Japanese government’s violations of the ‘Comfort Women’ deal (KAFC)

1. On Dec. 28, 2015, the same day when the deal was struck, the wife of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited Yasukuni Shrine – a slap in the face of the victims.

Yasukuni Shrine is where 14 Class-A War criminals are revered as national heroes, and this includes SHEISHIRO ITAGAKI, then Minister of War who was responsible for creating and maintaining the system of military sexual slavery during WWII.

2. On Jan. 18, 2016, merely three weeks after the deal was struck, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe DENIED in front of Japanese Diet that the victims were “forced” into the system of sexual slavery.  Foreign Minister Kishida also DENIED that it was a “slavery” and ACCUSED western media for disseminating this wrong information.  Abe and Kishida are hellbent to “correct” this “wrong perception” in the international community.

3. On Jan. 25, 2016, Japanese ruling party, LDP, passed a resolution that demands removal of the Peace Monument in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul.  Attempts to remove (and sabotage efforts to build more) memorials that are dedicated to the victims of Japanese military sexual slavery is a clear attempt to deny and erase the history.

4. According to the Asahi Shimbun, in a recent report to a UN panel, Japan again DENIED that the Imperial Japanese Army or wartime government “forcibly seized” women into military brothels.

“(The) ‘forceful taking away’ of comfort women by the military and government authorities could not be confirmed in any way of the documents that the government of Japan was able to identify,” Tokyo told the UN Convention of the Elimination of all Formes of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in Geneva.

Alexis Dudden, a professor and an expert in East Asian history at University of Connecticut, said in a recent email interview that, “Like the UN, the US Gov, and the rest of the international community, the ROK side used – and uses – the term “sexual slavery”. By definition this means “coercion” whether or not any paper pieces of evidence ordering the round up and torture of the victims is ever discovered.”

She also noted that “Thus, what we are witnessing is beyond destroying the Dec. 28 understanding; it is proof positive that the current Japanese administration is openly flaunting the international community as well as the thousands of Japanese researchers and activists whose work has proven the substance of state-sponsored militarized sexual slavery (including pieces of paper evidence involving trafficking victims across international borders on military transport ships).”

5. Shortly after we launched our campaign to support California Department of Education in its decision to include ‘Comfort Women’ history in the 10th grade world history textbook in California (www.comfortwomenpetition.org), two Change.org petitions (petition 1 and petition 2) appeared to deny and revise the ‘Comfort Women’ history.

Now, who says it is a deal?