The following is the seventh in a series of articles on Japan’s wartime sexual enslavement of Asian women on the occasion of the 61st anniversary of the foundation of The Korea Herald on Aug. 15. ― Ed.


Tucked away on a quiet street in Seongsan-dong, Seoul, the Museum of War and Women’s Human Rights is home to memories of victims of Japan’s military slavery during World War II.

The museum, which opened in 2012, is filled with images, written texts and video footage related to the victims’ experiences, including their brave testimonies and artwork. 

Establishing the museum, however, was a lengthy process. It took the organizers nine years to raise the required 2 billion won ($1.93 million) to build the museum.

The Korean government offered 500 million won for the project, and the rest ― 1.5 billion won ― was supplied entirely by individual donors. Some may be surprised to learn that among 8,000 donors whose names are engraved in the property, 3,000 are Japanese individuals.

“One of the elderly Japanese donors in fact donated all of her wealth to us and entered a nursing home,” said Kim Dong-hee, the Secretary-General of the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan. The NGO, which has been working with the Korean victims for more than 23 years, also runs the museum in Seongsan-dong.

“Another Japanese donor gave all of his severance pay to us.”

According to Kim, some 100 Japanese activists have been supporting victims of Japan’s sexual slavery during World War II over the past 20 years. “A very large number of visitors to our museum are Japanese individuals,” Kim added.

Seo Hyun-ju, a research fellow at Korea’s Northeast Asian History Foundation, said it is very important for Korea to support and collaborate with such activists in Japan, in the nation’s effort to bring more international attention to the wartime slavery issue.

Korea’s small number of surviving victims are still demanding an official apology from Tokyo and legal compensation for the human rights violations.

“The Japanese public is increasingly becoming more conservative, beyond the political circles in the country,” Seo told The Korea Herald.

“These activists are very small in number in Japan and they are facing a lot of difficulties considering the country’s political climate today. It is important for us to support their activism, because the military sexual slavery is not just a Korean issue, but an international issue. Activism by Japanese individuals in Japan matters (as much as in Korea and other Asian countries), as it contributes to how people in Asia remember and acknowledge our shared past.”

Scholars in Asia estimate that up to 200,000 women, mostly from Korea and China, were forced to work as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers during the war. Many of the victims, euphemistically called “comfort women,” have died from old age. In South Korea, there are 54 survivors remaining.

In spite of Seoul’s repeated demand for an apology and legal reparation for the victims, Tokyo has been claiming that all compensation was settled in the 1965 South Korea-Japan Normalization treaty.

However, not all Japanese scholars and historians agree with their government’s stance.

Scholar Yayo Okano from Doshisha University, for one, said reflection on the past is one of the most important elements of a democratic government in a recent forum held in Seoul, and that Tokyo needs to acknowledge the victims of the wartime enslavement.

“Democracy is based on a notion that a nation is imperfect, and its power is prone to making mistakes and vulnerable to corruption,” he said.

“Therefore, democracy always reflects on its past wrongdoings and thinks of these as lessons. Acknowledging our errors in the past and the present gives us an opportunity to build a better future.

“And in democratic nations, their laws reflect the opinion of the citizens,” he continued.

“By publicly announcing that it ‘does not have any legal responsibility’ for the former ‘comfort woman,’ the Japanese government is in fact announcing to the world that the Japanese people are not willing to take responsibility.”

Another Japanese scholar, Kazu Nagai from Kyoto University, said Japan’s wartime sexual enslavement involved fraud and kidnapping.

“The ‘comfort stations’ were maintained by de facto human trafficking and criminal activities,” he wrote in material for his presentation “The Truth on the System of Japanese Military Brothels” for a human-rights forum in Seoul.

“Drafting women into Japan’s military brothels often involved kidnapping and fraud (such as telling them that they’d be working as nurses in hospitals). Some in Japan acknowledge that such criminal activities took place while drafting women, but they say it was done by private Japanese agencies, not by the nation’s military or government.”

The professor, who also discovered cases of women being kidnapped in China, the Philippines and Indonesia by the Japanese military during World War II, noted such brothels were almost the only “welfare services” available for Japanese soldiers throughout the war.

“So all soldiers thought every unit deserved such brothels. Those who didn’t have one in their unit felt they were being treated unfairly,” Kazu said.

The Japanese scholar’s research findings coincide with those of the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan.

According to the NGO, the largest number of Korean victims said they thought they would be working at factories or hospitals before being forced to work in brothels, while some said they were forcefully taken away without even knowing why.

After the war ended, many of the women were forced by Japanese soldiers to join them in mass suicides, while most of the survivors suffered severe trauma and became infertile due to sexually transmitted diseases.

“I am angry about (what happened to the victims) as a woman,” said a Japanese visitor to the Museum of War and Human Rights last month, through an interpreter. She did not want to be named. “I hope the surviving victims get the acknowledgement that they deserve.”

By Claire Lee (dyc@heraldcorp.com)