|
Post by Admin on Jul 24, 2014 21:37:56 GMT
A United Nations human rights panel called on Japan on Thursday to undertake independent investigations of wartime sex slavery and apologise to the women who were victims before it was too late. Some historians estimate that as many as 200,000 so-called comfort women, many from China and South Korea, were forced into the Imperial Japanese Army's brothels before and during World War Two. The U.N. Human Rights Committee, which was looking at the issue as part of a regularly scheduled review, said that all reparation claims brought by victims before Japanese courts have been dismissed, and all complaints seeking criminal investigations and prosecutions have been rejected on grounds of the statute of limitations. "We want Japan to make the kind of statement that the families, the women themselves, the few who are still surviving, can recognise as an unambiguous, uninhibited acceptance of total responsibility for compelling them to engage for a part of their lives in something that could have only destroyed their lives," said Nigel Rodley, the British expert chairing the panel. The panel urged Japan to "ensure that all allegations of sexual slavery or other human rights violations perpetrated by Japanese military during wartime against the 'comfort women', are effectively, independently and impartially investigated and that perpetrators are prosecuted and if found guilty, punished". Such acts carried out against the will of the victims meant Japan had a "direct legal responsibility," it said. Secret government records should be opened to investigators, who could include non-Japanese to strengthen the independence of the investigation, according to Rodley and Dutch committee member Cornelius Flinterman. The panel also said Japan's position on the issue was "contradictory", in that it says the comfort women were generally recruited and transported through coercion, but they were not "forcibly deported". "But given that the 1993 Kono declaration admitted that it was forcible, we have no doubts about it," Rodley said, referring to the government statement on comfort women."And what is troubling is that the delegation now seems to need to speak out of both sides of its mouth," he said. Japan has said compensation for women forced to work in the brothels was settled by a 1965 treaty establishing diplomatic ties with South Korea. Japan also set up a fund to make payments to the women from private contributions in 1995, but South Korea has said that was not official and so not good enough.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jul 25, 2014 21:18:39 GMT
Japan on Friday rejected a call by a UN watchdog to accept full blame for pressing Asian women into wartime sexual slavery in military brothels, saying it was not obligated to do so. The United Nations Human Rights Committee in Geneva on Thursday called on Japan to take responsibility for its use of so-called “comfort women” during World War II. Japan’s foreign ministry said the UN committee was expected to adhere to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which Tokyo ratified in 1979. “The covenant is not supposed to be applied to issues, including the comfort women issue, dating back further than that time (1979),” an official at the ministry’s press division said. Tokyo issued a landmark apology in 1993 — called the Kono Statement after then top government spokesman Yohei Kono who announced it. The statement acknowledged the military’s involvement in the coercive brothel system but did not admit the government’s complicity in it. But a tranche of the political right, including Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, continue to cast doubt, claiming the brothels were staffed by professional prostitutes. Japan recently held a review of the issue which upheld the apology but asserted there was no evidence to corroborate the women’s testimony on sex slavery, sparking regional anger. With few official records available, many researchers have estimated around 200,000 women, mostly from Korea but also from China, Indonesia, the Philippines and Taiwan, served Japanese soldiers in “comfort stations”. Japan previously offered money to former comfort women through a private fund set up in 1995 that ran until 2007. But some survivors refused the cash because it did not come directly from the government.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Aug 3, 2014 21:48:08 GMT
Westwood artist Steve Cavallo will present a solo exhibition, "From Many Wounds We Bleed," Sunday to Aug. 21 at the Nabi Museum of the Arts, inside the World of Wings complex in Teaneck. The collection of watercolors in the exhibition is the latest in Cavallo's series about what he calls "innocent victims of war." Like last year's "Eulogies" exhibit, these paintings depict the struggles of "comfort women," Korean women who were forced by the Japanese military into sexual slavery during World War II. What's different this time, Cavallo said, is that he's gotten to know his subjects personally. "It's not just statistics anymore," said Cavallo, who was initially inspired to explore the topic after reading "Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women" by Dai Sil Kim-Gibson. "I've visited these women in South Korea and in California. I know what they want to get across – that they want an apology and want the world to know what happened to them." Two opening receptions for the exhibit, open to the public, will be held at 3 p.m. Monday and from 5 to 7 p.m. next Saturday; during the first, guests can meet some of the comfort women. The City of Union City, Mayor Brian Stack and the Board of Commissioners will hold a dedication ceremony for the city’s “Comfort Women” memorial on Monday, August 4 at 12 p.m. at Liberty Plaza, 30th St. and Palisade Ave. Attending the dedication ceremony will be Mayor and State Senator Brian Stack and the Board of Commissioners, City Historian Gerard Karabin, City Art Curator Amado Mora, Artistic Director of the Union City Philharmonic Orchestra Jahye Kim, Artistic Director of West Hudson Opera John Jay Hebert, Artistic Director of The Grace Theatre Workshop Megan Fernandez, a guest speaker from Women Rising, and several other dignitaries. Very special guests will be Ok-Sun Lee and Il-Chul Kang, two ladies who survived this horrific time in history and who are flying from Korea for the ceremony. The event will feature a haunting poetry reading by Cat J. Lane from the cast of the play “Comfort,” currently playing in New York City, as well as a performance by twelve-year old Subin Lee playing “Smetana-Moldau” on the harp. Surrounding Liberty Plaza will be the memorable and thought-provoking art installation “Our Cry” by the Union City Artist Collective, featuring artists Amado Mora (Ecuador), Alma Peralta (Puerto Rico), Ines Berges (Dominican Republic), Juan Ramiro Torres (Peru), Ruth Alvarado (Costa Rica), Abby Levine (USA), Craig Radhuber (USA), Obdulio Romero Sabino (Dominican Republic), Sigfrido Duarte (Dominican Republic) Jhon Vargas (Ecuador), and Lucio Fernandez.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Aug 6, 2014 20:45:17 GMT
Now in the middle of Liberty Plaza, a location that Fernandez called the "heart of Union City," a butterfly sculpture can be seen mounted on top of rock with a plaque dedicated to the memory of the "Comfort Women." The monument was fully funded by private donors, according to Fernandez. Stack acknowledged the importance of educating the youth about this issue so as not to repeat a similar event in the future. State Sen. Sandra Cunningham spoke about the need to share history and give these women some dignity back. Commissioner Lucio Fernandez blasted critics of the art who have been calling it "over the top." "We think over the top is having 300,000 girls as young as 11 years old raped 50-to-200 times a day, Fernandez said. "We think over the top is having 200 young girls kidnapped in Nigeria while most of us watched the World Cup. Over the top is the genital mutilation of girls in the Middle East. Over the top are the 300 girls per day that get gang raped in India every single day and right here in Union City finding a bar full of captive young girls from Central America forced into prostitution." However, for the victims themselves, the shame they feel still lingers with them in their everyday lives, even 60 years later. "I still feel very shameful and embarrassed," Kang said through a translator. "To share with you these miserable tragedies breaks my heart." Kang wasn't able to return home from her "comfort house" after the war ended for several years, and when she finally did, she came home to find that her entire family was dead— a story she told through tears. The women, in separate accounts, each described living in a "comfort house" as a place unsuitable for humans, with Lee even referring to it as a slaughter house. The Asahi Shimbun admitted Tuesday to serious errors in many articles on the “comfort women” issue, retracting all stories going back decades that quoted a Japanese man who claimed he kidnapped about 200 Korean women and forced them to work at wartime Japanese military brothels. The correction came more than 20 years after the Sankei Shimbun based on studies by noted historian Ikuhiko Hata first pointed out apparent errors in the man’s account in April 1992. Hata and the Sankei said there was no evidence supporting the account of Seiji Yoshida, who claimed he conducted something akin to “human hunting” by rounding up about 200 women on Jeju-do Island in present-day South Korea. All local residents interviewed by Hata denied Yoshida’s claims. Mainstream historians have now agreed that his statements were false. Yoshida, who claimed to have worked for a labor recruitment organization in Yamaguchi Prefecture during the war, reportedly died in July 2000. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has repeatedly called out the Asahi for quoting Yoshida’s accounts, saying the paper’s “erroneous reports” have magnified the issues involving the so-called comfort women. Asked to comment on the Asahi’s retraction of the articles during his regular news conference Tuesday, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said: “We hope correct recognition of the history will be formed, based on objective facts.” The term comfort woman is a euphemism referring to women forced into sexual servitude in wartime Japanese military brothels. Media outlets and activists often describe them as “sex slaves,” given the harsh conditions they faced. The Asahi repeatedly reported on Yoshida’s accounts in the 1980s and 1990s. The paper has faced growing criticism about its coverage of comfort women, prompting the paper on Tuesday to carry two pages of feature articles looking into its previous coverage. In April and May this year, the Asahi dispatched reporters to the island and interviewed about 40 elderly residents and concluded that Yoshida’s accounts “are false.” As far as the present-day Korean Peninsula is concerned, the Asahi, like most mainstream Japanese historians, maintained that no hard evidence had been found to show the Japanese military was directly involved in recruiting women to the brothel system against their will.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Aug 13, 2014 21:10:51 GMT
A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed against Glendale that sought the removal of a controversial statue installed in a city park to honor women coerced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II. The statue's opponents were unable to show that the 1,100-pound memorial caused them harm, and Glendale didn't break any laws by erecting it in Central Park in July 2013, according to a court order signed last week by U.S. District Court Judge Percy Anderson. The opponents — Michiko Gingery, a Glendale resident; GAHT-US Corp., an organization that works to block recognition of the former sex slaves, also known as "comfort women"; and Koichi Mera, a Los Angeles resident — claimed in court records that by installing the statue, Glendale infringed upon the federal government's exclusive power to conduct foreign affairs, violated the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution and caused opponents to avoid Central Park because the statue made them feel excluded and angry. "The fact that local residents feel disinclined to visit a local park is simply not the type of injury that can be considered to be in the 'line of causation' for alleged violations of the foreign affairs power and Supremacy Clause," Anderson said in court documents. The decision comes after more than a year of unsuccessful attempts to block, then to remove, the bronze memorial of a girl in Korean dress sitting next to an empty chair. In addition to the lawsuit, multiple delegations of conservative Japanese politicians have traveled to Glendale to ask the City Council to get rid of the monument. At the same time, supporters who visit the statue leave behind bouquets and gifts. The Supreme Court has upheld its 2010 ruling junking the petition of Filipino comfort women to compel the Philippine government to take up their cause of seeking a formal apology from the Japanese government for the abuse they endured during World War II. In a full-court resolution on Tuesday, the high court denied motions for reconsideration that the women, collectively called the “Malaya Lolas” or Liberation Grandmothers, filed to appeal the April 28, 2010 ruling of Associate Justice Mariano del Castillo. The petition was originally filed by 60 grandmothers in 2004. Among the motions dismissed on Tuesday was a supplemental plea that pegged its appeal on allegations that Del Castillo had plagiarized his decision, including portions supposedly copied from at least three law publications. Supreme Court spokesperson Theodore Te said in a press briefing on Tuesday, that Del Castillo did not take part in Tuesday’s resolution, along with Associate Justice Marvic Leonen who, as dean of the University of the Philippines law school, signed a July 2010 position condemning the decision along with other faculty members. The court did not release Tuesday’s resolution. In Del Castillo’s upheld decision, the Supreme had ruled that “it is not within our power to order the Executive Department to take up the petitioners’ cause.”
|
|