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Japan
- Comfort Women - Norm Internalization through Transnational Legal Process: The
Case of Individual Compensation for the Former Wartime Comfort Women
2011
APSA 2011
Annual Meeting Paper
Abstract:
This paper will explore why the
transnational legal process over the issue of wartime comfort women has not led
to the legislation of individual compensation for them in Japan. It also poses
a theoretical question on the internalization of the international norm of
individual compensation for the victims of war crimes under Article 3 of the
1907 Hague Convention. The puzzle is that diverse transnational efforts to
address the issue and persuade the Japanese government have not been
successful, while legal scholarship suggests that transnational legal process
functions to facilitate interactions among actors involved, including
governments, advocate lawyers, judges, and scholars, to generate an agreed-upon
interpretation of an international norm at issue in a particular context, and
to effect internalization of the norm in domestic society.
The empirical study of the process and establishment of the system of the
individual compensation from private donations from the Japanese people through
the Asia Women’s Fund, as a product of the transnational legal process,
demonstrates that three domestic conditions in Japan obstructed a successful
establishment of an official system of individual compensation by the Japanese
government. These three are the political condition surrounding the
transnational legal process (the rightists’ staunch resistance to individual
compensation and the leftist government’s willingness to compromise with the
rightists), the cleavages in Japanese society, and some leftists’ dogmatism.
The study suggests the need for further exploration of the cases of
transnational legal process in order to see under what circumstances it
functions effectively to lead to an agreed-upon interpretation of an
international norm and thus its internalization in domestic society.