobilization of the comfort women. On Jan. 18, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe reconfirmed this position at Japan’s House of Councillors.

As a consequence, this response does not constitute a reversal of the Japanese government’s current position, expressed, for example, in the 1993 Kono Statement, which acknowledged the forcible nature of the mobilization of the comfort women.

The difference is that, by emphasizing the fact that it has not found any official government documents that demonstrate the forcible mobilization of the comfort women, the Japanese government effectively denies the testimony of former comfort women who said they were forcibly taken away. This is part of an all-out effort by the Japanese government to reverse the widely held view in the international community that the comfort women were sexual slaves and that the comfort women system was a crime of the state.

What the Japanese government hopes to accomplish through this is to reduce the comfort women issue from a crime of the state that was orchestrated by the Imperial Japanese Army to a failure of the Japanese government to manage and supervise the aberrant behavior of some brokers.

“The forcible nature of the recruitment, mobilization, and transportation of the comfort women for the Imperial Japanese Army is an undeniable historical fact about which the international community has already rendered clear judgment through reports by the special rapporteur for the UN Human Rights Committee and through resolutions adopted by legislatures in the US and other countries,” South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs emphasized.

The ministry also called on the Japanese government to “refrain from words and actions that could damage the purpose and spirit of the Dec. 28 settlement and to show through its actions that it intends to restore the reputation and dignity of the former comfort women and to heal their wounds.”

By Gil Yun-hyung, Tokyo correspondent

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