Page:Larry Niksch - Japanese Military's Comfort Women System - CRS April 3, 2007.pdf/21

 agreements with several countries, and the language of the South Korea-Japan normalization treaty of 1965. The February 2006 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Joo vs. Japan seems to add strength to the Japanese government’s position. However, demands for official compensation have a strong moral component; even some defenders of the Asian Women’s Fund argue that Japan could have followed Germany’s example and set up additional private-government combined funds to compensate other abused groups like forced laborers and prisoners of war. Japan has indicated concern that official compensation to comfort women could open up a pandora’s box of claims from other abused groups. This possibility opens up a number of uncertainties, including the potential for Japanese to counter by demanding official U.S. compensation for the U.S. napalm bombings of Japanese cities in 1945 (beginning with the massive Tokyo fire raid of March 9, 1945, which killed an estimated 80,000 or more Japanese) and the atomic bombings of August 1945.

The Japanese government cites two statements as official apologies to comfort women: Cabinet Secretary Kono’s statement of August 1993 and the Prime Ministers’ letters to former comfort women who accepted assistance from the Asian Women’s Fund. The Prime Ministers’ letters state that the Prime Minister is speaking in the letters “as Prime Minister of Japan.” The letters, all of which are identical in language, use the words “apology” and “apologies” and addresses these to all comfort women rather than just the recipients of the letters. Critics state that these are inadequate, but they have not detailed their reasons for considering the statements inadequate. Some critics have suggested a resolution by the Japanese Diet as a suitable mode of apology, but the prospects of the full Diet approving such a resolution appear remote.

Some of Prime Minister Abe’s statements in March 2007, including his reaffirmation of the Kono Statement and the Prime Minister’s letters, continue this tone of acknowledgment and apology. However, other statements appear to contradict elements of the Kono Statement and the Prime Minister’s letters. His emphasis on one component of the comfort women system, recruitment, has the effect of minimizing the Japanese military’s deep role in other aspects of the system (transport, establishment and administration of comfort stations, and control of the women at the comfort stations). The military may not have directly carried out the majority of recruitment, especially in Korea; but the Abe government’s denial of any evidence of military coercion in recruitment goes against the testimony former comfort to Japanese government researchers who compiled the 1992–1993 government report and the testimony of forced recruitment by nearly 200 former comfort women from different Asian countries and the Netherlands of the 400 plus testimonies cited in Yuki Tanaka’s book, Japan’s Comfort Women.

The credibility of these women’s testimony appears to be a major point of contention between the Abe government and the LDP’s Committee to Consider Japan’s Future and Historical Education, on the one hand, and the Kono Statement and the Japanese government’s report of 1992–1993, on the other hand. The Kono Statement and the government’s report were based partly on the testimony of former comfort women. Kono Yohei, current Speaker of the Diet’s House of Representatives, stated on March 30, 2007, that his 1993 statement was based on government interviews with 16 former comfort women, who “offered explanation after explanation on a situation known only to