hankyoreh

Apr. 23. (by Gil Yun-hyung

South Korean and Japanese organizations that are working to resolve the issue of the comfort women have come up with a new approach - asking the Japanese government to acknowledge the truth and compensate the victims without admitting legal responsibility . With relations between South Korea and Japan hobbled because of the comfort women issue, attention is on how the Japanese government will respond.

On Apr. 23, the two groups who have led the campaign about the comfort women in South Korea and Japan - the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan and the Japanese National Movement for Resolving the Issue of the Military Comfort Women - held a press conference at the House of Councillors assembly hall in Tokyo, where they unveiled a new proposal for the Japanese government.

The civic groups ask the Japanese government to admit that the imperial government and military planned, built, administered, and controlled the comfort stations as military facilities, that women became comfort women against their wills, and that they were forced to remain at the comfort stations. On the basis of these admissions, the government is asked to make an irreversible apology in a clear and official manner, to compensate the former comfort women to prove the sincerity of this apology, and to include information about the comfort women in textbooks.

In the past, the Korean Council has made seven demands - for Japan’s Diet to adopt a resolution apologizing to the comfort women, for the Japanese government to acknowledge legal responsibility, and for the guilty parties to be prosecuted, among others - but these were not included in the new proposal.

This proposal synthesizes the results of four meetings of the South Korean and Japanese groups working on the comfort women issue, which has deadlocked bilateral relations, that were held in the two countries between July 2012 and Aug. 2013.

“If the Japanese government acknowledges the facts about the comfort women system as we describe them and provides the compensation that follows as a matter of course, that would constitute an acknowledgement of legal responsibility in our view,” said Yang Jing-ja, co-leader of National Movement.

“The comfort women groups had initially been asking the Japanese government to make a legal apology, but their demands have changed. Now they want it to acknowledge that the women were brought to the comfort stations against their will. I think we are getting closer to a solution,” said Haruki Wada, professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo.

The Japanese government has held the position that it cannot accept legal responsibility for the comfort women, an issue that it regards as having been completely and permanently resolved by the 1965 treaty that normalized relations between South Korea and Japan.

Since this proposal replaces the term “legal responsibility” - a term that the Japanese government has rejected - with the concrete measures that Japan would have to take if it were in fact legally responsible, it remains to be seen how the Japanese government will respond.

“The only way for South Korea and Japan to live together in harmony is for Prime Minister Abe to change his mind and own up to the mistakes of the past,” said Kim Bok-dong, 90, a former comfort women who attended the press conference on Thursday.

By Gil Yun-hyung, Tokyo correspondent

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