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GUEST: T Kumar, Advocacy Director for Asia and the Pacific, Amnesty International USA

As many as 200,000 women primarily from China and South Korea were forced into sexual slavery to service Japanese soldiers during World War II. The women were euphemistically called “comfort women,” and were forced to serve Japanese soldiers in about 2000 so-called “comfort stations” across Asia. In 1993 the then Chief Cabinet Secretary in Japan issued an unofficial apology to the women. But last week, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stirred fresh anger in neighboring Asian countries by claiming that there was no evidence that the women were coerced. Abe’s statement contradicted evidence in Japanese documents, unearthed in 1992, that showed that military authorities had a direct role in working with private contractors to forcibly procure women for the brothels. Now, the Prime Minister has announced that the government would cooperate with a study to be conducted by a group of Liberal Democratic party MPs who are skeptical of the issue of “comfort women.” Meanwhile, the US Congress is preparing to vote on a non-binding motion proposed by Democrat Mike Honda, which calls on Tokyo to “formally acknowledge [and] apologize … in a clear and unequivocal manner for its imperial armed forces’ coercion of young women into sexual slavery.”

Download Amnesty International’s report on “Comfort Women” here: http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engasa220122005