Winton Dong

    dht620@sina.com

    WHILE women all over the world were celebrating Women’s Day on March 8, a piece of news caught my attention last week. According to a South Korean report, an NGO recently set up a statue of a “comfort woman” before the building of the Japanese Consulate General in Busan, the second-largest city in South Korea, aiming to honor female victims and families affected by World War II.

    The Foreign Ministry of South Korea has demanded Busan to dismantle the statue or move it to another place. Japan also called back its ambassador to South Korea to show its anger and protest. Even under great pressure from home and Japan, the local government and people of Busan insist on keeping the statue there.

    As a special term, “comfort women” refer to women and girls who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese army in occupied territories before and during World War II. The name “comfort women” is a translation of the Japanese word “ianfu.” The exact number of “comfort women” is still being researched and debated. Historians say that as many as 200,000 women, mostly from China, the Korean Peninsula, the Philippines and other Southeast Asian nations, and even from Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands, were enslaved by the Japanese army before and during the war.

    Busan is not the only South Korean city that memorializes “comfort women.” Prior to Busan, two statues of “comfort women” were set up in a park in northern Seoul in October 2015. The statues were designed by the joint efforts of artists from both China and South Korea.

    Moreover, according to an Associated Press report in February this year, the San Francisco Arts Commission has given final approval to a memorial of “comfort women” in the city’s Chinatown. The memorial, which describes a trio of women with linked hands as a fourth woman looks on, is expected to be installed in September 2017.

    “The Japanese military sexual slavery system is a prosecutable criminal offense in international criminal law. It is not only Japan’s wrongdoing during the war or that of the victim countries, but also an issue of global justice,” the San Francisco-based Comfort Women Justice Coalition said in a statement.

    The memorial issue has caused tension between San Francisco and its Japanese sister city Osaka. Both former mayor of Osaka Toru Hashimoto (from 2011 to 2015) and current mayor Horofumi Yoshimura wrote letters to San Francisco authorities opposing the idea, saying the memorial may lead to difficulties in exchanges between the two cities.

    Frankly speaking, San Francisco is also not the only city in the United States that has paid tribute to comfort women. There already were similar memorials in other cities in California, New York, New Jersey, Washington and other places within the country.

    The existence of “comfort women” as part of the Japanese military ferocity cannot be denied. The Japanese Government acknowledged in 1993 that the state played an important role in forcing Chinese and Korean women into military brothels. In August 1995, the then Japanese Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi delivered a speech, showing deep remorse for “comfort women” and their families. While showing remorse, Japan has always refused to pay direct compensation to those victims and survivors.

    However, the current Japanese Government has distorted the truth and has changed its attitude in the presence of clear evidence. In January 2016, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said that no proof had been found in any documents that those women were forced to work in Japanese military brothels. If the women were not forced into sexual slavery, why did the Japanese Government pay South Korea US$13.3 million in December 2015 to set up a fund for South Korean victims?

    World War II ended in 1945. After more than seven decades, even the youngest survivors would be about 90 years old now. According to the latest statistics, only about 40 “comfort women” are still alive in South Korea and they have been provided with official assistance from their government.

    Chinese suffered the most in the 14-year war against Japanese aggression (from 1931 to 1945). Researchers said that less than 100 “comfort women” are still alive in China. Many are still suffering from physical ailments and psychological trauma as a result of their experiences during the war. Moreover, it is difficult for local governments to take care of them due to the remoteness of the locations in which they live. Most of their families also would rather not have them speak openly about their unspeakable experiences for fear of the shame it might bring.

    As time goes by, fewer and fewer people of Asian heritage, even the youth from China, Japan and the Korean Peninsula, are now familiar with Asia’s history of war. Meanwhile, time is also running out for those aged survivors. Maybe in 10 years, there will be no surviving “comfort women” in the world. If the truth is still being denied by Japan, they won’t rest in peace even after death. But what can we do to make sure that such a barbaric history will never be repeated in the future?

    (The author is the editor-in-chief of the Shenzhen Daily and guest professor of Shenzhen University with a Ph.D. from the Journalism and Communication School of Wuhan University.)