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Members of Korean American Forum of California along with Chinese and Japanese supporters

In California, educators have released a document that includes guidelines for public high school 10th-grade history classes that will go into effect from September 2017. World history lessons will include information about the comfort Women.

In a July 14 meeting held at its headquarters in Sacramento, the California Department of Education announced that after public hearings and discussions, it had unanimously approved the 2016 revision of its History–Social Science Framework, which provides standards for the curricula of California public schools, including the content of textbooks.

The document includes such statements as "'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. 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 San Francisco Board of Education resolved to include information on comfort women in its history curriculum last year, and the new curriculum will go into effect in the city's middle and high schools this September.

Such groups as the Korean American Forum of California have been very active in pushing for the inclusion of the comfort women in history courses. Kim Hyeon-jeong, the secretary-general of the Forum, said in an email, "Japanese nationalists of the extreme right have posted petitions online, presenting distorted propaganda claiming that the comfort women were highly paid prostitutes. I want to tell the good news to the now elderly former comfort women, who have fought for decades to restore their human rights and dignity. Let me express my great appreciation to all those who worked so hard on the grassroots campaign to gather the signatures needed to accomplish this."

By Park Soo-jin, staff reporter

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