Why Comfort Women Matter to the U.S.-Japan Values Summit
Getting history right matters and Washington needs to hold its allies to the same moral values and standards that America and its allies claim to represent.
In February 1942, after sinking the
SS Vyner Brooke off the coast of Bangka Island near the Java Sea, the occupying Imperial Japanese gave the Australian and European women who survived a choice: they could starve in a prison camp on Sumatra or sign a document to provide sexual services on demand for Japanese troops.
This episode and many others like it during the war in the Pacific have reverberated over the generations. On Friday, nearly eighty years later, this history will underlie President Joe Biden’s summit meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga.