“Japanese Military Sexual Slavery on Trial: Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal in Tokyo in 2000” by Michiko Nakahara.

In this chapter, Michiko Nakahara, a scholar of Southeast Asian history, describes Japan’s negligence to (legally) address Military Sexual Slavery (also known under the euphemism of “Comfort Women”),  from 1932 to 1945 in (inter)national post-World War Two courts. She specifically assesses Emperor Hirohito’s role in creating and continuing these practices and the omission of details concerning the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal (WIWCT) in Tokyo in Japanese Newspapers. She aims to “historically contextualise our historic battle against the Japanese patriarchal structure as embodied by the importance of the emperor and the ultimate triumph of transnational activism which culminated in The Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal 2000” (164). 

Japanese Military Sexual Slavery was not addressed as one of the crimes in the Tokyo trials of 1946; it took until 1991 for three Korean women who had been forced into the role of Comfort Women during the war to file a lawsuit. The unearthing of these women’s stories created a wave of activism that led to the academic investigation of the Comfort Women. Nakahara shows that international organisations, such as the Asian-Japan Women’s Resource Centre, the Violence Against Women in Wars Network (VAWW NET), and later the VAWW NET Japan, played a role in unearthing these war crimes and the search for legal justice. In a brief analysis of the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal in Tokyo of December 2000, she delineates how Hirohito and nine generals were found guilty of crimes against humanity. The Japanese broadcasting station NHK was supposed to give a complete account of these trials. Though Hirohito’s conviction made headlines in other countries, Japan’s media withheld information concerning the particularities of the WIWCT trial; changing the title of the NHK’s broadcast from “‘Questioning Wartime Sexual Violence by the Japanese Army’ to ‘Questioning Wartime Violence’” (169). This misinformation remained prevalent until the Ashi Newspaper published a report in 2005 that gave insight into the political pressure that led to the NHK’s omission of Hirohito’s conviction and the withholding of information about the true nature of the trials. Nakahara describes the discrepancies between the NHK’s publication and the actual trial, such as a failure to mention the verdict or the testimonies of Japanese perpetrators. She then argues that the erasure of the initially planned NHK broadcast on the tribunal illustrates how Hirohito’s guilt and Japanese history from 1932-1945 have been removed while also erasing the existence of the women that survived these atrocities and the international and often feminist networks these women helped convene. This chapter illustrates the emergence of Comfort Women and war crimes against women in an international sphere and illustrates the legal and social constraints this topic has had in Japanese society.

Author of this entry: Anne van Buuren

Nakahara, Michiko “Japanese Military Sexual Slavery on Trial: Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal in Tokyo in 2000” Sexuality, Oppression and Human Rights, edited by Júlia Tomás and Nicole Epple, Oxford Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2015, pp. 163-172.