Former 'comfort woman' slams Japanese denials

A former wartime sex slave has strongly condemned Japan's failure to admit that its military forced girls and young women to become "comfort women" during World War II.

"It's just hideous not to acknowledge it. There are so many witnesses who have spoken out about this," Jan Ruff-O'Herne was quoted by Australian newspaper The Age as saying on Tuesday.

Ruff-O'Herne, 91, expressed her anger from her home in the South Australian city of Adelaide.

Ruff-O'Herne was captured as a teenager with her Dutch parents on the island of Java in present-day Indonesia. She was raped and beaten by Japanese soldiers and later coerced into sexual slavery.

Ruff-O'Herne immigrated to Australia in the 1960s. Her photo is on display at the Australian War Memorial's World War II section.

The report said that she kept her abuse secret for 50 years, even from her family, until speaking out in the early 1990s in support of South Korean "comfort women" who were seeking an apology from Japan.

"At first it was only the Korean women, and nobody took any notice because 'they were only Asian women'. But then when a European woman spoke out, the world suddenly took notice," Ruff-O'Herne said.

The pressure led to the Japanese government issuing a statement of "apologies and remorse" for abused women, with a promise to teach people about what had taken place.

The report also quoted Tessa Morris-Suzuki, an expert on modern Japanese history at the Australian National University, as saying that the "comfort women" issue had become symbolic in the revisionist drive that argues that Japan was as much a victim as an aggressor.

"From the point of view of people like (Prime Minister Shinzo) Abe and others in his government, it is something that makes Japan look very bad," Morris-Suzuki said. "They want to say this didn't happen, or it didn't happen the way people think it did - or if it did happen, everybody else did it as well."

The report said that supporters of the abused women fear an attempt is being made to whitewash history, after Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga indicated last week that the government wanted to verify the authenticity of testimony from 16 South Korean comfort women recorded in the follow-up to the 1993 apology.

"No inquiry has been launched, but ultra-conservatives in Japan's parliament dismiss the stories and say there are no documents to prove Japanese soldiers forced women into sexual servitude," the report said.

Ruff-O'Herne said the apology must stand.

"When such a terrible thing happens, you expect an apology. It was important for my healing process. It takes a lifetime to get over a thing like that," she said.

(China Daily 02/26/2014 page11)