Life Onboard LAST UPDATE  October 13, 2007
site design imagesparkle.com
October 3, 2007 Japan’s Dark Past and Present: The Ripple Effect of War and Violence – Utsumi Aiko
image
Utsumi Aiko, an expert in the area of the direct violence of war relating to Japan’s involvement in Southeast Asia.
Utsumi Aiko, a university professor and Director of the Pacific Asia Resource Center, joined Peace Boat from Yokohama, Japan to Singapore to discuss the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia during its colonial period leading up to and during World War II. Onboard, Ms Utsumi illustrated how the Japanese government effectively lulled the nation into believing that the Japanese military was liberating these countries from their western oppressors. In reality, however, they were attempting to replace one form of colonialism with another. This was part of a larger plan for Japanese nationalist expansion and a way for the nation to fuel its war effort by exploiting the colonized nations’ natural resources such as oil and rubber. During the war, the Japanese fought a total of 44 countries.
site design imagesparkle.com
image

Utsumi Aiko stands with Hirokawa Ryuichi and their onboard helpers. They held a lecture together called “Can you hear the SOS? From Japanese Pornography to Comfort Women”

Japan’s “Sacred War”
 There were many non-Japanese victims during the process of “liberation” that were both legitimately and illegitimately recruited for the Japanese war effort. Soldiers, for example, were recruited from Taiwan and Korea to fight for Japan but were denied any post-war compensation or reparations. As a result, many either stayed in prison or committed suicide. Since the so-called “Sacred War” ended, comfort women (a euphemistic term used by the Japanese military to describe women who were cheated into being used as sex slaves) have also been denied compensation.

The Ongoing Struggle of Comfort Women
 Although exact statistics do not exist, it has been estimated that hundreds of thousands of women from Japan, Korea, China and Taiwan, among other Asian nations, were subjected to government-sanctioned rape and other sexual violence throughout areas of East Asia occupied by the Japanese military. Despite all evidence to the contrary (including official documents, written and oral testimonies) the Japanese government continues to deny its role in the institutionalization and sanctioning of this abhorrent practice. ‘It is indisputable that these women were forced, deceived, coerced and abducted to provide sexual services to the Japanese military … [Japan] violated customary norms of international law concerning war crimes, crimes against humanity, slavery and the trafficking in women and children ... Japan should take full responsibility now, and make suitable restitution to the victims and their families,’ the International Commission of Jurists reported in 1994.
image
Utsumi Aiko relays her encyclopedic knowledge of Japan’s colonial period and the struggle of minorities in Japan
Many of the women are only demanding an official acknowledgment and apology from the Japanese government before they pass away and history forgets them. Ms Utsumi showed video footage of a civilian court held in 2000 in Tokyo in which both former comfort women and soldiers testified. One soldier stated that: ‘Rape was an everyday occurrence during the war time,’ as they also committed rape against civilian women, sometimes girls. They thought it was permissible because they were going to kill them anyway. Ms Utsumi linked that episode from Japan’s past with a more current problem – that of organized prostitution and human trafficking in Japan. ‘The problem we are facing now connects the past and present,’ she said.

Pornography and Trafficking
During a lecture, one brave member of the audience, a Japanese male in his early twenties, stood up to comment that: ‘They [the soldiers] were normal people who carried out these criminal acts. If it is considered normal and everyone is doing it, I wonder if I would’ve done it.’ He also highlighted the complexities of the issue of violence against women by confessing he had already seen the atrociously violent and illegal pornography film on the Internet of which stills had been shown during the joint lecture by photojournalist Hirokawa Ryuichi and Utsumi Aiko. In this film a woman is, against her will, gang-raped and then forced into a bath where she is nearly drowned. This brought attention to the issue of the boundary between sexual pleasure and sexual violence, with others arguing about the right to freedom of expression. ‘The question is where we draw the line,’ suggested Mr Hirokawa. The discussion also shed light on the fact that extreme violence against women is not a phenomenon confined to war time, and that it continues today is telling of how women are still treated as commodities and objects, rather than human beings.
According to Ms Utsumi, ‘Japan is a paradise for human traffickers.’ Women from less developed Asian nations such as Thailand are imported and sold in Japan and Mr Hirokawa showed photos taken recently in Kabukicho, a red-light district in Shinjuku, Tokyo, of women being trafficked. This emphasized how close to home the problem is. However, Ms Utsumi also added that Japanese women have been subjected to trafficking. In the nineteenth century, Japanese men moved through villages in Japan, collecting poor women and selling them into prostitution abroad. In Indonesia, for example, there still exists today “Japanese Flower Street” where Japanese prostitutes could be found. The men only stopped this practice in the early days of the twentieth century because it became shameful to the growing nation of Japan. In order to move forward, Ms Utsumi firmly believes that Japan needs to sign and ratify the regulation passed by the International Criminal Court in The Hague that states sexual violence and abuse is a crime against humanity. She also believes that Japan needs to adopt support systems for victims that exist in the west such as rape crisis centers and help-lines. Currently, very little of this exists in Japan. ‘Japan is very backward in this respect,’ she concluded.