Legislators Call on Japan to 'Accept Responsibility for Sexual Slavery' During WWII

A senate panel approved a resolution that commemorates the struggles endured by ‘comfort women’ at the hands of the Japanese government during WWII, Bergen County assembly members Connie Wagner and Gordon Johnson said in a statement Monday.

The bill now awaits full approval by the New Jersey senate.

“Some of these women were sold to ‘comfort stations’ as minors, others were deceptively recruited with the promise of employment and financial security, and still others were forcibly kidnapped and sent to ‘work’ for soldiers stationed throughout the Japanese occupied territories,” said Johnson (D-37), who drafted the bill with Wagner. “Although many have long since passed, they still deserve the dignity of having these crimes acknowledged by their perpetrators with the hope that it will never be repeated again.”

The bill also calls upon the Japanese government to “accept historical responsibility for the sexual enslavement of comfort women by the Imperial Japanese military and educate future generations about these crimes,” the pair wrote.

Most of the women – estimated to number as many as 200,000 – came from Korea or China and were interned at military comfort stations where they would be forced to have sex with Japanese soldiers. Other women came from Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Maylasia, the Phillipines, Australia and the Netherlands.

The issue of memorializing the women has been hotly debated in Fort Lee in recent months.

Korean-American groups have been lobbying for a memorial to be constructed honoring women at Abbott Boulevard's Freedom Park. But infighting among various groups over the verbiage and design of the proposed memorial has halted the project.

The decades-old crimes are “too horrific to ignore” and should not be “glossed over” with historical inaccuracies, Wagner (D-38) said.

“Approximately three-quarters of comfort women have died as a direct result of the brutality inflicted on them during their internment,” Wagner said. “Of those who survived, many were left infertile due to sexual violence or sexually transmitted diseases and many are now dying without proper acknowledgment by the Japanese government of the suffering they endured during their forced internment in military comfort stations.” 

Palisades Park and Bergen County currently have dedicated memorials to Comfort Women.