Japan apologises for South Korea’s wartime sex slaves

Japan and South Korea have agreed to settle a toxic dispute about wartime sex slaves forced to work in Japanese military brothels. The historic agreement means Japan will pay more than $8 million (€7.3 million) for the psychological care of the surviving Korean "comfort women".

Japanese foreign minister Fumio Kishida announced the deal in Seoul yesterday with his Korean counterpart, Yun Byung-se. Mr Kishida said his government was "painfully aware" of its responsibilities for the brothel system.

A statement released by Tokyo expressed “apologies and remorse” to the women, who “underwent immeasurable and painful experiences and suffered incurable physical and psychological wounds”.

Japan has also promised a formal apology by prime minister Shinzo Abe.

Japan's wartime behaviour and its perceived lack of atonement has long haunted relations between the two east Asian neighbours. The United States has been pushing its two closest regional allies to resolve the dispute.

Mr Abe only recently formally met South Korean president Park Geun-hye after an extended diplomatic deep-freeze. Ms Park, who had rebuffed all previous summit requests, called the comfort women controversy the “biggest stumbling block” to friendly ties.

Many Koreans say Japan has yet to properly make amends for its 1910-1945 colonial rule over the Korean peninsula. Japanese conservatives insist that their country has apologised enough. Japan’s official position is that all compensation issues were settled in the 1965 treaty that established diplomatic relations with Seoul.

Tokyo said that yesterday’s announcement means the comfort women issue is “resolved finally and irreversibly” and that both sides have agreed to end the diplomatic mudslinging that has poisoned ties for years.

But a demand that a talismanic statue of a girl symbolising the women be removed from outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul appears to have been rebuffed. South Korea merely said it “acknowledges” Japanese concerns about the statue and will “strive to solve this issue”.

The statue has become a rallying point for those seeking redress for Japan’s wartime behaviour, but is viewed by Japanese conservatives as an embarrassment. A support group for the sex slaves issued a statement on Saturday criticising the Japanese demand on the statue. Failure to have the statue removed could add to Mr Abe’s difficulties in selling the deal to his conservative supporters, many of whom oppose any compromise on wartime legacies. The two sides have also yet to settle on the exact wording of an apology from Mr Abe.

Three-quarters of Japanese voters support Mr Abe's attempt to improve relations with South Korea, according to a fresh poll by the Nikkei business newspaper and broadcaster TV Tokyo. But 57 per cent said Japan need not make concessions relating to wartime "comfort women".

On issues involving Japan’s wartime past, Mr Abe often seems torn between his nationalist instincts and diplomatic necessity. In this case, diplomacy seems to have won out.

WHO WERE THE ‘COMFORT WOMEN’?

During its wartime campaign, imperial Japan set up a network of military brothels across Asia, known euphemistically as “comfort facilities”. Thousands of women were corralled into the brothels, sometimes after being transported across vast distances, to service troops in the outposts of Japan’s shortlived empire. One aim was to stop sexual diseases from decimating the army.

Many records of the brothels were torched after the war and the surviving "comfort women" stayed largely silent until the early 1990s. In 1993, Japan's then chief cabinet secretary, Kono Yohei, acknowledged Japan's role in pressing the women into sexual slavery. A private fund was set up to compensate them.

But conservatives, championed by some of Japan’s most popular newspapers, have long denied that the military was directly involved in forcing the women into the brothels, and insist they voluntarily serviced frontline troops. Nationalist politicians say the women were prostitutes, often sold or brokered by locals in Korea and elsewhere.

Those claims ignore the extensive documentation of military and government involvement in the brothel system, says Denis Halpin, a former senior Asia policy staffer with the US government and one of the authors of a landmark 2007 US House of Representatives resolution demanding that Japan face up to its responsibility.

They also play down the testimony of the women themselves, and other crucial evidence, including a Dutch parliamentary report in 1994, which found that some European civilians had been herded into the military brothels. Most expert historians accept that a mixture of coercion, deception and outright force was used against many of the women.

As a parliamentarian, Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, supported nationalist think tanks that rejected Japan’s “apology diplomacy” in relation to its wartime misdeeds. During his first term as prime minister in 2007, he got himself into hot water by saying there was “no proof” that the women were coerced by the military. But, in 2014, he bowed to pressure by pledging not to revise the Kono Yohei statement.

Ironically, that statement was intended to end the controversy and reset the diplomatic compass. Instead, the dispute has festered and spread to the US, where a string of memorials to the sex slaves, erected by Korean communities, has triggered angry Japanese diplomatic protests. American textbooks have also included references to the brothels.

Japan wants the controversy to end. It has apparently been prodded into action by Washington, which wants resolution of an issue that divides its two key allies in east Asia as they struggle to deal with China. Mr Abe seems prepared to weather criticism from his supporters in pursuit of a cherished aim next year: revising Japan's constitution along conservative lines.