Thursday 16 October 2014
Japan Rebuffed Over U.N. Report on Wartime Brothels
The Japanese government has asked for the partial retraction of a nearly two-decade-old United Nations report on women forced to work in Japanese military brothels, but the report’s author has refused the request, a Japanese government spokesman said on Thursday.
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Japan Rebuffed Over U.N. Report on Wartime Brothels
MARTIN FACKLEROCT
16 October 2014
The Japanese government has asked for the partial retraction of a nearly two-decade-old United Nations report on women forced to work in Japanese military brothels, but the report’s author has refused the request, a Japanese government spokesman said on Thursday.
The spokesman, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, said his government sent a top diplomat to make the request personally to Radhika Coomaraswamy, a former United Nations special rapporteur on violence against women. Ms. Coomaraswamy, a Sri Lankan lawyer, wrote the 1996 report that called on Japan to apologize and pay compensation to women who the report said had been coerced into serving as sexual slaves for the Japanese Army during World War II.
Mr. Suga did not specify exactly which part of the report his government had asked to be retracted, but he said that Ms. Coomaraswamy had declined the request.
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In making the request, the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe appeared to be heeding longstanding demands by supporters of Mr. Abe on the political right that Japan challenge the internationally accepted view that the women, known euphemistically in Japan as “comfort women,” were forced to provide sex to Japanese soldiers.
Those calls have increased sharply since August, when a major Japanese newspaper, the liberal Asahi Shimbun, printed a front-page retraction of several stories that it published on the issue in the 1980s and 1990s. Those stories were based on the testimony of a former Japanese soldier, Seiji Yoshida, who said he had helped kidnap Korean women to work in the brothels.
Mr. Yoshida’s claims were later shown by scholars to have been fabricated. In its retraction, the Asahi also admitted that it could not find evidence backing up the testimony of Mr. Yoshida, who died in 2000.
Conservatives have seized on the Asahi’s retraction to assert that the entire sex slaves issue itself is a fabrication, and that the women were no more than common prostitutes who worked in the brothels of their own accord.
However, many Japanese mainstream scholars and most non-Japanese researchers reject those claims, saying that Mr. Yoshida’s testimony was never a major piece of historical evidence that women were coerced. They cite other evidence, including the testimonies of many of the women themselves, who in the 1990s broke decades of silence to begin speaking out about their experiences.
Based largely on these testimonies, many mainstream scholars have concluded that tens of thousands of mostly Asian but also Dutch women worked in Japanese wartime brothels, many against their will. Japanese conservatives dispute that, calling the women’s testimony biased and unreliable, and citing what they call a lack of corroborating evidence.
In an interview published earlier this month with a top Japanese conservative newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun, Ms. Coomaraswamy said that the Asahi’s retraction did not convince her of a need to amend the United Nations report. She was quoted as saying that the report was based mostly on the testimonies of “a large number of ‘comfort women.’ ” She was also quoted as saying that the testimony of Mr. Yoshida, which was cited in her United Nations report, did not play a big role in its conclusions.
Mr. Suga did not say if the Japanese government would take additional steps following her rejection of its request. Japan’s Kyodo News agency said the Japanese diplomat, Kuni Sato, Japan’s ambassador in charge of human rights issues, met with Ms. Coomaraswamy on Tuesday in New York to make the request.
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