Comfort women: Why Abe won't offer new apology
TOKYO - PRIME Minister Shinzo Abe rejects the notion that the pre-war Japanese military and government had used coercion to recruit women as prostitutes for Japanese troops.
However, he does not deny that those women, said to have numbered about 200,000 and to be mostly Asians, had suffered in servicing the military and that they deserved an apology.
So earlier this week, in a bid to quell the rising tide of criticism against him in the United States, Mr Abe said in Parliament that he was 'apologising here and now as the Prime Minister'.
Earlier this month, when he first said there was no documentary evidence to show that the military was involved in the forcible recruitment of the so-called 'comfort women', it was a statement of conviction.
The Japanese leader acknowledged that private brokers engaged by the military could have lured the women against their will in a 'broader sense of coercion'.
But that did not mean the military itself had hunted for comfort women or dragged women out of their houses, he said.
He clearly did not anticipate the criticism his statement brought, as the nuances were entirely lost on the media, especially the liberal US press.
Some observers believe that with his popularity waning, Mr Abe may have become too preoccupied with trying to win July's Upper House elections and may not be paying enough attention to other issues.
But the fact is that Mr Abe and his conservative colleagues in the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) are not the only people in Japan who think their military was not involved in the use of coercion on comfort women.
In a lengthy article explaining the issue on Tuesday, the largest-circulating Yomiuri Shimbun daily pointed out that Japan had allowed licensed prostitution in the old days.
The so-called comfort stations for Japanese troops were simply the military version of civilian brothels and no one had batted an eyelid.
Those were also the days when very poor Japanese were often forced to sell off their daughters to brothels.
So it is not difficult to imagine that many women ended up in comfort stations the same way.
Some scholars believe that, in fact, 40 per cent of comfort women were Japanese.
According to the Yomiuri, the term 'military comfort women', which suggests that the women were under the control of the Japanese army, was actually never in use, and came into vogue only after a writer made it the title of a book in 1973.
Besides, the newspaper pointed out, comfort stations were not limited to Japanese patronage.
The American military occupiers of Japan after World War II had patronised comfort stations prepared for them by the Japanese.
So why did the Miyazawa administration in 1993 decide to issue a declaration under the name of then chief Cabinet secretary Yohei Kono that implied that the Japanese government had used coercion to recruit comfort women?
The forcible recruitment of comfort women was graphically depicted in a book published in 1983, but its contents were later determined to be fabricated.
However, the damage was already done.
The issue was further fanned by some careless reporting on the Japanese side.
With a visit to Seoul coming up, and the South Koreans up in arms, then premier Kiichi Miyazawa was forced to find a political solution.
Although a government study did not turn up any documentary evidence of coercion, the Miyazawa administration crafted the so-called 'Kono Declaration' - which implied through some vague wording that the government was guilty - in order to appease the Koreans.
Said Professor Lee Myon Woo, a Japan-Korea relations expert at Sejong Institute, a respected think-tank in Seoul: 'In 1993, the Kim Young Sam government just came to power and the Japanese wanted to establish good ties with the new administration. The Kono Declaration could have been made with such political consideration in mind.'
But he added: 'The issue hinges on the definition of coercion. As far as Seoul is concerned, Korean women were forcefully violated, something that semantics cannot downplay.'
The Kono statement did not attract much attention in Beijing at the time, as bilateral ties were on a much better footing then.
Beijing certainly welcomed the expression of contrition on the part of Tokyo, but did not otherwise make a big deal out of it.
Professor Shi Yinhong of Renmin University said: 'Back then, problems in Sino-Japanese ties were generally under the radar and not as obvious as what we see today.'
He added that public anger over the comfort women issue was much stronger in Seoul compared to Beijing back in 1993.
Before Mr Abe became Prime Minister last September, he and his conservative colleagues had for several years repeatedly called for the Kono Declaration to be overhauled in order to properly reflect the truth.
A veteran political reporter, who declined to be named, said: 'The liberal faction of the LDP under PM Miyazawa had agreed to issue the Kono Declaration even though they could not find any documentary proof.
'So when Mr Abe came to power, the hawks saw it as the opportunity to put things back into proper perspective.'
Mr Abe has stressed that he would stand by the declaration, which offers 'sincere apologies and remorse' to the comfort women, but that he would provide no fresh apology even if a resolution demanding one was passed in the US Congress.
The resolution, introduced by Japanese-American congressman Michael Honda, 65, is based on the Kono Declaration, which Mr Abe and company believe is faulty to begin with.
When interviewed by the press, Mr Honda admitted that though some Japanese-Americans were not with him on his resolution, he believed that an official apology from Japan, not just expressions of regret, would make Japan a more mature democracy and improve ties among South Korea, China and Japan.
Mr Honda had previously played a part in a US resolution demanding that Japan apologise for war crimes and pay compensation to victims.
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