ITO AY SINABI KNOW WHAT KAMALA HARRIS WOULD DO FOR THE COMFORT WOMEN. WHAT WILL DONALD TRUMP DO?

ITO AY SINABI

Some of us who worked in the Harris Campaign had gotten a commitment from Vice President Harris that she examines the issue of the World War II Comfort Women. These were women who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army. Among them were thousands of Koreans, Filipina, Vietnamese, Kymer and many others. Many of these women some as young as 14 were required to 'service" up to 8 Japanese soldiers every day. I gave my word to a very beautiful Lola, or grandmother in Manila that President Harris would address the issue, which essentially requires the Japanese government to more than it has none to acknowledge and to make some sort of reparations ( there is that word again) to the women, who are very few, and senior citizens today and there will be even fewer next year.

We had written to President Trump during his first term. Nothing happened. Given the history of sexual offenses by Donald Trump & his Attorney General designate, I do not have a

THE COMFORT WOMEN KNEW NO COMFORT

Roland Nicholson Jr.

Principal at Roland Nicholson, Jr. & Associates

Published Nov 29, 2020

Since the death of SF Mayor Ed Lee three years ago, there have been several monuments erected to the Women who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army during WW ll. During my last trip to Japan someone suggested to me that it might be time to put the issue of the so called " Comfort Women", to rest. Comfort women is the name the Japanese Army applied to the women and young, some as young as 11 & 12 who were raped repeatedly by Japanese soldiers during World War II. I invoked Faulkner, " The past is not dead. It is not even past ". The grand daughter of a Filipina Lola, grandmother in Tagalog and the word that is used to refer to the Comfort women who survived the Japanese Army, just asked me, "Roland, now that the US is about to have an Asian woman VP, can more pressure be brought on getting the Japanese government to do more in terms of reparations and acknowledgement. At some point great sins have to be addressed. There is not a single person in America alive today who owned or who was a slave. General Sherman's Field order 15 , which would have redistributed the wealth of slave owners to freed slaves in the South was never implemented. Many think that the greatest failure of Reconstruction was the failure of Reparations. We are still having that debate. I hope my Filipina Lola friend lives to see 100, but whatever happens we cannot pretend that a great crime was not perpetrated by the Japanese Empire. " The past is ........" . You know the drill.

Roland Nicholson Jr. is in San Francisco, California.

December 26, 2017 ·

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

Dec. 16, 2017

Farewell to Mayor Ed Lee

Rest in peace, Mayor Ed Lee. We at the Fortune Society will continue the fight against over-incarceration and the homelessness that it can lead to. While the U.S. is mired in sex scandals and trying to decide how it should continue to honor men who fought for the cause of continuing slavery, you saw to it that your great city erected a monument to a group of women who were the victims of the greatest sex crime in history: the “comfort women.”

They were Chinese, Dutch, Korean, Filipina and other women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army during World War ll. As you told me once: “To ignore a crime is a crime itself.” Thank you for putting faces on them. See you in heaven, Bro.

The Rev. Roland Nicholson, Jr.,

San Francisco

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