Last Friday, March 30, the McGill Golden Key Society and the East Asian Students’ Association hosted “Sexual Slavery and the Asian Holocaust: A Seminar on the Comfort Women Issue in EastAsia.” McGill East Asian studies professors BrianBergstrom and Adrienne Hurley provided historical background and demonstrated the importance of the ongoing issues facing “comfort women.”
These comfort women were the thousands of women from Korea, China, and other Asian nations were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II. The women were forced to travel across Asia, offering sexual gratification to Japanese soldiers. Male visitors lined up outside of comfort camps to repeatedly rape women as young as 12, assaults that resulted in venereal disease, injury, and death.
The system was conducted under the official supervision of the Japanese government, a reality that modern-day Japanese officials continue to ignore. Ever since Jan. 8, 1992, a group of the 61 registered survivors in South Korea meet every Wednesday on the steps of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul to protest these atrocities that occurred over half a century ago.
“[The] Japanese have been firm on this issue,” Hyun-Soo Lim, Golden Key member and the leading co-ordinator of the McGill Comfort Women Lecture said. “The idea of shame for them is very different from Western or Korean culture. You would think apologizing would be a way to deal with that guilt, but that would implicate their ancestors, which is disrespectful.”
Surviving comfort women, or “grandmas,” as their supporters prefer to call them, do not think that cultural sensitivity is a valid excuse for crimes against humanity.
During the early 1990s, the women took their case to the international community, asking the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the UN Human Rights Commission to pressure the Japanese government with an official ruling on the comfort women issue. In 1995, the UN Commission and numerous other international bodies agreed that the Japanese should offer compensation and issue an official apology for their involvement in the recruitment and rape of these women.
As of today, over 20 years after the grandmas started protesting for an apology, there has still been no compensation or apology made. Japanese officials avoid the issue, stating that suffering is a natural part of war, and that rape is an inevitable occurrence in these circumstances.
“If the goal of having certain rules is to prevent harm, whose perception of harm is recognized as valid?” Hurley asked.
During the seminar, students could participate in a silent auction for a lunch date with McGill professors to raise money for the Shim-Tuh shelter in Korea, a home that provides assistance for the surviving Korean comfort women. Twenty-two professors volunteered from all faculties, including law, medicine, political science, and philosophy.
Although this seminar emphasized the specific issue of Japanese comfort women, it also aimed to place the decades-old issue into a modern perspective.
“This seminar is not just about the past, it’s about connecting these issues to today,” Lim explained. “This is the same system of injustice and silence that perpetuates all these crimes. We want a full, round picture that connects all similar international issues.”
In the introduction of the seminar, attendees viewed a short movie that included interviews with some of the survivors. One woman warned that Japan’s avoidance of the issue sets a dangerous precedent for similar situations in other countries.
Students who attended the seminar appreciated the opportunity to broaden their understanding of the Second World War.
“I had read about the rape of Nanjing, but I didn’t know much about comfort women,” Golden Key member Juliette Chausson said. “Usually when people talk about World War II, they focus on the Western Holocaust and don’t talk about Asia. [The seminar] was really eye-opening.”
