Symposium: The Second World War in Asia: Justice Efforts, War Memory, and Reparations
Tokyo Women’s Tribunal – Voices of the Women Working Behind the Scenes
(Part One)
Interviews of Indai Sajor, Aurora De Dios, and Susan Macabuag
By Aishwarya Arumugham and Lee Jia Ying
Published on 19 January 2024
The Tokyo Women’s Tribunal (TWT) was a peoples’ tribunal that addressed the mass rape and sexual enslavement of women, also known as ‘comfort women’, by Japanese military personnel during the Second World War. This piece features excerpts from a series of interviews conducted by the authors with Indai Sajor, Aurora de Dios, and Susan Macabuag, three Filipina activists who played key roles in the organizing of the TWT.
Indai Sajor was one of the three main organizers of the tribunal. Aurora de Dios was one of the prosecutors in the Philippines prosecution team. Susan Macabuag was the deputy to the tribunal’s registrar.
This two-part blog post discusses the rationale, organization, and impact of the TWT. Part 1 explores the ideas underlying the TWT, the influence of familial ties and secrecy on the TWT’s organization, and the TWT’s engagement with individual and state responsibility. Part 2 examines some challenges encountered by activists when organizing the TWT. It ends with our interviewees’ advice to future generations.
Question: May we know how the idea for the TWT came about?
Indai Sajor: This idea was started by Yung Jun Ok and followed through by Yayori Matsui, a Japanese reporter, and I. We were in Geneva in 1998 as we brought the case of the ‘comfort women’ to the UN Commission of Human Rights, pushing for different governments to urge Japan to recognise their accountability to the case of the ‘comfort women’. For years we had unsuccessfully filed court cases in the Tokyo District Court for the ‘comfort women’. It was in Geneva that Yayori Matsui asked me one day, to consider whether we should organise a peoples’ tribunal on the ‘comfort women’.
Question: Why did you choose the format of a tribunal? Did you consider any other formats such as a fact-finding commission?
Indai Sajor: When Yayori suggested the TWT, one of my main conditions for it was that it should be similar to the structure of the International Criminal Court (ICC). In fact, our approach towards this issue had been very legal from the start since we brought the cases before Japanese courts. The entire concept and framework down to the name was modelled after the International Military Tribunal of the Far East (IMTFE) also known as the Tokyo War Crimes Trial. The war criminals that were prosecuted at the IMTFE were those who were also prosecuted at the TWT. We were very legalistic in our approach from the start, studying and researching the IMTFE war archives, where it was very clear that they did not include rape and sexual slavery in the IMTFE charter. That gave us more resolve and determination to hold a war crimes trial to specifically prosecute sexual slavery and rape.
Question: How did you collect evidence regarding the mass rape of Mapanique for the TWT?
Susan Macabuag: We spent several months in the village of Mapanique together with Indai Sajor and practically interviewed all the survivors of mass rape and the men who were also tortured by the Japanese soldiers. We interviewed and collected evidence from about 70 survivors. In fact, these survivors were victims of mass rape that took place in the village of Pampanga, Philippines. There were also other ‘comfort women’ from other provinces whom we interviewed during this period.
Indai Sajor: The case of the mass rapes in Mapanique was very interesting. One day the son of one of the women heard me talking on the radio about the women who were raped during the Second World War and that those who are still alive should come forward as we would like to document their stories. He surprisingly arrived in my office with two vans of old women out of the blue. There were 25 women interviewed that day and 18 of them were victims of mass rape and two or three of them were ‘comfort women’ who stayed in the ‘comfort station’ for months. Out of the three, two of them were mother and daughter. The daughter was the mother of the guy who brought all of them that day to my office.
Susan and I started to dig deep into their stories, and they were all recounting the same experience. Susan whispered to me, ‘Their stories are all the same. Are you sure this is true?’ We thought about how possible this is since the stories were all the same. Then I decided to visit their village. This is where we found the Bahay na Pula, that literally means ‘red house’ as the house has red bricks, where the mass rape took place. The house had a very beautiful, very Hispanic, architecture with a veranda and it was located in the middle of a rice field. I started talking to the local officials and they told me that the Japanese first killed the women’s husbands, fathers, and brothers before bringing them to Bahay na Pula and raping them. Some of the women were released on the first day, some on the second day and so on. That was when we realised that their story is a classic mass rape. They named themselves ‘Malaya Lolas’.
Question: Were the families and communities of survivors involved at any point during the TWT process?
Indai Sajor: In the case of all the ‘comfort women’, the majority of their families did not know that they were raped during the war. Some of the women’s husbands did not even know, as it is a shame to be a rape victim and one is stigmatized forever. There was one strong Lola in Mapanique, who was a really beautiful tall woman with smiling eyes, already in her late eighties at that time. She told us, that before she got married, she told her husband: ‘I just want you to know that I was raped by the Japanese three years ago during the war as I don’t want to you to come back to me and accused of lying.’ That courage gave her dignity and made a lot of difference for her. For the other women in Mapanique who did not tell their husbands, their testimonies and stories later created tension and conflict within families.
The majority of families in Mapanique supported these women. But some children were stunned and even shocked to learn of their mothers or grandmothers being raped during the war. There was one young grandson who was angry and ashamed to talk about it. We had to address a lot of this within families when we met with them. We held meetings with the husbands, children, and grandchildren of these women to explain to them that it was not the fault of these women. That it was the fault of those who raped them during the war. As a matter of fact, when the TWT judgment was handed down, these communities genuinely felt they won the case. The young grandson who was ashamed of what happened to his grandmother went around telling others that [his grandmother] won the case in Tokyo. He was very proud of it. The TWT judgment changed people’s lives.
Aurora de Dios: It was a very sensitive issue. I think the family members were as much surprised as everyone else that the Lolas had this kind of experience. I think it was also traumatic for them. They too had to process what they leaned. They asked themselves: ‘How could my Lola have kept this secret for a long, long time’.
Family members could not always be expected to cooperate or support these women. Sometimes the Lolas will come on their own. They came with no family. I remember this old woman who lived in the shack from Ilo Ilo. I think I remember her the most since she came to Tokyo without adequate winter clothes, so I lent her several of my shawls to keep her warm. I was asking her about where her relatives were and she did not have any because earlier on, the family had abandoned her. She was 70 or 80 years old, and I could see that she suffered in life, she was so thin. Some of these women did not have family, and when they had family, sometimes their family members would be ashamed and embarrassed about the whole thing.
Question: As a TWT organiser, which aspect of the TWT do you think is the most unique, perhaps in comparison or relation to other tribunals such as the Permanent People’s Tribunal (PPT) or the Nuremberg Trial?
Indai Sajor: The TWT was totally different from the PPT as we set it up like a real war crimes tribunal from the start. We studied and researched the IMTFE and the ad hoc international criminal tribunals of the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Some of us including me participated as NGOs in negotiations leading to the ICC’s establishment. The writing of the charter of the TWT took us a year to complete, with lawyers and advocates from nine countries meeting in Tokyo, Shanghai, Seoul, Taipei and Manila where it was finalized. We all came from different legal systems. Most of the lawyers were domestic lawyers and had to familiarize themselves with international law and international humanitarian law. A gender-sensitive approach was also taken from the start when drafting the Charter of the TWT. And most of all the TWT addressed both individual criminal responsibility and state responsibility.
Question: The TWT addressed both individual criminal responsibility and state responsibility. Which was more important in your opinion?
Aurora de Dios: State responsibility was important for me because the ‘comfort system’ was a state policy. It was not random. It took place over a period of time and required infrastructure, planning and strategizing. It was integral to the military invasion of Southeast Asian countries. Individual criminal responsibility is also important, but it doesn’t make sense to pinpoint individuals if we don’t consider the wider framework that facilitated their actions.
Indai Sajor: State responsibility. I think the unique thing we did was to indict Emperor Hirohito. Since we decided to do both individual accountability and state accountability, there arose tensions with the South Korea Team because they wanted just state responsibility. But all of us insisted that we had to have individual accountability because the individuals were the ones who executed the command to set up the ‘comfort station’.
Part Two will be available at 3:00pm, 19 January 2024