INTRODUCTION

On 19 November 2006, the Asian Women's Fund (AWF) convened a symposium in Tokyo to mark its own demise. Established in 1995 on the initiative of the Japanese government to compensate women who had been recruited to provide sexual services for Japanese soldiers during World War II, the AWF's mandate ended on 31 March 2007. Dogged by controversy from its inception, the organization was able to provide compensation to 285 former ianfu (comfort women) in eleven years. Right wing politicians and critics in Japan, who had long insisted that all comfort women had been “voluntary paid prostitutes”, denounced the AWF for attempting to address a non-existent issue. As for the Asian feminist and nationalist women's organizations who had embraced the ianfu as symbols of their various causes, virtually all had pressured the elderly women they supported not to accept funds from the AWF. To the ianfu support groups, the AWF was an attempt on the part of Japanese government to avoid taking full legal responsibility for state-sanctioned sexual enslavement of hundreds of thousands of Asian women.

Throughout its short existence, the AWF represented in a microcosm the failure of Northeast Asian nations to forge a shared perception of a negative past in spite of the passage of more than half a century since the end of World War II. Perhaps it was fitting that the farewell symposium should end with a heated exchange between a representative of a Japanese women's NGO and a Korean academic, one of very few to have come to the AWF's aid. Just as the moderator was about to declare the final session of the symposium closed, Nishino Rumiko, representative of the Japanese NGO VAWW-Net (Violence Against Women in War Network) stated: “This summing up session has been carried out without regard for the victims. The victims don't want money. Their sufferings cannot be settled with financial compensation.”