Mark Selden

[Ed. Note: The author is a professor at Binghamton and Cornell universities in the United States. His most recent books include Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany and the United States with Laura Hein and Bitter Flowers, Sweet Flowers: East Timor, Indonesia and the World Community with Richard Tanter and Stephen R. Shalom. The article below appeared in the Asian Studies Newsletter, Vol. 46, No. 1, published by the Association for Asian Studies.]

The diminutive witness struggled unsteadily to gain her feet and then launched into a story that had been seared into her memory over the six decades since the events: Wan Aihua was 11 when Japanese soldiers stormed her village in northern China, killing her parents, raping her and beginning her enslavement as a 'comfort woman' to Japanese forces. Under the repeated prodding of the tough young Chinese prosecutor, her story crescendoed to an emotional peak, and she collapsed on the stage, requiring emergency hospitalisation. Her testimony was among many presented by 75 former comfort women to the Women's International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan's Military Sexual Slavery. A Japanese and international audience of more than 1,300 attended the tribunal convened from Dec. 8 to 12, 2000, by Violence against Women in War Network, a Japan-based non-governmental organisation (NGO). The tribunal offers a unique perspective for posing issues pertaining not only to Japanese war crimes but also to those committed by other nations.

In the docket, charged with personal responsibility for crimes against humanity, were Emperor Hirohito, Prime Minister Tojo Hideki and Japan's leading wartime field commanders. More important perhaps, the tribunal presented charges of crimes against humanity, including sexual slavery and systemic rape, against the Japanese colonial State. An international team of chief prosecutors headed by Patricia Viseur-Sellers, an American legal advisor to the Inter-national Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and Australian legal scholar Ustinia Dolgopol joined prosecutorial teams from north and south Korea, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, East Timor, Malaysia and the Netherlands. Chief Judge Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, an American who had served as president of the Yugoslavia War Crimes Tribunal, was joined on the bench by Carmen Maria Argibay, the Argentine president of the International Association of Women Judges, Christine Chinkin, a London University expert on gender and inter-national law, and Willy Mutunga, chair of Kenya's Commission on Human Rights.

As Eric Hobsbawm and others have observed, the 20th century is likely to be remembered above all for the destructive-ness of its wars. In a century in which efforts were made to develop universal protocols to restrict the scope of war and hold individuals responsible for crimes against humanity through international law, the reality has been the unbridled expansion of the targets of war to non-combatants, including unprecedented levels of sexual violence against women. As the tribunal's charter observed, the 20th century came to an end 'without any justice done to women victims and survivors of sexual slavery committed by the Japanese military in various Asian countries under its colonial domination.' More than half a century after the commission of these crimes, including the enslavement of perhaps 100,000 to 200,000 Asian 'comfort women' and mass military rape, 'the survivors do not receive a word of acknowledgement of the crimes by the perpetrators nor is there any genuine apology made or reparations provided by those responsible for the crimes committed against them while one survivor after another is passing away without any redress.'

The century of murderous war in Asia began with the U.S. colonial war in the Philippines, was followed by Japan's half century of invasion, colonisation and war with Asia, by successive U.S. wars from the U.S.-Japan Pacific War to Korea and Vietnam and a host of anti-colonial wars and revolutions. It came to an end in the year 2000 with East Timor's independence ending Indonesia's 25-year pogrom. All of these wars are notable for the targeting of non-combatants in general and violence against women in particular.

As Beyers Naude observed of South Africa's attempts to arrive at reconciliation through truth, 'No healing is possible without reconciliation, and no reconciliation is possible without justice, and no justice is possible without some form of genuine restitution.' The Tokyo tribunal presented the salient facts of violence against women in war as a basis for establishing individual criminal culpability and state responsibility to press the Japanese government to issue an unequivocal official apology and provide restitution to the victims for that nation's war with Asia. The tribunal ruled that Emperor Hirohito, as supreme commander of Japan's military and a hands-on wartime leader, was 'criminally responsible for crimes against humanity' with specific reference to violence against women, notably in the 'comfort women' system as well as in the Nanjing Massacre and other atrocities.

The tribunal and the reinvestigation of issues pertaining to sexual slavery and the Nanjing Massacre are products of the emergence of international feminism in Asia and the end of the Cold War. This conjuncture provided the milieu in which former Korean comfort women first went public with their stories in the early 1990s, followed by Filipinas, Chinese, Indonesians and others. The Japanese government's denial of responsibility triggered an international movement for justice and research efforts to penetrate the veil of obfuscation created by Japanese government destruction and concealment of most official documentation. Honda Katsuichi's The Nanjing Massacre and Yoshimi Yoshiaki's Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military during World War II, both recently published in English decades after their appearance in Japanese, are among the research foundations for the current movement. Facing public pressure to end its denial and provide an apology and compensation to victims of war atrocities, the Japanese government tacitly accepted moral responsibility for state involvement in the establishment of comfort women stations and the enslavement of Asian women but denied legal responsibility. Claiming that all outstanding World War II issues had been settled years ago through negotia-tions with individual Asian countries, the Japanese government formed a 'private foundation' and encouraged individual donations by Japanese citizens to compensate the 'comfort women.' The strategy backfired, however, when most 'comfort women' angrily rejected the government's evasion of its responsibility, paving the way for the tribunal and other actions that highlight Japan's failure to lay to rest the ghosts of its World War II atrocities.

The German and American experiences with reconciliation in the wake of bitter wars offer fruitful comparison as Laura Hein and I have argued recently in Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany and the United States. In contrast to Japan, which not only has not prosecuted a single war criminal since the end of the U.S. occupation but has enshrined and continues to compensate all Japanese war dead, Germany persists in prosecuting Nazi murderers to the year 2000, and both the State and leading corporations have accepted responsibility and have paid large reparations to victims. This is not, to be sure, simply altruism. These actions have been the foundations for a European Community with Germany at its core. In other words, reconciliation and justice have paved the way for new forms of economic, political and social community. By contrast, Japan, despite repeated (contested) apologies by prime ministers, continues to face persistent public criticism both in Japan and elsewhere in Asia for its failure to unequivocally accept responsibility for its crimes against Asia's peoples and to provide official restitution.

The United States, by contrast, has faced no comparable demands for an apology and restitution for major atrocities committed during its wars in Asia or elsewhere: indeed, the United States continues to maintain the high ground as the arbiter and chief prosecutor of major international war crimes tribunals, emblematic of its continued hegemonic reign. For example, despite widespread, if episodic, international criticism of the United States for its World War II firebombing of German and Japanese cities and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and for wide-ranging atrocities, including most infamously the killing of non-combatants at No Gun Ri in Korea and My Lai in Vietnam, its use of Agent Orange and other life-threatening defoliants, no significant international movement presently targets the United States for its war crimes or demands an apology and restitution for the victims. A powerful anti-war movement in the United States and worldwide contributed to the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam in the 1970s but not before two to three million Vietnamese had died. With the end of the war, however, that movement virtually disappeared and with it international calls for reparation and reconciliation.

The U.S. government and the American people have yet to come to terms with the suffering that the United States has inflicted in major Asian wars or to provide restitution to its victims, most notably in Korea and Vietnam. In this, the United States shares much with the Japanese government in its failure to accept the legitimacy of the cries of anguish and demands for justice from Asian war victims. Yet not only is there no international movement pressing Americans to accept responsibility and compensate victims, but there appears to be much wider recognition among many Japanese than among Americans of the wrongs their nation committed against Asia's peoples.

In contrast to the United States, the Japanese State faces powerful pressures to accept its responsibilities for war atrocities. The precedent-setting Nov. 29, 2000, decision by a Tokyo court requires the Kajima Corp. to pay US.6 million to compensate Chinese forced labourers and their descendants for their treatment at Hanaoka, including the deaths of 418 Chinese, many in a 1944 uprising protesting their harsh conditions. Numerous other cases brought by forced labourers and other victims are pending in Japan, the United States and elsewhere. Moreover, two major U.N. human rights reports have called on the Japanese government to accept responsibility for and compensate the former 'comfort women.' Most indicative, however, is the strength of the alliance of forces across Asia as exemplified by the Women's International War Crimes Tribunal and other actions that focus critical attention on Japanese attempts to bury the issues of war atrocities. Will the United States also, in due time, be required to make amends for its crimes of war?