In 1942, Hwang Seon-sun, 17, left home following a man who promised her a factory job in Busan. It was a trip to hell: Hwang was forced to work for three years at a "comfort station” on the small Pacific island of Nauru. After returning home, she suffered from extreme poverty and chronic diseases such as cerebral infarction and diabetes, until she died on Monday. She only hoped that the Japanese government would formally apologize.
Unfortunately, it seems increasingly unlikely that the lifelong wish of Hwang and 54 surviving former sex slaves will become a reality. On the same day, more than 10,000 Japanese people sued the country’s leading liberal newspaper, Asahi Shimbun, over its coverage of the so-called comfort women issue, which they said stained their reputation as Japanese nationals.
These litigants, led by right-wing "intellectuals” such as researchers, journalists and lawmakers, were referring to Asahi’s retraction of some stories based on false testimony from Seiji Yoshida, who claimed to have taken part in rounding up Korean women on Jeju Island to send them to military brothels on Asian fronts during World War II.
The Japanese nationalists base their claims on the fact there is no written evidence that their army coerced foreign women into sexual slavery ― exactly as Japan’s leader, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, has argued.
As foreigners see it, Japan as a whole appears to have become an ostrich trying to bury its head in sand, however. There must of course be a silent ― and conscientious ― majority, but their voices are hardly being heard abroad.
But Abe and his conservative supporters must know it is not the liberal newspaper but the nationalists themselves who are tainting Japan’s image.
There are too much testimonies and too many documents pointing to the Japanese army’s involvement ― coercing or coaxing hundreds of thousands of girls and women into sexual enslavement ― to deny what happened in many places throughout Asia more than seven decades ago.
What concerns Japan’s neighbors even more is the likelihood that further historical facts will be denied in the months ahead, because Prime Minister Abe’s government may delete some expressions of remorse and apology in its statement on the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II.
In a recent TV interview, Abe hinted at omitting some wording in the landmark 1995 statement that offered an apology for the colonial occupation and wars of aggression, which has been a key element, or foundation, for Japan’s relationship with Korea and other Asian nations. If Abe turns his suggestion into reality around August, it will mark the end of the postwar political and diplomatic balance that has sustained Northeast Asia.
Little wonder that even other Japanese groups, including political opposition and rational media outlets, are calling for Abe to drop this revisionist stance.
Abe should rethink and restart. The best place to do this is to settle the comfort women issue. He may think the issue will end when all the comfort women are dead within a decade or so. But that will be the end of Japan’s opportunity to restore its reputation as a country with a modicum of reason and conscience.