This text is a part of a Girls and Management particular report highlighting girls who’re charting new pathways and combating for alternatives for ladies and others.
When Gil Gained-ok, a Korean girl, died lately on the age of 96, the worldwide group misplaced an outspoken warrior within the effort to make Japan accountable for its follow of sexual slavery throughout the early a part of the twentieth century.
Ms. Gil was one in all about 240 so-called consolation girls from South Korea who had publicly spoken out about their abuse by the hands of the Japanese army from the Thirties via World Struggle II, and her dying left only a handful of survivors to proceed the trigger.
However Mina Watanabe, a Japanese girl who was born years after the conflict ended, and who had no direct relationship to the follow or its victims, has continued to press for fuller acknowledgment and reparations from Japan. As director of the Girls’s Energetic Museum on Struggle and Peace (WAM) in Tokyo, she and the museum concentrate on sexual violence in opposition to girls in conflict and battle conditions — with further consideration targeted on her homeland’s historical past.
Ms. Watanabe stated she had been all for girls’s rights since her faculty days in Tokyo. When a few of the survivors of Japan’s army sexual slavery system lastly got here ahead within the Nineties, her encounters with them “modified my life,” she stated in an interview in Tokyo.
She co-founded the museum in 2005 with donations from folks in Japan and overseas, and has been campaigning internationally for the rights of survivors since.
Activists for consolation girls are sometimes subjected to criticism or left remoted by their fellow Japanese. The interview was edited and condensed.
Who’re the ladies known as “consolation girls”?
That refers back to the victims who have been put into the sexual slavery system for Japanese troops from the Thirties as much as 1945 within the Asia-Pacific area. Whereas “intercourse slaves” is a extra correct time period to precise the important nature of many alternative types of sexual exploitation they have been subjected to, we retain the time period “consolation girls” as a result of it has a historic significance, because it was the euphemism utilized by the Japanese army on the time.
The Japanese authorities admits that women and girls suffered, however denies proof that they have been taken in opposition to their will throughout wartime. They’ve stated that with the settlement reached on the Japan-ROK Overseas Ministers’ Assembly in December 2015, the difficulty was “resolved lastly and irreversibly.” What are you continue to in search of?
The problem just isn’t how they have been taken, however that they have been held in opposition to their will and raped for months or years underneath army management. With out clear rationalization, the federal government nonetheless denies that it was sexual slavery. What the survivors wished was for the Japanese authorities to totally acknowledge what had occurred to them and to cross their tales on to the subsequent era to forestall recurrence. It’s not nearly a bilateral settlement with South Korea. Though many survivors have handed away, we proceed to work to make the federal government acknowledge the crimes its personal army forces dedicated. I really feel it’s my accountability as a girl in Japan.
Has any progress been made?
As for reparations, nothing has progressed. The federal government claims it has apologized, however what injury it has apologized for has by no means been clear. It’s our remorse and disgrace that the Japanese authorities doesn’t settle for the survivors’ testimonies as proof even now.
The overall perceptions of “consolation girls,” nonetheless, have modified dramatically on the planet group. Worldwide regulation now explicitly acknowledges wartime rape and sexual slavery as crimes in opposition to humanity. Individuals have listened to the survivors’ tales with compassion and respect them as human rights defenders.
You’ve stated that the legacy of Japan’s therapy of consolation girls influences the therapy of girls in at this time’s society in Japan. Might you give us some examples?
It’s nonetheless frequent that victims face difficulties in bringing perpetrators of sexual crimes to justice wherever on the planet. Nonetheless, in Japan, I discover a form of “tolerance” exists for sexual violence dedicated by army forces. There have been many rapes by U.S. troops in Okinawa, the place U.S. bases in Japan are concentrated, however they usually go unprosecuted. One well-known Japanese politician even recommended U.S. army officers make the most of the intercourse business. The concept that sexual violence by troopers is inevitable should be deeply ingrained in Japan.
(Requested to reply, the Pentagon stated in an announcement: The usual of conduct for U.S. Forces Japan is unwavering professionalism and nil tolerance for legal conduct. U.S. personnel who commit legal acts are held accountable underneath each Japanese and U.S. regulation, per the Standing of Forces Settlement. Acts of sexual assault undermine the values of respect and dignity which are elementary to service. These incidents overshadow the friendship and professionalism we exhibit every day. They don’t mirror the constructive actions of the overwhelming majority of U.S. service members who serve honorably on this nation.)
How did you develop into concerned with the Girls’s Energetic Museum on Struggle and Peace (WAM)?
I received concerned within the girls’s motion within the mid-1990’s and met the late Yayori Matsui, a distinguished journalist and main activist in Japan. She proposed the Girls’s Worldwide Struggle Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Army Sexual Slavery be held in 2000 in Tokyo, a folks’s tribunal to carry these accountable to justice based mostly on proof and the regulation. I used to be concerned from the preparation interval. After the judgment was delivered in 2001, nonetheless, Yayori handed away in 2002. Her final will was to ascertain a museum in Japan to cross on the testimonies and paperwork collected for the Girls’s Tribunal. To indicate the total image of the “consolation girls” system in our restricted exhibition area, now we have held a dozen particular exhibitions in these 20 years specializing in totally different international locations and areas of the Asia-Pacific.
What work have you ever been doing to enhance the therapy of girls in Japanese society?
As one in all our concerted efforts, WAM, along with activists and students from eight different international locations, has submitted the applying associated to “consolation girls” to the UNESCO Recollections of the World Register as a singular and uncommon documentary heritage to be preserved. The Japanese authorities has tried to forestall this and withheld its contribution to UNESCO as soon as, however the pending process is to begin once more this yr.
There are folks in Japan, too, who assist our efforts to reply the decision of those brave survivors for justice and nonrepetition. That offers me hope.
