| Summer 2000 A Letter from the President of MN NOW Wal-Mart rolling back women's rights Speaker: Japan must admit WWII crimes against humanity MN NOW 2000 Legislative Wrap-up HousingMinnesota launches outreach campaign MN NOW names Mary Ann Bailey Gaspar Feminist of the Year Chrysalis and Amazon Bookstore Cooperative move to South Mpls. MN NOW has open volunteer opportunities
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Speaker: Japan must admit WWII crimes against humanity
By Lucy Smith The evening of July 18, TC NOW held a special meeting. Akiko Tsutsui and Byong Moon Kim, Ph. D. spoke about the role of Japan before and during War World II and its still unsettled crimes against humanity. Akiko Tsutsui, a Japanese woman, has been trying for many years to get her country to acknowledge and take responsibility for its crimes—she views this as a basic means of restoring the honor to Japan. This is so important to her that even her recent surgery didn’t prevent her from coming to talk to NOW members. She described Japanese culture and its role in inducing Japanese people to accept what was done to Asian countries invaded by Japan. One of those countries was Korea. Dr. Kim, following Akiko Tsutsui’s presentation, described how Japan mistreated and humiliated Korean people. He spoke about the fate of Korean young women who were either kidnaped or deceived by promises of good jobs into sexual slavery commonly known as "comfort women." He spoke about the reasons Japan had to create the "comfort stations" for a Japanese army filled with mostly Korean but also the women from other conquered Asian nations. The availability of such stations provided control and prevented possible sharing of information with "enemy" and problems with sexually transmitted diseases. Stations were either permanent or movable, transporting the women into regions normally forbidden to civilians. The women were abused and exploited. According to recovered documents, the ratio of women to men they were forced to"serve" was one woman to 29 men. There were 200,000 women victimized in such stations. After the war, most of those women never returned to their families because of the shame they felt and because what happened to them made them unfit for any normal relation within their culture. In the words of Dr. Kim, "The Japanese government has refused to accept the following: the military planned and implemented the military sexual slavery system, the system represents crimes against humanity, and the 1965 agreement between Korea and Japan did not include reparations for the victims in view of the fact that the issue came out in 1991. “The victims have demanded the following to the Japanese government: 1. Reveal the truth about the crime of military sexual slavery by Japan. 2. Acknowledge war crimes. 3. Make a formal apology. 4. Punish the war criminals. 5. Erect a memorial tablet and establish a museum to honor the victims. 6. Pay reparations to the victims, and 7. Record the truth in the school textbooks." There are many obstacles on the road to obtain even some justice, but it is crucial that this and every other crime against humanity doesn’t go unpunished and that all war criminals will know that there will be no place in the world to hide from justice and no time limit for the punishment. We should all help to work toward this goal. |