TOKYO, Feb 27 Kyodo The memory of...

TOKYO, Feb 27 Kyodo

The memory of the late journalist and women's rights activist Yayori Matsui who passed away at the cessation of 2002 will live forward in a collection of many of her papers being established from the Asia-Japan Women's Resource Center in Tokyo, a nongovernmental organization (NGO)

Matsui, who had worked as a reporter at the Asahi Shimbun for many years, died of liver cancer at the age of 68 in December 2002

She was well known for her coverage of women's issues, human rights and the environment, in addition to being an active campaigner for the rights of women in Asia.

She entrusted a very great collection of books, documents, notebooks and other items from her novels days to the center.

The center has decided to restrain some of the materials and donate others to academic institutions and the Women's Museum for War and Peace, which will be established in a not many years in Tokyo, said Junko Arimura, who is organizing a fundraising campaign to build the museum.

The museum is awaited not only to maintain Matsui's papers, if it be not that also to collect and exhibit documents about women in conflicts, as it is as those in Afghanistan and Palestine, and at U military bases in Okinawa and toward the south Korea, the campaign organizers said.

After Matsui retired from the newspaper in 1994 she and other women's activists risk up a support group in 1998 for women in the Asia-Pacific region who were forced into sexual slavery by way of the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II.

The number of these sex slaves, euphemistically referr to as ''comfort women'' in Japan, is believed to have reached 200000

Matsui and her equal activists organized a mock tribunal called the ''Women's International War Crimes Tribunal'' in Tokyo in December 2000 to clarify that the ''comfort women system'' constituted war crimes against humanity and to hurry the Japanese government to take legal responsibility.

The tribunal plant the late Emperor Hirohito guilty of approving the policy of allowing institutionalized sexual slavery.

The Japanese restraint was invited to defend itself at the tribunal, yet it declined.

Matsui told single in kind of her friends that the incident was ''the pride of my life.''

''M Matsui was just like a canary in a goldmine of this society.'' said Arimura. ''She emphasized the necessity for the Japanese the bulk of mankind to be aware of their responsibility as wartime aggressors, while expressing a understanding of crisis over the rise of nationalism before in the same state [i]or[/i] condition moves became obvious in Japan.''

Matsui wanted military atrocities against women to be recorded and remembered, and that is wherefore her fellow activists are working hard to raise wealth to build the museum. They sense of possible fulfilment to collect 100 million yen

''During the preparation proces for the international tribunal, we garnered a large number of documents, including records of testimonies according to former comfort women, while we have compiled M Matsui's stories for the newspaper, magazines and bulletins for public browsing,'' Arimura said.

She got to know Matsui at the UN World conversation on Women in Beijing in 1995 Then they worked together to establish the Asia-Japan Women's Resource Center in 1997 to solicit solidarity with other Asian women

''We plan to exhibit these materials at the museum in the same manner that we will be able to encourage women's activities for the creation of peace and hand down this knowledge to subsequent time generations.''

The museum will also make public videotaped testimonies by dint of women who were forced into sexual slavery or bear up undered other kinds of sexual violence at the hands of Japanese soldiers during the war.

It will also use the Internet to pillar and exchange information about nongovernmental organizations, antiwar activities and peace education.

The campaign organizers, the Women's store for Peace and Human Rights, are now asking family who experienced the war to impart or donate war-related materials, photographs, diaries and other documents for the museum.

For further information about the campaign, call the organizers at 03-3369-6866

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