A group of Asian female lawmakers and former sex slaves from Taiwan and the Philippines yesterday joined Japanese female lawmakers in urging the approval of a bill granting compensation to wartime comfort women.
"On behalf of 155 Taiwanese legislative members I am here to formally demand that Japan makes an apology and compensate former sex slaves through an early enactment of a law," said Taiwanese deputy Kuo Su-chun (
"I'm already over 80 years old and I cannot work any more," said former comfort woman Cheng Chen-tao, 80, from Taiwan.
Cheng burst into tears as she described how she was drafted into sexual slavery in China at age 18 by Japanese police and was kept at a military brothel for 14 months, finally returning to Taiwan to find her entire family had disappeared.
"It still makes me grieve when I talk about what happened more than 65 years ago. We are all old, and we can no longer wait" for restitution, she said.
The meeting was called to press the Japanese Diet to start debating the compensation bill and enact it during the current session which ends on June 29.
The bill was submitted to an upper house committee last November by a group of upper house members from the opposition Social Democratic Party of Japan and the Japan Communist Party. It was the first time a bill designed to spell out an apology over the Japanese Imperial Army's sexual slavery of Asian women had been tabled.But with the end of the parliamentary session looming, the bill looks doomed to fail as deputies have yet to start discussing it.
"The best way to resolve this issue is through the enactment of a law. But the biggest problem lies in the unwillingness of the [ruling] Liberal Democratic Party to cooperate," said Wang Ching-feng (
Attempts by victims to seek legal redress and compensation in Japan's courts have all foundered, with judges ruling claims on the state were settled in bilateral peace treaties after the war.
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