Asking for an Apology

(Thumbnail image from the Korea Herald)

“A rally urging Japan to apologize for forcing women to serve as sex slaves before and during World War II has opening Washington.” (KBS)

From 1932-1945, as many as 200,000 sex slaves serviced Japanese soldiers

“The captain of the Garrison passed out entrance tickets. Along with the tickets, we were given condoms. It was like taking off your boots, drop you pants and just do it.” – former Japanese soldier (KRON-TV)

Now those women are mostly in their 80’s. And telling Tokyo they want an apology and compensation.

Japan hass yet to issue a formal apology and we’re looking at why…. with perspectives from the BBC, the Korea Herald, CBS News, Dawn, KRON-TV and IBN.

82-year old Korean Gil Won-ok told the Korea Herald she was 13 when she arrived at her first comfort station.

“She was forced to have sex with more than 20 soldiers a day, until the war ended three years later in 1945. After she developed tumors relating to syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease, a Japanese military doctor removed her uterus.”

Tokyo delicately refers to former sex slaves like Gol won-Ok as ‘comfort women.’ It remains defiant that Japan never hurt or abused any women, though admitting brothels existed at army camps.

In 2007, Japanese PM Shinzo Abe told the BBC…

“It was not as though military police broke into peoples’ homes and took them away like kidnappers.”

In 2007, CBS interviewed Korean national who suggested one reason Japan may be hesitant to apologize.

“Like others, he traces Japan’s refusal to apologize to its samurai past when a mistake was a matter of shame that often lead to a samurai’s ritual suicide. So in today’s Japan an apology for war time atrocities would bring shame not only on Japans current leaders but on ancestors that fought in the war.”

Pakistan’s Dawn.com offers another perspective. Tokyo’s elite contend while there may have been brothels, they weren’t state-run.

“After the war, the Japanese government long maintained that military brothels had been run by private contractors…Conservative elements in the political establishment still insist there is no documentary evidence that the Imperial Army conducted an organised campaign of sexual slavery…”

A report from 2001 by San Francisco’s KRON-TV disputes that. Author Chunghee Sarah Soh claims the Japanese government was involved.

“After the [inaud] of [inaud] the Japanese military killed a lot of civilians and also raped a lot of women and so Japanese government didn’t like the random acts of violence that there soldiers were committing so they thought one way to control them was to provide these controlled places where they could have sexual service.”        

India’s IBN correspondent Sohn Jie-ae went to the streets of Tokyo and found the Japanese people just want to resolve the issue once and for all.

“If women were treated like that, then we must apologize, says this Japanese woman. This Japanese officer worker thought Abe was inconsiderate. Opposition politicians say his stance could endanger Japan’s standing in the international community.”

So do you think it’s time for Japan to apologize? Or should further investigations find out who was behind the plan for comfort women?