Overcoming Past Wrongs Committed by States

Abstract

This article investigates whether or not reconciliation for historical wrongs can be realized in the absence of a state apology. States have traditionally been notoriously reluctant to apologize for their past crimes, and this has often meant that victims are unable to attain closure while they are still alive. What, then, are the alternatives? This article examines the case of the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery, which was held in 2000. The Tribunal was organized primarily by non-governmental organizations: its judgements were neither legally binding, nor was the Tribunal capable of issuing a ‘sincere’ apology that was the equivalent of a state apology. Nevertheless, this article makes the case that faced with the fact that the Japanese state has not always been forthcoming in acknowledging and taking legal responsibility for its past wrongs, such private, non-state attempts may constitute the best chance for us to accord some victims of war crimes some sense of closure for their past suffering.

Keywords

Asia-Pacific War ‘comfort women’historical wrongs Japan reconciliation states

Introduction

In recent controversies surrounding Japan’s ‘history issues’ (rekishi mondai 歴史問題) – a euphemistic term referring to Japan’s war crimes during the Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945) – no other issue has captured the public’s attention more than that of the so-called ‘comfort women’. The term ‘comfort women’ is coined from the Japanese (ianfu 慰安婦), and refers to women (from Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Indonesia, the Netherlands, East Timor, and the Philippines, among others) who rendered sexual services to the Japanese military during the Asia-Pacific War, often against their will. The exact number of these women remains unknown, as ‘[t]here is no documented evidence to determine the total number of military comfort women, or how many of them were forced into the role’ (Soh, 2003: 212). Estimates range from 50,000 to 200,000, but the sense of shame still associated with serving in this role leaves the possibility that many more women have not come forward to identify themselves as such.

The plight of these women received particular attention in the context of a growing feminist movement in East Asia. Since the issue came to light there has been an on-going international campaign to obtain a full governmental apology and financial compensation for the victims of this war crime. Yet, in East Asia many victims of Japanese war crimes have yet to attain full closure from the suffering they have had to endure. While successive Japanese governments have issued apologies – at times admittedly vague – many of the survivors have dismissed these as lacking in any sincerity. Furthermore, lawsuits aimed at bringing about financial compensation for the victims of Japanese war crimes have ultimately all been dismissed on the grounds that ‘international customary law did not recognize an individual victim’s right to claim compensation from the State’; that ‘cases were filed more than twenty years after the end of WWII, and statutory limitation had run out’; and pre-war Japanese law dictated that ‘the State had no liability for compensation, according to the principle of no liability for the State’ (Matsui, 2001: 129).

Given these obstacles, is it possible to bring about any form of reconciliation in East Asia? It is well known that states are reluctant to apologize for historical wrongs committed in their name. While the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which currently holds power, has tended to demonstrate greater awareness of Japan’s persisting ‘history issues’ than the more conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) governments, it is probably too much to expect any form of atonement that is likely to satisfy the victims. As Bilder has noted, states often refuse to apologise for past wrongs for fear of being exposed to future compensation claims or adding strength to a particular international norm to which it is opposed (2008: 26–27). In addition – and particularly so in the case of Japan – apologizing for the past carries considerable risks of creating a domestic backlash (Lind, 2010; Lu, 2008). Conservative nationalists wield considerable political influence within some Japanese elite circles, and any government finds it hard to ignore their voices.

Furthermore, the issue of Japan’s war crimes is of an international nature, involving peoples from multiple countries (particularly Korea and China), and this has frequently hampered the expression of remorse from Tokyo. The privileging of inter-governmental political agendas can result (and has resulted) in papering over issues of the ‘past’. This was particularly the case during the Cold War, when strategic needs to counter the threat from the Soviet Union resulted in Chinese and South Korean decisions to ‘forgive’ Japan for its past wrongs, with victims’ voices completely ignored. Today, the need to maintain stable politico-economic relations can still mean that governments are reluctant to dwell on the past and risk souring diplomatic relations.

Overall, the prospects of achieving the purported goals of the ‘comfort women’ and their supporters seems bleak. But, if the ‘optimum outcome’ is unfeasible, should we give up? Can no other form of reconciliation be reached in the case of ‘comfort women’? Here, two points are worth considering. First, many of the survivors are old and do not have long to live. Second, given the aforementioned political obstacles, attaining the ‘perfect outcome’ (i.e. ‘genuine’ state-led apologies and financial compensation) is politically unfeasible. There is therefore a practical need to find other solutions, even though this may be the ‘second best’ option.

Of course, there are ethical difficulties with this stance: while victims are not a monolithic entity, it is often the case that they desire a state apology over anything else. My own views are based on practical/political considerations that a heartfelt apology of an unchanging nature that would satisfy the victims cannot be achieved in the context of Japanese society and politics today. Similar reasoning was used by the Asian Women’s Fund (AWF) in their efforts to get the victims to accept ‘non-state’ financial compensation. Such arguments have been criticized by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) which support ‘comfort women’ as tantamount to blackmail. Of course, NGOs do not hold the monopoly of ‘truth’ with regard to the feelings of the victims. Nonetheless, it is important to acknowledge the potential dangers of ignoring the wishes of the victims in promoting particular pathways of reconciliation, and it must be made explicit from the outset that I do not have a ready answer to this criticism. It is, however, worth pointing out that these alternatives need not be in a zero-sum competition with other pathways of reconciliation (such as demanding compensation from the state), and searching for alternatives should not imply that we give up on our primary aims, as this would certainly amount to ignoring the wishes of the victims.

To explore this issue, this article examines the case of the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery, which was held in 2000. The Tribunal was organized primarily by NGOs: its judgements were neither legally binding, nor was the Tribunal capable of issuing a ‘sincere’ apology that was the equivalent of a state apology. Nevertheless, faced with the fact that the Japanese state has not always been forthcoming in acknowledging and taking legal responsibility for its past wrongs, such private, non-state attempts may constitute the best chance for us to accord some victims of war crimes some sense of closure for their past suffering.

The term ‘reconciliation’ can be a multifaceted and sometimes vague concept, but the aim of this article is neither to review the various debates surrounding this concept, nor to offer an alternative and authoritative definition of what exactly ‘reconciliation’ is. In this article, ‘reconciliation’ is meant as a process in which ‘previously divided groups will come to agree on a mutually satisfactory narrative of what they have been through, opening the way to a common future’ (Torpey, 2003: 25). Reconciliation is attained through a series of activities, which Torpey calls ‘reparations’, a range of activities that seek ‘to make up for egregiously and unjustly violated selves and for squandered life chances’ (2003: 4). These include financial compensation, apology, or appropriate commemoration of historical wrongs that acknowledges victims’ suffering and ensures that it does not fade from public memory. Closure is used in a similar sense, but with a greater focus on the victims’ agency. It is not meant to describe a situation where victims feel that the wrongdoings of the past can be despatched to the past. On the contrary, many victims desire the complete opposite, in that they seek for their suffering to be actively remembered and kept alive in the collective memory of a given society. Therefore, in this article it is simply meant to depict a situation in which individuals on the receiving end of a particular historical wrong accept that broad recognition has been given (by both the victim’s and victimizer’s societies) to both the abuse they have suffered and their dignity as ‘victims’.

The ‘Comfort Women’ Issue

Much of the precise details of the ‘comfort women’ remain unclear. The exact number of ‘comfort women’ has yet to be ascertained, as has the exact breakdown of the nationalities of the women. Korean women are frequently seen as constituting the largest non-Japanese group. Soh (1996: 1226–1227) states that Korean women made up 80 per cent of the ‘comfort women’. Yoshimi (1995: 81–84) also notes a large Korean presence, while acknowledging that there may have been more Chinese ‘comfort women’ than the record suggests. Hata (1999: 403–410), on the other hand, estimates that Japanese ‘comfort women’ were the largest group.

The degree to which these women were duped into sexual slavery also remains a contentious issue. What we do know, however, is that the reasons the women served as ‘comfort women’ varied. If we take the 48 Taiwanese ‘comfort women’ as an example,¹ research has indicated that all were recruited between 1938 and 1945, and 22 were duped into believing that they would be working as kitchen assistants, nurses, waitresses or performing other domestic tasks. Ten women are reported to have been forcibly collected, while five were allocated the task by the local authorities. Others were sent (often by recruitment brokers, but at times by relatives) overseas as ‘nurses’, only to be forced to serve as ‘comfort women’ upon arrival. Only three women left Taiwan clearly knowing they would be serving as sex workers for the Japanese military (Yoshimi, 1995: 110–111). However, the most important point here is that the women from Japan’s colonies and other occupied territories were not allowed voluntarily to leave their jobs. Violence against the women was a frequent occurrence.

The issue, although well known to many former soldiers or historians, received less domestic and international attention compared to other Japanese war-time atrocities (such as the Nanjing Massacre). It was barely debated in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (Hayashi, 2007: 33–38). In fact, the ‘comfort women issue’ only moved to the forefront of debate in the 1990s. This can be mainly attributed to the democratization of East Asia and the increasing influence of feminism in the region. It is thus no coincidence that the first demands for justice for the ‘comfort women’ came from South Korea, where the biggest numbers of non-Japanese ‘comfort women’ originated, and where the gradual democratization of South Korea and a growing sensitivity to women’s rights resulted in women’s organizations demanding that then president Roh Tae-woo press the Japanese government to investigate the ‘comfort women’ issue and express its remorse. In 1991, Kim Hak-sun ‘became the first Korean woman to give public testimony to her life as a “comfort woman” for Japanese troops during the [Asia-]Pacific War’ (Soh, 1996: 1233), leading to a succession of women coming forward.

State-led ‘Apologies’: Has it Been Enough?

In this context, the ‘comfort women’ issue rapidly gained symbolic importance as a typical (and heinous) case of the violation of women’s rights. A large number of NGOs quickly mobilized to support the former ‘comfort women’ in their fight for justice. If we take the demands of one of the most active groups, the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, as a representative example, the survivors and their supporters’ demands for justice have consisted of a formal acknowledgement of the event; a formal (that is, state-led) apology for the suffering caused; financial compensation; the ‘[e]rection of a memorial to the victims of the crime’; the ‘[i]nclusion of the history of Military Sexual Slavery in school textbooks and its education in the class rooms’; and the punishment of those culpable for the recruitment and abuse of ‘comfort women’ (Park, 1997: 109).

To an extent, the former ‘comfort women’ and their supporters have had success in drawing out expressions of remorse from Tokyo. The Japanese government’s initial response was to claim that ‘comfort women’ were recruited by ‘private contractors acting on their own initiative, [that] … the imperial army was not “complicit” in the procurement process’, and was thus not culpable (Wakabayashi, 2003: 226). Following the Asahi shinbun’s publication on 11 January 1992 of official documents which suggested systematic military involvement in the establishment and running of ‘comfort stations’ (ianjo 慰安所), the Japanese government finally apologized. The government’s new stance was reflected in Chief Cabinet Secretary Kōno Yōhei’s 1994 statement, which is regarded as the most definitive of governmental apologies for this issue:

The then Japanese military was, directly or indirectly, involved in the establishment and management of the comfort stations and the transfer of comfort women … The Government study has revealed that in many cases they were recruited against their own will … The Government of Japan would like to take this opportunity once again to extend its sincere apologies and remorse. (Ministry of Foreign Affairs Japan, 1994)

While Tokyo has thus appeared to have accepted its moral wrongdoing, it has continued to reject any legal responsibilities that may arise from this. It has argued that as the Geneva Convention had not come into force during the Asia-Pacific war, it cannot be held responsible for violating international law during this time. Furthermore, citing ‘the existence of various treaties between itself and the Allied Powers’, as well as other Asian states, it has claimed that it has already fulfilled its legal responsibilities for any damage inflicted on other states during the war (Dolgopol, 1995: 151). Japanese court rulings have also adhered to this line and have ultimately dismissed the lawsuits filed by various former ‘comfort women’. Such problems have been compounded by domestic backlashes in Japan. High-ranking conservative politicians have sought to dilute Japan’s responsibility by claiming that ‘licensed prostitution had been legal at that time, and that Britain, the United States, and other nations had done the same thing’, or that ‘the [comfort] women got paid, so Japan bore no moral culpability’ (Wakabayashi, 2003: 226). More recently, a member of the Abe Shinzō cabinet has added to these debates by stating that ‘there has been no evidence to directly establish that Japan’s military authorities or government officials were involved in the forced recruitment of Asian women’ (Kyodo News, 2007, emphasis added).

Such statements reflect the inherent difficulty found in state apologies: as a corporate entity, the state cannot always establish itself fully as a moral agent in its own right. As Janna Thompson notes, ‘[m]embers of states are not likely to be of one mind or heart’ (2008: 35), and we cannot always ascertain if the state apology carries the full support of its citizens. Furthermore, in a democracy, even if the executive does make an apology, ‘their policy is subject to reversal as soon as other people take power’ (Thompson, 2008: 35). While states can make moral or ethical commitments, in the case of Japan it seems that the pessimistic viewpoint is vindicated, at least in the eyes of the victims. The persistent revisionist remarks made by members of the Japanese legislative and executive bodies serve to create an image of a state that has been unable to make a ‘clean break’ from its dark past, at best suffering from collective amnesia and at worst still under the shadows of ‘militarism’.

Nevertheless, it is also true that the Japanese state has initiated some measures to try and bring closure for the former ‘comfort women’. One if its most important attempts was the establishment of the AWF, a quasi-governmental organization that was charged with the task of offering financial compensation and medical assistance for the survivors in order to ‘procure concrete expressions of Japan’s national atonement to aged victims, with a hope of bringing about improvements to the victims’ living conditions’ (Soh, 2003: 210). The AWF was set up during the tenure of the Socialist–LDP coalition government of Murayama Tomiichi, who was personally keen to attain some form of reconciliation between Japan and its neighbours that had suffered from Japanese imperial aggression. While the AWF was administered using state funds, the compensation given to the survivors came from public donations, reflecting the idea that all citizens should be held to account for their country’s past wrongs (Ōnuma, 2007: 19–22).

Even this attempt proved to be divisive. Many victims and their supporters were unhappy that the compensation did not come from the Japanese government. While supporters of the AWF justified this system on the grounds that some form of compensation had to be given while the survivors were still alive, this was also condemned for ‘reproduc[ing] the plot that has constructed the survivors as those opportunistically seeking financial gain’ (Mitsui, 2008: 55). Furthermore, critics claimed, the AWF robbed the victims of their agency by ignoring their needs (Nishino, 2008: 43–44), and by doing so failed to restore their dignity. As a result, many former ‘comfort women’ (particularly in Korea and Taiwan) refused to accept the funds dispensed from the AWF. As the survivors’ paramount demand was for the Japanese government to apologize and dispense compensation for their suffering, activists claimed, the use of the AWF amounted to a transfer of this responsibility from the state to citizens, allowing Tokyo to continue to evade its legal obligations (Nishino, 2008: 42–43; Ōnuma and Kishi, 2007: 134). One survivor from the Philippines ‘claimed that no justice would be attained by the “atonement money,” as long as it was a token of Japanese private citizens’ concern for her old age and poverty’ (cited in Mitsui, 2008: 47). In her own words, she ‘came to the realization that the atonement money the Asian Women’s Fund offers me would never be able to compensate the terrible perpetration and harms I received as a woman. The Japanese government should be held legally accountable for its conducts against my father and me’ (cited in Mitsui, 2008: 47).

Solutions Beyond State Apologies

Given these difficulties, can any degree of ‘closure’ be brought to the survivors? The story of the campaigns to bring about justice for the former ‘comfort women’ do not give cause for much optimism that a state-led solution is forthcoming in the near future. If state-led reconciliation efforts are short in supply, then we must look for alternative solutions.

The Case of the Women’s International Tribunal on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery

One noteworthy non-state attempt is in the Women’s International Tribunal on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery (hereafter the Tribunal), which was held from 8 to 12 December 2000. The Tribunal was organized primarily by the Japanese NGO, Violence Against Women in War Network, Japan (VAWW-NET Japan), in collaboration with ‘supporting organizations of six victimized countries: North and South Korea, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia’ (Matsui, 2001: 120).

The Tribunal was modelled on the ‘people’s tribunal’ held by Bertrand Russell in 1967 to expose the illegitimacy of the Vietnam War. Its starting point was that in the face of Tokyo’s failure to provide satisfactory atonement for the former ‘comfort women’, it was necessary for ‘citizens to act in order to ensure that international law was adhered to when the state manifestly failed to fulfil this responsibility’ (VAWW-NET Japan, 2005: 55; see also Chinkin, 2001: 339). The Tribunal’s purposes were twofold. In the words of Matsui Yayori, the chief organizer, it aimed ‘to confirm that the comfort women system is a war crime against women and a crime against humanity, and to put pressure on the Japanese government to take legal responsibility’ (2001: 120; also see Kim, 2001: 611–612). Second, by symbolically ‘prosecuting’ those deemed responsible, the Tribunal sought ‘to end the cycle of impunity of wartime sexual violence against women and prevent it from happening again in any part of the world’. The Tribunal thus sought to overcome the gender bias within international law that had been blind to the abuse of women during war, as well as its latent Eurocentricity that only regarded white, European women as ‘violated’ by working as sex slaves for the Japanese military. The Tribunal eventually found Emperor Hirohito (amongst others) guilty of crimes against humanity, and also chastised the Japanese government for refusing to fully acknowledge the extent of its wrongs and providing inadequate compensation, thereby ‘perpetuating the survivors’ shame and silence, bringing about unspeakable pain and robbing them of the possibility to live at peace with themselves, their families, and their communities’ (VAWW-Net Japan, 2002a: 433).

The Tribunal can be considered a success in some respects. It did manage to draw wider international attention to war crimes against women. It was attended by 305 journalists from 104 media companies. Non-Japanese journalists and media companies made up 200 and 95 of these, respectively (VAWW-NET Japan, 2002b: 66). While Japanese domestic coverage remained somewhat muted about the indictment of Emperor Hirohito (VAWW-NET Japan, 2002b: 69–71), the Tribunal and its proceedings were nevertheless reported in several international media outlets. The ‘indictment’ of Emperor Hirohito thus garnered considerable media attention (Watts, 2000: 24) and allowed the plight of the former ‘comfort women’ to be known to a much wider audience. Whether or not the Tribunal achieved its goal of further pressuring the Japanese government to atone to the victims’ satisfaction is more difficult to judge given that Tokyo still has to hand out ‘state compensation’. However, it is worth pointing out that the absence of reactions to moral pressure does not necessarily mean that the actor is impervious to its effects. We thus cannot dismiss out of hand the possibility that the wider international disapproval of the Japanese government’s perceived lack of atonement was felt back in Tokyo.

The Women’s Tribunal: Sharing a Historical Narrative, Overcoming Trauma?

Despite these achievements, it is arguable that the Tribunal contributed little to the reconciliation process for the former ‘comfort women’. The aim of highlighting war crimes against women had more to do with the goals of transnational feminist activism rather than the ‘comfort women’ and their demands for redress. Furthermore, despite the moral pressure the Tribunal generated, the victims have still not succeeded in receiving satisfactory state-led compensations and apologies. Yet, it appears that the Tribunal did make some contribution in helping the former ‘comfort women’ attain a partial sense of closure. In interpreting and evaluating the Tribunal, some commentators – including one of the judges, Christine Chinkin – use the language of trauma and healing. Chinkin states that peoples’ tribunals:

constitute a form of public acknowledgement to the survivors … [s]uch acknowledgement has been recognized as essential to redressing feelings of shame and guilt and providing healing and closure. A peoples’ tribunal can thus combine in a single process elements of both war crimes trials and truth commissions. (2001: 339)²

In this sense, the Tribunal provided important opportunities for the victims and the perpetrators to share a common historical narrative of past wrongs. Dwyer has noted that traumatic events constitute a powerful disruption to pre-existing belief systems that had rendered life ‘intelligible’, ‘thus threatening [the actor’s] sense of self’ (1999: 86). While such events can never be undone, Dwyer argues that the sharing of a narrative of events constitutes a crucial step in the healing and reconciliation process for victims. This is because ‘a degree of coherence and stability in our lives’ can be achieved by ‘being able to incorporate [traumatic events] into our personal narratives’, helped by ‘self-understanding, understanding others, [and] being understood by others’ (Dwyer, 1999: 86). Based on this, Dwyer outlines three stages of reconciliation: first, both victim and perpetrator ‘will require a clear view of [traumatic] events where only the barest of facts – who did what to whom when – are relevant’. Following from this, the ‘second stage will involve the articulation of a range of interpretations of those events’. Eventually, both sides reach the third stage, where they ‘choose from this range of interpretations some subset that allows them each to accommodate the disruptive event into their ongoing narratives’ (Dwyer, 1999: 89).

In the case of the ‘comfort women’, there was a strong perception among the victims that very little of these ‘barest of facts’ had been shared with others. Their experiences of enslavement were regularly dismissed as fabrications by the Japanese right. Perhaps equally disturbing is that their very own families and communities often refused to acknowledge their suffering, regarding them as ‘fallen women’. This problem – which can be seen largely as a product of enduring patriarchy in the victims’ societies – was described by a social worker in Taiwan working for the Taiwanese former ‘comfort women’:

The ‘comfort women’ have been stigmatised in Taiwanese society, and many people feel as though they ‘lose face’ if there is a former ‘comfort woman’ in the community, and tell us that they are lying. I was once out with a former victim … and the victim was showing me the cave near her village where she had been raped. The landowner who owns the land where the cave is located shouted at us and told us to leave; he felt that he would lose face. (Anonymous, 2009b)

The Tribunal, however, allowed the women to express their feelings of victimhood for the first time without being drowned out by more powerful societal voices that had forced them to remain silent, paving the way towards attaining a ‘shared history’ between Japanese society and the former ‘comfort women’.

The following of strict legal procedures was seen as crucial for enhancing the legitimacy of the Tribunal and making it harder to dismiss the victims’ voices. Most important in this endeavour was the organizers’ attempt to invite the Japanese government to present its case and defend itself in court, lest the court be dubbed a ‘kangaroo court’, which tried the accused in absentia. The invitation was ignored, and the organizers subsequently appointed an amicus curiae to defend Tokyo’s legal position. The organizers also took every care to follow due process to counter criticisms that the court’s verdict was ‘self-evident from the very beginning’.³ The judges ‘did not allow anyone near the room while they deliberated’, and the Japanese ‘chief prosecutor’, Kawaguchi Kazuko, recalls feeling a sense of dread that if Emperor Hirohito was declared to be innocent by the Tribunal’s judges, she would let the ‘comfort women’ down (VAWW-Net Japan, 2005: 63). This procedural legitimacy meant that the Tribunal’s decisions and interpretations of events surrounding the ‘comfort women’ issue were regarded as authoritative and provided some parameters for both sides to interpret the past.

The Tribunal may also have contributed to paving the way towards achieving Dwyer’s second and third stages of reconciliation. Martha Minow (1998: 67) notes that ‘[w]hen the work of knowing and telling the story has come to an end, the trauma then belongs to the past; the survivor can face the work of building a future’. Furthermore, ‘[t]here can be pride and strength in seeing oneself as an actor on the world stage, and as one who can educate the world while also exposing personal suffering in a public way’ (Minow, 1998: 67–68) Such positive effects were arguably enhanced by the presence of other victims and a generally sympathetic audience in the public gallery. The validation accorded to the story of the suffering of the ‘comfort women’ by the audience can constitute a crucial step in achieving a shared historical narrative between the victim and perpetrator (the Tribunal was held in Japan, meaning that many of the staff and audience were Japanese). Social workers working for Taiwanese ‘comfort women’ survivors seem to validate this when they recalled that at the Tribunal, ‘for the first time [the former ‘comfort women’] realised that they were not the only ones who suffered’ (Anonymous, 2009b), and that ‘seeing all the support was a big comfort’ (Anonymous, 2009a). In the court proceedings, the narratives of the survivors were taken seriously and received in a relatively non-judgemental manner, which was in contrast to how their testimonies had been treated in the past. The dignity accorded to the victims, writes Alexis Dudden, who observed the Tribunal,

found palpable expression during the tribunal when Chief Justice Gabriella Kirk MacDonald calmed one distraught survivor by saying, ‘If you’d like some water, if you’d like to be excused, if you’d like to take a moment, please, we’re all here to listen to you’. (2001: 593)

Finally, the Tribunal’s judgement can also be argued to have achieved the third stage of finding a common narrative of the traumatic event. The Tribunal’s judgement was greeted with cheers and applause by the audience (Kim, 2001: 612), and arguably provided a degree of evidence for the victims that the narrative of Japanese perpetration and women’s victimization was shared in their immediate environment. Of course, the Tribunal’s rulings were never going to be accepted by some quarters. However, the organizers’ efforts to attain some degree of procedural legitimacy meant that its findings (which found emperor Hirohito and a number of military leaders guilty of crimes against humanity and also issued a number of trenchant criticisms of the Japanese state for its failure to acknowledge and apologize for its past crimes), or the newly found ‘shared narrative’ could not be dismissed easily.

Conclusion

The Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal constitutes an interesting, non-state attempt to overcome the negative burdens of historical crimes, but it is not easy to determine the extent to which it was successful in achieving some degree of closure for the victims and to which it contributed towards reconciliation. While there is anecdotal evidence that the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal has scored some success in alleviating the victims’ suffering, much of this information comes from NGO publications which are all sympathetic to the causes of the Tribunal, and in many cases helped organize it (Kim, 2001; VAWW-NET Japan, 2002b; 2005). Given that the ‘comfort women’ issue is highly politicized in Japan, it is not surprising that the Tribunal was subjected to vehement attacks by conservatives as ‘lacking due process’ and being merely a meaningless ‘mock trial’ (Hata, 2001: 98–110; Kuwahara, 2001: 120–127). It would be naive not to presume the existence of a strong motivation for NGOs supporting the ‘comfort women’ to emphasize (or even exaggerate) the success of the Tribunal.

It is worth noting that some campaigners have voiced misgivings. For instance, a social worker in Taiwan stated with regard to the Tribunal:

The former ‘comfort women’ didn’t understand the meaning of the trial, because they are illiterate. The trial was also in English, and this made it even harder for them to understand as well, and this means that they didn’t receive any comfort from the process. (Anonymous, 2009b)

The fact that English was used in the trial was presumably based on the need to find a common working language, given that the participants came from a wide variety of countries. However, it is worth noting that given the fact that English constitutes the hegemonic lingua franca in today’s globalized world, the use of the English language is also the most effective means by which global activists can get their message across to the widest possible audience. Here we can see the possibility that the survivors’ needs and interests have been subordinated to those of international feminist activism. The same issue surfaced with regard to the AWF controversy, with allegations that activists pressured the former ‘comfort women’ to not accept AWF money for the sake of their campaigns, compelling the women to sacrifice their needs to that of the ‘collective good’ as defined by NGOs (Oka and Shimomura, 2006: 11–15; Ōnuma, 2007). All of this serves as a reminder that civil society actors may not be endowed with uniquely moral qualities (compared to their state counterparts), as is often assumed.

Nevertheless, non-state actors can come up with creative attempts to heal past wrongs, and it would be a mistake to think it is only states that are capable of doing this. As Rigby notes:

The efforts to promote reconciliation … should not be confined to a narrow strata of society. The different dimensions and values that together contribute to any healing process must be deepened and broadened to encompass all levels of society, creating in the process a new culture of respect for human difference and human rights. (2001: 183)

Furthermore, we need to keep in mind that there are various steps involved in achieving reconciliation, and state apologies are just one of them. Maier has noted that ‘the projects of reparation, remembering, and reconciliation involve the right to tell histories and have them listened to respectfully’ (2003: 303). In the case of the Women’s Tribunal, the process of articulating victims’ traumatic experiences played a part – no matter how tentative – in creating a new historical consciousness by bringing this previously ignored chapter of World War II history to international attention. The broader recognition of their suffering subsequently accorded to the victims by the international community is, in Cairns’s words, ‘in itself … a component of justice’ (2003: 84).

Footnotes

Notes

References

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Anonymous (2009b) Interview with social worker, 7 September, Taipei.

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