Documentary on "comfort women" screened in Japan's small cinema

A documentary on former South Korean "comfort women," a Japanese euphemism for about 200,000 sex slaves it forcibly recruited during World War II, was publicly screened for the first time in cinema here on Saturday.

About 200 audiences watched the 215-minute documentary in a small cinema called UPLINK in Shibuya, downtown Tokyo. Just like the zigzag process the victims witnessed in past years to sue the Japanese government for apology and compensation, the screening was stopped several times due to the small cinema's equipment bugs.

The documentary, "Live with the Memory," was conducted based on the video of Japanese journalist Doi Toshikuni's interview of seven victims from 1994 to 1996 in a home to former comfort women in South Korea.

The victims testified, according to the documentary, that they were recruited under the banner of "making uniform for Japanese soldiers" or "to be trained as nurses" and other excuses and were forcibly taken to places like Singapore and China as sexual slaves for soldiers while some maidens were served to officers for " enjoyment."

"When we talked about our history as a war victim, the image of each individual victim is very clear so that we can remember it in the heart. We are crying 'no more Hiroshima,' 'no more Nagasaki,' but there is no one shouts 'no more Nanjing.' We know nothing about the atrocities then Japanese soldiers committed in Nanjing, therefore we can not understand their agony. Such is the case with the 'comfort women' issue," Toshikuni said after the screening.

Toshikuni said in his blog that the documentary encountered great difficulties in public screening as he was rejected by a number of cinemas in Japan due to their worries about being troubled by Japanese ultra-rightists.

Such movies reflecting real wartime atrocities committed by Japan are always being opposed by Japanese rightists. Angelina Julie's movie - "Unbroken: a World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption," which tells the story of a U.S. pilot who was captured by the then Japanese Imperial Navy and was tortured during his imprisonment in war camp, met such doom last year here.

When the documentary was screened on Saturday, Japanese right- wingers launched a protest against the Asahi Shimbun's reports opposing "anti-media" remarks by lawmakers from Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

The Asahi Shimbun was attacked by Japan's conservative media since it retracted two stories last year, including one piece involving the "comfort women" issue.

The historical issue has become a major obstacle for Japan to mend its ties with South Korea for a long time. South Korean top diplomat Yun Byung-se told his Japanese counterpart Fumio Kishida during his visit last month, the first for a South Korean foreign minister to visit Japan in four years, that making progress in resolving the "comfort women" issue is key to improving bilateral ties. Endi