Japan nationalists protest landmark sex slave deal with S Korea
Some on Japan's conservative far right have long said the country has nothing to apologise for and have questioned the accounts of the surviving comfort women, suggesting they were prostitutes and not coerced.
- Posted 29 Dec 2015 17:50
- Updated 29 Dec 2015 17:54
People shout slogans as they hold Japanese national flags during a rally against a landmark deal between Japan and South Korea on their dispute wartime sex slaves in front of the official residence of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Tokyo on Dec 29, 2015. (Photo: AFP/Toru Yamanaka)
TOKYO: About 200 Japanese nationalists lashed out on Tuesday (Dec 29) at an agreement to settle a dispute with South Korea about wartime sex slaves, with some calling on Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to kill himself in shame.
Japan Monday offered a "heartfelt apology" and a ¥1 billion (US$8.3 million) payment to surviving South Korean "comfort women" forced into Japanese military brothels during World War II.
Abe, himself a nationalist who came to power three years ago vowing to revitalise Japan's economy and revise its war-renouncing constitution, has praised the agreement as heralding a "new era" for relations.
Ties between Tokyo and Seoul have long been soured by the sex slave issue, a legacy of Japan's colonial rule over the Korean peninsula and of World War II.
Some on Japan's conservative far right have long said the country has nothing to apologise for and have questioned the accounts of the surviving comfort women, suggesting they were prostitutes and not coerced.
Demonstrators, mostly in their 60s or older, sang "Kimigayo," the national anthem which is an ode to Japan's emperor, and carried red and white national flags.
"We will never allow this quislingism," participants at the rally outside the compound housing Abe's official office and residence chanted in unison, calling him a traitor. "Reverse this disgraceful act," they yelled.
"Abe, you stained the spirit of the war dead!" one woman shouted. "You must commit seppuku," she added, referring to the traditional act of ritual suicide by disembowelment.
Satoru Mizushima, a rally organiser, told AFP: "The agreement is going to be Japan's worst blemish. Prime Minister Abe did what he should not do. It was so deplorable."
The crowd then moved to the foreign ministry for a similar rally.
- AFP/ec
Japan and South Korea Settle Dispute Over Wartime ‘Comfort Woman
By
CHOE SANG-HUNDEC. 28, 2015
250 COMMENTS
By REUTERS on Publish DateDecember 28, 2015. Photo by Jeon Heon-Kyun/European Pressphoto Agency
SEOUL, South Korea — More than 70 years after the end of
World War II,
South Korea and
Japan reached a landmark agreement on Monday to resolve their dispute over Korean women who were forced to serve as sex slaves for
Japan’s Imperial Army.
The agreement, in which Japan made an apology and promised an $8.3 million payment that would provide care for the women, was intended to remove one of the most intractable logjams in relations between
South Korea and Japan, both crucial allies to the United States. The so-called comfort women have been the most painful legacy of Japan’s colonial rule of Korea, which lasted from 1910 until Japan’s defeat in 1945.
The Japanese and South Korean foreign ministers, announcing the agreement in Seoul, said each side considered it a “final and irreversible resolution” of the issue.
The apology and the payment, which, unlike a previous fund, will come directly from the Japanese government, represent a compromise for Japan’s prime minister,
Shinzo Abe, who has often been reluctant to offer contrition for his country’s militarist past.
“We are not craving for money,” said Lee Yong-soo, 88, one of the women. “What we demand is that Japan make official reparations for the crime it had committed.”\
The United States has repeatedly urged Japan and South Korea to resolve the dispute, a stumbling block in American efforts to strengthen a joint front with its Asian allies to confront China’s growing assertiveness in the region, as well as North Korea’s attempt to build a nuclear arsenal.
Both Ms. Park and Mr. Abe were eager to forge an agreement this year, the 50th anniversary of the treaty that normalized relations between their two nations and the 70th anniversary of the end of the war.
“The issue of ‘comfort women’ was a matter which, with the involvement of the military authorities of the day, severely injured the honor and dignity of many women,” the foreign minister of Japan, Fumio Kishida, said on Monday, as he read from the agreement at a news conference in Seoul. “In this regard, the government of Japan painfully acknowledges its responsibility.”
Mr. Kishida also said that Mr.
Abe “expresses anew sincere apologies and remorse from the bottom of his heart to all those who suffered immeasurable pain and incurable physical and psychological wounds as ‘comfort women.’ ”
Mr. Abe later called Ms. Park to deliver the same apologies, Ms. Park’s office said
Photo
A statue symbolizing Korean sex slaves in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul.CreditChung Sung-Jun/Getty Images
“I hope that the two countries will cooperate closely to build trust based on this agreement and open a new relationship,” she was quoted as telling Mr. Abe. Ms. Park, who had refused to hold a summit meeting with Mr. Abe until
last month, had repeatedly urged Japan to address the grievances of the women before relations could improve.
Although Japan had previously apologized, including in
a 1993 statement that acknowledged responsibility for the practice, the agreement on Monday signaled something of a shift for Mr. Abe.
As recently as last year, under pressure from his right wing to scrap the apology, Mr. Abe and his allies agreed to
review the evidence that led to it.
Under the agreement, the Japanese government will give the $8.3 million to a foundation that the South Korean government will establish to offer medical, nursing and other services to the women. Japan initially offered considerably less, according to news reports in both countries. Officials said the women would most likely not receive any cash payments.
That Tokyo will provide money from the national budget is a departure. The fund created after the 1993 apology relied on private donors and was
never fully accepted in South Korea. Although 60 South Korean women had received financial aid from the fund, many others refused to accept it.
Japan also won an important concession from Seoul, a promise not to criticize Tokyo over the issue again.
Historians say that at least tens of thousands of women, many of them Korean, were lured or coerced to work in brothels from the early 1930s until 1945. The Korean women who survived the war lived mostly in silence because of the stigma, and many never married. Only in the early 1990s did some of them begin speaking out.
Photo
South Korean women, who said they were forced to serve as sex slaves for the Japanese Army during World War II, waiting to hear the outcome of a meeting between the foreign ministers of South Korea and Japan in Gwangju, South Korea, on Monday. CreditYonhap, via Associated Press
“The agreement does not reflect the views of former comfort women,” Ms. Lee said at a news conference. “I will ignore it completely.”
She said that the accord fell far short of the women’s longstanding demand that Japan admit legal responsibility and offer formal reparations.
She said she also opposed the removal of
a statue of a girl symbolizing comfort women that a civic group installed in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul in 2011. During negotiations, Japan insisted that the statue be removed, and South Korea said on Monday that it would discuss the matter with the women.
A total of 238 women have come forward in South Korea, but only 46 are still living. Initial reactions to the resolution from the women were far from welcoming.
The deal won praise from the governing party of President
Park Geun-hye of South Korea and from Secretary of State John Kerry, but it was immediately criticized as insufficient by opposition politicians in South Korea, where anti-Japanese sentiments still run deep, and by some of the former sex slaves themselves.
A civic group, the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery in Japan, called the deal “shocking.”
“It’s a humiliating diplomacy for South Korea to give a bushel only to get a peck,” the group said in a statement. “The agreement is nothing but a diplomatic collusion that thoroughly betrayed the wishes of comfort women and the South Korean people.”
In a statement, Ms. Park appealed to South Koreans to accept the agreement in the broader context of the need to improve ties with Japan, a neighbor and important trading partner, adding that her government wanted to seal a deal before the women died.
Japan has maintained that all legal issues stemming from its colonial rule of Korea were resolved with the 1965 treaty. Negotiators from both nations worked out a compromise with the vaguely worded agreement on Monday, which did not clarify whether the responsibility that Japan acknowledged was legal or moral. Mr. Kishida made it clear on Monday that the money was not legal reparation.
The agreement also did not address a lingering debate over whether coercion was a policy of imperial Japan.
The initial reaction in Japan was generally positive. Former Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama, who made a historic apology in 1995 for Japan’s role in
World War II that many conservatives opposed, said that Mr. Abe had “decided well.”
Tomomi Inada, a right-wing member of Mr. Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party, suggested that the deal would be worthwhile if it put the dispute to rest.
The Democratic Party of Japan, the largest opposition party, welcomed the accord but cautioned Mr. Abe’s government that any future support for revisionist causes could undermine it.
Tsuneo Watanabe, a senior fellow at the Tokyo Foundation, a research group, said Mr. Abe had chosen a pragmatic approach that elevated economic and security ties over the bristly historical revisionism that he has sometimes championed.
Stable relations with South Korea, he added, were vital to Mr. Abe’s most cherished foreign policy goal: nurturing alliances to counter the growing power of China. “Ultimately, Abe believes in the balance of power.”
Hiroka Shoji, a researcher on East Asia at Amnesty International, said the agreement should not be the end in securing justice for the former sex slaves.
“The women were missing from the negotiation table, and they must not be sold short in a deal that is more about political expediency than justice,” she said.
Jonathan Soble contributed reporting from Nagano, Japan.
