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“Comfort women” survivor Lee Yong-soo, 92, speaks to reporters as she leaves the Seoul Central District Court on Wednesday after the court dismissed the case filed by Lee, the late Kwak Ye-nam and other survivors of Japanese military sexual slavery, and 20 family members of victims against the Japanese government to demand compensation. (Yonhap News)

“They held on to me and wouldn’t let go, they wouldn’t let go, those Japanese brutes, those terrible soldiers. All I could do was weep as they had their way with me. I’d just like to get revenge, even if only in words, just once before I die, before my eyes close for the last time.”

Kim Hak-sun (1924-1997) made this testimony thirty years ago, on Aug. 14, 1991, becoming the first person to open up about her experiences as a “comfort woman” for the Japanese imperial army. Her story filled South Korean society with unbearable sadness and shame.

Since that time, sympathizing with the pain of the victims, restoring their dignity, and receiving a proper apology from the Japanese government have become an imperative mission for South Korean society to accomplish in this era.

Initially, the Japanese government duplicitously claimed that the comfort women had been tricked by brokers. But then on Aug. 4, 1993, Tokyo released the Kono Statement, which acknowledged the Japanese military’s involvement in the comfort women system and the compulsory nature of their mobilization.

When South Korea and Japan normalized diplomatic relations in 1965, they agreed that all claims had been completely and finally resolved, creating a serious stumbling block for South Korean victims seeking remedies.

The Japanese government established the Asian Women’s Fund in July 1995 in an attempt to resolve this issue, but it refused to provide any government funds because of the 1965 agreement.

Japan would only accept “moral responsibility” for the comfort women issue, but not “legal responsibility,” which would require admitting that it had been a state crime. Because Japan refused to take on legal responsibility, South Korean society rejected the Asian Women’s Fund and initiated an open-ended struggle against Japan.

The situation changed when the South Korean government declared in August 2005 that the comfort women issue hadn’t been addressed by the 1965 agreements.

South Koreans earnestly demanded to know why their government wasn’t taking action to resolve the issue. They were backed up by the Constitutional Court, which ruled in August 2011 that the government was brazenly remiss in its duty to negotiate with the Japanese government about the comfort women.

After that, the comfort women issue rose to the forefront of lingering historical disputes between the two countries, becoming a diplomatic issue that the South Korean government was obligated to resolve.

Painful diplomatic deliberations over the comfort women issue began under South Korean President Park Geun-hye and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2013. Under pressure from the US, which insisted that South Korea and Japan needed to work together to counter the rise of China, South Korea was forced to accept a comfort women agreement, which it concluded with Japan on Dec. 28, 2015.

In the agreement, Abe declared that Japan “is painfully aware of responsibilities,” without specifying whether those responsibilities were legal or moral. In line with the agreement, Japan agreed to contribute 1 billion yen (US$9.3 million) from the government budget, a step it had long refused to do.

What South Korea promised in exchange was “the final and irreversible resolution” of the comfort women issue. Moon Jae-in, who came to power in South Korea in the wake of the candlelit protests in late 2016, said that the comfort women issue hadn’t actually been resolved by the agreement, but then in January 2018, he said he wouldn’t seek to renegotiate the agreement.

By that point, the comfort women issue had been degraded from one that the two governments had to solve to one that they needed to manage.

Then on Jan. 8, 2021, a South Korean court reached a ruling that defied everyone’s expectations. The district court said that the Japanese government must compensate the comfort women survivors, despite sovereign immunity, a principle in customary international law.

But President Moon said in in his New Year’s press conference that he had been “a little perplexed” by the ruling. At the end of last month, another court blocked the victorious plaintiffs from seizing Japanese government assets.

Then on Wednesday, another South Korean court rejected a separate lawsuit brought by comfort women survivors. Whereas the first court had said that the principle of sovereign immunity doesn’t apply to crimes against humanity such as the comfort women system, the second court accepted that principle and said that the 2015 comfort women agreement could serve as an alternative method of restoring the victims’ rights.

The court’s ruling recognizes the 2015 agreement as being the final resolution of the comfort women issue. While an appeals process remains, this makes it much less likely that the comfort women survivors will receive a legal remedy. It serves as a major inflection point in the comfort women’s thirty-year struggle.

The ruling isn’t likely to lead to an improvement in South Korea-Japan relations. The two countries still face a fundamental strategic disagreement about North Korea and China, and they’re wrestling with challenges both old and new, ranging from another court ruling that awarded compensation to the victims of forced labor to Japan’s plan to release radioactive water from the Fukushima nuclear power plant into the ocean.

The South Korean and Japanese governments have had little to say about the latest ruling so far.

“We will refrain from commenting specifically about today’s ruling, since we’re still looking into the details. The government will continue doing everything in its power to restore the dignity and repair the reputations of the comfort women survivors according to the principle of prioritizing the victims,” South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.

In comments directed at Japan, the Ministry observed that “the comfort women issue concerns a violation of universal human rights and an infringement of women’s rights in wartime without precedent in the world” and called on the Japanese government “to take action that is in line with the keen responsibility, regret and remorse it expressed in the Kono Statement in 1993 and the comfort women agreement concluded on Dec. 28, 2015.”

Tokyo’s response was terse. Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato said during the daily press conference that morning that Tokyo is “looking into the details of the ruling and will refrain from commenting at the present time.”

By Gil Yun-hyung, staff reporter

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