Between roughly 1932 and 1945, the Imperial Japanese military operated a system of what it called comfort stations across its theaters of war and occupation - in China, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Burma, Malaya, and dozens of smaller places. Women and girls, mostly Korean and Chinese, but also Filipina, Indonesian, Dutch, and Japanese, were taken into these stations by deception, abduction, or outright force, and used for sex by soldiers on a schedule. Estimates of the number of women held in this system range widely, from tens of thousands to several hundred thousand. Many did not survive. Those who did survived in silence, because to speak was to lose, in most of their cultures, what their families called face. For most of the postwar period the women carried what had happened to them as private wreckage. From the late 1980s onward, a handful of survivors began to give their names publicly. Kim Hak-sun, a Korean grandmother, testified openly in 1991. Others followed. They lost civil case after civil case. The tribunal in Tokyo was conceived as a response to those losses.

The Women's International War Crimes Tribunal was a private people's tribunal, organized by Violence Against Women in War-Network Japan, known by the acronym VAWW-NET Japan, led by the journalist and feminist Yayori Matsui. It had no legal authority. It could not jail anyone, fine anyone, or compel anyone to attend. Its model was the 1967 Russell Tribunal that Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre had convened to judge American conduct in Vietnam. The point of a people's tribunal is precisely that it does not require the consent of states. The charter set out a careful procedure. Judges and prosecutors were appointed by the organizers. Hearings were public. Evidence included documents, expert testimony, material evidence, and - above all - the testimony of survivors. The defenses of official capacity and superior orders were rejected. The crimes were declared not subject to any statute of limitations. Suggested remedies included acknowledgment, apology, compensation, disclosure of records, and education of future generations.

Over five days in December 2000, more than sixty survivors testified in Tokyo. They came from Korea, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, the Netherlands, East Timor, and Malaysia. Some were elderly women who needed help walking to the witness stand. Some had not told their full story before, even to their families. Some had been telling it for years and were tired of being disbelieved. They described how they had been recruited - some told they were taking factory jobs, some seized at gunpoint, some sold by intermediaries. They described the comfort stations. They described what had been done to them, in plain language, in front of a room of strangers, and in front of cameras that broadcast portions of their testimony to the public. Many of the women who had come forward over the years to fight for justice had already died. The tribunal's final judgment took care to name this. Many of the women who have come forward to fight for justice, the judges wrote, have died unsung heroes.

On December 4, 2001, in The Hague - a city long associated with international justice, host of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia - the tribunal issued its final judgment. The document ran to more than 200 pages and over 1,000 paragraphs. It found individual and superior responsibility for rape and sexual slavery as crimes against humanity. It named the late Emperor Showa - Hirohito - as bearing ultimate responsibility, on the grounds that as head of state and commander he had not stopped a policy he must have known about. It named senior military commanders: Hideki Tojo, Iwane Matsui, Shunroku Hata, Seishiro Itagaki, Rikichi Ando, Seizo Kobayashi, Yoshijiro Umezu, Hisaichi Terauchi, Tomoyuki Yamashita. It found the Government of Japan responsible as a state. It recommended remedies: acknowledgment, apology, compensation, full disclosure of military records, and education. Japan did not adopt the recommendations. The Japanese government did not recognize the tribunal. NHK, the Japanese public broadcaster, aired a documentary that included tribunal footage but, after political pressure, in a heavily edited form that became its own scandal. None of which had been the point. The point had been the four days in which the women, in their own words, in their own time, in front of judges who took them seriously, had said what was done to them and had been believed.

The final two paragraphs of the judgment have been quoted many times since, including by historians who think it the most precise sentence anyone has yet written about what those women were owed. The crimes committed against these survivors, the judges wrote, remain one of the greatest unacknowledged and unremedied injustices of the Second World War. There are no museums, no graves for the unknown comfort woman, no education of future generations, and there have been no judgement days for the victims of Japan's military sexual slavery. Then the second paragraph, which is what the tribunal had really been built to say. The judges recognize the great fortitude and dignity of the survivors who have toiled to survive and reconstruct their shattered lives and who have faced down fear and shame to tell their stories to the world and testify before us. While the names inscribed in history's pages, the judges noted, have been at best those of the men who commit the crimes or who prosecute them, rather than the women who suffer them - this judgment bears the names of the survivors who took the stand to tell their stories. For five days at least, they wrote, the tribunal put wrong on the scaffold and truth on the throne.