Ghosts of the Unburied: The Echo of Japan’s Unatoned Sexual Slavery Crimes

By end of WW II, Japanese Imperial Army forced ±200,000 women into rape centers. Only about 25% are said to have survived those daily abuses. --

In the long shadow of the Second World War, Japan emerged from defeat not only economically revived but narratively cleansed. The story crafted by legal institutions, particularly the Tokyo Trial (International Military Tribunal for the Far East), presented a sanitized image of injustice. This post-war legal theater, administered by Allied powers, indicted Class-A war criminals while systematically omitting Japan’s most degrading crime against humanity: the sexual enslavement of over 200,000 of women and girls across Asia, many underage.

This omission was not accidental. It was strategic.

Sanitized Injustice and the Legacy of Silence

The Tokyo Trial, hailed as a landmark moment in international justice, was in fact structurally incapable of delivering moral or legal redress to the survivors of Japan’s sexual violence. No charges of systematic rape, forced prostitution, or sexual slavery were brought. The suffering of women from Korea, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, and other occupied regions was deliberately ignored from the record, but forever unerasable from the memories of the victims.

Even more damning was the complicity of emerging international legal frameworks. Institutions like the ICRC, which had long championed the codification of humanitarian law, remained silent. The 1926 Slavery Convention, and the 1929 Geneva Convention failed to explicitly recognize sexual violence as a war crime. Though the post-WW II years brought the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the adoption itself was in 10 December 1948, just 29 days difference after the Tokyo Trial concluded in 12 November 1948, after 2.5 years of trials. Coincidence?

This silence by institutions that should have protected the most vulnerable reveals a disturbing truth: international law, as applied, was a function of post-war geopolitics, not moral rectitude. Tokyo Trial was a geopolitics-centered solution, never the victim-centered restoration. Has justice been served by Tokyo Trial? For geopolitical interests, perhaps. But for the more than 200,000 women and girls subjected to sexual slavery by Imperial Japan, justice was never delivered. And if we account for the grief carried by their families, the true number of people purposefully harmed by Japan’s system of military sexual enslavement is three to four times greater — a legacy of sorrow left intentionally unresolved. The Tokyo Trial was expected to deliver justice, instead it extended injustice indefinitely.

The Durkheim Diagnosis: Unatoned Crimes and Social Decay

Sociologist Émile Durkheim posited that when a society fails to address collective transgressions, it breeds a moral sickness. Crime unpunished becomes embedded into the social order, transforming from aberration into norm. What is not condemned becomes permissible; what is not atoned for festers.

This theoretical lens illuminates post-war Japan. The nation's refusal to acknowledge or redress its wartime sexual crimes has metastasized into present-day crises: a demographic implosion, the normalization of youth commodification in popular culture, alienation from historical truth, and an aversion to moral accountability. These are not separate issues. They are the cultural symptoms of a nation haunted by its unburied dead.

When States and Courts Failed: Law Reborn Through Conscience

When crimes of such scale remain unsolved and unacknowledged, they fester socially, legally, and spiritually. Durkheim warned that failure to restore the moral balance of a society after collective trauma results in structural decay and social anomie. This decay does not vanish with time; it migrates into law, into institutions, into everyday norms.

The Tokyo Trial did not restore the dignity of the sexually enslaved; it refused even to name them as victims. In this moral vacuum, survivors and feminist jurists convened the 2000 Tokyo Women's Tribunal—not as theater, but as law reborn through collective conscience. It was a people’s response to institutional cowardice. That the only full indictment of Japan’s sexual slavery system came not from the UN, nor the ICRC, nor IHL bodies—but from survivors themselves—reveals how global justice was negotiated away for political stability.

Confucius warned that cowardice must be called out in nations that refuse to do what is right—not by might or legality, but by moral will. The unresolved sexual crimes committed under Japan’s imperial project have become the unburied ghosts that haunt its present: from demographic collapse and commodified girlhood to a nation morally adrift. These are not unrelated crises—they are consequences of crimes left to rot. The age of sexual consent to Japan was 13 years which was adopted in 1907. It was only in 2023 Japan raised the age to 16 years.

A Call to Remember, and to Reckon

International humanitarian law, born out of wars and refined in treaties, has failed the very people it claimed to protect. The ICRC, the Geneva Conventions, the Tokyo Trial, and the UN all bear responsibility for enabling a silence that spanned generations. The 2000 Women’s Tribunal was not a footnote; it is a lighthouse that still projecting light, an emergency siren that still raising voice. And yet it remains ignored by the powers that continue to decide whose pain matters.

Justice was not only denied. It was traded.

If we are to understand Japan’s internal decline, we must look beyond GDP, beyond politics, beyond population graphs. Japan’s attempt to revise its own history — including efforts to remove the term “comfort women” from textbooks — reveals the guilt that continues to haunt its national conscience. We must listen to the silence beneath the national anthem, the silence where voices once cried and were buried. These ghosts are not of the past. They are the indictment of the present.

They will not rest until truth is named, and justice done.