Going Global: South Korea and Japan

South Korea reconciles with Japan on Comfort Women

At the end of December, Japan and South Korea made a historic deal on the matter of comfort women. Japan agreed to pay one billion yen ($12-million CAD) to victims and their families, and to offer an apology. In exchange, South Korea will agree to stop criticizing Japan over the issue, and remove the comfort women statue from the Japanese embassy in Seoul.

The agreement can be seen as a win for diplomatic techniques. Remember that at one point, Japan owned Korea. And while it maybe be unrelated, I can’t help but notice that South Korea’s current president, Park Geun-hye, is the first female president in the country’s history.

This news is welcomed by almost everyone. Park stands to gain politically in South Korea for extracting an apology from the Japanese government, as well as several million dollars in reparation funds. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe gains in Japanese politics for demonstrating long-term thinking, and making himself look better among Asian countries; demonstrating that he’s not a historical revisionist. However, some of the 46 remaining comfort women aren’t satisfied with the deal. Many of them have said that their goal isn’t money, but a formal and public apology from the Japanese government, as well as the removal of historical revisionism from Japanese historical textbooks.

“If one’s mother, one’s younger sister, or siblings, were taken as comfort women and met sexual abuse in Japan, I don’t think anyone would forgive that,” says Tomiko Okazaki, who was Minister of State for Social Affairs and Gender Equality from 2010-2011 in the Japanese Diet (parliament).

“In agreements between Japan and Korea, they said let’s put a close to all the damages,” explains Okazaki. “Also, Japan says these things wouldn’t be questioned—it’s been decided in the Japan-Korea agreement. But at that time, was the comfort women problem made clear? Nobody knew about it, did they?”

The problem of comfort women has been the thorn in the side of Japan-South Korea relations ever since World War II. It was during the period from roughly 1850 until the end of WWII that Japan behaved as an imperialist nation, ruled like a dictatorship via the emperor. At the height of its time as an empire in 1942, Japan controlled 7.4-million square kilometres of land, that’s the same size as Canada excluding Quebec and the Maritime provinces. During this time, Japan annexed and colonized several countries in the region, such as Indonesia, parts of China, Burma, Thailand, Taiwan, and of course, Korea.

Korea was one of the states that Japan had annexed fully, meaning Japanese citizens could travel there like it was another prefecture.

Unfortunately, the Japanese army didn’t treat the native populations with much dignity. “Comfort women” is actually euphemism for “prostitute,” and between 20,000 and 400,000 women were comfort women for the Japanese army. This number has a vast range, as it depends on who you ask.

The Japanese haven’t been as forthcoming about their atrocities during WWII as the Germans were for theirs. When I lived in Berlin, there was an abundance of monuments and museums dedicated to the people that were killed during the Nazi period. There is even the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a sculpture that takes up an entire city block. Holocaust denial is currently a crime in Germany, as well as several other European countries.

Visiting Tokyo last December, it was difficult to find anything similar, and some in China and Korea will quickly mention Yasukuni shrine. While the shrine is for all who died in service of the Empire of Japan, even the thousands of soldiers who were drafted against their will, it also commemorates several “class A” war criminals. Every time a Japanese Prime Minister visits the shrine, angry headlines show up in Asian newspapers.

Regardless, attitudes towards history and gender are changing in Japan, though slowly. And while many of the remaining comfort women and some South Koreans are unsatisfied, the recent deal between Japan and South Korea should be seen as a textbook example of good diplomacy.

This article couldn’t have been written without the help of Nuvjit Sidhho, who translated interview audio from Japanese to English.