17.04.2017

KBS News

By Ee Seungcheol

The Japanese military has revealed that hundreds of women were taken to work as “comfort women” on the island of Bali, Indonesia during the Pacific War [World War 2]. Although the Japanese government has kept this information hidden for decades, [it still] denies that these women were forcibly enslaved. The Japanese Ministry of Justice questioned a Japanese naval military prosecutor who was punished as a Pacific war criminal in 1962 [to discover this issue]. The most chilling aspect of the story is that it is a “comfort women” issue; the disgraced prosecutor said “during four years of the war, we brought around 200 women to work as ‘comfort women’ in Bali.”

It was also revealed that the Japanese military had spent about 700,000 yen in military funds after the war concealing this issue. The prosecutor was [subsequently] charged as a war criminal, but denied being involved in comfort women activities. His testimony is key evidence that that the Japanese military systematically mobilised comfort women – then intervened to conceal their activities after the war. Professor Hayashi of Japan’s Ganto University said “the Japanese government is claiming that it didn’t undertake any illegal activities, but clearly the soldier who undertook this cover-up was aware of that fact that these undertakings were illegal.” The Japanese government has classified the data for more than 50 years and classified it as confidential in February. As Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in January: “among the data we haven’t found anything which points to forced mobilisation.” The Japanese government has not yet recognized more than 400 articles on comfort women, including military trial records, as official documents.