IN December 2017, a memorial was erected along the Roxas Boulevard facing Manila Bay. It commemorated the Filipino comfort women who were forced to work as sexual slaves in Japanese military brothels during World War 2.

In late April 2018, after Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it was “extremely regrettable” that such statues were erected, the Philippines’ Department of Public Works and Highways removed the statue. As Japan has an important role in infrastructure investment, President Rodrigo Duterte suggested the statue could be placed on private property.

On December 28, another statue for the former comfort women was installed in a Catholic-run shelter for the elderly and the homeless in San Pedro, Laguna. After the Japanese embassy in Manila stated such statues were “extremely disappointing, not compatible with the Japanese government,” the statue was removed two days later.

This time the Duterte government noted that the statue was “dedicated to peace and women’s empowerment,” used private funds and was built inside private property. It was freedom of expression. Lila Pilipina, an advocacy group for Filipino comfort women, said the Japanese government was demanding that we “forget its war crime.”

The removal of the second statue fosters a perception that there is a systematic effort by the Shinzo Abe government to eradicate public statues for comfort women. By the same logic, all Holocaust memorials should be taken down, along with other memorials dedicated to historical atrocities because they all are inconvenient reminders of the past. Yet, the German government has a very different stance toward the Nazi era. Mental lobotomy does not prevent real-life tragedies.

Until 1993, the Japanese government had denied the history of the comfort women. But that year, after a government study, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono recognized that the Japanese Imperial Army had forced comfort women to work in military-run brothels during World War 2. In 2015, Kono reaffirmed the statement.

So, why is the Abe administration revising history? The reasons are historical — and perhaps personal.

Sexual slavery, Nobusuke Kishi and Cold War
The number of Japan’s wartime sex slaves has been estimated at 200,000 women, although Chinese scholars in Shanghai, where a Japanese “comfort station” was established already in 1932, put the real figure at 360,000 to 400,000.

In revisionist Japanese history, the role of these women has been downplayed. The very term comfort women is a euphemism for the Japanese Imperial Army’s sex slaves. Most women were from areas occupied by Japan, particularly China and Korea, but also the Philippines. There were comfort stations in Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, Indonesia, Singapore, East Timor and elsewhere. There were also hundreds of “comfort women” from the Netherlands and Australia.

Unlike his predecessors as prime minister and head of the Liberal Democratic Party, Abe has far-right views about history. He belongs to the ultranationalist Nippon Kaigi, which seeks to re-militarize Japan and to revive Imperial Japan and which, among other things, vehemently denies Japan’s comfort women history during World War 2. That’s why in the late 1990s, he led the controversial Japanese history textbook reform, which downplayed Japan’s war crimes, including crimes against comfort women.

But there is also a more personal reason. Abe comes from a political family dynasty. His grandfather Kan Abe and father Shintaro Abe were prominent politicians. His mother is the daughter of the highly controversial former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi. Starting in 1933, Kishi praised Nazi Germany as Japan’s model. In 1937, he signed a degree calling for the use of slave labor in Japanese puppet state Manchukuo. The enslavement of men paved the way for the exploitation of Chinese, Korean and other women as sex slaves in Japan’s occupied colonies in Asia.

Due to Kishi’s brutal rule in Manchukuo and his participation in the Tojo War Cabinet during World War 2, he was imprisoned for over three years as a Class A war criminal. In Germany, Nazi leaders were prosecuted, but not in Japan. When Washington launched its Cold War against the Soviet Union, it needed Japan as a key ally in Asia.

That’s when many Japanese war leaders were freed and enlisted by the United States to suppress Japanese communists and socialists. The most notable of them was Kishi, “America’s favorite war criminal.” who played a key role in the “1955 System,” which made the Liberal Democratic Party the dominant political force in Japan and America’s key ally until today.

Rising stakes in international debate
Wartime sex slaves are not “just history.” While Abe’s reformers have tried to open the economy to more women, his politics promotes a remilitarization that most Japanese oppose. And while Japan is one of the world’s major economies, it ranks only 110th worldwide in the Global Gender Report, far behind Myanmar and India. The lingering imperial fantasies contribute to Japan’s economic decline.

Forced silence about wartime sexual slavery is not acceptable in the rest of Asia. In December, 2015, Abe and South Korean President Park Geun-hye, who was later impeached for corruption, agreed to settle the “comfort women” dispute. Tokyo would pay a paltry $8.3 million to a fund supporting remaining victims. South Korea would remain mum about the issue and remove a memorial statue for the victims.

South Koreans criticized the odd pact. After the imprisonment of Park, Seoul began to demand recognition for its victims, along with the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The UN human rights commission (OHCHR) also called on Japan to acknowledge its violation of the human rights of comfort women, take legal responsibility and punish responsible individuals.

As international appeals did not work, the debate moved to a new stage. Recently, a South Korean court authorized the seizure of assets belonging to Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal, after the Japanese firm failed to comply with an earlier order to compensate victims of forced labor. Last week, Tokyo called the court decision “extremely regrettable,” while South Korean President Moon Jae-in urged Japan not to “politicize the issue” and to take a “more humble attitude towards the past.”

The issue of the comfort women should not be politicized. As the Kono statement evidences, most of Japan’s political leadership and most Japanese have acknowledged the comfort women history since the early 1990s. As polls indicate, only about a fifth of the population doesn’t — and that’s Abe’s core constituency.

If the Abe administration fails to acknowledge the past, it cannot win the future that overshadows a prosperous, but heavily indebted and declining nation.

The statues to commemorate the legacy of comfort women represent historical veracity and overdue moral right. Efforts to eradicate them will ultimately fail. When one is taken down, another will be erected elsewhere – until the truth prevails.

By Dan Steinbock, The Manila Times

Statues of former comfort women who have passed away at the House of Sharing. /CGTN Photo

Yi Ok-seon lies on her bed in a small room at House of Healing in South Korea.

At 92 she is surrounded by photographs of meetings with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and other dignitaries, and a few of her as a young girl.

But there is a gap in this photographic history. There is no trace of her time spent as a sex slave for the Japanese army during World War II.

Yi Ok-seon says she was dragged from her workplace at the age of 15, by two men, one South Korean and one Japanese. She was sent to China where she was forced, through violence, to work in a Japanese military brothel.

Yi was a fierce opponent of the compensation sent by Japan as part of a deal struck with South Korea in 2015 and, like many former so-called “comfort women,” applauded South Korea’s decision to disband the Japan-funded foundation set up to financially assist former wartime sex slaves.

“Japan brought the money to (South) Korea to reach an agreement. That money was given to us to shut our mouths up. That’s wrong. I felt good when they got rid of the foundation,” says Yi, perched on the edge of her bed with a fierce glint still in her eye as she speaks of the events that stole her youth.

Scrapping the compensation aspect of the deal was not the only part of the agreement to break down.

One of Japan’s key complaints was the comfort women statue outside its embassy in Seoul.

Under the compensation deal the comfort women statue was supposed to have been removed. Instead, it remained and about 50 more were placed across South Korea, a move that so angered Japan that last year it temporarily withdrew its ambassador from Seoul.

“As the agreement between (South) Korea and Japan has not been scrapped, we started protesting by insisting on the abolition of the agreement. We will help the grandmothers by protesting here until the agreement is scrapped,” says Kim Sun-kyung, a student who is one of the many volunteers who spend time in a makeshift translucent tent next to the statue to ensure it is not removed.

As part of the deal Japan did offer a statement of “apology and remorse” as well as compensation, to be distributed through the now defunct foundation.

But the director of the House of Sharing, Ahn Shin-kwon, says former comfort women were not consulted in the lead-up to the agreement, which they believe avoided explicit responsibility and was meant to silence the issue as much as settle it.

“Despite the war crimes, human rights abuses and women used as tools of war the agreement did not include education for the current generation and future generations, rather they tried to hide the victims’ problems forever,” says Kwon.

Ahn says the issue can be settled if a more human approach is taken that fully acknowledges historical wrongs and seeks genuine reconciliation.

Across the hall from Yi Ok-seon, another former comfort women Kim Soon-ok sleeps with the help of a respirator.

Time is running out for these women who continue to ask for one core thing, an apology from Japan that is linked to a full acknowledgment of what the women were subjected to.

By Jack Barton, CGTN