http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/pri ... 74189.htmlAustralian woman seeks apology from Japan
Penelope Debelle, Adelaide
February 14, 2007
Jan O'Herne was forced to become a "comfort woman" for Japanese officers in World War II.
IN 1944, a truck full of high-ranking Japanese officers arrived at a prison camp in Java. The young female prisoners were forced to line up. Among them was Jan O'Herne. She was 21.
"A selection process then started and they picked the prettiest ones, 10 girls out of the line," she said.
"We were hurled onto the truck and driven away from the camp, away from our mothers and families and taken to a house in Semarang, the capital of Central Java, that was turned into a brothel for the Japanese military."
Over the next three months, Jan O'Herne was raped repeatedly by Japanese officers. Fencing and guards meant there was no escape.
For 50 years Mrs O'Herne, who now lives in Adelaide, kept the story — and the horrors — to herself. Now she is going to Washington, where she will tell the US Congress of what she endured.
The silence was at first imposed by the Japanese, on the threat of death for her, her mother, her father and her two younger sisters. The "comfort women", as they came to be known, were also silenced by their own feelings of shame.
For Mrs O'Herne, the turning point was hearing a Korean woman tell her story on television in 1992. Emboldened, Mrs O'Herne travelled later that year to Tokyo to testify about Japanese war crimes.
Fifteen years later, and more than half a century after her dignity was stripped from her, Mrs O'Herne is still waiting for an apology from Japan.
Her hope is that her testimony, and that of two Korean women, on behalf of the 200,000 raped, will force Japan to "officially and unambiguously apologise" and accept responsibility for the abuse.
The biggest problem I have with this issue, as I do with other aspects of Japan's war time conduct, is its inability to recognise and try to correct the wrongs it did in a genuine and open way.
This is exactly the opposite of Germany, which in my view sometimes seems to go too far in trying to acknowledge and correct the wrongs its recent ancestors did.
So far as government and official attitudes are concerned, Germany has a predisposition to acknowledging and atoning for national guilt. Japan is, in some disturbing respects, the opposite.
Although Japanese governments have made several formal apologies (one can quibble about the language as to whether they were strictly "apologies" in the Japanese sense) since 1945, the fact remains that when confronted with issues like the comfort women the organs of Japanese government cannot acknowledge or deal fairly with their grievances. Combined with some curious attitudes to school texts about the war, despite some brave and isolated Japanese who have campaigned for and succeeded in slight amendments to these texts, it is difficult to avoid the inference that there are still elements of the Japanese government and officialdom which cannot accept or, worse, still approve of its conduct in WWII.
The main choices are that there are people, outside the far right and resurgent militarists, who still think that Japan's war was a glorious expression of national will and skill or there are people who cannot abide the loss of 'face' inherent in acknowledging that the war was wrong and that Japan's conduct in it was wrong.
Either way, there doesn't seem much prospect that Japan, even now, can or will acknowledge its bad actions such as those involved in using captured civilians as sexual slaves. Until it does, it is difficult to accept that Japan has advanced much beyond 1941-45 in some critical respects relating to human rights and accepting the values which MacArthur supposedly instilled in his institution of 'democracy' (whatever that means) in Japan..
