Yayori Matsui

Yayori Matsui (松井やより Matsui Yayori) (April 12, 1934 – December 27, 2002) was a Japanese journalist and women's rights activist noted for her work to raise awareness of sex slaves and sex tourism in post-war Asia. In 1961 she began work as a journalist for the newspaper Asahi Shimbun, retiring in 1994 to work as a full-time social activist, founding numerous women's organizations and writing on gender inequality in Japan and on sex crimes committed by the Japanese Imperial Army, namely against the comfort women of the Second World War. Her work culminated in the 2000 Tokyo Women's War Crimes Tribunal, a tribunal held to gain some form of justice for the victims of Japanese military sexual slavery.

Biography Matsui was born in Kyoto, Japan, to a family of Christian ministers. Her family moved to Tokyo where her parents founded the Yamate Christian Church and raised their six children. Matsui was introduced to the feminist movement while on a trip to the United States and Europe during her junior year in college. In their work Gender in Modern East Asia, Barbara Molony, Janet Theiss, and Hyaeweol Choi state that she experienced revulsion at the blatant racism she encountered there and surprise over the disparity in wealth and equality between these regions and Asia. As a representative of Asahi Shimbun and of the Asian Women's Association which she founded, Matsui attended all United Nations conferences from 1975 to 1995.

In 1976, she founded the organization Asian Women in Solidarity in opposition to sex tourism in Asia. In 1981, she was posted as a correspondent in Singapore, where she came into contact with comfort women, women who were forced into prostitution by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World War. In 1994, she resigned from Asahi to work full-time as a social activist, her decision influenced by the trend of Southeast Asian sex tourism among Japanese businessmen. Shortly after retiring, she founded the Asia-Japan Women's Resource Center,

In 1998, Matsui helped create the Japanese branch of Violence Against Women in War Network (VAWW-NET). In 2001, Matsui visited Afghanistan to meet with Afghan feminist-activists. While there, she was struck by illness, which was later diagnosed to be liver cancer. Matsui supported this idea and worked with women's rights organizations and advocates from China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, East Timor, Malaysia, and North and South Korea in order to make the tribunal a reality. Documents were presented that implicated the Japanese government and emperor in the atrocities committed throughout the Japanese Empire against these women - kidnapping, rape, sexual abuse and assault, and even murder ranked in the indictments. Detractors to the tribunal, such as Takashi Nakamiya, a "leftist watcher," labeled it a mock tribunal in an attempt to discredit the value of the proceedings and of Matsui's work in general. In the words of Takashi Yoshida in From Cultures of War to Cultures of Peace, "the term 'active museum' was chosen to symbolize the committee's wish that the museum would play a pivotal role in enlightening the public and transforming each visitor into a socially active citizen." Even in death, she was criticized by some, Nakamiya claiming that the 1.5 million yen donated to Matsui during her illness was used selfishly by her, when, in fact, the money had been used to build the Women's Active Museum of War and Peace. Despite such criticisms and attacks, Matsui's legacy of fighting for former comfort women and women victimized by war lives on in her numerous works on Japanese and East Asian women and in the inspiration her life and works give to those working towards gender equality worldwide.

Literary works

Books Women's Asia (1989) which deals with Asian women's economic perspectives and details the role they play in the economies of Asia. Women in the New Asia: From Pain to Power (2000) in which Matsui deals with the effects of globalization on human rights, focusing on the women of Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, Taiwan, China, Nepal, and Korea.

Articles Japan Becoming a War State-Let Us Cry Out against War with Women around the World (2002) Women's International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan's Military Sexual Slavery - Success Brought by the Power of Women's Transnational Solidarity (2001) Women's International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan's Military Sexual Slavery - An NGO Attempt to Restore Justice for Victimized Women and to Prevent Future Wartime Violence against Women (2001)