Pacific Affairs: An International Review of Asia and the Pacific

Volume 76, No. 2

 

Japan's National/Asian Women's Fund For "Comfort Women"
By C. Sarah Soh

 

Abstract

After the issue of Japan's responsibility for the "comfort women" exploded in 1992, Tokyo took a series of measured steps to deal with the demands of NGOs in Japan, South Korea, and elsewhere to reveal the truth and offer state compensation to victim-survivors of the Japanese wartime military comfort system. The United Nations has come to define that system as "military sexual slavery." This paper explores the transnational politics of redress for former comfort women from a critical comparative perspective: 1) by analyzing the responses of the Japanese government and civil society to the pressure of the international community, with a focus on the controversial National/Asian Women's Fund created by Tokyo to take moral responsibility and express Japan's national atonement to non-Japanese victim-survivors; and 2) by examining divergent responses of governments and NGOs in afflicted countries to the Fund's atonement projects. Although dismissed by militant activists as a "private fund," the Fund may be conceptualized as a national public organization or an "NPO" with a unique hybrid organizational structure, an inherent dilemma of representation, and internal tension. While it continues to incur severe criticisms from legal compensation advocates in unrelenting pursuit of their political goal, the Fund's implementation of its imperfect, limited, and yet substantive projects has served as a "constructive compromise" measure for 364 aged victim-survivorsimproving their living conditions and helping them to heal their long-silenced inner woundsin the face of the continuing stalemate of the international redress politics.