In the New York Times, Mindy Kotler has a powerful article about comfort women and Japan’s war on truth. She notes that for many years the issue was so uncontroversial in Japan that Yasuhiro Nakasone could describe in a 1978 memoir his role in setting up a military comfort station in Borneo in 1942, and still go on to serve as prime minister from 1982 to 1987. Thereafter, though, democratization in South Korea (coterminous with the end of Nakasone’s premiership) generated a backlash from one of the societies most heavily affected by a practice thought to have ensnared between 50,000 and 200,000 women. The eventual result was that Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono in August 1993 issued a formal acknowledgement of and apology for the Japanese military’s direction of the comfort women system – the Kono Statement. Two years later the Japanese government established the Asian Women’s Fund to handle compensation payments to the small number of comfort women still alive and prepared to detail the abuse they had suffered.

Serious pushback by the Japanese government dates from Shinzo Abe’s first 12-month premiership in 2006-07. It has become still more serious during his current premiership, which began at the end of December 2012. Kotler describes the significant consequences of determined efforts now being made to dilute the 1993 Kono Statement. One can be seen in the domestic arena: “The official narrative in Japan is fast becoming detached from reality, as it seeks to cast the Japanese people – rather than the comfort women of the Asia-Pacific theater – as the victims of this story.” Another has global ramifications: “In March, Japan became the only Group of 7 country to withhold support from a United Nations investigation into possible war crimes in Sri Lanka, when it abstained from voting to authorize the inquiry.” Her conclusion is therefore entirely merited: “If we do not speak out, we will be complicit not only in Japanese denialism, but also in undermining today’s international efforts to end war crimes involving sexual violence.”