A Debt That Must Be Paid
Sydney Morning Herald
Wednesday December 13, 2000
Women used as sex slaves by the Japanese during World War II are making a fresh bid to shame Tokyo into recognising their plight, writes Michael Millett.
Esmerelda Boe thrusts a bony hand into the air: ``I want to punch them in the face," she says, her weathered features and small stooped frame testimony to the hardship of her 70-something years.
Her anger is aimed at the Japanese soldiers who swarmed into Timor during 1942, extending the Imperial Army's empire to Australia's northern doorstep. The troops took over her remote farming village, raped and killed her two younger sisters, leaving their bodies in the tapioca fields, and then dragged the young teenage Esmeralda away.
``I am not sure how old I was but I was very small ... and had just started to develop breasts," she said in a singsong dialect, her body wrapped in a shawl to protect her from the unfamiliar Tokyo cold.
Her youth was no protection. For three years, Esmeralda was forced to serve Japanese officers as a comfort woman, the euphemism used by the military hierarchy to describe the Asian women forcibly ``recruited" to serve in frontline brothels.
Experts believe up to 200,000 women Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, Malayan, Filipino, Timorese, Indonesian and Dutch were victims of this system of slavery, used to keep the troops happy and to protect them from venereal disease.
Many did not live to see the end of the Japanese occupation, committing suicide, falling to illness or being murdered to hide the military's dark secrets. Others succumbed to illness and trauma in the years after the war.
Esmeralda and her countrywoman Marta Abu Bere are among a select few who have not only survived their mistreatment, but have come forward to be publicly identified as what they term ``military sex slaves".
Hours after talking to the Herald, Esmeralda and Marta climbed the stairs onto a stage at a Tokyo auditorium to give evidence to the Women's International War Crimes Tribunal, an unofficial panel set up by civil rights and women's groups from a number of countries. The panel was headed by the former head of the UN's Yugloslav War Crimes Tribunal, Gabrielle McDonald.
The tribunal's three-day hearing concluded yesterday with a judgment citing the late Emperor Hirohito for ``crimes against humanity" and a demand for huge compensation.
Sadly, the ruling has no legal force. The hearing was a desperate attempt by a range of international groups to get justice for the dwindling group of comfort women and was driven by the women's abject failure to get justice through the Japanese legal system.
Claims are routinely denied on the basis that Japanese law does not allow individual claims against the state, and that the cases extend too far back in time and that Japan settled all outstanding reparation claims in peace treaties with other nations long ago.
In the past fortnight, two cases, one involving 46 Filipinas and the other a Korean woman, have hit this legalistic brick wall.
While the Japanese Government now concedes there was a practice of enslaving comfort women, it has floundered for a response to demands that it confront the issue by issuing a formal apology and paying the victims compensation.
The stalemate encapsulates Japan's difficulty in emulating Germany by facing the truths about its behaviour during World War II and then moving on.
Cowed by Japan's outspoken right-wing elements, which regard any nod to the women's claims as an act of treason, authorities have either remained mute or have resorted to hamfisted policies, such as the mid-1990s' Asian Women's Fund which sought to marshal private funds to assist Asian comfort women. It succeeded only in raising the ire of its proposed beneficiaries.
The Government has lately lapsed into embarrassed silence, hoping the whole issue will disappear. Even one-line references to the comfort-women policy are being dropped from Japanese school textbooks.
While acknowledging its inability to enforce yesterday's verdict, the tribunal has gone to great lengths to shame the Japanese Government into admitting responsibility. The proceedings were given a legal aura, with indictments from North Korea, a number of organisations and the hearing of evidence from legal experts and survivors.
But the Japanese Government will studiously ignore the result, as it has the proceedings. The ``trial" has received scant coverage in the Japanese-language press.
But the organisers have ensured controversy by deliberately dragging the late emperor into the issue.
The 1945 Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal overlooked the role played by the Showa emperor in the commission of Japanese atrocities largely to meet geopolitical interests of the United States. Even today, this is a taboo area for most Japanese. But yesterday's verdict pointed the finger directly at Hirohito, saying he had ignored his responsibilities as Japan's de facto and de jure leader to challenge the comfort-women policy.
The judgment also paid tribute to the comfort women, acknowledging the enormous difficulties they faced in coming forward to present evidence.
The East Timorese women were the first from the former Portuguese colony to break their silence, casting light on an almost completely undocumented part of Japan's cruel grip on the small territory.
The Imperial Army is believed to have operated about 15 comfort stations in East Timor.
Marta Abu Bere told the tribunal that 10 soldiers had raped her on her opening day of ``service". ``I was treated like an animal. After the rapes, I was bleeding and could not walk."
Over three harrowing days, about 60 women recalled experiences that remain the stuff of nightmares more than five decades later.
Few spoke more eloquently than Jan Ruff-O'Herne, dragged away from her family in the Dutch East Indies as a 21-year-old to serve as a comfort woman. Now an Australian citizen living in Adelaide, Jan was training to become a Catholic nun.
In February 1944, she found herself with a group of other Dutch women trapped in an old colonial house and being repeatedly raped by Japanese officers.
Jan recalled her fear on ``opening night" as the girls cowered in the kitchen, hearing the floorboards creak under the soldiers' boots, and her panic as a ``big, fat, old" officer ran his sword down her body before raping her.
``There was whole line of Japanese men waiting. It went on until the early hours of the morning. Seven frightened little girls huddled together," she said in a Dutch lilt.
``How many times were we raped that night? We felt so helpless."
Jan cut off her hair to make herself look unattractive to her persecutors. ``It had the opposite effect. I was an object of curiosity."
Others struggled with their memories.
One small Chinese woman, 72, grew increasingly agitated as she described being trapped in a cave and repeatedly raped by Japanese soldiers in the puppet state of Manchuria. After being caught escaping, she was tied to a tree and tortured. ``My whole life is a misery," she wailed, before collapsing and being rushed to hospital.
A Malayan woman, Rosalind, testified on video about being imprisoned in a hotel room and being forced to service about 60 men a day 20 in the morning, another 20 in the afternoon and another group at night.
``All the time I was sitting on a bed. I was given no money and if you tried to run away, they would slit your throat," she said.
A Korean woman, Kim Young-suk, was taken to Shenyang in China at the age of 12 and raped by a soldier who used a knife to widen her vagina an apparently common practice on the frontline. ``I will never forgive them."
Esmeralda's strongest memory is of being forced to endure her rapes in a room with seven other women. ``I had to look right into the eyes of the woman next to me," she said.
The testimony was just as harrowing when it dealt with the lives of the women after the war. Discrimination was rife in Asian societies with rigid codes relating to family duty and sexual propriety.
Many comfort women died in poverty, shunned by family and friends. Others struggled with hideous mental and physical wounds.
``I could not bear to look at a man," one Korean woman stated matter of factly. Another shrugged as she described how her son had ``gone mad" with syphilis.
``The war never ended for us comfort girls," Jan said, revealing that she had endured four miscarriages before giving birth to two daughters. ``You feel this shame that stays with you for the rest of your life."
Two former Imperial Army soldiers struggled to explain how they were able to participate in and condone such inhumane conduct.
``I thought that I could die at anytime and that it doesn't matter raping women who will eventually be killed," one said.
© 2000 Sydney Morning Herald