Yayori Matsui

What to do when national and international legal 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 army during World War II. Decades after the Tokyo Trial was held by the Allies, her work helped to give women that were coerced into sexual slavery a voice before international judges, despite the backlash she faced from her home country Japan.

A Family Heritage of Peace

Yayori Matsui – 松井やよりin Japanese – was familiar with advocacy for peace from early childhood days. She was born in Kyoto on 12th April 1934, three years before Japan invaded China. She was the eldest of six children and grew up in Tokyo. Both of her parents were Christian converts who left their previous career paths to take up theological studies at Doshisha University in Kyoto.¹⁾ When her father was drafted as a soldier in 1945, he went on a hunger strike to oppose Japan’s aggression in China.²⁾ He later founded a Christian church where both of Yayori Matsui’s parents worked as ministers. Both of them also continued to be involved in peace and social activism movements.³⁾ Her parents’ beliefs alongside her experiences as a member of a religious minority have been described as influential for Yayori Matsui’s activist career.

Feminism and Journalism

Yayori Matsui studied at the Department of British and American Studies at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, with student exchange stays in France and the US. In 1961, she started her career as one of the few female journalists at Asahi Shimbun, one of the biggest newspapers in Japan. During her early days as a reporter, she preferred to cover environmental and public health issues, initially hesitant about reporting on what society regarded as women’s issues. Most notably, she researched the poisonous mercury spills first discovered in Minamata. From 1981 until 1985, she served as a correspondent in Singapore. Her journalistic work was guided by her belief that true journalism should prioritise advocating for the weak over trying to appear as objective.

Her experiences outside of Japan during her studies and career revealed to her the different experiences women encountered all over the world – racism, poverty and exploitation – but also introduced her to global feminist developments such as the US Women’s Liberation Movement. She grew aware of the connection between Japan’s economic development and the exploitation of Asian women, environmental pollution as well as the impact of Japanese colonialism.⁴⁾ Thus, in the 1970s, she actively began to explore this link in her articles. After facing rejection by the editors for some of her writings, she decided to take charge on her own and started publishing her research and ideas in books and articles outside the newspaper.⁵⁾ She followed a pan-Asian feminist approach, e.g. writing about the feminisation of poverty, migration and trafficking in East Asia as well as Japan’s responsibility for these issues.⁶⁾ In her texts, she understood women to face threefold oppression – economic, political and through military control. One of her central research topics were the trips Japanese men took to other Asian countries to purchase sexual services (‘sex tourism’) which she saw as a form of continuation of the Japanese colonial rule. In 1994, Yayori Matsui retired from Asahi Shimbun and solely focused on her activist work such as founding the feminist network Asia-Japan Women’s Resource Center to participate in global feminist movements.

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

The Tokyo Women’s Tribunal

While researching about Japan and its relations with other Asian countries, Yayori Matsui’s attention soon focused on the enslavement of Asian women by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Asia-Pacific War. Due to the negative optics the army had received for the mass rape of civilians during the invasion of cities like Nanjing, they found a way to institutionalise rape, hidden from the public eye. Euphemistically called “comfort women”, up to 200,000 young women and girls, mostly coming from the colonised and otherwise occupied territories (mainly the Koreas, but also China, the Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Timor-Leste, and Japan), already in a marginalised position because of previous involvement in the sex work industry 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 core international crimes, they did note the “recruiting” of women for prostitution, however, it was not recognised as a crime of rape or slavery. When survivors finally started to speak up in the 90s, claims for compensation or reparations within Japan and seeking justice through international institutions and organisations such as the UN remained largely unsuccessful. The awareness for sexual violence in war, however, was heightened, most notably due to the Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.⁸⁾ To finally achieve some sort of justice for the survivors, Yayori Matsui organised the Japanese Branch of the Violence Against Women in War Network and proposed a criminal tribunal at the Asian Women’s Solidarity Conference in 1998, together with Indai Lourdes Sajor and Yun Chung-ok.

Their idea became reality in 2000 with the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery, located in Tokyo (Tokyo Women’s Tribunal). It was a people’s tribunal which means it was organised by civil groups instead of state actors or international organisations. Even though a people’s tribunal has no legal power to enforce its findings, it raises public attention, collects evidence, allows survivors to share their experiences, and is a way of naming and shaming through the civil society. The Tokyo Women’s Tribunal’s goal was to establish individual criminal and state responsibility, for which it recruited various high-profile and qualified jurists as judges and prosecutors. It was supposed to be an continuation of the IMTFE with its charter being based on the IMTFE’s legal framework so as not to interfere with the principle of legality. During the opening ceremony of the trial, Yayori Matsui stated:

“Our tribunal is not a mock trial, nor is it seeking vengeance. 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 state influence and indicted not only ten top military and government officials, but also the late Emperor Hirohito, who had been spared at the IMTFE and whose involvement in the war was still seen as a taboo.⁹⁾ Formerly enslaved survivors of sexual violence from all over the East-Asia-Pacific region as well as professors and veterans appeared as witnesses. The judgment found evidence of mass rape, torture, sexual and (other) physical violence, forced abortions, slave labour, pregnancies and murder, for which they found the accused, including the Emperor, guilty. Also, they held the Japanese state responsible and ordered reparations.

The effectiveness and legitimacy of people’s tribunals is not for this post to determine. What makes the tribunal stand out, though, is its feminist approach. It is based upon a classic feminist method – analysing where international law has stayed silent and filling the gaps. For Yayori Matsui, the tribunal contributed not only to fill in the gaps, but to advance people’s involvement in international law altogether. In line with her feminist concept, the Tribunal was meant to bring justice to women affected by the intersection of various oppressive systems such as colonisation, gender and class. Another notable aspect was the focus on eyewitness reports, giving survivors a direct voice. However, the tribunal was met with ignorance or hostility in Japan, which lead to the cancellation of the only planned Japanese media coverage.¹⁰⁾

A Legacy of Fighting Injustice

After the Tribunal had ended, Yayori Matsui collected all its material for her new plan of preserving it in a museum. Completely unexpected, she received the news that she was suffering from late stage liver cancer in 2002. She died only a few months later on 27th December 2002 and left all her property for the creation 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 propelled by outrage and anger against injustice. I have been offered no official or social status of power, and I take that as an honour.”

This quote goes to show that Yayori Matsui was a controversially perceived 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, even being subject to right wing violent attacks. While Yayori Matsui did tackle prominent issues of second wave feminism such as forced prostitution, categorising her in such a way does not do her nuanced detection of intersecting issues¹²⁾ justice. She presented environmentalist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist ideas and stayed critical of Western feminism while acknowledging that Japanese women could be both victims and victimisers. Although she was not a lawyer herself, she used international law as a tool to achieve justice and influenced legal thinking on gender crimes in Japan.¹³⁾ With the ongoing negative responses to survivor’s activism by the Japanese state, her work remains as relevant as ever and should lead us to acknowledge her contribution to international law.

Further Readings

• Christine Chinkin, “Women’s International Tribunal on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery.” The American Journal of International Law 95, no. 2 (Apr 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, “Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s 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, Angered and Fought Courageously’.” 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 Report on Academic Research 71 (2020): 43-50. https://doi.org/10.15020/00001936.

Further Sources

• Archived material from the Tokyo Women’s Tribunal: Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal Archives | 女性国際戦犯法廷アーカイブズ (wam-peace.org)
• Documentary and panel discussion about the Tribunal: “Gendered Peace: the legacy of the Tokyo Women’s Tribunal,” LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security. Gendered Peace: the legacy of the Tokyo Women’s Tribunal (youtube.com)
• Documentary with original footage from the Tribunal: “Breaking the History of Silence,” Video Juku. Breaking the History of Silence (youtube.com)