Any Value to the Suga Visit

SS Vyner Brooke

Why Comfort Women Matter to the U.S.-Japan Values Summit
Getting history right matters and Washington needs to hold its allies to the same moral values and standards that America and its allies claim to represent.

The National Interest, April 12, 2021

by Tessa Morris Suzuki, Professor Emerita of Japanese History, School of Culture, History and Language at the Australian National University and Mindy L. Kotler, Director of Asia Policy Point in Washington, DC.

In February 1942, after sinking the SS Vyner Brooke off the coast of Bangka Island near the Java Sea, the occupying Imperial Japanese gave the Australian and European women who survived a choice: they could starve in a prison camp on Sumatra or sign a document to provide sexual services on demand for Japanese troops.

This episode and many others like it during the war in the Pacific have reverberated over the generations. On Friday, nearly eighty years later, this history will underlie President Joe Biden’s summit meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga.

The White House apparently invited Suga to be the first foreign leader to visit the White House in order to mirror Suga’s predecessor Shinzo Abe’s pre-inauguration meeting with Donald Trump in 2017—and to cover for the impending conflict over values. Although the U.S.-Japan Alliance is heralded as rock solid, opinion writers have been quick to point out the mercurial state of American foreign policy. They try to brush aside what the President might ask of Suga by saying that Americans change course very quickly and unexpectedly. In other words, Japan does not need to take the meeting over values too seriously.

All of this is a deflection from Japan’s responsibility for the rift in the Alliance. The Suga Administration has accelerated a project started under the Abe Administration to manipulate and rewrite the history of the Pacific War, and particularly of women and girls trafficked and coerced into military brothels throughout the areas occupied by Japan during World War II—known as Comfort Women.

Despite well-established history of the many ways in which women and girls of multiple nationalities were forced into sexual slavery to Imperial Japan’s military, the Japanese government tries to present the issue simply as one between Japan and an overwrought, never satisfied South Korea. The result has eroded trust between these two major American allies, and frustrated Washington.

At the heart of the problem lies the question of whether or not the Japanese government admits that Japan’s military was responsible for the Comfort Women system, and accepts that the women and girls involved were recruited by deception or coercion. A 1993 statement issued by Japan’s then Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono acknowledged the role of the military in the comfort women system, including the fact that “at the time administrative/military personnel directly took part in the recruitments,” and admitted that some women had been recruited through coercion.

The Japanese government states that they have “inherited” the Kono Statement, carefully avoiding any promise to “uphold,” “commit to” or “fulfill” the promises of the Statement. Instead, conservative governments have steadily promoted the view that there are no documents that show forcible removal of any women by military or government officials. A review of the history of the Statement, supervised by then-Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga in 2014, implied that Japan had caved in to pressure from the Korean government, undermining public confidence in the Statement’s content.

The Statement, in fact, has been so diminished that the government has recently announced it will no longer use the term “military comfort women” or “so-called military comfort women” (the expressions used in the Kono Statement): the word “military” has been removed from this phrase because it highlights the role of Japan’s armed forces in the comfort women system.

A recent academic article by Harvard Law Professor Mark Ramseyer has helped to fuel Japan’s development of a revisionist narrative that depicts the Comfort Women as willing prostitutes. Astonishingly, this article presents all Japanese and Korean Comfort Women as contractual workers under Japan’s prostitution system, in which (Ramseyer suggests) children as young as ten-years-old knowingly and voluntarily negotiated prostitution contracts. Some Japanese ruling party politicians have enthusiastically promoted this version of history, while the Japanese Education Minister has publicly suggested that Ramseyer’s article is part of the process by which we “approach the truth” of history.

Tokyo’s position is so antithetical to any contemporary understanding of trafficking and sexual violence in warfare that American policymakers must be stunned. The Japanese government’s blanket denial of forced recruitment of comfort women not only contradicts irrefutable evidence of force in multiple cases; it also shows a fundamental lack of understanding of sex trafficking and sexual slavery. This is because the Japanese authorities do not see the skewed power relationship nor comprehend the psychology of coercion.

The dispute itself is the tip of much larger and troubling “history wars”: part of a push to revise memories of the Asia Pacific War as a whole. Last month, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party announced that one of its main strategic objectives for 2021 was a further expansion of the government budget for telling its version of history internationally. With Tokyo demanding the removal of Comfort Women memorials from sites in America and Germany, and using pressure to have one ripped out of its foundation in sight of the Bayview Hotel in Manila where hundreds of Filipino women were gang-raped by retreating Japanese troops, this “war” is not confined to South Korea.

In releasing the 2020 Human Rights Report, Secretary of State Antony Blinken lamented that “the trend lines on human rights continue to move in the wrong direction.” A concerning part of this trend are denials in Japan and the United States of the terror that compelled women like some Vyner Brooke survivors to “choose” to join a Comfort Station. Blinken said in his remarks: “standing for people’s freedom and dignity honors America’s most sacred values.” The U.S.-Japan Alliance is said to be based on those shared values. Now Washington and Tokyo need to discuss what this means in practice. The Biden-Suga Summit will test the U.S. Administration’s ability to be fair, but firm with allies as well as with those it sees as rivals and security threats.

The ever-shifting sands of Japanese apologies

By Tessa Morris-Suzuki, an ARC Laureate Fellow based at the School of Culture, History and Language, at the College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University and an APP member.

East Asia Forum, 22 February 2016

On 16 February, Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida signed a ‘Strategy for Co-operation in the Pacific’, in which both countries emphasised their shared values of ‘democracy, human rights and the rule of law’.

As they were doing so, Japanese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Shinsuke Sugiyama was in Geneva addressing a meeting of the UN committee which oversees the implementation of one of the world’s key human rights accords: the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). On the agenda was the Japanese government’s treatment of the problems of memory, justice and redress arising from the imperial military’s mass recruitment of women (the so-called ‘comfort women’) to military brothels during the Pacific War.

It was a great opportunity for the Abe administration to follow up its 28 December 2015 joint statement with South Korea on ‘comfort women’. In the December statement Foreign Minister Kishida acknowledged ‘an involvement of the Japanese military authorities at that time’ and passed on Prime Minister Abe’s ‘sincere apologies and remorse to all the women who underwent immeasurable and painful experiences and suffered incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women’.

The December statement committed the Japanese government to contributing to a fund to assist surviving South Korean former ‘comfort women’, but its rather curious wording left some observers unsure just what Japan had apologised for.

Since coming to power the Abe administration has told the world that it is continuing to uphold — or (in the Japanese version) to ‘inherit’ (keisho suru) — the 1993 Kono Declaration. In that declaration, issued after an extensive study by the Japanese government, Japan acknowledged that ‘in many cases [‘comfort women’] were recruited against their own will, through coaxing, coercion, etc., and that, at times, administrative/military personnel directly took part in the recruitments’. The Japanese government also promised to ‘face squarely the historical facts as described above instead of evading them, and take them to heart as lessons of history’.

If the Abe administration has indeed ‘inherited’ the Kono Declaration, one would assume that Abe’s December ‘sincere apologies and remorse’ were apologising for the historical fact that many ‘comfort women’ were recruited and held against their will, and a reaffirmation of Japan’s determination to take the lessons of history to heart.

But oddly, neither Abe nor any of his ministers or spokespeople has ever been heard to echo the key words of the Kono Declaration. Instead, when challenged on the question of state responsibility for the ‘comfort women’ issue, they repeatedly respond with a formula developed during the first Abe administration of 2006–2007: ‘in the documents discovered by the Japanese government, none confirmed the forcible taking away of comfort women’.

This statement is extremely significant. It treats official Japanese government and military documents (the most incriminating of which were deliberately burnt in the closing days of the war) as the only reliable source of information on the topic. It entirely discounts the testimony of surviving former ‘comfort women’. This includes testimony collected and taken into account by the Japanese government at the time of the Kono Declaration. By implication, this formula says to the survivors that their testimony is at best unreliable evidence and at worst lies.

So the key question about the 28 December deal was this: when Foreign Minister Kishida referred to ‘an involvement of the Japanese military authorities at that time’, was he speaking about the involvement of the military in recruiting, transporting and holding women against their will? Was he upholding the promises of the Kono Declaration? If so, then the December accord was indeed a major step forward in Japan–South Korea relations. If not, it starts to look uncomfortably like a move that was motivated less by a desire to bring justice and redress to the victims than to buy their silence.

Foreign Ministry official Sugiyama’s response to the CEDAW committee on 16 February made the answer to these questions disturbingly plain. Pressed on the comfort women issue, he replied ‘in the documents discovered by the Japanese government, none confirmed the forcible taking away of comfort women’. He added that the notion that comfort women had been forcibly recruited was a misconception based on fabricated testimony by a former Japanese labour recruiter named Yoshida Seiji, and that this misinformation had been disseminated by the liberal newspaper Asahi Shimbun, which later retracted the claims.

This statement by Sugiyama is entirely misleading. The Yoshida testimony (which was reported in the early 1990s by almost all the Japanese mainstream media, not just Asahi Shimbun) has been known to be unreliable for more than a decade. And it has had no significant influence on the ‘comfort women’ debate in recent years. More importantly, it is far from the only evidence. The evidence that women were recruited against their will comes from a mass of testimonies from survivors and other eyewitnesses as well as evidence given to war crimes trials and court cases, alongside other historical material.

Australian survivor Jan Ruff-O’Herne, who was marched out of an internment camp and into a military brothel at gunpoint during the war, has never received an apology. Nor have many others forcibly recruited in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

It is time for Japan’s friends and allies, particularly those like Australia who plan to cooperate with Japan in protecting human rights around the region, to ask the hard questions. Will Prime Minister Abe and his cabinet repeat the words of the Kono Declaration loud and clear? Or will they admit that they have abandoned the declaration? They cannot have it both ways. Sugiyama insisted to the CEDAW committee that the Japanese government is not ‘denying history’. Now we need an answer to the follow-up question: which history are they not denying?

Abe ignores his Emperor - at his peril

‘Emperor Akihito favors an honest and long-overdue reckoning with Japan’s wartime past’

Interview by APP member, Peter Ennis of Dispatch Japan published January 23, 2015

Emperor Akihito raised many an eyebrow in Japan and abroad recently when he used his New Year message to urge Japan’s citizens to learn from history in this, the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. He specifically referred to the Manchurian Incident of 1931 as the start of the war, which many saw as a not-so-veiled swipe at Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and other advocates of a ‘revisonist’ view of history, who have tried to diminish Japan's responsibility for the hostilities in the Pacific that ultimately led to Japan’s destruction and surrender in 1945. The key passage in the Emperor’s message was:“This year marks the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, which cost many people their lives. Those who died on the battlefields, those who died in the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, those who died in the air raids on Tokyo and other cities-so many people lost their lives in this war. I think it is most important for us to take this opportunity to study and learn from the history of this war, starting with the Manchurian Incident of 1931, as we consider the future direction of our country.”The Emperor’s comment was initially overshadowed by the New Year’s festivities in Japan, but subsequently provoked a subdued but charged debate in intellectual and policy circles.

Below is the first of a two-part discussion about the controversy with Tokyo-based scholar and commentator Jeff Kingston. Professor Kingston is the director of Asian Studies at Temple University Japan, where he teaches courses on modern Japanese history, contemporary Japan, and Japan’s relations with Asia. He has been a regular contributor to The Japan Times since 1988. Kingston’s most recent book, Contemporary Japan, was published in 2012. He has a B.S. degree in foreign service from Georgetown University, and a PhD. in history from Columbia University.


DISPATCH JAPAN: Emperor Akihito referred to the Manchurian Incident of 1931 in several of his past birthday greetings, but never in a New Year’s message. Why do you think it is notable that he brought this up in his most recent New Year’s message?

KINGSTON: It is impossible to know what exactly Emperor Akihito intended with his 2015 New Year Thoughts. His comments were sufficiently vague to avoid giving the impression that he was infringing on constitutional limits that prevent him from weighing in on political issues.

The Imperial Household Agency carefully vets his remarks, so one can only speculate about the message he is trying to convey. In my opinion, the choice of topics is indicative, and must be considered in the context of Akihito’s track record on war responsibility. He has relentlessly crisscrossed the region over the past quarter of a century to express remorse to nations victimized by Japanese aggression.

Akihito has done more than all of Japan’s politicians combined to demonstrate that Japan is not in denial, and is contrite about the horrors it inflicted. Although revisionist politicians and the jingoistic press have worked hard to undermine the emperor’s reconciliation diplomacy, Akihito regards this as the unfinished business of the Showa Emperor (Akihito's father, Emperor Hirohito, who died in 1989), and persists in doing what he can in his circumscribed role.

His record suggests he favors an honest and long overdue reckoning. He has maintained his father’s post-1978 boycott of Yasukuni Shrine that was prompted by the enshrinement of 14 Class A war criminals at that time.

He also rebuked a Tokyo government official who explained to the monarch at an autumn 2004 garden party that he was in charge of enforcing a directive to teachers to stand and sing the national anthem (kimigayo) facing the national flag (Hinomaru). Akihito replied that this is not desirable, and should be left up to individual choice, comments he repeated in the Spring 2005 garden party. The Imperial Household Agency went into damage control mode, arguing that Akihito’s remarks held no political implications, even though they had clearly offered moral support to teachers who complained that their constitutional rights were being infringed on.

So when Akihito refers to the Manchurian Incident, he is weighing in on contemporary history controversies. Prime Minister Abe and like-minded revisionists seek to legitimize Japanese aggression, asserting that it was a war of Pan Asian liberation aimed at lifting the yoke of western subjugation. In addition, revisionists argue that it was a defensive war against escalating pressures from the western powers, the so-called ABCD (American, British, Chinese and Dutch) encirclement thesis.

But by pegging the war’s onset to 1931, Akihito inconveniently focused attention on the Kwantung Army’s plot in Mukden, which blamed ‘Chinese terrorists’ for a staged attack on Japan’s South Manchurian Railway, and used this as a pretext to launch a full-scale invasion and pacification of Manchuria.

This interpretation meshes with what scholars call the Fifteen Year War (1931-45), a reference to escalating Japanese aggression in China and a decision in 1940 to widen the war to Southeast Asia in order to secure the resources needed to subjugate China.

This narrative dismisses the Pan Asian liberation thesis as a fig-leaf for Japanese imperialism. Moreover, in 1931 Japan was not being encircled, but rather was carving off part of China to promote autarchy and prepare for the coming war with the US for hegemony in the Pacific. Ishiwara Kanji, the man who planned the Mukden Incident, was Japan’s foremost military strategist, and someone who had carefully studied the lessons of WWI. Total war meant a no-holds barred approach to winning, meaning that civilians were fair game and that economic sanctions were a weapon of war.

Ishiwara believed that Germany lost the war owing to economic sanctions that starved its war machine of what was required to wage war and thus became an advocate of economic autarchy. Manchuria had many of the resources Japan lacked that were crucial for its war machine, so taking it over was aimed at promoting autarchy and getting ready for the coming conflict. The Pan Asian thesis is more appealing to contemporary conservatives because it positions Japan as selfless and sacrificing for the benefit of others.

By contrast, the Manchurian thesis makes Japan look like a greedy predator, invading nations to secure resources and markets just like other imperial nations.

So Akihito’s apparently bland remarks actually resonate loudly in the arena of historiography. They position him in the camp critical of Japanese aggression, and critical of contemporary revisionists like Abe, who seek to rehabilitate Japan’s wartime past and assert a valorizing and vindicating narrative.

Akihito’s view represents the longstanding mainstream consensus in Japan (and elsewhere), but revisionists have bristled at this ‘masochistic’ history that singles Japan out for blame while overlooking Allied war crimes. They argue that the mainstream consensus is based on the judgments of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMFTE), a biased ‘victor’s justice’ narrative.

Judicial process at the IMFTE was indeed very flawed, and the guilty verdicts were preordained, but this doesn't mean that Japan’s military forces, or the architects of war called the Class A war criminals, were innocent. Revisionists often cite the dissenting opinion of Radhabinod Pal as exonerating Japan from the war crimes charges. A memorial to him is even located just outside the Yushukan Museum adjacent to Yasukuni Shrine, the talismanic ground zero for an unrepentant view of Japanese military aggression. In fact, Pal argued no such thing. He dismissed the IMFTE as lacking legal standing in international law, and for the baseless retroactive application of laws it allowed. But Pal readily acknowledged that Japan committed war crimes, and he lamented the fact that the Allies were not in the dock alongside the Japanese, sensibly pointing out that they should also be held accountable.

DISPATCH JAPAN: Why is this relevant to contemporary Japanese politics, and Japan’s national security policy?

KINGSTON: The judgments of the IMFTE, deeply flawed as they may be, are intrinsic to the Treaty of San Francisco that Japan signed to end the US occupation and make peace with the other signatories. In signing the treaty, Japan committed itself to accepting these judgments. Prime Minister Abe often talks about overthrowing the ‘postwar system’, one that most Japanese are rightly proud of. He is unhappy with the denunciatory view of wartime Japan and the US penned constitution, both essential elements of the postwar order that he believes humiliates Japan and keeps it subordinate.

In contrast, Akihito and most Japanese feel that Japan’s exemplary record in the second half of the 20th century brought redemption, and serves as the basis for the nation regaining its dignity. While Abe rails against the Peace Constitution, most Japanese see it as a reassuring touchstone of national identity. That is why his efforts to chip away at Article 9 are so unpopular. Hardly anyone in Japan supports Abe’s reinterpretation of Article. 9 to allow for collective self-defense, because they worry that Washington will drag them into war, and they understand that the new US-Japan Defense Guidelines will facilitate that scenario. Both governments keep postponing formal adoption of the guidelines precisely so they don’t become a liability to the LDP in elections.

DISPATCH JAPAN: So the political right finds itself in the interesting position of opposing the views of an Emperor in whose honor they claim to speak?

KINGSTON: The Emperor’s remarks highlight the horrors of war and send a strong anti-militarism, pro-peace message. He has enjoined Japanese citizens to reflect on the lessons of the past, perhaps because he has witnessed the culture wars since Abe came to power. Many Japanese and long-time Japan observers have expressed dismay about the recrudescence of self-righteous nationalism under Mr. Abe, who has emboldened right-wing extremists.

They have aggressively attacked liberal targets, such as the Asahi, and downplayed some of the more egregious examples of wartime Japan’s depredations, including the comfort women. Akihito is surely aware that Abe did nothing to repudiate colleagues in the Diet who worked to undermine the 1993 Kono Statement, in which Japan accepts responsibility and promises to atone for the sordid system of sexual slavery that involved tens of thousands of young women throughout Asia between 1932-1945. They were recruited through deception and/or coercion, both direct and indirect.

The Asahi’s admission that a handful of their reports on the comfort women over twenty years ago were based on the discredited testimony of Yoshida Seiji has been disingenuously used as a pretext to try to cast doubts on the nature and extent of this system and thereby promote a narrative of minimization and denial. Naturally, Team Abe is manipulating the Asahi affair for political advantage. This saga is, after all, more about politics than journalism, part of a larger culture war being waged by conservatives to redefine Japanese identity on their terms. The Asahi has long been the right’s main media adversary in this culture war and thus a prime target.

There is also the case of Net Uyoku (ultra-nationalists on the Internet) harassing former Asahi reporters and their university employers, threatening to harm students by deploying nail bombs if these former journalists’ contracts are not terminated. And the hate speech campaign promoted by the Zaitokukai (an organization devoted to denying rights to non-citizens – mostly Koreans – residing in Japan), harassing Japan’s zainichi (mostly Korean) community, again threatening death. Abe has tolerated this intolerance, and indeed has acted as cheerleader in chief for the anti-Asahi campaign. This is not the Japan that most Japanese feel comfortable with, and is not consistent with their national identity.

This is the context in which Akihito’s comments can be interpreted as a rebuke and warning.

Monday in Washington, August 4, 2014

This week in Washington is dominated (August 4-6) by the first U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit hosted by the White House. Many think tanks and NGOs will have Africa-focused programs and host individual African leaders. For many, it will be the first time that they feature more than one speaker of color.

Over 50 African heads of state are expected at the Summit. Not invited are the presidents of four countries with a record of human rights violations – Eritrea, Zimbabwe, Sudan and Central African Republic.

On Monday, President Obama's birthday, there will be a civil society forum. The U.S. emphasis on human rights and good governance separates this gathering from recent Africa investment summits held by China, India, Japan and Russia.

Also Monday, August 4th is the anniversary of the 1993 Kono Statement providing an unofficial apology to the Comfort Women. Through Prime Minister Abe's two terms in office the Kono Statement has been methodically deconstructed to remove the focus on apology and the involvement of the Japanese Government. No member of the current Abe Administration uses the word apology when referring to the Kono Statement. Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga also says the government is working off of the March 2007 revision of the Kono Statement saying that the Japanese government did not coerce women and that the Statement is a non-binding announcement of the conclusion of a study.

August 6th is the 69th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan and August 9th on Nagasaki, Japan. There will be a number of activities organized by the Hiroshima/Nagasaki Peace Committee of the National Capital Area.

Congress is in recess and will not return until September 7th. Washington will be quiet in August and hopefully there will be no "August Surprise."

THE GAME HAS CHANGED: THE NEW LANDSCAPE FOR INNOVATION AND BUSINESS IN AFRICA. 8/4, 9:15am-5:00pm, Washington, DC. Sponsor: Brookings. Speakers: Karen R. Bass (D-CA), U.S. House of Representatives; Christopher Smith (R-NJ), U.S. House of Representatives; Vera Songwe, nonresidential senior fellow, Global Economy and Development, Africa Growth Initiative, Brookings; Carolyn Cambell, managing director and general counsel, Emerging Capital Partners; Donald Kaberuka, president, African Development Bank; Mo Lbrahim, founder and chair, Mo Ibrahim Foundation; Jason Njokum founder and CEO, iROKO Partners; Amadous Sy, senior fellow, Global Economy and Development, Africa Growth Initiative; Fernando de Sousa, general manager, African Initiatives; Jay Ireland, president and CEO, GE Africa; Robert Collymore, CEO, Safaricom; Strive Masiyiwa, executive chairman, Econet Wireless International; Kemal, vice president and director, Global Economy and Development, Brookings; Helene Cooper, White House correspondent, New York Times; William Sallis, writer and former editor, African Affairs, Financial Times; Alaune “Akon” Thiam, recording artist and philanthropist; and Witney Schneidman, nonresident fellow, Global Economy and Development, Africa Growth Initiative, Brookings.

EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT NATIONAL SECURITY LAW (BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK). 8/4, Noon-1:00pm. Sponsor: Center for Human Rights & Humanitarian Law and Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission. Speaker: Stephen Vladeck, professor, Washington College of Law, American University. 

Japan and the art of un-apologising

Japan and the art of un-apologising is an Op Ed published first in The Canberra Times, June 29, 2014 By Dr. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, APP member and an Australian National University College of Asia and the Pacific Japanese history professor and an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow.

The Japanese government has long had difficulties coming up with effective apologies for the wartime misdeeds of the country’s military.

For decades, while many ordinary Japanese grassroots groups worked tirelessly to right the wrongs of the past, the silence from the corridors of power in Tokyo was deafening.

But then in the 1990s all that changed, and the Japanese government issued a series of statements on the events of the war. Like official apologies elsewhere, these were not perfect. Turning words into deeds proved to be a challenge. But the apologies enhanced Japan's standing in the eyes of the world; above all, they made a very big difference to many of the surviving victims.

Now the world is confronted with the spectacle of a Japanese government caught up in a contorted process of un-apologising; and a very strange and disturbing spectacle it is too.

The issue at stake is the Kono Declaration of 1993, an apology issued by Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono to the so-called "comfort women", women who suffered terrible sexual and other abuse in an empire-wide network of wartime military brothels.

Sexual violence in war is not a problem unique to Japan. Many countries have ugly stains on their history. But the "comfort station" system was remarkable in its size – tens of thousands of women were recruited. And there is abundant testimony from victims and others that many of the women were recruited by force or trickery.

The 1993 Kono Declaration was a forthright apology for these events. Though it focused particularly on Korean women, it was also addressed to former "comfort women" in other countries including Australia. It admitted that they were "recruited against their own will, through coaxing, coercion, and so on" and "lived in misery at comfort stations under a coercive atmosphere". It went on to promise that Japan would "forever engrave such issues in our memories through the study and teaching of history".

The Japanese government refused to provide direct monetary compensation to former "comfort women". But, following the Kono Declaration, it did offer welfare and medical support, while "atonement money" was paid from a non-governmental fund. This response, sadly, created divisions among the survivors: some welcomed the payments; others rejected them on the grounds that the Japanese state should pay direct compensation itself.

During the late 1990s, some Japanese history texts were extended to include a very brief mention of the "comfort women" issue, but this aroused the ire of Japanese nationalists, who launched a fierce campaign for more "patriotic" history education. All mention of the issue has now disappeared from textbooks, and the promise to engrave the issue in public memory has simply not been kept.

Meanwhile, the "comfort women" issue had become a political football in both Japan and Korea, being used by nationalists on both sides to enhance their popularity. In Japan some prominent conservative politicians launched fierce attacks on the Kono Declaration, which they regarded as an insult to the memory of Japan's war dead.

Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has always been uncomfortable with the declaration's references to coercion. But Abe is also an eager supporter of Japan's alliance with the US; and the US government, concerned to maintain good relations between Japan and South Korea, insists that Japan stand by the declaration.

This left the government with a dilemma: how to undo the words of the Kono Declaration without officially withdrawing the declaration. Here is the solution.

Step one: create a committee to "re-examine" the process by which the apology was put together. This, not surprisingly, finds evidence that the Japanese and Korean governments negotiated about the wording of the apology before it was released. Now the apology can be presented, not as a truly Japanese document, but as a compromise worked out by a Japanese government that lacked the will to stand up to pressure from the Koreans.

Step two: cast doubt on the veracity of victims. The Japanese committee's "re-examination" of the Kono Declaration does this by stressing the fact that some of the former comfort women whose testimony was collected had "quite confused memories", and that the Japanese government did not fact-check their stories.

Step three: define the word "force" extremely narrowly, so that it applies only to situations where women were marched out of their homes at gunpoint by members of the Japanese military. This allows your committee to inform the world that, according to the studies conducted by Japan, it is, after all, "not possible to confirm that women were 'forcefully recruited'".

The result is the un-apology that you make when you are not un-apologising. Now the Japanese government can truthfully insist that it has not withdrawn the Kono Declaration; all it has done is very effectively to demolish its credibility.

Prime Minister Abe has repeatedly stated that the "comfort women" issue should be left to the scholarly judgment of historians, but the government's committee contained just one historian, Ikuhiko Hata, who had been campaigning for years to have the Kono Declaration rewritten.

Hata, who has also made an art form of combing through the testimony of former "comfort women" for any inconsistency that may cast doubt on their truthfulness, publicly predicts that the committee's report is likely to make some Japanese people "so enraged that their hair will stand on end" and "conclude that Japan was duped by Korea". "Maybe," he adds, "a new public view will emerge that the Kono Declaration should be withdrawn."

The next step, foreshadowed by the prime minister's key political confidant Koichi Hagiuda, may be official tours to countries including Australia to present them with the "facts" revealed by the new committee report.

How Prime Minister Abe handles this issue on his impending visit to Australia will be watched with great interest – and at least some discomfort.

Silence Broken: Comfort Women

Today, August 4th, is the 20th Anniversary of the Kono Statement, Japan's unofficial apology to the women and men who served as sex slaves to Japan's military and their contractors. It is a statement of acknowledgement, it asks for forgiveness, and uses clear apology language. It was followed up by a program of atonement, the Asia Women's Fund.

Unfortunately, all the good intentions of this apology were undermined by Japanese denier politics. The apology was publicized, yet it was never approved by the Cabinet and, thus, was never an official governmental statement. This was driven home by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe during his first term where he issued a Cabinet Decision affirming that the Kono Statement had never been approved by the Cabinet. The atonement fund did not draw funds from the public treasury--where the "salaries" of many Comfort Women still remained--but from private individuals. The contemporary Japanese state took no responsibility, other than to "administer" the fund, much like Imperial Japan administered the Comfort Women system.

In 2006, the U.S. House of Representatives began to take notice of this historic injustice. It echoed so many international conflicts in which women and children were the main victims; where sexual violence was a rationalized norm. The international community was fast accepting that this "norm" of warfare was an unconscionable crime.

The personal anger and humiliation of the victims being voiced in the new democracies of Asia highlighted the  failure of a responsible, appropriate apology by a modern Japan. Time did not bury the pain. Time, in this case, provided the scholarship and knowledge that rape is a form of power and is a crime. Time only seemed to stand still for Japan's leaders.

Congress awakened to the issue of the Comfort Women through an understanding of the consequences of the many assaults on women's dignity worldwide. To learn more, members of congress reached out to the victims and scholars for briefings and information.

On Shinzo Abe's birthday, September 21, 2006, and a few days before Abe would become Prime Minister, Congressman Lane Evans (D-IL) hosted a press conference and briefing on the Comfort Women issue and a resolution he was sponsoring, the precursor to the 2007 H. Res. 121, asking Japan for an official apology to the Comfort Women. 

Among the speakers were Congressman Edward Royce (R-CA). His prepared and presented remarks, as you can see below, were the most eloquent and insightful of the day. Representative Royce is now Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee

Rep Ed Royce (R-CA)

Comfort Women Briefing

9/21/06

The Imperial Government of Japan orchestrated the enslavement of up to 200,000 young women.  Many of these women were abducted from their homes and sent to Japanese Military brothels.  Others were lured from their homes under the false pretense of work or employment.  Of course, they found neither.

The trauma and shame that these women suffered drove many to conceal their past, either too embarrassed or scared to speak of it.  Many died without ever mentioning their ordeal, suffering in silence and psychological angst.

To this day, Japan maintains that all potential claims by individuals for sufferings inflicted in the war were closed years ago, by treaties normalizing its ties with other Asian countries.  Clearly, many feel differently.  The Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery in Japan and groups of former comfort women continue to hold demonstrations outside of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul every week, rain or shine.  They have done so since 1992. 

Still, the Japanese government continues to deny these women the full recognition they deserve.

But that is why we are here today.  Those here recognize that confronting this issue is the right thing to do.  Those of us in Congress are taking action to see that the Japanese government confronts this dark part of the history of Imperial Japan.  Recently, the House International Relations Committee, on which I, Chairman Chris Smith, and Ambassador Watson serve, passed out of committee H. Res. 759, the Japanese Comfort Women Resolution, a bill that I am proud to have cosponsored.  This resolution calls on the Japanese government to formally acknowledge and take full responsibility for their sexual enslavement of thousands of young women. 

Some have asked me why do this now?  Certainly time has passed.  Yesterday my Committee held a hearing on the killing in Darfur, Sudan.  What we have there is genocide being conducted by the Sudanese government.  Much of the world, sadly, is ignoring this killing.  The Chinese government is blocking sanctions.  The world's strength to oppose killing today is made greater by accountability, for actions present, but also past.  It's weakened by denial of accountability and obfuscation of past acts.  History is a continuum that affects today and tomorrow.  It's much harder to get tomorrow right if we get yesterday wrong.

Thank you.

Will history again trip up Prime Minister Shinzo Abe?

At Chidorigaifuchi

Issues of history have dominated the past few weeks of Japan's international relations. For Japan's leaders, they are defending the nation's honor, for all others Tokyo's inability to squarely confront its past undermines trust and distracts from the economy.

APP Senior Fellow William Brooks, who is an Adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, addresses the domestic repercussions of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's focus on "correcting" the misperceptions of history in the essay below that first appeared in the Asahi Asia Japan Watch on May 7, 2013.

Dr. Brooks echoes The Economist's May 18th Cover Story "It's Japan." The editors are unsure if Abe is the economic modernizer, the internationalist, or the radical nationalist. The Prime Minister's emphasis on "backward-facing patriotism as a model for modern strength" and constitutional reform is troubling. Or as The Economist notes:

At best, all this could prove a distraction at a time when some structural-reform initiatives already appear to be running into the sands. At worst, it could endanger all reform by eroding the government’s popularity, at the same time increasing tensions with Japan’s neighbours. Far from having banished the ghosts of his past, as some of his advisers claim, the prime minister is in danger of summoning them up again.

More pointedly, The Economist's editors conclude: 

Mr Abe is right to want to awaken Japan. After the upper-house elections, he will have a real chance to do so. The way to restore Japan is to focus on reinvigorating the economy, not to end up in a needless war with China.

~~~~~~

With the landslide victory of the Liberal Democratic Party in December, its president, Shinzo Abe, returned for the second time as prime minister, aiming to fix Japan’s perpetually ailing economy through dramatic policy measures, dubbed “Abenomics,” which were cheered by the markets and welcomed by the public.

As Abe’s popularity soared in the polls to a 70 percent or higher approval rating, it seemed the momentum would give his ruling party an easy win in the Upper House election in July. Abe also defied trade-protectionist sentiment even in his own party and wowed international opinion by making a bold decision for Japan to join the U.S.-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations that would open the economy to what will become a huge free-trade bloc in the world.

Abe was lauded in Washington, too, by his promise of a strong national security agenda that would enhance Japan’s alliance with the United States. Washington hoped that finally, Japan had a strong leader that it needs to bring the country back on track, return stability to politics and restore Japan’s status as a “tier-one” level member in the global community.

But at the same time, the return of Abe to power has been accompanied by growing controversy due to his nationalistic agenda and revisionist views toward history.

His plan to drastically revise the Constitution, including the war-renouncing Article 9, has set off domestic alarms, even with the LDP’s coalition partner, the New Komeito. He also has upset Asian neighbors by questioning Japan’s wartime legacy and breaking his own taboo by letting Cabinet members visit Yasukuni Shrine, where war criminals are enshrined.

Abe left office in 2007 in a cloud over his handling of the war-guilt issue. Will history ultimately trip up Abe’s second try as prime minister?

Abe's Right-Turn Agenda Detours To Yasukuni
While the Japanese public welcomed the new prime minister, Abe was seen overseas in quite a different light. The Western media were especially critical. The Economist of Britain on Jan. 5, 2013, called Abe an “arch-nationalist” and predicted that his “appointment of a scarily right-wing cabinet bodes ill for the region.” The magazine noted “thirteen [members] support Nippon Kaigi, a nationalist think-tank that advocates a return to ‘traditional values’ and rejects Japan’s ‘apology diplomacy’ for its wartime misdeeds.”

Similar warnings about Abe’s nationalist roots appeared in major U.S. dailies, as well. This sparked a series of rebuttals in op-eds and commentaries from scholars and think-tanks seeing Abe instead as a pragmatic leader who had learned from his unsuccessful first term.

Such concerns seemed borne out when Abe soon began to make comments that were seen in the Western media as “exposing his true nationalist colors.” Abe talked of revising the statements of wartime apologies made by earlier administrations and, in a Diet reply, he questioned the definition of “aggression” to describe Japan’s wartime actions in Asia.

Although he and his Cabinet spokesman sought to assuage irate Korean and Chinese reactions by later assurances that past apologies would always be honored, the damage had been done.

Things did not stop there, however. Abe in his previous turn as prime minister was careful to avoid visiting Yasukuni Shrine, where 14 Class-A war criminals are enshrined. He was painfully aware of the trouble with China and Korea caused by the visits to Yasukuni of his predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, and he desired above all to repair ties with those countries.

This time, however, Abe broke his old rule by allowing three of his Cabinet members, including Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso, himself a former prime minister, to pay homage at Yasukuni during its April spring festival. Angry reactions swept across Korea and China, and scheduled high-level meetings were either postponed or canceled. Major Japanese dailies and the Western press slammed Abe. He may have miscalculated Korean and Chinese reactions, for it was clear from the start of his administration that he wanted to repair relations strained by territorial disputes. Although Abe himself did not visit the shrine, only sending a donation of a sacred plant, his allowing his deputy to pay homage at the shrine was to Asian eyes the equivalent of sending a proxy.

The impact of the Yasukuni visits has gone far beyond Asia. Abe was chastised for allegedly revealing his nationalist colors by editorials in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and other major Western dailies. The Financial Times stressed, “Yasukuni ... is irredeemably associated with the nationalist cult of emperor worship.” The New York Times charged: “Visits to Yasukuni … are often seen as proof that Japan remains unrepentant for its brutal wartime march across Asia.”

The Japanese government’s position, which under ordinary circumstances would be reasonable and understandable, is that how Japan mourns its war dead is not something that other countries can give orders on.

Such a stance may still resonate among U.S. officials, for it harks back to the Yasukuni visits of Koizumi during his tenure in office (2001-2006). Koizumi was careful always to state that his intention was to pay homage to the war dead, not to war criminals. But his actions, though certainly not personally linked to nationalism, roiled China and South Korea and wrecked relations with those countries.

Those who defend official visits to Yasukuni as no more than paying respect for the war dead are denying the reality that the shrine long ago has become hopelessly politicized as a symbol of Japan’s militarist past. The Showa emperor himself stopped going to the shrine decades ago when he found that war criminals had been enshrined there. Still, most Japanese these days are probably neutral about the shrine, seeing Yasukuni as just a place to go to pray for the war dead, perhaps their own relatives. They do not think they are praying for the war criminals enshrined there.

Neutralizing Yasukuni
There has been much talk over the years of separating the souls of the war criminals from Yasukuni and enshrining them elsewhere. Other suggestions have included establishing a secular war memorial where even a U.S. president could lay a wreath. Such talk has not led to any action, though one could persuasively argue that the 14 Class-A war criminals do not belong at Yasukuni anyway: They were never killed on the battlefield but were executed for sending millions to die in battle.

As Abe’s miscalculation shows, though, Yasukuni remains a potential lightning rod for trouble if officials believe that visiting there is just an act of respect for the war dead.

Yasukuni Adds To U.S. Security Concerns In The Region
When Yasukuni flared up again in April, Washington officials were likely more upset about the timing of the dispute than with the visits to the shrine by Cabinet ministers. Washington has become increasingly concerned about escalating tensions between Japan and China over the Senkakus, islands both countries claim. China’s maritime surveillance ships repeatedly intrude into Japanese waters near the isles, and earlier this year, a Chinese warship, locking its radar on a Japan Coast Guard vessel, was ready to fire.

Conflict could have ensued. Moreover, the isles have taken on an even more strategic significance when Beijing recently announced that the Senkakus were part of China’s “core interests,” ranking them with Tibet and Taiwan.

Adding nationalism to territorial and historical issues makes an extremely volatile mixture, and U.S. officials worry that in the case of China and the Senkakus, a military clash is not out of the question. In that case, the United States might be dragged into an unnecessary war.

America’s pivot to Asia is largely centered on protecting its maritime security interests in the region. In that connection, Washington would like Japan and China to find diplomatic ways to return relations to a more cooperative mode, putting the territorial issue on the back burner and toning down the historical rhetoric.

Japan's rocky relations with South Korea further complicate U.S. regional strategy. Washington expects trilateral cooperation among the United States, Japan and South Korea in dealing with North Korea’s dangerous nuclear and missile programs.

Officials are disappointed, too, that bilateral strategic cooperation between Japan and South Korea, such as planned agreements for intelligence and materiel sharing, have been sidelined by the territorial row in 2012 and made even more remote by the tiff over history.

Moreover, the United States and Japan at this point cannot leverage cooperation from China in pressuring North Korea to reconsider its nuclear ambitions. As Japan becomes more isolated, another casualty is the loss of access to close consultations between Beijing and Seoul over the North Korea problem--a matter of direct national security interest for Tokyo.

Comfort Women Issue Could Roil U.S. Again
The comfort women issue--sex slaves used by the Japanese military in World War II--has the potential to flare up again, not only with Asian countries but also with the United States, if Abe makes good his oft-stated intention to review the 1993 Kono Statement, which admitted military involvement in the recruitment of women, mostly Koreans, to service Japanese soldiers at the war front.

A similar review of the 1995 Murayama Statement of apology for Japan’s wartime acts has also been suggested.

The comfort women issue became a bone of contention between the United States and Japan when Abe was prime minister for the first time. Congress was upset when the Abe government began to deny military involvement in that wartime system, and subsequently passed a resolution critical of Japan’s responses to date.

Americans view the comfort women’s plight as a humanitarian issue and expect Japan to do the right thing. Should the Abe administration, in its review of the Kono Statement, take the tack of again denying coercion and military involvement in this prostitution corps, it will find that the United States has joined the chorus of international criticism, too. Relations that started out so well early in the year could quickly cool. Such a scenario need not happen, though. Abe, who says he has learned from his mistakes in his first time in office, should apply that wisdom by turning over historical issues to historians to discuss and taking politics out of the act.

Japan and the Politics of Guilt

By Gareth Evans

Former Australian Foreign Minister Minister and the principal framer of the United Nations "responsibility to protect" doctrine Gareth Evans issued an important opinion piece for Project Syndicate on the need for Japan to hold to contemporary values on war and peace.


30 January 2013

CANBERRA – Japan is again alienating its neighbors and driving its friends to despair over the issue of accepting responsibility for its wartime aggression and atrocities. With the election of the new government, the voices of denial are heard again at the highest levels, and are resonating with the public, including the young, in ways that would be unthinkable, by contrast, in modern Germany. All of this is fueling nationalist sentiment in China and South Korea, and making even more dangerous the already volatile territorial disputes in the East China Sea and the Sea of Japan.

It may be, as some Japanese colleagues tell me, that newly elected Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, despite his deeply conservative nationalist background and instincts, is ultimately a realist who will do what it takes – no doubt with the help of pressure from the United States – to defuse these tensions. But there are three specific talismanic issues on which he and his colleagues have taken worrying positions, jangling regional nerves.

The first is the long-running saga of an appropriate apology for Japan’s initiation and conduct of aggressive war the years before and during World War II. For many years, the affected countries sought a comprehensive and unequivocal apology; as Australia’s foreign minister from the late 1980’s, I pushed hard for it in Tokyo, as a form of closure that was morally right and in Japan’s own interests. Eventually, on the 50th anniversary of Japan’s defeat in 1995, Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama responded with personal language of both “deep remorse” and “heartfelt apology.”

Most subsequent leaders have repeated these sentiments in various degrees – albeit never to the complete satisfaction of China or South Korea. But, after his landslide election victory last month, Abe told the newspaper Sankei that he would seek to replace the landmark 1995 statement – “issued by a Socialist prime minister” – with a “forward-looking” statement, the content of which he did not describe.

The second issue is that of a specific apology to the “comfort women” – from many countries, including my own, but especially South Korea – who were sexually enslaved in army brothels. Then-Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono broke the ice in 1993, expressing “sincere apologies and remorse” to all those who had “suffered immeasurable pain.”

But Abe and several of his colleagues have gone on the record over the years – including during Abe’s first term as Prime Minister in 2006-2007 – denying that coercion was involved. In 2007, his national security adviser told a colleague of mine, “All of this is the work of Korean leftists: there’s nothing to it.” Now, in January 2013, Abe’s chief cabinet secretary, Yoshihide Suga, has said that experts would be invited to study the basis of Kono’s statement.

Finally, there is the issue of the Yasukuni Shrine to Japanese war dead, which records in its “Book of Souls” 14 A-class war criminals, and contains a museum that glorifies Japan’s conquests as “just wars fought for survival and self-defense” or for the “liberation of Asia.”

Abe has been a regular visitor to Yasukuni. He visited it again last October, after being elected LDP leader, and expressed “bitter grief” during the election campaign that he had not done so during his previous term as Prime Minister. It has been reliably reported that he wants to visit the shrine while in office this time. Fourteen of his 19 cabinet members are reported to belong to a group promoting pilgrimage tours to the site.

Compounding these concerns is evidence that Japanese public opinion is sympathetic toward the positions that Abe has taken or seems to favor. In a Jiji Press opinion poll conducted in January, 56.7% of those surveyed believed that Abe should visit Yasukuni now – up significantly from 2006, when 43% took a similar position.

There are, of course, always two sides to these stories. It is possible to argue – as many Japanese do – that much of the negative reaction by Japan’s neighbors has been driven by cynical nationalist considerations. Campaigners for South Korean comfort women, for example, have often failed to acknowledge the number and intensity of the statements that have been made on this issue over the last two decades, and the amount of compensation on offer. Likewise, China may have set the bar too high concerning the language that it has demanded in any general apology.

But, even before Abe’s latest wavering, there is much more that Japan could have done long ago – and which it should still do – to put its position beyond reasonable criticism. The benchmark 1995 Murayama apology remains a personal one, because the Japanese Diet, then and since, would not agree to anything as strong: a “deep feeling of remorse” was as much as they could muster, and even then 241 members abstained. Moreover, Murayama’s statement referred vaguely to “a certain period in the not-too-distant past,” rather than to specific war years, and others have since resisted phrases – for example, “war of aggression” or “colonial rule” – that Japan’s neighbors have not unreasonably sought.

The more fundamental problem is that Japan seems unable, as a nation, to manage the kind of collective psychological shift that has transformed Germany, with which it is inevitably compared. Apologizing sincerely for the sins and omissions of earlier generations is never easy. Australia had a long national debate before we could say that we were sorry for the horrible past mistreatment of our Aboriginal people, particularly the “stolen generations” of Aboriginal children who were regularly taken from their parents by governments until the 1970’s.

But statesmen, if they are to deserve the name, sometimes must take the politically uncomfortable high ground – and then bring their publics along. Leadership of that quality has been a long time coming in Japan.

An encounter with a denier

The sick man of Asia: costs of denial

By Richard Tanter

Nautilus Institute, January 10, 2012

Let me tell you a story. It’s a bit long, and about a friend of mine and her family, but it might explain why I believe that the idea of Japan as the northern hinge of the United States’s pivot strategy against China is simply not viable in political terms, and may well prove dangerous.

In early March 2007 I found myself on the stage of CLSA’s annual Japan Forum in Tokyo, together with Koike Yuriko, at the time Prime Minister Abe’s National Security Advisor, and soon after, Minister of Defence. Koike, an Arabic speaking former journalist, gave a short anodyne talk to the 800 or so assembled suits about plans for a national security council. I followed on with some hopefully less anodyne comments, but then shifted from my prepared remarks to raise the issue of the Prime Minister’s comments in that morning’s newspaper in response to the testimony to a US Congressional sub-committee by three women, two Korean and one Australian, about their experiences as sexual slaves for the Japanese Army in WW2. Abe had said that while the events were regrettable, “in the legal definition”, this was not a matter of coercion.^[1]

Addressing Ms Koike, and trying to keep a level tone, I said that as someone who had lived in Japan for a long time, with a deep affection for the country, I thought these remarks were disastrous for Japan in policy terms. Soft power – the capacity to generate a desire for imitation or admiration – is generally regarded as an important part of a country’s strategic posture, but for Japan this issue, and the inability of the country’s leaders to rise above it, was the repellent – and repelling – inverse of soft power. Moreover, I said, I had a small personal connection to the issue which would not permit me to let the matter pass without comment.

One of the three women who testified so courageously in Washington, was a woman named Jan Ruff O’Herne, who happened to be the mother of a close friend, the Australian painter Carol Ruff. Born and raised to Dutch parents in the Dutch East Indies, Jan had been a 17 year old girl planning a life as a nun when she and her mother were interned by the Imperial Army in 1942. Jan and other young girls were sent to the city of Semarang, to a brothel for army officers, where she was raped, repeatedly, daily, for many months. Eventually returned to the internment camp, Jan told only her mother, who just held her, and her priest, who told her any hopes she had of becoming a nun were over. At war’s end, the camp was liberated, and she fell in love with a young British soldier, Tom O’Herne, who she married, telling him, and no-one else for the next fifty years, what had happened to her. Despite all, it was a happy marriage, and Jan and Tom raised two daughters, Eileen and Carol, in Australia.^[2]

In 1989, the first few extraordinary Korean women told the story of their abductions and systematic rape by the Imperial Army to their fellow Koreans, and then the wider world, bringing with them the strange and shocking phrase “comfort women”. Jan saw these women on television, and felt that she too had to break the silence of half a century, and sat down to write her story for her daughters in an old school notebook, which later became her remarkable book Fifty Years of Silence^[3]. The Korean women had given her the courage to face the feelings of shame:

The truth is winning. Because, all of a sudden, after 50 years we had the courage to shed the shame.It was a risk I had to take, but I was afraid. Then to have the enormous relief when I had spoken out to be received back among my friends and my parish, and be welcomed and embraced and flowers put on my seat in the church, when I first went to Mass. It was a wonderful reception I had, you know? Mmm. It was good. ^[4]

For her daughters, suddenly many things made sense.

“My mother’s a very beautiful woman”, said Carol. “She’s really attractive and, as a young woman, she was stunning. And, in a sense, sometimes I think that her beauty has also been her disguise. We knew all along that she’d been in prison camp. I’ve never seen my mother as someone with a terrible past that she was hiding from me. Not a hint.”^[5].

Carol and her then husband, the film maker Ned Lander, went on with Jan to make an award-winning film, also called Fifty Years of Silence^[6], about Jan’s story, and most importantly, about her first, anxious visit to Japan after an invitation to speak about what had happened to her, and to so many other girls and young women.

Carol and I were friends from Alice Springs, that hard and special part of Australia where art and politics meet, where Carol painted the spirited landscape.^[7] When the film came out, I was teaching politics in a Japanese university, and organising a fieldwork program for third year students to come to Australia for half a year. Carol was by now living in Sydney, and I asked her if she would consider showing the film to my students, and then talking with them. She had never shown it to a Japanese audience, and was not sure – about her own response or that of the students. 

Beforehand I prepared the students, talking about the historical background, working through the script of the film. On that first occasion, as in many later years, crowded into in Carol’s little Sydney house, the mainly female students watched intently, some in increasing dismay, and some, at least initially, in disbelief or denial, but all shattered by the end, wondering how they could possibly speak to the daughter of this extraordinary woman. And then the conversation, the many-stranded, halting, tearful, wondering conversations that were founded on the rock of authentic witness, began. In later years, Carol and I would start the film off, and then move to coffee in her tiny exquisite garden, catching up on the doings of our families, the quiet gossip about our friends, until it was time to go back in, to wait for the end of the film, and readying ourselves for the electric silence and the talking.   

On stage at the CLSA event, after explaining the Abe statement, I told a little of Jan’s story. I said to Ms Koike that I hoped that for both strategic policy reasons and because of the simple truth of what these women had been saying about their own lives in a committee room in Congress, the Abe administration would change course, and choose a path of historical reconciliation. After all, if a country so deeply imbued with racist attitudes as the Australia of my childhood could overcome most of its war-borne antipathy for Japan, then surely it was possible to at least start that process here. Ms Koike thanked me for my policy advice – with some asperity.

After the session, the atmosphere in the backstage waiting room was a tad awkward for the CLSA suits. I apologised to Ms Koike for ambushing her, but she was unflustered, and brushed any unpleasantness aside. That’s politics she said, smiling. I was about to say to her that Jan Ruff O’Herne was a deeply religious and decent person, outside the world of politics, and except for this issue, which marked her so deeply, she was an “ordinary” person who I felt sure Ms Koike would be able to talk with. 

“Sometimes God asks of us, late in life, to do an amazing task. And this has come to me late in life, you know. Without my faith I couldn’t have even survived the time that I was in the comfort stations. My faith has always been the backbone of my whole life.”^[8]  

Before I was able to say any of these well-meaning, but, as it turned out, naive things, Ms. Koike leaned towards me and said,

“But you know, all this is the work of Korean leftists. There’s nothing to it.”

I was left with my mouth open as she wished me good bye, leaving the room with her minders. I realised that I had just heard the authentic voice of Japanese restorationist nationalism from a woman already spoken of at that time as a future prime minister. If a woman younger than me – and a journalist even! – was in such deep denial, it was clear that there really was nothing useful to be said. 

Just a few months earlier, at the ceremony to open the new Ministry of Defence, Prime Minister Abe declared it

“a landmark event that marks the end of the postwar regime and will lay the groundwork for building a new state.”^[9]

There could not have been a clearer statement of the goal of the first Abe cabinet, which fizzled out ignominiously but typically a few months later. The most extreme nationalist amongst Japanese postwar leaders^[10] (and grandson of war-criminal and later PM Kishi Nobusuke), Abe Shinzo is again the leader of America’s most important ally in the Pacific pivot, and once again, despite American hopes of a return to alliance stability, the issue of sexual slavery is on the Abe agenda. Most ominously, there has been a Cabinet-level suggestion of “revising” the 1993 “Kono statement” over sexual slavery^[11], and Prime Minister Murayama’s 1995 apology.^[12]

Militarily, of course, the process of Heisei militarisation Japan has undertaken over the past two decades has made it into a quiet military powerhouse, much more capable of close and effective operational coordination with the US than at the end of the Cold War.^[13] But politically, Japan is the sick man of Asia, capable of neither building the successor to the late, great Japan Incorporated, nor abjuring the enduring toxins of its colonial and military domination of East and Southeast Asia three generations ago. The United States may well wonder whether the new state Abe has in mind is one that fulfills American hopes.

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