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The comfort women statue outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul’s Jongno district sports an umbrella

From 2017, students at public high schools in California are slated to learn about the Imperial Japanese Army’s “comfort women” system as an example of the human rights abuses and crimes against humanity that women have suffered during war. This is the first time for the comfort women issue to be included in a US public high school curriculum.

On Dec. 21, the Sankei Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper, reported that the comfort women issue had been added to a draft of the history and social studies curriculum that will take effect in California public high schools in 2017. The newspaper said that the subject’s addition to the curriculum appeared to have been a response to requests by South Korea and that the next question could be how Japan would respond.

The California Department of Education will finalize the revised curriculum after collecting opinions from residents of the state.

References to the comfort women appear in the draft of the curriculum for “World History, Culture, and Geography: The Modern World,” the social studies textbook for the tenth grade, which was posted on the website of the California Department of Education.

“‘Comfort Women,’ a euphemism for sexual slaves, were taken by the Japanese Army in occupied territories before and during the war. ‘Comfort Women’ can be taught as an example of institutionalized sexual slavery, and one of the largest cases of human trafficking in the twentieth century; estimates on the total number of comfort women vary, but most argue that hundreds of thousands of women were forced into these situations during Japanese occupation,” the draft says.

Quoting articles from several South Korean newspapers, the Sankei Shimbun reported that Korean-American educators had attended a hearing to revise the history and social studies curriculum held by the California Department of Education in mid-November and argued that the comfort women system and other savage practices that the Japanese army perpetrated against Korean women during World War II ought to be taught to students in an appropriate way. This suggests that an aggressive media campaign by Korean-Americans brought about the inclusion of the comfort women issue in the curriculum of American public schools.

The newspaper also reported that officials from the Japanese government have been complaining at several international conferences that it is inappropriate to refer to the comfort women as sex slaves.

But in Aug. 2014, the UN Human Rights Committee urged the Japanese government to carry out fair, effective, and independent investigations of every complaint about sexual slavery or other human rights violations by the Imperial Japanese Army, to prosecute the accused, and to punish those who are found guilty. The committee also recommended that students and the general public be educated on the issue by adequately covering it in textbooks.

By Gil Yun-hyung, Tokyo correspondent

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