March 08, 2007
Abe Plans WWII Slavery Probe Amid Furor
Japan's nationalist prime minister, Shinzo Abe, announced today that lawmakers from the ruling party would conduct an investigation into the Japanese military's use of sex camps in World War II, AP reports. Japan has been taking heat from its neighbors and other nations, including several American lawmakers, over remarks in which Abe denied what is considered by most historians as fact: the mass kidnapping, enslavement and rape of foreign girls and women during the war.
Unlike Germany, which has made numerous official atonements for the Holocaust and continues to do so today, Japan was able to regain the respect and trust of the world's major powers with relative ease. It is likely, for instance, that the country, with Washington's backing, will gain a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council in the near future. That Japan seems to have been held less to account is widely attributed to guilt felt over the devastating nuclear strikes on the island nation.
China and South Korea, home to most of the women captured by the Japanese, have not let up in their demands for formal apologies. (Tokyo claims to have issued one in 1993, but the nation's Parliament rejected it.) So when Abe last week said of the sex camps, "The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion," it smacked a little too much of Holocaust denial.
South Korean and Chinese leaders expressed outrage at the remarks, even as the three nations were locked in negotiations with North Korea. The Economist writes in this week's edition that the remarks "revealed Mr Abe's true colours, as a conservative politician who has long taken a revisionist view of Japan's 20th-century history." U.S. papers and columns also weighed in.
A number of women enslaved in the camps have devoted their lives to pressuring the Japanese government to address the issue. But time is running out; most are in their 70s and 80s. The New York Times has a report today on their reactions to Abe's denial.
