Taipei demands Japan provide redress and apology for "comfort women" sex slaves

In the Korea-related blogosphere, it's a common tactic of Korea bashers and Japan apologists (two groups that are not interchangeable) to look at still seething historical issues from World War II and the earlier colonial period and brush them off, saying that it is just the Koreas and China that complain about these. The rest of Asia and the world, so the argument goes, have moved on, so it must be nationalistic agitators in Korea and China that are causing trouble, not the occasional revisionist military figure or politico who denies this atrocity or excuses that invasion. 

A big part of that premise, of course, is not true, as anyone actually paying attention would know. While people in Taiwan, a former colony of Japan just as Korea was, tend to look less critically at Japan's history and its nationalists' modern revisionism (or at least are less vocal about it), past wrongs are still in the public mindset. 

Today's headline from Taipei is a good example of this. According to the Japan Times, the Taiwanese parliament yesterday "adopted a resolution seeking an apology and compensation from Japan for forcing women into sexual slavery during the war."

It was "a rare show of unity" for the Greens and the Blues (respectively, the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party [DPP] that just lost presidential power, and the lately Beijing-friendly Kuomintang [KMT] which just gained presidential power). By unanimous vote, the two parties passed the Taiwan Comfort Women Resolution.

The legislation calls on Tokyo to "accept historical responsibility for its World War II sex slavery institution, and apologize to and compensate surviving victims." This follows similar resolutions passed last year in the United States and the European Union (among whose citizens are some Dutch former comfort women). 

As the JT states, these resolutions are "calling on Tokyo to own up to its wartime military brothel program that forced thousands of women and girls to become prostitutes, euphemistically referred to as 'comfort women' in Japan." Taiwanese politicos don't think the resolution will adversely affect Taipei-Tokyo relations:

"I don't think the resolution will have any specific impact on Taiwan's relations with Japan. We just hope Japan will begin to hear the voices of the world on this issue," said Huang Sue-ying, an opposition Democratic Progressive Party legislator and cosponsor of the resolution.

Taiwan's parliament, or Legislative Yuan, timed the resolution to roughly coincide with a similar resolution passed by South Korea's National Assembly last month, Huang said. That resolution calls on Japan to compensate surviving comfort women in South Korea.

To be fair, it's not exactly true to say that Japan hasn't officially addressed the issue at all. After decades of denial in which the front-line brothels were said to be privately operated affairs, Japanese government representatives acknowledged Japanese government culpability, which was followed by heart-felt statements of regret by the prime ministers at the time. However, Japan has refused to take any substantive measures beyond that. In the case of South Korea, for example, Tokyo insists all claims were settled by the soft loan guarantees and other financial instruments that were provided as part of the 1965 normalization treaty between Seoul and Tokyo. 

Obviously, many people find that response to be wholly unsatisfactory. The comfort women of Korea (or any country) were not party to the agreement, Japan was denying any involvement for the comfort women as it paid out the modest settlement anyway, and any dealings with Seoul have no bearing on women in North Korea, China, Taiwan, Indonesia, the Netherlands, the Philippines, or anywhere else. In other words, there's still a long way to go. (And not just a few people in South Korea blame the Park regime for failing these women, as well as current administrations for not doing enough to help out the elderly survivors.)

In the meantime, while it's possible to argue that US Representative Mike Honda's Comfort Women Resolution comes from a country that was unaffected by the horrific acts perpetrated on women in Asia by the Imperial Japanese military during World War II, the same cannot be said of Taiwan.