Former comfort women want another apology from Japan
The Associated Press has an article up about former Korean comfort women gathering in Tokyo to demand that Prime Minister Hatoyama follow through with statements he once made in support of further apologies and compensation:
The women gathered in Tokyo to pressure Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, who as opposition leader in 2002 told lawmakers the Japanese government should “offer compensation to the victims and restore their honor.”
Lee Yong-soo said Hatoyama has been supportive of the so-called “comfort women” since she first met him as opposition leader over a decade ago in Seoul.
“Now Mr. Hatoyama is prime minister. It’s time for him to settle the issue,” said the 80-year-old Lee, who said she was forced to become a sex slave in Taiwan after being abducted from Korea by Japanese soldiers in 1944.1
Historians say up to 200,000 women, mainly from the Korean peninsula and China, were forced to provide sex for Japanese soldiers in military brothels during the war.2 Many more women were raped as Japanese troops rampaged through the region. Only hundreds of the women are believed to still be alive.
Under the 1965 treaty normalizing relations between Japan and South Korea, Japan paid 180 billion yen in indemnity and aid to the South Korean government with the understanding that South Korea would then shoulder responsibility for compensating individual victims of the colonial period.
After the comfort women issue started getting a lot of attention in the 1990′s, the Japanese government issued a unambiguous apology to victims and set up the Asian Women’s Fund to distribute directly compensate former comfort women. Most of the fund’s financial backing came from government money, but many former comfort women in Korea rejected the compensation because it the AWF was not a government agency and the Japanese government’s apologies were not in the form of diet resolutions. The AWF dissolved in 2007 after concluding that it had done all it could to locate and pay those willing to accept compensation.
According to the Japan Times, DPJ lawmakers are now working to introduce an official comfort women apology bill to the Diet.
Notes:
1: This will inevitably appear in the comments section of the post, so I might as well mention it now – Lee Yong-soo has given many different accounts of how she became a comfort women. In some, she was forcibly abducted by soldiers. In others, she ran away from home.
2: Estimates range from 20,000 to over 400,000. Some historians, such as Ikuhiko Hata, estimate that close to 40% of comfort women were Japanese – more than any other individual nationality.
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