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I. Introduction
In 1897, the Japanese intellectual Uchimura Kanzo1 wrote in an essay entitled "National Repentance":
Repentance is humble acknowledgement of the supremacy of the Eternal Law of Justice, from which no man or nation-not even Japan-can be exempt.... Nothing can buy off the just penalties of sins by whomsoever committed, but contrite and broken hearts. No glories of war can cover up the innocent blood that is shed in connection therewith. The sooner we own our evils as evils, the better.2
In the following century, Uchimura's words had a new relevance for his country. Beginning with its invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and continuing throughout the duration of its involvement in World War II, the Japanese military committed countless wartime atrocities against the peoples of East Asia and the Pacific and against the military forces of the Allied Powers. The record of atrocities included torture, massacres, executions, forced labor, and the razing of entire cities.3 Many of these crimes were prosecuted by the international community after the war at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) in Tokyo, and at other military tribunals set up by the members of the Allied Powers throughout Asia and the Pacific.4 This paper, however, addresses a crime that, for the most part, was never prosecuted: the subjugation of roughly 200,000 women and girls into a system of sexual slavery, where they were euphemistically referred to as "comfort women."5 In the sixty years that have passed since the conclusion of World War II, the vast majority of the victims of this system of slavery have yet to receive any legal recognition or redress for the wrongs they suffered. In 2000, a group of former "comfort women" filed suit in a United States federal court, seeking monetary damages from the government of Japan for its wartime violations of their rights under international law. Sadly, however, the case of Hwang v. Japan6 soon became one more in the series of legal and political defeats for the "comfort women." Despite the tireless work of legal scholars in articulating the principles of international humanitarian law throughout the twentieth century, the unresolved cases of the "comfort women" make it painfully clear that these principles are still far from being realized.
This...