ABSTRACT
The comfort women issue has been reduced to the simple question of whether or not government and military authorities recruited women directly by force. The revisionist narrative answers that question with a resounding “No!” But forcible recruitment is not confined to kidnapping and rounding up. It also includes “fraud, violence, threats, abuse of authority, or any other method of compulsion” that is used to procure or entice a woman or underage girl. That is how the International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children, to which Japan became a signatory in 1925, defined the “taking away by force” of adults and minors “in order to gratify the passions of another.” The Japanese Penal Code of 1907 contained similar provisions.
Japanese military and civil authorities violated all of these legal structures by forcibly prostituting tens of thousands of women in military comfort stations across Asia and the Pacific. For a true resolution of the comfort women problem, we must see through the denialist discourse. We are asked to acknowledge Japan’s historical responsibility for the crime of wartime sexual enslavement and to listen closely and respond to the voices of surviving victims. For the past quarter of a century, they have been demanding an unambiguous Japanese act of contrition and redress that will “finally and irreversibly” remove the stigma they continue to bear, restore their dignity, and afford them closure.
