The sorrow of war victims must be understood.

Issues involving the history of a nation inevitably stoke nationalism and spark fierce debate.

The Asian Women's Fund, which will be dissolved in two years, has persistently been the subject of criticism both in Japan and abroad.

About 10 years ago, the Japanese government admitted that the Imperial Japanese Army was involved in the problem of ``comfort women,'' a euphemism used to describe women in many parts of East Asia who were forced to provide sex for Japanese troops.

But the government decided not to pay direct compensation to individual victims. The government's justification was that the question of compensation had already been settled by international laws, including the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty.

Instead of paying compensation, the government created the Asian Women's Fund, whose official Japanese name is ``Josei-no Tame-no Ajia Heiwa Kokumin Kikin'' (Peaceful people's fund in Asia for women).

The fund, consisting mainly of donations collected from the public, presented 2 million yen to each former comfort woman.

The government has offered medical and welfare services for the women, and successive prime ministers sent letters expressing ``a heartfelt apology and penitence'' for those women who had been disgraced and abused.

This wartime problem was spotlighted in the 1980s and 1990s, as former comfort women at long last came forward.

The problem was not an issue when Japan normalized its diplomatic relations with China and South Korea, to say nothing of the time when it signed the peace treaty with former Allied countries. Nothing had been done to address the issue.

Therefore, some argued that Japan as a state should pay compensation. Besides, aged women died one after another.

Looking back at the time when the government decided to create the Asian Women's Fund, Tomiichi Murayama, the fund's president and prime minister at that time, said: ``If we had simply waited, there would be no knowing when the problem could be solved. So we decided to pay compensation to atone for our moral responsibility.''

The fund came under fire, however, from people who refuse to admit the shadowy past of Japan. They argued that the government had not coerced the women into prostitution for the soldiers.

On the other hand, those who wanted to hold the government fully accountable criticized the fund as ``obfuscating the government's responsibility.''

Controversy stirred not only in Japan. In South Korea and Taiwan, support organizations for former comfort women blasted the establishment of the fund. As a result, the women who wanted to receive the atonement money were put in an embarrassing position.

The fund has handed out money to only 285 women in South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines. In the Netherlands, which was the suzerain state of Indonesia under the Japanese occupation, the Japanese government provided medical and welfare services to 79 women.

The fund will be dissolved when the last remaining welfare service in Indonesia is completed in March 2007.

The Asian Women's Fund may not have lived up to original expectations. But it has provided an indirect acceptance of Japan's war responsibility by braving domestic and foreign pressure. It has managed to move the history issue ahead, if only just a little.

According to the fund's staff members who had direct contact with former comfort women, most of the women wept, saying, ``Japan did not abandon us after all,'' when Murayama's letter of apology was read aloud. Some said, ``Now I can be put into the ancestor's tombstone.''

If Japan is really to come to terms with its past, it must understand the sorrow of each former comfort woman. That is perhaps the most precious lesson that the fund has left to the Japanese people.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Jan. 25(IHT/Asahi: January 26,2005)