Japan Can Never Evade Responsibility for Crime of Sexual Slavery

Pyongyang, February 22 (KCNA) -- Ri Hye Yong, a researcher at the Human Rights Division of the DPRK Institute of International Studies, Thursday issued an article titled "Japan Can Never Evade Responsibility for Crime of Sexual Slavery".

The following is the full text of the article:

When people come up with the words "sex slavery", they call to mind a country, called Japan.

That is because Japan is the most despicable and audacious country in the world, which in the first half of the last century forced hundreds of thousands of women from Korea and several other countries into the humiliating sex slavery and neither felt the slightest remorse nor reflected on its past for over a century.

Nevertheless, Japan recently keeps harping on "championing women's empowerment" deceitfully in the international arenas including the UN. What is worse, it impudently seeks to cover up its past crime by paying a trivial sum of money.

Sex Slavery, A-Class State Crime against Humanity Committed by Japan

Japan is distorting the fact, claiming that the sex slavery started after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. But it began with Japan's "dispatch of its troops to Siberia".

The Japanese soldiers, dispatched to Siberia in August 1918 for imperialist armed intervention against the Soviet Russia, raped the Russian women at random everywhere they passed. As a result, over 12 000 of the 73 000 soldiers, the number equivalent to the troops of a whole division, caught venereal disease, and the casualties far outnumbered those killed in action. This was a huge blow to "the Imperial Japanese Army".

It was the sex slavery that the Japanese military, in panic, contrived on the plea of "preventing the spread of venereal disease and offence of military discipline and whipping up war fanaticism and preserving the fighting power of the army" after that.

As can be seen above, the sex slavery was the crime of organized and massive abuse of women's right, perpetrated by the Japanese government and military from its contrivance to the execution as a state policy.

There are some materials testifying to the fact; a document entitled "the matter of recruitment of the staff needed to operate the military 'comfort stations'", drawn up on March 4, 1938 in the Legal Affairs Section of Japanese Ministry of War, and set with the seals of the Army Chief of the General Staff at that time, Hiroshi Imamura, and the then Director of the Legal Affairs Bureau, Umez; a document on issuing "the Emperor's Edict No. 300" in March 1942, referring to the reorganization of the structure of the Ministry of War for the work related with the operation of the military "comfort stations"; the wartime telegraph dated March 12, 1942, wired by the former commander of the Japanese military unit stationed in Taiwan to the then Japanese Prime Minister, Tojo, to request the supplement of managers needed to control sex slaves.

In the whole period of the aggressive war, the Japanese government set the goal of providing one sex slave for 29 Japanese soldiers and mobilized the state authorities including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of the Interior and the "Government-General in Korea", and particularly granted the military authority to organize and execute the plan.

As a result, in the 1920s "comfort stations" were set up in many places of Korea including the present Ranam District, Chongjin City, North Hamgyong Province and Changwon City, South Kyongsang Province. In March 1932 just after the Manchurian Incident, a Japanese military "comfort station" was established for the first time in Shanghai of China, on the order of Okamura, the then chief of Staff of the Shanghai Expeditionary Force.

With the war becoming protracted and occupation zones expanding, hundreds of military "comfort stations" were set up in over 10 countries in Asia and Oceania, and hundreds of thousands of women, mainly on the Korean peninsula, fell prey to massive sex slave hunt by the Japanese authorities, and were abducted to those "comfort stations".

At an interview held in February 1992, Seiji Yoshida, one of those involved in the sex slave hunt, said: "To put it flatly, 'comfort women' were not recruited, but were taken by force. None of them volunteered."

The American newspaper The International New York Times, dated November 15, 2014, reported that in 1942, a lieutenant in Japan's Imperial Navy had organized a military "comfort station" at Balikpapan on the island of Borneo (the present Kalimantan), and mitigated the mood of his troops so well that he had been highly praised by the military authorities, and that he was just the later prime minister of Japan, Yasuhiro Nakasone.

In general, the severest crime against women is sexual abuse. However, at that time, the king, the prime minister, the military and even the police of Japan ran amuck to institutionalize sexual assault and gang-rape, instead of punishing such crimes. On top of that, one of the executors of sex slavery was elected as prime minister later. Hence Japan deserves to be branded as one and the only violator of women's rights.

The sex enslavement enforced by Japan was, to all intents and purposes, a part of Japan's policy of obliterating the Korean nation. Among all the countries, nations and women that suffered from Japan's sex enslavement, the most extreme and miserable victims of it were none other than Korean women, trampled mercilessly by the Japanese imperialists for 40-odd years.

Enforcing wicked fascist laws like "the National Mobilization Law"(1938) and "the Women's Volunteer Corps Service Ordinance"(1944), Japan mobilized its executive agencies including provincial, county and sub-county offices at the lowest echelon as sub-station, all under the "Government-General in Korea", as well as police stations and even military police and the army to the sex slave hunting. They hunted women on their way, in fields, at wells, sleeping at home at midnight, going to or from school, and even mothers-to-be and women in maternity at random.

The captives in Korea numbered at least 200 000, ranging from innocent girls aged 12 or 13 to married women under their forties.

In this regard, at "the 3rd International Forum on Peace of Asia and Role of Women" held in Pyongyang, Sumiko Shimizu, a Japanese woman, said: "The issue of 'camp-following comfort women' is the most vicious act by the Japanese imperialists against the Korean people, a violation of their sexual morality and human rights, destruction of their life and humanity, and a part of the policy of obliterating against the Korean nation. It was an international crime brutally committed in an organized way by the Japanese army and government."

Even after committing the unprecedented crime against humanity, beyond one's imagination, Japan made desperate efforts to keep the crime buried into oblivion of the history forever.

Before and after Japan's defeat in World War Ⅱ, the sex slaves were registered as "assistant nurses" and official records and other relevant documents were all burned on the order of the military and the vice-minister of the Interior. What was worse, Japan committed another state crime of slaughtering the sex slaves, clamoring that "the bloodline of the enemy country must be cut."

However, its crime can be neither kept in secret nor erased in history.

After World WarⅡ, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East officially branded the sex slavery by the Japanese military as a war crime, and the military tribunal, which was established in Hague, the Netherlands in 1948 found 12 officers of the Japanese army guilty and sentenced some of them to death.

The above-mentioned facts clearly prove that the sex slavery is the A-class anti-humanity state crime unique to Japan, contrived by the militarist ruling circles to satisfy the sexual appetite of their soldiers and whip up their morale with sex slaves, particularly a direct result of Japan's colonial rule over Korea and its policy of obliterating the Korean nation.

Japan's Sinister Intention to Evade Its State Responsibility for Crime of Sex Slavery

Japan is bent on refusing to recognize its legal and moral state responsibility for the sex slavery.

Entering the 1980s, the facts of the crime of sex slavery, which had been kept in darkness for over half a century after Japan's defeat in World War Ⅱ, began to be revealed by the historical documents and testimonies of a large number of victims. In this situation, in August 1993, the then chief cabinet secretary, Kono, issued a statement of "asking pardon", as the recruitment of "comfort women" had been conducted by private dealers at the request of the military, mainly in a coercive manner and sometimes with the involvement of public servants.

The point of the statement was that, as the recruitment was mainly done by individual civilians by means of force and some officials were involved by mistake, it was proper to say "sorry", not "apology".

Furthermore, the Japanese government recently moves to deny its heinous sex slavery crimes entirely, casting aside even a "pardon" and insisting that "any warring country recruited 'comfort women'" and that "the prostitutes volunteered for money".

It not only removed the words such as "camp-following comfort women" and "forceful abduction" from the history textbooks for its high schools, but also insisted on revision of other countries' history textbooks, saying that the textbooks contained materials "conflicted with the facts".

Last year, in opposition to the discussion at the UNESCO on inscribing the sex slavery-related documents on the Memory of the World Register, it threatened and blackmailed the international organization, saying that it would suspend paying its share of contribution to it and it would withdraw from it.

This is a reflection of the way of thinking of the "economic animal" that it can resolve everything with money.

Then, why does Japan so desperately try to evade its state responsibility for its bloody, crime-ridden history? Is it because of the inborn character of the insular nation that hates self-reflection upon its wrongdoings? Nay, that explanation is not enough.

Underlying it is its intention to repeat its history of aggression and crime by training not only the rising generations but also all its citizens in the spirit of revanchism and militarism.

On January 14, 2018, one of the Japanese newspapers reported that in the nation-wide opinion poll 83 per cent of the Japanese citizens "supported" Abe's reckless remark that he would not make an iota of concession in connection with the behind-the-scene "agreement" between him and Park Geun Hye's "government" of south Korea on the sex slavery.

The trustworthiness of the opinion poll is doubtful, but if it is true by any chance, the moral despicability of the Japanese citizens are quite shocking as they have not a bit of shamefulness and guilty conscience about their preceding generations' crime of mentally and physically violating hundreds of thousands of women from countries under their colonial rule.

The former German president, Richard von Weizsacker said:

One who has no will to correct his mistakes of the past fails to understand where he is today and why he is in that place. He who ignores his past repeats his past any time.

Herein lies the dangerous nature of Japan that insists on denying its bloody, crime-ridden history.

For that reason, the international community vehemently denounces the Abe government for making frantic efforts to repeat Japan's crime-woven past by turning Japanese citizens into brutes in human skin again.

In August 2014, the UN Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) demanded that the Japanese government make full reparation to the victims of sex slavery and bring a trial against those who were involved in it. And in May 2017, the UN Human Rights Council issued a report condemning the Japanese government for passing through national examination the history textbooks that distort the crime of sex slavery.

Statues of girls and memorials to sex slaves have been set up one after another in Germany, Singapore, Canada and other countries and parts of the world. Given fierce international outcry over Japan's heinous violation of women's human rights, even the United States is unwilling to take its junior ally's side.

However strongly it advocates "women's human rights" and whatever cunning tricks it employs, Japan cannot cover up its past crimes for the sex slavery--the A-class state-sponsored crime against humanity that has left an indelible mark in mankind's history.

The more Japan tries to conceal its crimes, the greater the punishment will be. Crimes against humanity have no statute of limitations.

If Japan refuses to reflect honestly on the nation's wrongful past and make a sincere apology for its past crime, it will continue to be subjected to strong international condemnation and it cannot evade the responsibility for the disgraceful crime of sex slavery. -0-