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International Herald Tribune
By Norimitsu Onishi
Published: March 30, 2007
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/30/asia/japan.php
TOKYO: It was about 15 years ago, recalled Yoshiaki Yoshimi, a mild-mannered historian, that he grew fed up with the Japanese government's denials that the military had set up and run brothels throughout Asia during World War II.
Instead of firing off a letter to a newspaper, though, Yoshimi went to the Defense Agency's library and combed through official documents from the 1930s. In just two days, he found a rare trove that uncovered the military's direct role in managing the brothels, including documents that carried the personal seals of high-ranking Imperial Army officers.
Faced with this smoking gun, a red-faced Japanese government immediately dropped its longstanding claim that only private businessmen had operated the brothels. A year later, in 1993, it acknowledged in a statement that the Japanese state itself had been responsible. In time, all government-approved junior high school textbooks carried passages on the history of Japan's military sex slaves, known euphemistically as comfort women.
"Back then, I was optimistic that this would effectively settle the issue," Yoshimi said. "But there was a fierce backlash."
The backlash came from young nationalist politicians led by Shinzo Abe, then a little-known lawmaker in the long-governing Liberal Democratic Party, who lobbied to rescind the 1993 admission of state responsibility. That long-cherished goal seemed close at hand after Abe became prime minister in September.
Abe has undercut the 1993 statement by asserting that there is no evidence showing the military's role in forcibly recruiting women into sex slavery, though he said that he would adhere to it. His comments have sparked outrage in Asia and the United States, where the House of Representatives is considering a nonbinding resolution that would call on Japan to unequivocally admit its history of sex slavery and apologize for it.
To Yoshimi, Abe's denial sounded familiar. Fifteen years ago, until Yoshimi came along, the government had always maintained that there were no official documents to prove the military's role in establishing the brothels. Abe was now saying that there are no official documents to prove the military forcibly procured women - thereby discounting other evidence, including the testimony of former sex slaves.
"The fact is, if you can't use anything except official documents, history itself is impossible to elucidate," said Yoshimi, a history professor at Chuo University in Tokyo.
The emphasis on official documents, according to Yoshimi and other historians, has long been part of the government's strategy to control wartime history. In the two weeks between Japan's surrender on Aug. 15, 1945, and the arrival of American occupation forces, wartime leaders fearing postwar trials had incinerated so many potentially incriminating documents that the Tokyo sky was said to have been black with smoke. Even today, Japan refuses to release documents that, historians believe, have survived and would shed light on Japan's wartime history.
Although Yoshimi found official documents showing the military's role in establishing brothels, he is not optimistic about unearthing documents about the military's abduction of women.
"There are things that are never written in official documents," he said. "That they were forcibly recruited - that's the kind of thing that would have never been written in the first place."
John Dower, a historian of Japan at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that Yoshimi's "extremely impressive" work has "clarified the historical record in ways that people like Prime Minister Abe and those who support him refuse to acknowledge."
"So he's demanding the impossible," Yoshimi said of Abe, "presumably because he's confident that such documents will never be found."
The groundbreaking research of Yoshimi, who is 60, coupled with subsequent work by other scholars, presents a history of Japan's sex slavery that is now disputed only in certain corners of Japan.
Yoshimi grew up in Yamaguchi Prefecture in western Japan, in a household with fresh memories of the war. He traces his interest in history to a junior high school lecture on Japan's American-written, pacifist Constitution and its guarantee of human rights. He was impressed that the Constitution "even had something to say about a kid like me in the countryside."
After completing his studies at the University of Tokyo, Yoshimi embarked on a career as a historian, focusing on the country's postwar democratization. It was while searching for documents related to Japan's wartime poison gas experiments in the Defense Agency's library that he first stumbled upon proof of the military's role in sex slavery.
Yoshimi copied the document but did not publicize his finding. At the time, no former sex slave had gone public about her experiences, and awareness of wartime sex crimes against women was low.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/30/asia/japan.php?page=2
But in late 1991, former sex slaves in South Korea became the first to break their silence. When the Japanese government responded with denials, Yoshimi went back to the Defense Agency's library on a hunch that there were more incriminating official documents.
Of the half-dozen he then discovered, the most damning was a notice written on March 4, 1938, by the adjutant to the chiefs of staff of Japan's North China Area Army and Central China Expeditionary Force. Titled "Concerning the Recruitment of Women for Military Comfort Stations," the notice said that "armies in the field will control the recruiting of women" and that "this task will be performed in close cooperation with the military police or local police force of the area."
In another document from July 1938, Naosaburo Okabe, the chief of staff of the North China Area Army, wrote that rapes of local women by Japanese soldiers had deepened anti-Japanese sentiments and that setting up "facilities for sexual comfort as quickly as possible is of great importance." Yet another, an April 1939 report by the headquarters of the 21st Army in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, noted that the 21st Army had directly supervised 850 women.
Yoshimi went public by informing the Asahi Shimbun, a national daily. The attention led to years of harassment from the political right, including nightly phone calls.
These documents survived because they had been moved 40 kilometers, or 25 miles, west of central Tokyo before the end of the war, Yoshimi said. The postwar American occupation forces had confiscated the documents at that time, eventually returning them to Japan in the 1950s.
Despite the government's efforts to hide the past, Yoshimi succeeded in painting a detailed picture of Japan's wartime sex slavery: a system of military-run brothels that emerged in 1932 after Japan's invasion of Manchuria, then grew with full-scale war against China in 1937 and expanded into most of Asia in the 1940s.
Between 50,000 and 200,000 women from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, the Philippines, Indonesia and elsewhere had been tricked or coerced into sex slavery, Yoshimi said. Thousands from Korea and Taiwan, which were Japanese colonies at the time, were dispatched aboard naval vessels to serve Japanese soldiers in battlefields elsewhere in Asia. Unlike other militaries that have used wartime brothels, the Japanese military had been the "main actor," Yoshimi said.
"The Japanese military itself newly built this system, took the initiative to create this system, maintained it and expanded it, and violated human rights as a result," he said. "That's a critical difference."
Yoshimi said that he was unsurprised by the most recent moves to deny yet again the history of the wartime sex slavery. They were simply the culmination of a long campaign by nationalist politicians who have succeeded in casting doubt, in Japan, on what is accepted as historical fact elsewhere. In 1997, all seven government-approved junior high school textbooks contained passages about the former sex slaves. Now, as a result of the nationalists' campaign, only two out of eight do. "Mr. Abe and his allies led that campaign," Yoshimi said, "and now they occupy the center of political power."
A fund set up by Japan to help women forced into prostitution by its military during World War II was set to expire on Saturday, with the termination of its last project, a nursing home in Indonesia, The Associated Press reported from Tokyo on Friday.
The privately financed fund, started in 1995, provided 285 women in the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan with monetary compensation, helped set up nursing homes for former Indonesian sex slaves, and gave medical aid to some 80 Dutch sex slaves. Many victims rejected the aid because it had neither come directly from the government nor been accompanied by an official apology.
http://img.iht.com/images/2007/03/30/web0330-japan550.jpg
Yoshiaki Yoshimi, in his Tokyo office with a photo copy of a 1938 army order. (Ko Sasaki for The New York Times)
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