Japan's fund for former sex slaves never achieved purpose

Facing calls to compensate the aging victims of its wartime sexual slavery, Japan set up the Asian Women's Fund in 1995. It was a significant concession from Japan, which has always asserted that postwar treaties absolved it of all individual claims from World War II. But the fund only fueled anger in the very countries with which Japan had sought reconciliation. By the time it closed as scheduled last month, only a fraction of the former sex slaves had accepted money from the fund.

Two Asian governments even offered their own money to discourage more women from taking Japan's.

The central problem was that the Japanese government had set up the fund as a private one and made clear that the "atonement" payments came from ordinary citizens. Critics inside and outside Japan saw the fund as another tortured attempt by Tokyo to avoid taking full responsibility for one of the ugliest aspects of the war.

"It was not directly from the Japanese government - that is why I did not accept it," said Ellen van der Ploeg, 84, a Dutchwoman who was taken from a prisoner of war camp in Indonesia and forced to work in a Japanese military brothel for three months in 1944. "If you have made mistakes in life, you must have the courage to say, 'I'm sorry, please forgive me.' But the Japanese government to this day has never taken full responsibility."

"If this were a pure government fund, I could have accepted it," Van der Ploeg said by telephone from Houten, the Netherlands. "Why should I accept money from private Japanese people? They were also victims during the war."