General
A Plea for Justice for Japan’s So-Called Comfort Women
Mina Watanabe has made it her life’s work to tell the stories of the women who were sexually enslaved by the Japanese military before and during World War II.
This article is part of a Women and Leadership special report highlighting women who are charting new pathways and fighting for opportunities for women and others.
When Gil Won-ok, a Korean woman, died recently at the age of 96, the international community lost an outspoken warrior in the effort to make Japan accountable for its practice of sexual slavery during the early part of the 20th century.
Ms. Gil was one of about 240 so-called comfort women from South Korea who had publicly spoken out about their abuse at the hands of the Japanese military from the 1930s through World War II, and her death left just a handful of survivors to continue the cause.
But Mina Watanabe, a Japanese woman who was born years after the war ended, and who had no direct relationship to the practice or its victims, has continued to press for fuller acknowledgment and reparations from Japan. As director of the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM) in Tokyo, she and the museum focus on sexual violence against women in war and conflict situations — with extra attention focused on her homeland’s history.
Ms. Watanabe said she had been interested in women’s rights since her school days in Tokyo. When some of the survivors of Japan’s military sexual slavery system finally came forward in the 1990s, her encounters with them “changed my life,” she said in an interview in Tokyo.
She co-founded the museum in 2005 with donations from people in Japan and abroad, and has been campaigning internationally for the rights of survivors since.
Activists for comfort women are often subjected to criticism or left isolated by their fellow Japanese. The interview was edited and condensed.
