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Fourteen civic groups from South Korea, Japan, and six other countries and a UK war memorial requested UNESCO Memory of the World registration for archival materials related to the drafting of comfort women by the Japanese Imperial Army.

A group calling itself the International Solidarity Committee for Joint UNESCO Memory of the World Registration of Records Related to Japanese Military Comfort Women held a press conference at the Franciscan Education Center in Seoul on June 1 to announce that it had filed a request the day before with Memory of the World headquarters for the listing of 2,744 related materials. The records include 660 submitted by South Korea related to the comfort women.

“To honor the brave voices of the Japanese military comfort women survivors as a first step toward justice, we assembled materials from different countries and are attempting to have the listed under the name of ‘voices of the comfort women,’” explained committee team leader Han Hye-in.

The materials include telegraphs from the collection of the Jilin Prefecture Archive in China, along with personal documents such as a 1943-44 journal by a comfort woman supervisor. Also included were recordings and transcripts of testimony by survivors, photographs, treatment records for a survivor from a Daegu hospital, and archival records provided by the Lila Pilipina Lolas Center from an investigation of Filipina victims.

The committee expects a final decision on the Memory of the World listing around Oct. 2017.

In May 2015, fourteen groups from eight countries, including South Korea, Japan, China, and the Philippines, formed the committee with the aim of having records of the comfort women’s history registered with the UNESCO Memory of the World. At the time, the Ministry of Gender and Family and other South Korean government agencies were also openly pushing for the listing.

But the ministry has been more muted on the effort since an agreement reached on Dec. 28 last year by Seoul and Tokyo on the comfort women issue, stressing that it is being “pursued by private groups.” Critics suggested the change in stance may have been the result of terms in the agreement requiring that both sides “refrain from denouncing or slandering each other before the international community.”

“The comfort women materials are things that need to be preserved for the sake of peace and humankind,” said committee team leader Shin Hye-su.

“The UNESCO registration request is not a political issue,” Shin added.

By Park Soo-jin, staff reporter

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