A National Fund a.k.a. the Asian Women's Fund
After acknowledging the involvement of the military in the comfort system in January 1992, the Japanese government conducted two formal investigations into the matter before it admitted in August 1993 that there had been coercive recruitment in some cases. Prime Minister Miyazawa indicated that the government would come up with some vague gesture in lieu of compensation for the survivors. The Miyazawa cabinet, however, was unable to act on this for two reasons. First, the Korean Council and other support groups were opposed to any measure that evaded Japan's legal responsibility. Second, the Japan Socialist Party had insisted on the investigation of the truth, a sincere apology, and compensation as its policy. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party was trapped between its admission of coercive recruitment and its unwillingness to say or do anything that might indicate legal responsibility.
Moreover, there arose a wave of strong resistance among conservative Japanese to compensating Korean comfort women survivors. Ken'ichi Takaki, head of the legal team for the class-action lawsuit, has suggested three causal factors for this Japanese resistance. First, stunned by the compensation lawsuit, some Japanese immediately assumed that the comfort women survivors were motivated by economic gain. Second, many pointed out that everybody had suffered during the war and that Japanese women had also worked as comfort women. (In other words, it was gendered labor that a certain class of women had offered in order to help their nation win the war.) Finally, many backed the government position that the 1965 agreement normalizing relations between Korea and Japan had settled all reparation issues.
When Tomiichi Murayama, the leader of the Socialist Party, became prime minister in June 1994, progressive intellectuals and movement leaders had high hopes for achieving a satisfactory resolution to the comfort women issue. But Murayama, as a leader of a coalition cabinet, was caught between the conservative resistance and the progressives' clamor for state compensation. In June 1995, his cabinet came up with the proposal to establish the Josei no tame no Ajia Heiwa Yuko Kikin (Asia Peace and Friendship Fund for Women).
Despite harsh criticism of the proposal, a month later the government announced the formation of Josei no tame no Ajia Heiwa Kokumin Kikin, accompanied by a statement from nineteen proponents of the fund calling for public participation in a fund-raising drive. The name of the fund was also slightly changed: Yuko (friendship) in the originally proposed name was replaced by Kokumin (a people, or a nation). In Japanese, the fund is commonly referred to as the Kokumin Kikin (People's or National Fund), while in English, it is known as the Asian Women's Fund.
One of the main criticisms leveled against the AWF has been that it is a "private fund." However, this is inaccurate: although an amalgam of private and government money supports the projects for comfort women survivors, the Japanese government is financially responsible for the operation of the fund. The first president (1995-1999), Bunbei Hara, was a former speaker of the upper house of the Diet. Following Hara's death in 1999, former Prime Minister Murayama agreed in the fall of 2000 to become the second AWF president.
The fund's activities fall into four categories: 1) to deliver two million yen (around US$18,000 depending on the exchange rate used) to each survivor-applicant as "atonement money" raised from the Japanese people, accompanied by letters of apology from the Prime Minister and the AWF president; 2) to implement government programs for the survivors' welfare; 3) to compile materials on the comfort women for the historical record; and 4) to initiate and support activities that address contemporary issues of violence against women. The funds raised from the private sector between 1995 and 2000 have amounted to about 448 million yen, while the government is expected to expend about 700 million yen over a ten-year period in order to pay the medical and welfare expenses of individual victims. The government also grants the fund several hundred million yen each year for its operating budget.
However, the Japanese government has authorized the fund to operate as a non-profit foundation and regularly reiterates that it supports AWF projects out of moral responsibility and that legal compensation issues have been settled. The meaning of the expenditure of state funds is thus fudged by the state's double-talk. Moreover, with its insistence on moral responsibility, the government has sidestepped the issue of whether the comfort system was a war crime. This is the fundamental reason why supporters of state compensation will continue to reject AWF funds.
Another important issue in the AWF controversy is the state's formal apology to the survivors. When the AWF delivered the first "atonement money" to four Filipina survivors in August 1996, they also handed over letters of apology from both Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto and the President of the AWF, Bunbei Hara. Hashimoto's letter included phrases such as "apology and remorse" and "women's honor and dignity," but without any reference to the war of aggression or colonial domination. Activists for state compensation also found fault with the phrase "my personal feelings" in Hashimoto's letter, pointing out that it conveyed the feelings of one individual and not of the government of Japan. It is not known why the term "personal" was added in the official English translation of the Japanese phrase "watashi no kimochi" (my feeling). From 1998 on, when Keizo Obuchi succeeded Hashimoto as prime minister, the letter in English no longer contained the term "personal." Furthermore, Obuchi's letter in the official Korean translation contains the crucial term sajoe (shazai in Japanese). The English word would be "apology," but it is a stronger term than sagwa, another term for apology: sajoe, in contrast to sagwa, implies the admission of a crime, rather than just a mistake. However, except for a few undisclosed recipients of the AWF atonement money, practically no one in Korea is aware of this terminological change because the AWF projects cannot be implemented publicly, owing largely to the strenuous objections raised by the Korean Council and the survivors.
In any case, in comparison to Hashimoto's 1996 letter, which was designed primarily to evade the issue of state compensation, AWF president Hara's letter of apology recognized the involvement of the Japanese military in establishing comfort stations as well as acknowledging coercion and dissimulation in the recruitment of comfort women, some of whom were teenage girls. Both letters do not fail to mention Japan's "moral responsibility," and the phrase, "in cooperation with the Government of Japan," appears multiple times in Hara's letter.
Since the AWF is a compromise measure to deal with the issue of compensating comfort women survivors, the organization is composed of supporters from opposing camps ranging from conservative neo-nationalists to progressive intellectuals. The tensions among them have resulted, among other things, in personal confrontations on the AWF Committee on Historical Materials on "Comfort Women." For example, Ikuhiko Hata, a conservative historian and a member of the committee, has publicly criticized, in a 1999 essay, fellow committee members Soji Takasaki and Haruki Wada, calling them "termites" (shiroari) and accusing them of having a secret agenda eventually to turn AWF activities into state compensation. A primary reason why even some supporters of state compensation-- such as Wada and Takasaki -- back the AWF is their desire to take some concrete action before elderly survivors die without receiving any tokens of atonement, let alone legal compensation. For his decision, Wada has been subjected to vitriolic name-calling by his former friends and allies.
