By Seiji Yoshida
In April of 1996, the “U.N. Kuwarasuwami Report” by Ms. Kuwarasuwami, the special reporter, was officially approved by the plenary session of the United Nation’s Human Rights Committee held in the U.N. European Headquarter. And my name and part of my book were referred to in Clause 29 of this report for the “Conform Women” of the World War II.
During the war, the Japanese army organized “comfort stations” in occupied areas and on the front lines, forcing more than hundred thousand young women to be prostitutes for Japanese officers and solders. Comfort women were caged like cattle and forced to work as sexual slaves, each raped by tens of Japanese solders every day. In the Philippines, the only Christian country in Asia, the Japanese army forced even Catholic nuns into sexual slavery.
In 1943 to 1944, I worked as an official for Japan’s labor recruitment organization coordinating approximately one thousand young “comfort women” into such labor. The Korea was a colony of Japan and we forcibly recruited young married women from the Korea as the most of young unmarried women were already mobilized to munitions factories. These married women were recruited in the inhuman way. A group of wartime policemen entered into rural corners of Korea, surrounded entire villages, and seized well-proportioned women. The policemen and followers grabbed screaming infants from the young women’s arms and passed the infants to the remaining old women before forcing the young women into trucks. If these screaming infants were grown and survive, they are almost sixty years old now. They never forget the scene when their mothers were forcibly recruited and they are sure to continue having a grudge against the Japanese.
When the Japanese military evacuated in 1945, many comfort women were left on front bases and died by the enemy bombardment. When a very few comfort women were liberated in different Asian countries at the end of World War II, they were alienated from their local society due to the oriental custom of chastity. They led the life of wanderers and suffered extreme poverty. After World War II, many wars and disputes continued in Asian countries such as the Chinese civil war, Korean War, Vietnam War and Cambodian civil war. Many of the former comfort women were died by these wars. After fifty years of World War II, only one thousand of the former comfort women are expected to survive in Asian countries. Approximately a hundred thousand young women were killed like wild beasts, and no cemeteries or tombstones exist in Asian countries.
The historical facts of comfort women such as a lot of interrogation and investigation records, picture evidence and recording films are not sorted out yet. They are in a huge depository of documents of World War II in the American National Library. The full-scale document investigation and research by the world specialists are highly expected.
My testimony on the comfort women issue has appeared not only in the media of various Asian countries involved but also in the European and American newspapers and television. From that time, I’ve been slandered and threatened by veterans and organizations of relatives of the war dead as someone who is defiling the honor of the Japanese Emperor.
The United Nations’ ten-year-period campaign of human rights education has started in 1995. The comfort women issue is the most serious violation of women’s human rights in this 20th century, and it should be used as a textbook of human rights education.
Of all the Asian women involved, the former comfort women from the Philippines are in the worst situation. Their lives are threatened due to the severe poverty and disease. In the current Philippines society, these former comfort women are unable to receive treatment in their own country and are gradually succumbing to sickness. The former Filipina comfort women, who survived in the past fifty years by the grace of God, are sick in their bed without medical care. The victims by one of the greatest crimes of human rights in history are left without any support. I ask for support from you to save the lives of these former comfort women. At the same time, by establishing an international fund to support the comfort women human rights in many countries. I do hope the worldwide human rights protection organizations will start supporting the former comfort women in order to save their live and to teach the importance of human rights to all people of the world. Thank you.
© S. Yoshida
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S. Yoshida
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