In a bid to keep wartime sexual violence against women in people's minds, female activists in Japan are set to open a museum in Tokyo to collect and display materials mainly about those who were forced into sexual slavery for the Imperial Japanese Army during the war.
The Women's Active Museum on War and Peace, established by public donations, will present videos and written materials in which former "comfort women," as they are euphemistically called in Japan, from the Asia-Pacific region testify about their suffering. Historians put their number at around 200,000.
The museum, due to open Aug. 1 as Japan's first resource center on the crime, will also provide visitors with information about other wartime atrocities through its collections of books, photo panels and other documents, including court materials, said Rumiko Nishino, chief of the institution.