Spotlight: Neglected pains of "comfort women"

"He's waiting for us all to die but I'm not going to die. I keep living," Jan Ruff-O'Herne told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in her final public interview in February, referring to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Ruff-O'Herne brought into spotlight the often obscure issue of "comfort women" outside China and the Korean Peninsula. She was imprisoned with her family and many other Dutch civilians by Japanese forces when they invaded the then Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) in WWII.

She married a British man and moved to Australia after the war. She remained silent on her ordeal for 50 years until the late 1990s when she began campaigning for a Japan apology and compensation for all victims of the Japanese military's sexual enslavement in WWII.

ALL VICTIMS DESERVE JUSTICE

The Japanese government in 1993 acknowledged the Japanese imperial forces' involvement in the "recruitment" of "comfort women," but it only covered those forced into prostitution on the Korean Peninsula.

But evidence shows the Japanese forced women in all its occupied territories, including China, the then Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), the Philippines, Malaysia and the former Australian territory of Papua New Guinea (PNG).

The voices and calls by the "comfort women" and civil societies for justice have been stymied by potential economic consequences from pressuring Japan, said Caroline Norma, a historian at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, who has written extensively on "comfort women".

"Japan obviously invests a lot of overseas development assistance and aid in (Southeast Asia and the Pacific), so they're beholden to that to some extent," Norma said.

Earlier in June, an international civil group alliance, including those from China, South Korea and Japan, lodged an application with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to list 2,744 records of Japan's sexual enslavement of women on the Memory of World register, a program established in 1992 by UNESCO that preserves the world's most important documents.

The UNESCO filing hopefully brings some form of support for all victims by allowing the world to remember the terrible atrocities.

AUSTRALIA CALLS FOR JUSTICE

Norma argued that Australia too has a heavy responsibility to confront Japan over the issue of "comfort women", given the fact that the country itself has a living victim of Japan's forced prostitution and that war crimes were committed on what was Australian soil.

Australia itself has a large cache of WWII documents linking the Japanese to forced prostitution in PNG, including confiscated Japanese documents, translated interrogations of high-ranking Japanese officers as well as intelligence reports from mobilized civilians who went into the Japanese occupied territory.

"There's very clearly defined crime of enforced prostitution that was perpetrated by the Japanese military on PNG soil," Norma said.

These documents however aren't part of the UNESCO filing, and Australia is unlikely to seek its inclusion.

However, Norma expressed concern that the widely favorable attitude toward Japan in Australia, particularly within the political class, might stand in the way of seeking justice for "comfort women".

For various reasons, economics is the major one, Norma said.

Japan is Australia's second-largest export market, with bilateral trade in goods and services valued at 67.6 billion Australian dollars (50.85 billion U.S. dollars) in the 2014/15 financial year. Endi