Imagine someone you knew. A high school girl on her way to Tainan's Girls High School was captured by a uniformed Japanese military police and was sent to the battle front to serve the Japanese army as a sex slave, being raped day and night for 1095 days - nightmares carved in the girl's memory, painful and unbearable. This happened during WWII. She tried to commit suicide three times with cleaning agents but was unsuccessful. After the Japanese surrendered, she was sent back to Taiwan, but she was shamed and rejected by most of her own people. She finally built up her courage to demand justice from the Japanese government, demanding a sincere apology.  But she received none. Now she is over 90 years old and is still fighting for her justice and dignity as a human being. You could watch her story in a video interview, but Xiao Tao's story is just one of perhaps 200,000 'comfort women' whom the Japanese Army through the authority of the Japanese Government systematically forced into the cruelest and most inhumane sex slavery. This did not just happen to Asian women, as evidenced by a Dutch woman, Jan Ruff-O'Herne's testimony to a U.S. House of Representatives committee.

Yes! Atrocious crimes often were committed during wars, but justice ultimately should prevail. After a war was ended, the war criminals should have been punished, their government should have apologized and their fellow country men and women should have shown remorse and accepted the guilt. The historical facts should have been passed down to the future generations so everyone would remember the shameful past and would never repeat it again. No! Not the Japanese government, it denies that the atrocious war crimes ever happened during WWII despite volumes of photographic and video evidence. The Japanese authority denies 'comfort women', 'massacres', 'chemical and bacterial weapons experiments on humans', 'live humans for surgical experiments', and ruthless 'speed contests in slaughtering innocent people'. The Japanese government denies them all. The Japanese officials have only made a veiled and half-hearted apology. They twisted the facts and whitewashed the history in their national textbooks. This is done not just about their war crimes in China, but also the war crimes in Korea, the Philippines, Singapore, and many other Asian nations.

Why?! You may ask. After the ending of WWII, Hitler committed suicide, the Nazi surrendered and the post-war German government accepted the guilty verdict and apologized to the countries the Nazi army invaded. The German authority builds memorial monuments for the victims (including the holocaust) on its homeland and pays tribute to war memorials everywhere showing sincere remorse. The post-war Japanese government, however, behaves entirely differently, which angers all of the countries Japan invaded during WWII. The Japanese Prime Ministers, knowing the consequences of their words (lacking sincerity in accepting the war responsibility and making an apology) and deeds (worshipping the Japanese war criminals instead of paying tribute to the war victims slaughtered by the Japanese Army), nonetheless repeatedly made inaccurate, inflammatory and insincere remarks concerning the war history and war crimes.

In 2015, as the world is commemorating the 70th Anniversary of the Ending of WWII, some efforts were made to raise the public conscience about the ‘Comfort Women’ issue.

For example, a local news item in California reported: “Toru Hashimoto, the mayor of Osaka, the sister city of San Francisco, feuds with supervisors of San Francisco, in objecting to the establishment of a memorial for comfort women”. Led by supervisors Jane Kim and Eric Mar, the board passed resolutions to condemn Hashimoto's objection and to build a memorial similar to the ones already erected in Glendale and Rohnert Park in California. In March 2015, two comfort women statues were being erected in a South Korean city, Pusan. The project was jointly promoted by the South Korean Civic Group and the Association of Chinese Living in the US. The purpose of the memorial statues is to elicit genuine remorse from the Japanese authority. Unfortunately, so far only the remarks like Hashimoto's statements that "Comfort Women were necessary to maintain discipline in the Army" and "the Japanese Army was not the only army that committed war crimes" were heard, which, of course, infuriates the war victims and the public, even some caring Japanese citizens.

A couple of other events related to the comfort women are also noteworthy. Ms. Kazuko Yokoi, a daughter of a WWII Japanese War Criminal, courageously and admirably performed in a one-woman show in New York City, in September 2015 (and earlier in 2015 in the San Francisco Bay Area) about the experiences of comfort women. The show, named Hitoma (meaning Seeing Is Believing), sifts through the consequences and legacy of the Japanese sex slave program of WWII. Featuring the stories of Korean and Chinese women, their children and Japanese men, and testimonials of comfort women survivals, the show offered a different perspective, broken away from the consciousness of the Japanese public. Another Art Show, named 'Intimate Transgression' cosponsored by the Asian-Pacific Center in Flushing, NY, curates art pieces to portray and remember Comfort Women. It is so appropriate that these art shows were exhibited in a year when all over the world commemorated the 70th Anniversary of the Victory of WWII in one form or another. We hope that these art images and activities can awaken people's conscience to recognize that there were indeed 'Comfort Women', some still alive now, living in pain and shame. There are some Japanese like Kazuko Yokoi who are not ignorant or insensitive to the atrocious facts in the war history. But sadly, the Japanese authority still refuses to accept the truth and still consciously fools the Japanese youth.

How can anyone justify Japan's official response to the Comfort Women issue? By reading through some historical reports about the Japanese Imperial Army, I could piece together the following scenario: When the Japanese occupied part of Shanghai (joining seven other Western nations) in 1932, there were too many rape cases in Shanghai involving Japanese soldiers. The Japanese commander then sent a request to Nagasaki city to send prostitutes (Ianfu) to Shanghai which eventually evolved into a government coordinated effort to offer “comfort women” to raise the military morale. When Japan later took control of Korea, the program became a systematic process, changing from "recruiting" (kidnapping and luring) to "military support operation" (installing at military bases or even moving with the army with strict freedom control and medical examinations to reduce venereal disease). As the Japanese aggression progressed, so expanded the comfort women program. Hence hundreds of  thousands of women like the above Taiwan girl were captured and sent to other countries as sex slaves to serve the Japanese army; the comfort women had no way to escape in a foreign land.

The Japanese army might have started the comfort women program with Japanese prostitutes, but that is no excuse for the Japanese authority to justify the inhumane program or to stubbornly deny the Comfort Women issue involving other Asian countries. With further studies, I venture to offer the following logic for explaining the Japanese authority’s behavior towards the ‘Comfort Women’ issue:

1. The post-war Japanese authority is essentially controlled by the descendants of the Japanese war criminals (thanks to the generosity of the US occupation command in Japan).

2. The militarism never went away in Japan despite of its peace constitution; restoring Japan's Imperial glory is still deep in the minds of powerful Japanese politicians such as Abe Shinzo and Toru Hashimoto.

3. Honoring the Imperial Army and its mission to conquer the weak nations justifies all efforts (including using comfort women) to support the Imperial Army. The desire to restore the honor of the Japanese Imperial Army mandates continued denying their past war crimes. 

4. A belief that sending prostitutes to serve soldiers as a patriotic act is used to justify forcing innocent women to serve the Japanese army as sex slaves as “necessary” military support.

5. All the denials are rooted in the philosophy that the Imperial army’s honor and spirit must be restored in order for Japan to become ‘normal’ again. The Japanese authority hence decides that they will not allow anything to shame the Japanese army.

The above is just one scenario; perhaps, there are other interpretations. I urge people to have an open dialogue to help the Japanese authority reconcile with the war crimes like the Germans have done. The world would have a brighter future.