Posted on: Sunday, January 12, 2003

Rights advocate Yayori Matsui dead at 68

Los Angeles Times

Yayori Matsui, a pioneering Japanese journalist and women's rights advocate who fought for greater Japanese disclosure of its sexual enslavement of Asian women during World War II, has died of liver cancer at 68.

Matsui fought against injustice and the exploitation of the underprivileged, especially women. Her strong views sometimes earned her enemies in Japan's right wing.

"She never hesitated to fight against something she thought was wrong," said her sister, Yayuki Mukoyama, 66. "In a sense, her life was a battle."

Matsui was visiting feminists in Afghanistan in October when she was overcome by illness. She was diagnosed with terminal cancer upon returning to Tokyo but continued to work from her hospital bed until shortly before her death on Dec. 27.

Given all the unfinished work, "I wanted to live at least 10 more years" she told supporters in one of her final e-mails.

Matsui was born on April 12, 1934, in Kyoto, the eldest of six children. Her father, a Christian minister who had served in China during the war, adored her and would explain to her in great detail what he had witnessed, including many abuses committed by Japanese troops. She went to college in Minnesota and Paris. On her way back to Japan, she stopped in Asian mainland, and was exposed to abject poverty for the first time.

"I believe this was the first real trigger that would drive her life's work," said longtime friend and fellow activist Rumiko Nishino.

Matsui started working in 1961 at the mainstream Asahi Shimbun newspaper, placing her among the first career female reporters in Japan. She worked in journalism for 30 years.

After retiring, she dedicated herself to social activism.

In 2000, she helped organize a mock tribunal that drew former comfort women from all over Asia to testify. She was infuriated when the Japanese news media refused to publicize it and filed a lawsuit charging falsified reports against national broadcaster NHK, which is pending.

She spent her final days planning a Japanese museum on the comfort women issue and other war-related subjects, scheduled to open in 2006.