South Korea intends to build a museum in memory of wartime sex slaves for Japanese troops, a minister said yesterday, reigniting a perennial diplomatic thorn in the two neighbors’ sides.
The plight of the so-called “comfort women” who were forced into sexual slavery for Japanese troops during World War II is a hugely emotional issue that has marred ties between the US allies for decades.
Mainstream historians say up to 200,000 women — mostly from Korea, but also other parts of Asia, including Taiwan — were forced to work at Japanese army brothels across the region during the 1939 to 1945 conflict.
“We are planning to build a ‘comfort women’ museum in Seoul,” South Korean Minister of Gender Equality Chung Hyun-back said at a shelter for a shrinking number of survivors, who now number only 38 in total.
The “House of Sharing,” in a rural area south of Seoul, has a memorial hall, but Chung said the country needed a museum in the capital with better public access.
She did not elaborate on when it would open or what kind of materials it would display.
Japan maintains that there is a lack of documentary proof that the women were forcibly made to work at the brothels. In late 2015, under now-ousted South Korean president Park Geun-hye, Seoul and Tokyo reached what they described as a “final and irreversible” agreement under which Japan offered an apology and a ￥1 billion (US$8.6 billion) payment to South Korean survivors.
Critics of the accord, including some survivors, say the deal did not go far enough in holding Japan legally responsible for wartime abuses during its 1910 to 1945 colonial rule over the Korean Peninsula.
Tension escalated further after South Korean activists refused to remove a statue of a girl erected in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul to symbolize the victims of sex slavery. Tokyo has pressed Seoul to remove it, but activists have since put up more statues, including one outside the Japanese consulate in Busan.
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