Abstract

Watching Rights

A few weeks ago the Japanese government took another step in acknowledging its World War II atrocities by agreeing to spend $1 billion over a ten-year period on a Peace, Friendship and Exchange Initiative that includes support for historical research on relations between Japan and its Asian neighbors. None of the money will be used to pay reparations to the now elderly Korean women forced into prostitution to service Japanese troops. Japan's armed forces murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians, raped scores of thousands of women and forced additional thousands into prostitution in several Asian countries, enslaved large numbers of Koreans and Chinese, and conducted medical experiments on prisoners in Manchuria, giving them injections that caused painful and deadly diseases. Yet even the episode that has come to symbolize this record, the "Rape of Nanking" in 1937, is mentioned only cursorily in Japanese high school textbooks, helping to induce a collective amnesia from which the Korean "comfort women" are promoting recovery.