‘Comfort women’ museum pioneer won’t let nation forget
Mina Watanabe’s goal is to archive testimonies so her country can come to terms with its dark past
the new chief of a Tokyo museum focusing on wartime sexual violence against women, Mina Watanabe faces a great challenge: how to preserve and pass on the memories of those who were forced into sexual servitude as “comfort women” under the Imperial Japanese military.
“The victimised women are ageing or have already passed away without receiving ample justice, while those who sexually exploited them have already died without being punished,” Watanabe of the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace, or WAM, said.
“What we can do now is to never forget what happened to the women during wartime so the atrocities will never be repeated,” she said, referring to the museum’s long-standing plan to create an archive on the issues involving comfort women.
“We need to secure their testimonies and documents so Japanese citizens will come to terms with the past even under a revisionist regime.”
The museum was urgently trying to collect comfort womenrelated documents within the next few years before they were scattered and lost, she added.
Watanabe worked to establish WAM in August 2005, the 60th anniversary of the end of the second world war, as Japan’s only museum on the issue of comfort women. It followed a simulated trial, known as the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal, in December 2000 in Tokyo.
The tribunal was organised by women’s rights activists and legal experts from around the world and concluded that the comfortwomen system constituted a crime against humanity and urged the Japanese government to take legal responsibility.
Watanabe travels abroad often to draw more attention from the international community to the comfort women issue, and to coordinate joint actions with overseas human rights groups.
In Geneva she visited United Nations panels on human rights to seek further recognition on the issue, and she met victims of sexual violence in Argentina.
Comfort women came to light when Kim Hak-sun became the first to come forward in Seoul in 1991, demanding Japan take responsibility for wartime atrocities.
Her move encouraged many other victims, not only in South Korea but also in China, the Philippines and other countries to join her struggle for seeking apologies and compensation from the Japanese government, while restoring their dignity.
“But it is quite regrettable that they couldn’t fully make it,” Watanabe said, indicating that the Japanese government’s handling of the issue had not been sufficient to satisfy the victims.
Japan concluded a deal with South Korea in 2015 to “finally and irreversibly” settle the issue, featuring a foundation, which was put in charge of handing out cash payments to the victims and their families from a 1 billion yen (HK$68.9 million) fund.
But Seoul decided earlier this month to dissolve it, heightening bilateral tensions. The 2015 agreeAs ment, struck under the previous administration of president Park Geun-hye, is unpopular with the public and seen as an inadequate solution by the current government of President Moon Jae-in.
“Saying it does not intend to scrap or renegotiate the agreement, South Korea has apparently left the issue in Japan’s hands, but Japan has been at a loss about how to deal with it as it has remained reluctant to sincerely face its wartime responsibility and learn lessons from history,” Watanabe said.
“Now, we, the Japanese citizens, are required to persuade the government to fulfill its responsibilities for settling the past questions.”
It was encouraging news for Watanabe that Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist, and Nadia Murad, a Yazidi human rights activist from Iraq, were awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize for their “efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict”.
“I expect him to continue keeping in mind the issue of sexual slavery involving comfort women, and I also hope his initiative will be widely supported by the international community,” Watanabe said.
In addition to the archives project, WAM has worked to have thousands of comfort women-related documents listed in Unesco’s Memory of the World Register. Tokyo has shown a sense of displeasure against the registry, lodging a protest at South Korea’s support for the listing on the grounds that it would go against the 2015 agreement.
Rikkyo University professor Akane Onozawa, an expert on women’s history, is now studying the diary of a former Japanese comfort woman, which is preserved at WAM, for research on how her bitter wartime experiences affected her postwar life.
Onozawa has urged her students to visit the museum if they are interested in the comfort women issue. WAM draws about 3,000 visitors annually.
Japan has remained reluctant to face its wartime responsibility MINA WATANABE, MUSEUM CHIEF