뉴스레터

Upon the seventy-third anniversary of Korean's liberation, August 14, the same day Kim Hak-soon became the first "comfort women" victim to give a public testimony twenty-seven years ago, has been designated by the Korean government as the "international memorial day for comfort women." The day right before Korea's National Liberation Day celebrating the recovery of sovereignty has become an occasion to remember the significance of human rights. And speaking of invading sovereignty and human rights, August 22 marks the 108th anniversary of Imperial Japan's forced annexation of Korea. As such, the Northeast Asian History Foundation's comfort women research team held an international academic conference to discuss the current circumstances in uncovering historical sources related to the Japanese military comfort women and the challenges lying ahead.

Regarding the ongoing Japanese military comfort women issue, the Northeast Asian History Foundation has held international academic conferences to review the 100 years since Japan's forced annexation of Korea in 2010 and the 50 years since the 1965 Korea-Japan agreement. The purpose of such conferences was to examine the issues in Japan's argument that "the 1910 annexation was legal" and that "the 1965 treaty between Korea and Japan was a final settlement." Such conferences served as opportunities to build a network for academic research into Japan's colonial responsibility as a fundamental source of historical conflict and for seeking a resolution to the Japanese military comfort women issue, which has evolved into a major human rights issue in international society for involving crimes against humanity by forcibly mobilizing women during wars of aggression.

As the Foundation continued to raise historical issues over the process of searching for ways to bring relief to comfort women victims whose human rights suffered multiple, serious violations at the hands of Imperial Japan, the Korean Supreme Court issued a judgment based on the idea of normative justice. The judgment leaned toward historical justice by concluding that the 1965 Korea-Japan Claims Agreement does not cover the individual rights of Korean victims to make claims over crimes against humanity in which the Japanese government was involved during its colonial rule of Korea. It was a judgment that wholly confirmed Japan's colonial responsibility and supported an active pursuit of peace through the security of human rights as a universal value of mankind.

However, the Japanese Prime Minister Abe's statement made on the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II in August 2015 showed that Japan has failed to break away from the postwar system and is taking a revisionist approach to history, denying its responsibility for colonizing Korea, for launching wars of aggression, and for forcibly mobilizing comfort women. And once the Korean and Japanese foreign ministers reached an agreement over the comfort women issue on December 28, 2015, Japan has been openly denying before the United Nations Human Rights Council that Japanese state authorities were involved in committing crimes against humanity by forcing women to serve as sex slaves for the Japanese military.

A direct instance of this would be what the Japanese representative Otaka Masato (大鷹正人) said in response to the criticism raised at the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination meeting in Geneva on August 16, 2018. The U.S. human rights activist Gay McDougall, who also authored the Report of the Special Rapporteur on Systematic Rape, Sexual slavery and Slavery-like Practices during Armed Conflict, said “I don't think that agreements between governments [. . .] are able or adequate to extinguish the claims of individuals with regards to human rights abuses." To this, Otaka Masato responded by saying that "The comfort women issue was fully and irreversibly resolved with the December 2015 agreement."

To more firmly commit to revealing the historical truth about what the Japanese military comfort women suffered and to resolve the issue based on a victim-centered approach, the Northeast Asian History Foundation formally launched the Japanese Military Comfort Women Research Center on September 17, 2018. The Center will strive to serve as a central platform of academic research and build and share a pool of irrefutable sources related Japanese military comfort women in the hopes of contributing to the realization of true historical justice the victims have been dreaming of.