hankyoreh

Staff at the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace in Tokyo

The Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM), a group working to resolve the comfort women issue in Japan, is facing high tensions after the arrival of a letter - believed to be from a far-right group - threatening a bomb attack.

“I think it may have to do with the UNESCO Memory of the World listing effort,” said WAM secretary-general Mina Watanabe of the letter on Oct. 31. Located near Waseda University in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, the museum exhibits materials related to problems with the South Korean and Japanese government’s agreement on the comfort women issue on Dec. 28 of last year and accounts of the women’s experience, which are vanishing from Japanese middle school history textbooks. Since July, it has been hosting “Battlefield of Hell: Japanese Military Comfort Stations in Burma,” a special exhibition on women mobilized as sex slaves on the Burmese front during World War II.

The threat was received on Oct. 5. Written on a postcard postmarked in Shinjuku on Sep. 30, it read, “We will bomb you. Take down your war exhibits,” and was signed “Asahi Sekihotai.”

“To date, their enemies on the comfort women issue have been South Korea and China. But since the Japan-South Korea agreement [of Dec. 28], it looks like their spears are now pointed at us [advocates within Japanese society],” Watanabe said.

The motivation appears to have been the June application by civic groups in eight countries, including South Korea and Japan, to have archival materials related to the comfort women registered with the UNESCO Memory of the World. WAM participated in the application on Japan‘s behalf. The move prompted a number of Japanese right-wingers to write critical columns in the conservative Sankei Shimbun newspaper. The Japanese government is currently threatening not to pay its UNESCO contribution of 3.85 billion yen (US$36.7 million) this year, demanding a halt to the registration of comfort women-related materials. Now the bomb threat has been added to the mix.

Sekihotai is a right-wing group responsible for a May 1987 attack in which the Hanshin Bureau of the liberal Asahi Shimbun newspaper was infiltrated and two reporters shot, one fatally.

On Oct. 30, the museum released a statement titled “A [Japanese] Society That Does Not Link the Press with Violence.”

“Underneath the media discourse in Japan flows a current of nationalism and violent intimidation and stifling of people who criticize the government,” it read.

“We believe that by enriching the media discourse in Japan, we can protect human rights and enrich Japanese democracy,” it continued.

By Gil Yun-hyung, Tokyo correspondent

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