The government might soon enter talks with the Japanese government and demand that it offer an official apology and provide compensation to Taiwanese women used as sex slaves by the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II, a diplomatic official said yesterday.
Huang Ming-lung (黃明朗), secretary-general of the East Asian Relations Commission of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told a regular press conference that the ministry would bring up the issue with Japanese officials as soon as the government resumes operations after the New Year break.
Attending an exhibition on Sunday highlighting litigation by Taiwanese against Japan over the issue of comfort women, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said he regretted the Japanese government’s failure to acknowledge its mistakes and promised to seek justice for the women.
“The position of the Taiwanese government has been that the Japanese government has to apologize and compensate the comfort women as soon as possible,” Huang said.
Japan has rejected such requests from the Taiwanese government in the past, but Taipei has never wavered from its position, he said.
Although some Taiwanese victims, along with victims from Korea and the Philippines, had previously obtained compensation from a fund sponsored by several Japanese civic groups, they considered it inappropriate and insufficient because Tokyo has refused to admit the women were either recruited or swindled by the Japanese government to become comfort women, Huang said.
The number of comfort women conscripted by Japan during World War II is estimated to have reached 500,000 throughout East and Southeast Asia, the Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation says.
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
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IN FULL SWING: Recall drives against lawmakers in Hualien, Taoyuan and Hsinchu have reached the second-stage threshold, the campaigners said Campaigners in a recall petition against Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Yen Kuan-heng (顏寬恒) in Taichung yesterday said their signature target is within sight, and that they need a big push to collect about 500 more signatures from locals to reach the second-stage threshold. Recall campaigns against KMT lawmakers Johnny Chiang (江啟臣), Yang Chiung-ying (楊瓊瓔) and Lo Ting-wei (羅廷瑋) are also close to the 10 percent threshold, and campaigners are mounting a final push this week. They need about 800 signatures against Chiang and about 2,000 against Yang. Campaigners seeking to recall Lo said they had reached the threshold figure over the
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