Health knowledge made personal
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This is a letter of protest on behalf of the Asian women who were forced to serve the Japanese army as prostitutes, “comfort women”, during the Second World War. Some 200,000 women from Korea, China, the Philippines and other countries in the Pacific were forced to suffer at the hands of the Japanese under conditions that rivaled the worst of the atrocities of the German Nazis. In the interests of justice and simple decency, I demand that the government of Japan publicly admit its country’s crimes against these women and offer apologies to them and to the world. In some countries such as Korea it is mistakenly believed that the comfort women were willing collaborators. This is a lie that has in part been fed by misinformation from the Japanese government itself. As a result the surviving women and their families are afraid to come forward publicly because they know that they might be shamed and ostracized by their fellow countrymen. The government of Japan has a moral obligation to make clear to the world that the comfort women were not collaborators, but were victims who were forced into prostitution under threat of death. I have seen photographs taken by Japanese soldiers themselves of the girls whom they brutalized who were too young to have willingly collaborated in their own humiliation. The older women in the photographs have clearly been raped and tortured. It is also high time that the government of Japan seek out the families of the comfort women, as well as the few remaining survivors themselves, and offer direct apologies to them as well as appropriate compensation. My novel, Silent Marionette, a Story of a Comfort Lady, is based upon true events in the life of a Korean teenage girl who was kidnapped by the Japanese and forced to serve them as a comfort woman in Manchuria. It is not yet published, but is in the hands of a literary agent, Ger Nichols, with The Book Bureau in Ireland. When it is published I recommend that it be made part of the curriculum in Japanese high schools and universities. This generation of Japanese must be aware of the sins of the past so as not to repeat them in the future.This letter is an open invitation to anyone who was a victim of the Japanese, or who knows of victims of the Japanese, or anyone else who cares about the tragedy of the comfort women to send me their testimonies and any comments they might have atnilynaiman@hotmail.com, and I will forward them along with my own letter to the Japanese government.
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