by Chetan Prabhudesai

The story of World War II “Comfort Women” is a long, arduous, and controversial one. What we know now is, like many other war crimes committed during World War II from Auschwitz to Bataan, more than we knew back then. Many people find the story of comfort women sickening or disturbing, but according to U.S. House of Representatives member Michael Honda of California, it is a story that needs to be put into the open – and a story that needs to be recognized by the government that, according to Representative Honda, officially sanctioned the acts.

Honda claims that over 200,000 of these women were taken by the Japanese government as sex slaves, and endured “gang rape, forced abortions, humiliation, and sexual violence resulting in mutilation, death, or eventual suicide.” These women came from many countries, mainly Korea, China, and Japan itself. However, women also came from other Japanese-controlled regions, such as the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Thailand. Sometimes, advertisements would be put out in search of these women (especially in Japan), as evidence suggests that many of the initial women were actual Japanese, Korean or Chinese prostitutes, or simply women who were in economic hardship (the Japanese army paid most of these women, although it is believed that up to half of their wages were often taken from them). 

However, as one might expect, it became harder to find women willing to join the Japanese army as prostitutes. This is where much of the controversy begins. Some claim that middlemen, independent of the Japanese government, did the coercing after being asked to simply “recruit” women, while others claim that the Japanese military had authorized kidnapping of local women in Japan-occupied regions. Many of Honda’s critics, including a few University professors tied to Japanese war crime apologist/revisionist groups, claim that the middlemen who kidnapped women, and the individual soldiers who raped and abused them, should be the people at fault.

On January 31, 2007, Representative Honda delivered a scathing address to the U.S. House of Representatives denouncing Japan for both its treatment of comfort women and the country’s refusal to apologize to them. His resolution calls on Japan to “formally and unambiguously apologize and acknowledge the tragedy which the comfort women endured.” This would be a major step for the Japanese government, as the list of WWII war crimes it has admitted to is rather short.

What makes Representative Honda so notable? He is indeed Japanese, and spent part of his childhood in a US-run Japanese internment camp during World War II. He made clear that the intent of his resolution was not “to bash or humiliate Japan.” Rather, he simply wants an apology on behalf of the Japanese government to the relatively few comfort women still surviving.

Honda has been a key figure behind a hearing that brought former comfort women to the House of Representatives to speak of their experiences, on Thursday, February 15. A full telecast of this was made available at the website for the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific and the Global Environment, at http://foreignaffairs.house.gov/sub_asia.asp.

Representative Honda wants the Japanese government to take full legal responsibility for its treatment of comfort women. For him, justice served 60 years too late will still be an important step towards remembering the 200,000 women who sacrificed their bodies and lives for the Japanese military.