The mayor of food-loving Osaka has spoken and his statement is extremely hard to swallow. Mayor Toru Hashimoto said that the so-called “comfort women” of World War II served a “necessary” role to enable beleaguered soldiers to let off steam.
The mayor’s insensitive statement defends the atrocious gender-based crimes committed by Japan’s military and the failure of justice mechanisms to redress victims up to the present. This also came in the wake of recent moves by the Japanese government to review its official 1995 statement expressing remorse and apology to Asian nations affected by Japan’s war of aggression.
Japan’s military sexual slavery system during World War II victimized 200,000 women from various countries, among them the Philippines, Korea and China. The women have filed a class suit against Japan. Responding to the growing pressure from continued protests and appeals by the survivors and their supporters, Japan set up the Asian Women’s Fund in 1995 and collected monies from private Japanese citizens, offering the funds to the victims as “atonement payment.”
But until now, only the war crimes trials held in Batavia (Jakarta) after World War II have convicted Japanese defendants of “enforced prostitution”—for forcing Dutch women into sexual servitude to the Japanese military. To date, the Japanese government continues to deny any legal responsibility and refuses to pay the survivors who have started to succumb to old age and death.
The crime of sexual slavery was specifically designated as such in the International Criminal Court (ICC) Statute. Prior to the ICC, international law provided bases to hold states accountable for violations experienced by the “comfort women.”
It is high time the Philippine government heeded the demands for justice of these survivors of Japanese sexual slavery. Aside from calling a retraction of this recent faux pas of the Osaka mayor, the state should support the women’s call for a formal apology from the Japanese government, the inclusion of all the wartime atrocities committed by the Japanese in Japan’s school history books, and monetary reparations for all the abuses and violence committed against them.
The Philippine government should also provide adequate financial compensation from its own coffers for its failure to protect the rights of these Filipino women during the war.
—REBECCA E. LOZADA,
National Coordinator, Philippine Coalition
for the International Criminal Court,
Unit 202, Tempus Place, No. 21
Matalino Road, Diliman, Quezon City