ABSTRACT
The Asian Women’s Fund (AWF) was created in July 1995 as a quasi-state, quasi-private “atonement” project designed to meet Japan’s “humanitarian,” not legal, responsibility to provide relief to surviving victims of the Imperial military’s comfort women system. This chapter examines the goals and programs of the AWF, the impact these activities had on women designated as beneficiaries, the response of the South Korean government and world community, the role of two prominent Japanese intellectuals in promoting the fund, and the influence of pre-1945 colonialism on contemporary Japanese attitudes and society.
The AWF’s privately solicited “atonement payments” were not state-sanctioned compensation. Whether to accept such donations in the absence of a formally legislated settlement created a dilemma for many of the selected recipients, producing confusion, uncertainty, anger, unhappiness, and mutual distrust and recrimination. Ultimately, these factors prevented the fund from achieving its stated goal of reconciliation, and the endeavor ended in failure. The AWF was dissolved in 2007. More than eight years later, on December 28, 2015, the Japanese and South Korean foreign ministers reached a bilateral agreement purporting to resolve the comfort women issue once and for all. In fact, the accord is an attempt by Japan to wash its hands of responsibility for the wartime system of sexual slavery. This turn of events presents victim-survivors and redress advocates with their greatest challenge yet.
