The SMH argues in its recent editorial titled Australia must face up to its role in the lack of justice for comfort women that the 'comfort women' agreement between South Korea and Japan creates the political fiction that Japan's government has ceded to the demands of sexual slavery survivors and finally made amends for past wrongs.
The Japanese military organised the sexual enslavement of women in an Australian territory during the war (New Guinea), which we inexplicably failed to prosecute in trials after the war. Civic groups in Papua New Guinea today retain evidence of tens of thousands of cases of Japanese military war crimes, and cry out for assistance in approaching Japan for recognition and restitution.
Australia has never responded to these appeals, despite the enduring fact of our own historical liability for failing to protect women in an Australian jurisdiction and failing to pursue justice for them after the war.
Without Australian help, Papua New Guineas wartime comfort women have little possibility of ever attaining justice.
If we want to celebrate an occasion of justice delivered the wartime comfort women, Australia should immediately commence investigation of what happened in wartime New Guinea. But for this to be politically possible, our relationship with Japan needs to be placed second to the historical justice owed to sexual slavery survivors. For their sake, I hope the pull of our allied interests will be resistible.
