hankyoreh

On the afternoon of Nov. 22 at the Japanese branch of the Korean YMCA in Tokyo, Yoon Mi-hyang, president of the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, stood at the podium. Yoon’s group has played a leading role in the comfort women movement over the past 25 years.

Perhaps because this was the first lecture that Yoon has given since the leaders of South Korea and Japan agreed on Nov. 2 to speed up deliberations to reach a breakthrough on the comfort women issue, the audience included not only reporters and ordinary Japanese interested in the issue, but also members of the Japanese security establishment.

Yoon began by talking about the “peace monument” - a statue of a young girl designed to commemorate the comfort women that was installed across from the Japanese Embassy to South Korea - as if to counter growing opposition in Japanese society to the statue.

“This is not just a statue of a young girl, but a monument to peace. Next to the young girl, there’s an empty chair. Kim Hak-sun and many other comfort women asked us to restore their human rights, but we ultimately failed to achieve this. The empty chair represents our commitment to achieving the things that the victims could not achieve while they were with us,” Yoon said.

While emphasizing the fact that South Korea’s comfort women movement is intended not to attack Japan but rather to restore the dignity of women, Yoon introduced the butterfly fund and a variety of other solidarity activities that the council is engaging in overseas.

The council is using the fund, which was built from donations by South Korean citizens, to help Vietnamese women who were the victims of sexual violence perpetrated by South Korean soldiers during the Vietnam War.

Japanese audience members also asked some pointed questions about the council’s activities.

Once again, Yoon summarized the council’s demands. “Both the governments of South Korea and Japan and the US government are aware of what the victims want. During the Asian Alliance meeting that was held in June 2014, victims from eight countries and activist groups came together to provide the Japanese government with a proposal that lists their demands,” she said.

That proposal called upon the Japanese government to acknowledge the truth about the comfort women issue, to make an incontrovertible apology as proof of this acknowledgement and as a measure of repairing the damage, and to provide compensation as evidence of this apology.

The event on Sunday was organized by the National Movement to Resolve the Issue of the Comfort Women for the Imperial Japanese Army. “It is already clear what the Japanese government needs to do in order for South Korea to stop making an issue of the comfort women. It needs to acknowledge its responsibility in an unambiguous fashion, to make an official apology based on this, and to provide compensation as evidence of the apology,” the group stated in a written demand.

By Gil Yun-hyung, Tokyo correspondent

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]