Last weekend, a memorial gathering was held in Waseda for Yayori Matsui, the former Asahi Shimbun reporter and women's rights advocate, who died in December from liver cancer at the age of 68. A proper funeral service had been held two months earlier at the Shibuya church founded by Matsui's minister father.
The purpose of the Waseda event, however, was to look forward as well as backward.
That's because Matsui's work continues. Throughout her 33-year career in journalism, she always tried to cover environmental and women's issues for the newspaper, though her editors would have preferred she didn't. Following her retirement in 1994, Matsui founded the Asia-Japan Women's Resource Center, and in 2000, she and the Women Against Violence in War Network Afghaheld a mock tribunal in Tokyo on crimes committed by the Japanese Imperial Army against sex slaves during the Pacific War. The tribunal featured testimony from former sex slaves and the participation of international judges. The verdict found Emperor Showa guilty of war crimes, but by that point just the idea of the trial had invited the wrath of rightwing groups, who demonstrated at the venue and made threats.