Yayori Matsui – Verfassungsblog

What to do when national and international justice systems fail thousands of survivors of sexual violence? The life and work of Yayori Matsui shows that the fight for justice does not require a legal background. As a journalist and feminist activist, she succeeded in convening a private people’s tribunal to prosecute crimes against women committed by the Japanese military during World War II. Decades after the Allied Tokyo Trial, her work helped give women forced into sexual slavery a voice before international judges, despite the backlash she faced from her home country of Japan.

A family legacy of peace

Yayori Matsui – 松井やより in Japanese – was familiar with peace advocacy from an early age. She was born in Kyoto on April 12, 1934, three years before Japan invaded China. She was the eldest of six children and grew up in Tokyo. Her parents were both Christian converts who abandoned their previous careers to study theology at Doshisha University in Kyoto.¹⁾ When her father was called up as a soldier in 1945, he went on hunger strike to oppose Japanese aggression in China.²⁾ He later founded a Christian church where both of Yayori Matsui’s parents served as pastors. Both also remained involved in peace and social activist movements.³⁾ Her parents’ beliefs and her experiences as a member of a religious minority are seen as influential in Yayori Matsui’s activist career.

Feminism and journalism

Yayori Matsui studied at the Department of British and American Studies at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, with student exchanges in France and the US. In 1961, she began her career as one of the few female journalists at Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s largest newspapers. In her early years as a reporter, she preferred to cover environmental and public health issues, initially reluctant to report on what society considered women’s issues. In particular, she investigated the toxic mercury spills first discovered in Minamata. From 1981 to 1985, she was a correspondent in Singapore. Her journalistic work was guided by her belief that true journalism should prioritize standing up for the weak rather than trying to appear objective.

Her experiences outside Japan during her studies and career revealed to her the different experiences women faced around the world – racism, poverty and exploitation – but also introduced her to global feminist developments such as the American women’s liberation movement. She became aware of the connection between Japan’s economic development and the exploitation of Asian women, environmental pollution and the impact of Japanese colonialism.⁴⁾ In the 1970s, she began to actively explore this link in her articles. After being rejected by editors for some of her writing, she decided to take matters into her own hands and began publishing her research and ideas in books and articles outside the newspaper.⁵⁾ She adopted a pan-Asian feminist approach, writing, for example, on the feminization of poverty, migration and human trafficking in East Asia and Japan’s responsibility for these issues.⁶⁾ In her writings, she understood women as facing triple oppression: economic, political, and military control. One of her central research topics was the travel Japanese men made to other Asian countries to purchase sexual services (“sex tourism”), which she saw as a form of continuation of Japanese colonial rule. In 1994, Yayori Matsui retired from Asahi Shimbun and focused exclusively on her activist work, such as founding the feminist network Asia-Japan Women’s Resource Center to participate in global feminist movements.

(c) Women Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM)

Tokyo Women’s Tribunal

During her research on Japan and its relations with other Asian countries, Yayori Matsui’s attention soon turned to the enslavement of Asian women by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Asia-Pacific War. Because of the negative optics the military had received for the mass rape of civilians during the invasion of cities like Nanjing, they found a way to institutionalize rape, hidden from the public eye. Euphemistically called “comfort women,” up to 200,000 young women and girls, mostly from the colonized and otherwise occupied territories (primarily the Koreas, but also China, the Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, East Timor, and Japan), already in a marginalized position due to previous involvement in the sex trade or poverty, were tricked or forcibly abducted and enslaved in military brothels.⁷⁾When the Allies established the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) to prosecute Japanese military and political leaders for fundamental international crimes, they noted that women were “recruited” for prostitution, but this was not recognized as a crime of rape or slavery. When survivors finally came forward in the 1990s, claims for compensation or reparations within Japan and efforts to seek justice through international institutions and organizations such as the UN remained largely unsuccessful. However, awareness of sexual violence in war was raised, notably through the Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.⁸⁾ To finally bring some justice to the survivors, Yayori Matsui founded the Japanese branch of the Violence Against Women in War Network and, at the 1998 Asian Women’s Solidarity Conference, together with Indai Lourdes Sajor and Yun Chung-ok, proposed the establishment of a criminal tribunal.

Their idea became a reality in 2000 with the Tokyo-based Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery (Tokyo Women’s Tribunal). It was a people’s tribunal, meaning that it was organized by civil society groups rather than state actors or international organizations. While a people’s tribunal lacks legal authority to enforce its findings, it attracts public attention, collects evidence, allows survivors to share their experiences, and serves as a means of naming and shaming through civil society. The Tokyo Women’s Tribunal’s goal was to determine individual criminal and state responsibility, recruiting several eminent and qualified jurists as judges and prosecutors. It was intended to be a continuation of the IMTFE, with its charter based on the IMTFE’s legal framework so as not to disrupt the principle of legality. At the trial’s opening ceremony, Yayori Matsui stated:

“Our tribunal is not a show trial, nor is it seeking revenge. It is a people’s tribunal with a legal framework.”

Unlike the IMTFE, the Tokyo Women’s Tribunal was able to operate without any political influence from the state and indicted not only ten high-ranking military and government officials, but also the late Emperor Hirohito, who had been spared by the IMTFE and whose involvement in the war was still considered taboo.⁹⁾ Former slave survivors of sexual violence from across the East Asia-Pacific region, as well as professors and veterans, appeared as witnesses. The verdict found evidence of mass rape, torture, sexual and (other) physical violence, forced abortions, slave labor, pregnancy, and murder, for which they found the accused, including the emperor, guilty. They also held the Japanese state responsible and ordered reparations.

The effectiveness and legitimacy of people’s courts is not for this post to determine. What sets the tribunal apart, however, is its feminist approach. It is based on a classic feminist method: analyzing where international law has remained silent and filling in the gaps. For Yayori Matsui, the tribunal not only contributed to filling in the gaps, but also to promoting people’s engagement with international law in general. In line with her feminist concept, the tribunal was intended to bring justice to women affected by the intersection of various oppressive systems such as colonization, gender, and class. Another notable aspect was its focus on eyewitness accounts, giving survivors a direct voice. However, the tribunal was received with ignorance or hostility in Japan, leading to the cancellation of the only planned Japanese media coverage.¹⁰⁾

A legacy of the fight against injustice

After the Tribunal ended, Yayori Matsui gathered all the material for her new plan to preserve it in a museum. Quite unexpectedly, in 2002, she received the news that she was suffering from advanced liver cancer. She died just a few months later, on December 27, 2002, leaving all her possessions to the establishment of the museum.¹¹⁾ Her vision came to life in 2005 with the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace in Tokyo. In one of her last publicly available statements, she wrote:

“My life has been a life of action, driven by outrage and anger at injustice. I have not been offered any official or social status of power, and I consider that an honor.”

This quote shows that Yayori Matsui was a controversial figure. Although she has been described as a “legendary figure in the Japanese women’s movement”, her fight against militarism, nationalism and revisionism also made her unpopular in her home country, and she was even the victim of right-wing violent attacks. Although Yayori Matsui addressed prominent issues of second-wave feminism, such as forced prostitution, categorizing her in such a way does not do justice to her nuanced detection of intersecting issues.¹²⁾ justice. She presented environmentalist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist ideas and remained critical of Western feminism, while recognizing that Japanese women could be both victims and perpetrators. Although not a lawyer herself, she used international law as a tool to achieve justice and influenced legal thinking on gender crime in Japan.¹³⁾ Despite the Japanese state’s continued negative responses to survivors’ activism, her work is still relevant and we should recognize her contribution to international law.

Read more

• Christine Chinkin, “International Women’s Tribunal on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery.” The American Journal of International Law 95, no. 2 (April 2001): 335–341. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2661399.
• Yayori Matsui, Women in the New Asia: From Pain to Power (London: Zed Books Ltd, 1999).
• Yayori Matsui, “International War Crimes Tribunal for Women on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery: Memory, Identity, and Society.” East Asia 19 (Dec. 2001): 119–142. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12140-001-0020-2.
• Yumiko Mikanagi, “In Memory of Yayori Matsui Who ‘Loved, Was Angry, and Fought Bravely’.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 6, no. 1 (2004): 141–149. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461674032000165978.
• Lisa Rogers, “Japanese Women Activist Leaders and Global Networks: A Brief Study of Yayori Matsui”. Doshisha Women’s University Annual Review of Academic Research 71 (2020): 43–50. https://doi.org/10.15020/00001936.

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