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Minister of Gender Equality and Family Chung Hyun-back talks with former comfort woman Kim Koon-ja during a visit to the House of Sharing in Gwangju

On July 10, the State Affairs Planning Advisory Committee announced that the South Korean government would designate Aug. 14 as a day of tribute to the comfort women, who were victims of Japanese military sexual slavery during World War II. That was the day in 1991 when Kim Hak-soon became the first victim to publicly testify about the plight of the comfort women. At the same time, the committee also said that it would promote the establishment of a center for research on the comfort women and the construction of a national history museum.

This makes official a day of tribute that has already been observed by the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan and other civic groups since 2013. Previously, on a visit to the House of Sharing in Gwangju, Gyeonggi-do, Minister of Gender Equality and Family Chung Hyun-back said that she was looking into the idea of building a comfort women museum in Seoul. These events seem to indicate that the government is now taking on the task of delving into the facts about the violence committed against women during the war.

At a July 10 morning briefing, Park Kwang-on, spokesman for the committee, revealed policies aimed at achieving gender equality in South Korean society and said that the government would lead research and education efforts to raise awareness of the comfort women’s plight and restore their reputation.

The committee says that within this year it will institute a five-year plan to increase women‘s representation in the public sector, which will include raising the quota of acceptance of female cadets by the military and police academies and will place more women in executive and other high-level positions in state institutions. Currently, the military academies accept one woman for every nine men, and the police academy takes in only 12 female cadets out of 100.

By Yoon Hyeong-joong, staff reporter

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