www.newsandletters.org
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS, April - May 2007Comfort women ralliesIt was distressing to read of Japan’s further movements to the right, in the “Our Life and Times" column in News & Letters. It was more shocking to find that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe publicly denied the Japanese military's role in forcing over 200,000 women from China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Korea and other countries into sexual slavery during World War II. Abe's denial flies in the face of an official government statement acknowledging that the Japanese military did just that and, more importantly, demonstrates a flagrant lack of recognition of the dignity that each human being deserves. In protest of such inhumanity, survivors held rallies in Sydney, Australia, and at the Japanese Embassy in Manila, Philippines, as part of International Women's Day, where they spoke about what they and hundreds of thousands more suffered. Eighty-four-year-old Jan Ruff O'Herne demanded what many so-called “comfort women" want so that they may regain their dignity: an official apology from the government. What will happen to Japanese women as Japan moves further right, reaching back (think "backwards") to tradition, as Abe and his supporters insist? Now, Japanese women still have to deal with the "boys' clubs" in the business world, working twice as hard as men and demonstrating that they're twice as smart, without any guarantees. If they marry, they are expected to fill the "traditional" roles of obedient wives and stay-at-home moms whose husbands often work late and don’t help with domestic tasks. Many Japanese women are not marrying. As the Japanese government strives to deprive the former “comfort women"--women who survived an inhuman organized atrocity--of their humanity, their words and lives reveal the way to move forward to something new and truly human. --Elise, half-Japanese and living in the U.S. |
|
Home l News & Letters Newspaper l Back issues l News and Letters Committees l Dialogues l Raya Dunayevskaya l Contact us l Search Published by News and Letters Committees |
