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Over the Chuseok holiday, the Korean film "I Can Speak" quietly attracted an audience of three million alongside blockbusters that took hefty costs to produce. The film features a humorous, yet heartfelt story about former Japanese military "comfort women." Comfort women still remain at the center of a long-standing issue yet to be resolved. At a time when even some in Korea wish to look away from the painful truth about compatriots who are comfort women victims, this month's interview presents Secretary General Watanabe Mina of the Women's Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM), someone from the aggressor nation Japan who is trying to inform the truth about the history of the Japanese military comfort women.

Interviewer: Nam Sang-gu (Chief, NAHF Department of Modern History)

Watanabe Mina (渡邊美奈, Secretary General of the Women's Active Museum on War and Peace)

Watanabe Mina has been taking part in the restitution of surviving Japanese military comfort women victims as she began working since the 1990s as a staff member and steering committee member of an NGO focused on issues involving women's rights and war-time sexual violence. She is currently the secretary general of the Women's Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM). For nearly fifteen years, she has continued to provide UN human rights organs with material related to Japanese military comfort women victims so that the Japanese government may take international legal responsibility.

Q1 What is the purpose of your visit to Korea this time?

Watanabe Mina I came to attend the UNESCO International Seminar on Human Rights Archives held from the 20th to the 22nd of September. For the Japanese committee that applied for documents related to Japanese military comfort women to be included in UNESCO's Memory of the World Register, the seminar was a good opportunity to learn about how records of human rights violation can on their own contribute to achieving justice and how such records are maintained overseas. Because the seminar took place at Gwangju, we had the chance to visit the May 18th National Cemetery and the May 18th Archives. It was impressive to see how Gwangju people take pride in having fought in a critical battle to democratize Korea and believe in keeping records of their experience.

Q2. Please introduce how the Women's Active Museum on War and Peace (hereinafter WAM) came to be established and what activities it is involved in.

Watanabe Mina Beginning with Korea, former Japanese military comfort women from multiple countries since the 1990s started to reveal their past and openly demand the Japanese government to acknowledge the facts and its responsibility, apologize, pay reparations, and educate people about comfort women. In December 2000, the "Women's International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan's Military Sexual Slavery" (hereinafter tribunal) was held in Tokyo. It was a people's tribunal hosted by an international civic society and participated by eight victimized nations, the aggressor nation Japan, and several women's and human rights organizations. The tribunal's ground-breaking judgement based on the law at the time declared that ten high-ranking Japanese military officials including the Japanese emperor Hirohito were responsible for operating the comfort women system. The journalist and women's rights activist Matsui Yayori who had proposed and headed the tribunal, passed away from cancer in 2002, and right before she did, her dying wish was to create WAM. Not only Matsui, but the rest of us who had been involved in the tribunal all wanted to be able to preserve and pass down the testimonies, official documents, and other records collected for the tribunal while descriptions about comfort women were disappearing from Japanese textbooks. To prevent war time sexual violence from being repeated, we organized a construction committee and a fund-raising campaign to set up a base to remind posterity of the harm the comfort women system inflicted and to carry out activities for peace. Three years later in 2005, we were able to establish WAM in Tokyo's Nishi Waseda.

Although WAM is a small museum, it has held 15 special exhibitions on Japanese military comfort women over the past twelve years. WAM concurrently hosts seminars and symposiums for each exhibition and publishes catalogs and books as a means of educating the public. It also operates a hotline for former comfort women, creates maps of comfort stations, conducts research to make comfort women-related official documents publicly available on our website, and takes part in various advocacy activities urging the Japanese government to take responsibility.

Q3. After twelve years since WAM was established in 2005, has there been any change in how the Japanese society or press react toward Japanese military comfort women? If there has been, what was that change?

Watanabe Mina WAM was established in the summer of 2005, sixty years after Japan's defeat. Up until that time, the mass media had featured deep self-reflection over the war, but had covered close to nothing about the Japanese military comfort women or WAM's establishment. If you look at the change in the newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun's coverage of comfort women, it began to increase particularly after March 2007.

That's because Prime Minister Abe Shinzo who was serving his first term back then denied the fact that "forced mobilization was used" to operate the comfort women system and was being internationally criticized for it. When the United States House of Representatives adopted the resolution about comfort women in July 2007, many came to realize the comfort women issue was not over yet. The Korean constitutional court ruled in August 2011 that the Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs had failed to make tangible efforts to settle disputes with Japan and facilitate former comfort women in receiving compensation. I believe that ruling affected negotiations that took place after it between the governments of Korea and Japan. Meanwhile, the former mayor of Osaka Hashimoto Toru came under the spotlight in 2013 when he said, "comfort women were necessary," but such comments of denial and abuse by politicians actually seem to have drawn more attention toward the issue in a way.

However, the second Abe administration was launched in 2012 and after the newspaper Asahi Shimbun reported in 2014 that Yoshida Seiji's (吉田清治) descriptions about forced mobilization were "false," the negative campaigns led by Sankei Shimbun, Yomiuri Shimbun, and the Abe administration gained greater influence. Around that time, regional councils started to switch their stance to "preserving the honor of Japan" and once Korea and Japan reached an agreement in 2015, almost all newspaper reports considered the matter resolved. And those circumstances have still not been overturned.

Q4. There was a news report saying that WAM received a postcard in October last year threatening to "blow up the museum if you don't tear it down." We truly admire WAM for choosing not to discontinue its operations despite such a threat. Has it by any chance affected the museum's operations or activities in any way?

Watanabe Mina Since it opened, WAM has had Emperor Hirohito's photo on display to show he is ultimately responsible for the Japanese military comfort women system, so such threats were expected. That's why we have the policy of immediately recreating and replacing an exhibit should it get damaged from an attack. What victims of the comfort women system suffered remained obscured from history for a long time after the war. We only found out what actually happened during the war when former comfort women mustered up the courage to publicaly state their names and reveal what they've been through. It would be unforgivable to make obsolete again a historical truth that has been treated as though it didn't happen. We at WAM believe such a thing should never be repeated, which is why our activities are not affected by threats. Of course, unlike before, we have units of staff members and volunteers working as a team on site and pay closer attention to what visitors say or do.

Q5. Since you've been trying to get comfort women related documents to be included as entries in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register, what would be the significance for doing so?

Watanabe Mina I believe the verbal testimonies of former comfort women, their struggle in demanding justice, and the series of documents that prove the system was in fact operated for the Japanese military are already invaluable to the world regardless of whether they get listed under the UNESCO register. However, if UNESCO was to acknowledge victim testimonies and records of their struggle as worth preserving for the world and guarantee their preservation, victimized women may feel relieved that records of their suffering will remain intact even after they pass away. In that sense, making such records become part of the UNESCO Memory of the World Register is also a form of restitution.

Once records get listed, they can be properly preserved and disclosed, and it will be up to the following generations to study them. It would also accelerate the speed with which the eight countries that jointly applied for the records to be listed share information and cooperate on adopting preservation techniques and ways to access the records. In terms of preservation, it would be a huge advantage to have the records listed so that their preservation can be advised by UNESCO. Moreover, if the bundle of records under the title "Voices of Comfort Women" were to be accepted as entries of the register, people all over the world will become aware that there is evidence of the harm sexual violence caused and the struggles to restore human rights. That would lend a tremendous amount of support to victims of sexual violence during war, which continues to occur around the world today. It would no doubt also be tremendously meaningful to movements for preserving records of female struggles.

UNESCO is not an organization that makes judgements about history. And how the Japanese government has reacted toward the UNESCO Memory of the World Register is embarrassing. I would like to once more stress that the purpose of being listed under the register is to preserve and ensure access to records that carry international significance.

Q6. What were you able to gain from visiting the National Archives of Korea?

Watanabe Mina It was very helpful to hear what the head of the national archives thinks about comfort women and historical sources and to learn how a national institution maintains records and provides public access to them. We were given a tour inside the repository, which was very interesting because we could learn about how records were managed during Japan's colonial rule of Korea. It was emotional when we were allowed to turn the pages of original official documents related to comfort women. It would be great if we could acquire a copy of those documents, but of course, those copies wouldn't be able to invoke the same intensity of emotions the originals could.

Q7. What was the impression you received after visiting Korean museums and monuments related to Japanese military comfort women?

Watanabe Mina We visited a total of four museums during our stay in Korea this time, including the Heeum Museum of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan in Daegu and the Nest of Peace and time capsule in Paju. They are all privately established museums that were holding comfort women exhibitions carefully based on multifaceted ideas to display invaluable original sources and panels that encourage visitors to think about genocide. The National Memorial Museum of Forced Mobilization under Japanese Occupation in Busan is housed in a grand building, but the content of its exhibition came short of our expectations. Since privately established museums in Korea have developed the capability to hold exhibitions with substantial content and use diverse ways to reach out to visitors, I think it would be rather futile for a Korean government arm to pursue the idea of creating the ultimate museum of museums.

Q8. Could you please share with us what WAM plans to do in the future?

Watanabe Mina WAM is currently holding the special exhibition "Silence by Japanese Comfort Women: State-Controlled Sexuality," which focuses on how Japanese comfort women suffered. From licensed prostitution after the Meiji Restoration to the Japanese military comfort women system, the comfort stations operated for U.S. soldiers after Japan's defeat, and even in the contemporary times, the exhibition has been designed to show how Japan as a state has continued to control female sexuality and why Japanese women have been forced to remain silent under such circumstances. The exhibition runs until the summer of next year and awaits your visit.

One of the exhibitions we'll definitely do, although we haven't decided when, is about Japan's responsibility for colonial rule and the comfort women system. Responsibility for colonial rule is a notion that tends to be brought up alongside responsibility for war in discussions about the afflictions comfort women suffered. So, without simultaneously featuring the circumstances of colonial rule back then, it would be difficult for visitors to gain a grasp of what women suffered from being taken away from the Korean peninsula to serve at comfort stations. The exhibition's planning would greatly benefit from cooperation by Korean scholars, so I'd like to take this opportunity to ask for some in the future.

WAM has also begun to focus on creating a "Japanese Military Comfort Women Archive." The archive's purpose is to preserve testimonies by victims, records of their activities, and the activities Japanese civilians took part in to support the victims, in a way that can be understood even after five decades from now. It is a very challenging project. We launched the project in 2015 because Japanese supporters of comfort women victims have been growing old and are passing away. We are currently collaborating with supporters all over Japan to prevent records from getting scattered.

Q9. Would there be anything else you'd like to say to the Korean government and people about the comfort women issue or WAM's activities?

Watanabe Mina Some say the comfort women issue needs to be resolved for the sake of reconciliation between Korea and Japan, but I don't think so. Because the comfort women issue is an ongoing human rights issue in search of ways to reinstate the rights of women who suffered from sexual slavery or systematic sexual violence organized by a state. We hope to make efforts to resolve the issue together with Koreans who share the belief that all violence including sexual violence should not be tolerated.