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「しんぶん赤旗」 2014年11月25日(火)
ＮＹタイムズ／「歴史否定する安倍政権」／「慰安婦」問題で寄稿掲載
http://www.jcp.or.jp/akahata/aik14/2014-11-25/2014112502_03_1.html
米紙「ニューヨークタイムズ」１６日付は日本軍「慰安婦」問題に関する安倍政権の動きを批判する寄稿を掲載しています。筆者は非営利民間研究所「アジア・ポリシー・ポイント」のミンディー・カトラー代表。
カトラー氏は寄稿のなかで、中曽根康弘元首相の回顧録『二十三歳で三千人の総指揮官』（１９７８年）を読むと、中曽根氏が「慰安所設置で果たした役割について知ることができる」と指摘。当時海軍主計士官だった同氏の指揮によって１９４２年当時、インドネシアで慰安所が設置され「女性４人を確保した彼の成功で軍隊の『雰囲気』はすこぶる改善されたとの彼のコメントが、海軍の報告書に出ている」と指摘。インド太平洋地域で数千の日本軍の士官によって「女性たちは征服の第一の戦利品として扱われた」と告発しています。
いまの安倍政権について、「（「慰安婦」に関する）歴史的記録を、日本の評判を傷つけるための一連のウソとして描くために最大限の取り組みをしている」と強調。その最新の動きとして中曽根元首相の息子である中曽根弘文元外相が、自民党で「慰安婦問題に関して、日本の名誉を回復する具体的方策について検討する」委員会の委員長に指名されたことを皮肉っています。
さらにカトラー氏は、「朝日」の“吉田証言”取り消しを機会に、安倍首相が「性奴隷は根拠のない中傷的な主張だと非難した」ことについて、「慰安婦に対する巨大で疑い得ない歴史を否定する試み」と糾弾。米国政府に対して「同盟国である日本に、人権と女性の権利はアメリカの外交政策の柱であることを認識させる責任がある」と警告しています。
ニューヨークタイムズ紙の英文記事（電子版では14日付） ⇒
Photo
Credit
Robert G. Fresson
― In 1942, a lieutenant paymaster in Japan’s Imperial Navy named
Yasuhiro Nakasone was stationed at Balikpapan on the island of Borneo,
assigned to oversee the construction of an airfield. But he found that
sexual misconduct, gambling and fighting were so prevalent among his men
that the work was stalled.
Lieutenant
Nakasone’s solution was to organize a military brothel, or “comfort
station.” The young officer’s success in procuring four Indonesian women
“mitigated the mood” of his troops so well that he was commended in a
naval report.
Lieutenant
Nakasone’s decision to provide comfort women to his troops was
replicated by thousands of Imperial Japanese Army and Navy officers
across the Indo-Pacific both before and during World War II, as a matter
of policy. From Nauru to Vietnam, from Burma to Timor, women were
treated as the first reward of conquest.
We
know of Lieutenant Nakasone’s role in setting up a comfort station
thanks to his 1978 memoir, “Commander of 3,000 Men at Age 23.” At that
time, such accounts were relatively commonplace and uncontroversial ―
and no obstacle to a political career. From 1982 to 1987, Mr. Nakasone
was the prime minister of Japan.
Today,
however, the Japanese military’s involvement in comfort stations is
bitterly contested. The government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is
engaged in an all-out effort to portray the historical record as a
tissue of lies designed to discredit the nation. Mr. Abe’s
administration denies that imperial Japan ran a system of human
trafficking and coerced prostitution, implying that comfort women were
simply camp-following prostitutes.
The
latest move came at the end of October when, with no intended irony,
the ruling Liberal Democratic Party appointed Mr. Nakasone’s own son,
former Foreign Minister Hirofumi Nakasone, to chair a commission
established to “consider concrete measures to restore Japan’s honor with
regard to the comfort women issue.”
The
official narrative in Japan is fast becoming detached from reality, as
it seeks to cast the Japanese people ― rather than the comfort women of
the Asia-Pacific theater ― as the victims of this story. The Abe
administration sees this historical revision as integral to restoring
Japan’s imperial wartime honor and modern-day national pride. But the
broader effect of the campaign has been to cause Japan to back away from
international efforts against human rights abuses and to weaken its
desire to be seen as a responsible partner in prosecuting possible war
crimes.
A
key objective of Mr. Abe’s government has been to dilute the 1993 Kono
Statement, named for Japan’s chief cabinet secretary at the time, Yohei
Kono. This was widely understood as the Japanese government’s formal
apology for the wartime network of brothels and front-line encampments
that provided sex for the military and its contractors. The statement
was particularly welcomed in South Korea, which was annexed by Japan
from 1910 to 1945 and was the source of a majority of the trafficked
comfort women.
Imperial
Japan’s military authorities believed sex was good for morale, and
military administration helped control sexually transmitted diseases.
Both the army and navy trafficked women, provided medical inspections,
established fees and built facilities. Nobutaka Shikanai, later chairman
of the Fujisankei Communications Group, learned in his Imperial Army
accountancy class how to manage comfort stations, including how to
determine the actuarial “durability or perishability of the women
procured.”
Japan’s
current government has made no secret of its distaste for the Kono
Statement. During Mr. Abe’s first administration, in 2007, the cabinet
undermined the Kono Statement with two declarations: that there was no
documentary evidence of coercion in the acquisition of women for the
military’s comfort stations, and that the statement was not binding
government policy.
Shortly
before he became prime minister for the second time, in 2012, Mr. Abe
(together with, among others, four future cabinet members) signed an
advertisement in a New Jersey newspaper protesting a memorial to the
comfort women erected in the town of Palisades Park, N.J., where there
is a large Korean population. The ad argued that comfort women were
simply part of the licensed prostitution system of the day.
In
June this year, the government published a review of the Kono
Statement. This found that Korean diplomats were involved in drafting
the statement, that it relied on the unverified testimonies of 16 Korean
former comfort women, and that no documents then available showed that
abductions had been committed by Japanese officials.
Then,
in August, a prominent liberal newspaper, The Asahi Shimbun, admitted
that a series of stories it wrote over 20 years ago on comfort women
contained errors. Reporters had relied upon testimony by a labor
recruiter, Seiji Yoshida, who claimed to have rounded up Korean women on
Jeju Island for military brothels overseas.
The
scholarly community had long determined that Mr. Yoshida’s claims were
fictitious, but Mr. Abe seized on this retraction by The Asahi to
denounce the “baseless, slanderous claims” of sexual slavery, in an
attempt to negate the entire voluminous and compelling history of
comfort women. In October, Mr. Abe directed his government to “step up a
strategic campaign of international opinion so that Japan can receive a
fair appraisal based on matters of objective fact.”
Two
weeks later, Japan’s ambassador for human rights, Kuni Sato, was sent
to New York to ask a former United Nations special rapporteur on
violence against women, Radhika Coomaraswamy, to reconsider her 1996
report on the comfort women ― an authoritative account of how, during
World War II, imperial Japan forced women and girls into sexual slavery.
Ms. Coomaraswamy refused, observing that one retraction did not
overturn her findings, which were based on ample documents and myriad
testimonies of victims throughout Japanese-occupied territories.
There
were many ways in which women and girls throughout the Indo-Pacific
became entangled in the comfort system, and the victims came from
virtually every settlement, plantation and territory occupied by
imperial Japan’s military. The accounts of rape and pillage leading to
subjugation are strikingly similar whether they are told by Andaman
Islanders or Singaporeans, Filipino peasants or Borneo tribespeople. In
some cases, young men, including interned Dutch boys, were also seized
to satisfy the proclivities of Japanese soldiers.
soldiers raped an American nurse at Bataan General Hospital 2 in the
Philippine Islands; other prisoners of war acted to protect her by
shaving her head and dressing her as a man. Interned Dutch mothers
traded their bodies in a church at a convent on Java to feed their
children. British and Australian women who were shipwrecked off Sumatra
after the makeshift hospital ship Vyner Brooke was bombed were given the
choice between a brothel or starving in a P.O.W. camp. Ms. Coomaraswamy
noted in her 1996 report that “the consistency of the accounts of women
from quite different parts of Southeast Asia of the manner in which
they were recruited and the clear involvement of the military and
government at different levels is indisputable.”
For
its own political reasons, the Abe administration studiously ignores
this wider historical record, and focuses instead on disputing Japan’s
treatment of its colonial Korean women. Thus rebuffed by Ms.
Coomaraswamy, the chief cabinet secretary, Yoshihide Suga, vowed to
continue advocating in international bodies, including the United
Nations Human Rights Council, for Japan’s case, which is to seek to
remove the designation of comfort women as sex slaves.
The
grave truth about the Abe administration’s denialist obsession is that
it has led Japan not only to question Ms. Coomaraswamy’s report, but
also to challenge the United Nations’ reporting on more recent and
unrelated war crimes, and to dismiss the testimony of their victims. In
March, Japan became the only Group of 7 country to withhold support from
a United Nations investigation into possible war crimes in Sri Lanka,
when it abstained from voting to authorize the inquiry. (Canada is not a
member of the Human Rights Council but issued a statement backing the
probe.) During an official visit, the parliamentary vice minister for
foreign affairs, Seiji Kihara, told Sri Lanka’s president, “We are not
ready to accept biased reports prepared by international bodies.”
Rape
and sex trafficking in wartime remain problems worldwide. If we hope to
ever reduce these abuses, the efforts of the Abe administration to deny
history cannot go unchallenged. The permanent members of the United
Nations Security Council ― all of whom had nationals entrapped in
imperial Japan’s comfort women system ― must make clear their objection
to the Abe government’s perverse denial of the historical record of
human trafficking and sexual servitude.
The
United States, in particular, has a responsibility to remind Japan, its
ally, that human rights and women’s rights are pillars of American
foreign policy. If we do not speak out, we will be complicit not only in
Japanese denialism, but also in undermining today’s international
efforts to end war crimes involving sexual violence.
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