Documents showing military’s coercion in wartime sex slavery uncovered

Researchers have discovered seven official documents used in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East that prove that the Japanese military had forced foreign women into sex slavery in its occupied areas during WWII.

   At a press conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Tokyo on April 17, Kanto Gakuin University Professor Hayashi Hirofumi, Chuo University Professor Yoshimi Yoshiaki, and VAWW-NET Japan Co-Chair Nishino Rumiko revealed these documents, which Hayashi had found at the Tokyo University Institute of Social Science library last year.

   The Dutch, French, and Chinese prosecutors submitted these documents to the 1946-1948 tribunal (Tokyo Trial) as evidence.

In a Dutch-submitted statement, a Japanese Navy employee in Indonesian Borneo stated that he had arrested three local women, slapped them, ordered them to undress, and left them undressed for an hour.

   “Their arrest by order of UESUGI was only a pretext in order to put them in a brothel,” he stated. Captain Uesugi was a chief security officer.

   These documents prove the Japanese military’s direct involvement in forcing women into brothels in Java in Indonesia, Lang Son in Vietnam, and Guilin in China.

   “These documents were used as evidences in the Tokyo Trial whose judgment was accepted by the Japanese government in the San Francisco Peace Treaty. Therefore, the current Japanese government cannot avoid admitting them as evidence,” Hayashi said.

   Yoshimi criticized Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s remarks denying, in effect, the 1993 Kono Statement that expressed “sincere apology and remorse” to victims, saying, “This issue has a bearing on the prime minister’s awareness of human rights. The government must not backpedal from the Kono Statement.”

- Akahata, April 18, 2007