President Lee Myung-bak is visiting Kyoto, Japan, on Saturday and Sunday for shuttle diplomacy with Prime Minister Yoshiko Noda. Glaringly missing from the officially sanctioned summit agenda, however, is an issue concerning Korean women forced into sex slavery during World War II.
The summit will have to deal extensively with the case, be it on the official agenda or not.
True, presidential aides say that Lee, very much concerned about the issue, may take it up any time he meets Noda. But a cursory discussion will not do. Lee will have to give top priority to the issue and put hard pressure on an evasive Japan for an official apology and proper official compensation.
That is his obligation mandated by the Constitutional Court, which ruled in August that the Korean government’s inaction with regard to the demands of the women, who go by the euphemism of “comfort women,” was unconstitutional. The court concluded that their demands were legitimate as they are not covered by the 1965 Korean-Japanese agreement on the settlement of all claims stemming from Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule of Korea.
Based on the court decision, Korea called on Japan to start talks on the issue. Japan has yet to respond to the Korean demand.
Lee is called on to have a sense of urgency in dealing with the matter, given that most of the 234 women officially registered with the Korean government as former sex slaves have died. The average age of the 63 surviving women is 86. They are among the hundreds of thousands of women from Asian countries who were sent to brothels run by the Japanese military during the Second World War.
The poignancy of Japan’s wartime crime of forcing Korean and other Asian women into sex slavery came to the fore again on Wednesday when Korean comfort women and their supporters held the 1,000th weekly protest rally in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. Yet, Japan had the impudence to say their installation of a bronze statue as a symbol of the victims in front of the Japanese Embassy would “harm its dignity” and adversely affect its relations with Korea.
But Japan should be reminded that its dignity has already been damaged, with quite a few countries in the world condemning its wartime atrocities. The only way to restore it is acknowledge its wrongdoing, express contrition and make compensation.
