The intractable issue of compensation for women forced into sexual slavery during Japan's World War II occupation of South Korea looks likely to undermine the US-led united front against China's naval expansion and North Korea's nuclear ambitions. Stirred in part by nationalist pressure in the run-up to presidential elections in the South, the gap between the two sides' perceptions on the sensitive issue remains as wide as it ever was.
- Kosuke Takahashi (May 21, '12)
Cold comfort for Japan-South Korea ties By Kosuke Takahashi
TOKYO - Sixty-seven years after the end of World War II, history is once again beginning to produce heightened diplomatic tensions between Japan and South Korea.
The thorny question of whether or not the Japanese government should meet South Korea's renewed demand that Tokyo pay compensation to "comfort women" forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese military during World War II, accompanied by an official apology, is likely to show no sign of settlement. Escalating tensions between Tokyo and Seoul could harm the US-led united front against China's naval expansion and North Korea's nuclear and missile ambitions in coming months, especially before the South Korean presidential election is held in December amid rising domestic nationalist pressure.
"Regarding comfort women, there is a wide perception gap between Japan and South Korea," Masao Okonogi, a research professor at the Research Center for Korean Studies of Kyushu University in Fukuoka City, told Asia Times Online. "It's very difficult to bridge that gap, and it's difficult to resolve this issue."
South Korea's Defense Minister Kim Kwan-jin on May 17 canceled a trip to Japan. Kim was expected to visit Tokyo on May 30 and 31 to conclude two bilateral accords on sharing military intelligence and logistics, in what would be the first such pacts since Japan's colonial rule over Korea ended in 1945.
"As public attention is high on a military pact with Japan, I will not handle the matter with more haste than caution but handle it throughout discussions at the National Assembly," Kim was quoted as telling Park Ji-won, the floor leader of the Democratic United Party (DUP), according to South Korea's Yonhap news agency.
His reservations over bilateral military cooperation with Tokyo came just days after South Korean President Lee Myung-bak and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda at a summit in Beijing on May 13 agreed to move forward on concluding the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA), a pact on the sharing of military intelligence, and the Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement (ACSA), another pact for the exchange of supplies between the South Korean military and the Japanese Self-Defense Forces (SDF).
Behind the South Korean defense chief's sudden policy reversal was an opposition party offensive. Park on May 17 urged Kim to be cautious about signing any military pact with Japan as Tokyo had not fully repented on atrocities committed during its colonial rule, Yonhap news agency reported.
This incident became a major setback for the strengthening of the US-led alliance in the Asia-Pacific region to counter the military expansion of China. The foreign ministers of Japan and Australia on May 17 had signed an accord aimed at protecting classified information shared by the two nations, the latest example of bilateral agreements between US allies in the region.
The US also has tightened security ties with Australia, the Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam in recent years, the US alliance system that Beijing considers a tool of encirclement. Thus, the US has long wanted the agreements between Japan and South Korea, the US's strongest allies in the region, to contribute to enhancing greater cooperation among its alliance partners by filling the missing link, especially when Seoul was about to stomach them politically.
This tinderbox was ignored for years, but the recent dispute first erupted in late August 2011 when the constitutional court of South Korea decided that it was a violation of the constitution for the government to make no tangible effort to resolve the compensation claims from former "comfort women", who were mobilized, or often coerced, as sex slaves during its 1910-1945 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula. Following the court decision, the Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs officially requested the Japanese government to start negotiations over the issues.
Then, during a summit between the two nations last December in Kyoto, Lee directly also asked Noda to address the issue of comfort women. Meanwhile, a couple days earlier, a statue of a comfort woman was set up in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, reigniting diplomatic tensions between the two nations.
Most recently, a museum called the War and Women's Human Rights Museum opened on May 5 in Seoul. The museum records the turbulent history of comfort women through photographs, videos, documents and clothes detailing the history of their victimization. Placed in the exhibition is the same bronze statue of a demure teenage girl in traditional Korean hanbok that was implanted across the narrow street from the rear of the Japanese Embassy.
"The life I've lived is like a dream, but even dreams come as terrible nightmares," one engraving of a comfort woman says. Another says, "I am the very evidence alive. Why does Japan say they have no evidence?"
When I visited the museum on May 14, a South Korean resident in Osaka welcomed me as a volunteer guide and toured me throughout the museum, which has two stories and a basement level.
"Harumoni just hope this kind of tragedy will never happen again," Oh Woog-yeon, 40, who lives in the Ikuno district of Osaka, said at the museum. Harumoni means grandmothers in Korea. She said there are now only 61 survivors left out of the 234 "comfort women" registered with the South Korean government.
The Japanese Embassy in Seoul has lodged a complaint on South Korea’s funding of the museum, claiming that exhibition regarding the so-called “comfort women” did not comply with Japan’s stance.
Takashi Kurai, minister and deputy chief of mission at the Japanese Embassy in South Korea, on May 7 visited Korea’s foreign ministry to lodge a protest, expressing regret that the South Korea government had provided 500 million won (about US$427,000) towards building the museum, Japan’s conservative Sankei newspaper reported on May 18.
The newspaper said the museum’s exhibition did not recognize Japan’s efforts to solve the issue of comfort women.
Although Seoul has urged Japan to take a positive stance on solving the issue, Tokyo has made no concrete response. Japan has maintained the issue was settled by a 1965 treaty that normalized bilateral ties.
While many South Koreans think the Japanese government continues to delay issuing official apologies or compensation from government coffers, many Japanese feel that they have already repeatedly apologized and expressed regret.
Moreover, although many Japanese think Tokyo has no legal obligation to compensate war victims, including those forced to become laborers and comfort women, Japan has already tried to make its best efforts to make amends in some way for their ancestors' crimes on humanitarian grounds. The Asian Women's Fund (AWF), which was privately established in 1995 to follow Germany's "Germany-Poland Reconciliation Fund", collected money from the Japanese public and distributed it to former comfort women.
South Koreans and their government had repeatedly criticized the fund after Japan started paying atonement money to South Korean women in January 1997. The objecting South Koreans said the money should come from directly from the Japanese government treasury, accompanied by an official apology.
Right-wing Japanese lawmakers and neo-conservative nationalists have also exasperated elderly Korean female survivors of the enslavement of comfort women by claiming many Korean women during the war were merely sex workers for money. Those reactionaries have always bitterly disputed that it was Japan's official policy of centralized recruiting and dispatching of comfort women to carefully administered comfort station under military control.
For South Korea's part, some supporters are, consciously or subconsciously, using those women to stir up the so-called victim-based Korean nationalism. The issue has been assimilated to national history, sometimes ignoring the women's real feeling and experiences. Many experts have pointed out the women were not often given freedom of speech because they were expected to become symbols of the Japanese colonial exploitation of Korea, although each woman had different relations with Japanese people.
Japan has amnesia about past wrongs generally, while Seoul is failing to accommodate the victims' feelings.
"Both governments need to decide whether they will seriously work together by building up domestic consensus, or decide to mothball this issue once and for all as it seems impossible to solve," Okonogi said.
Kosuke Takahashi is a Tokyo-based Japanese journalist. His twitter is @TakahashiKosuke
(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
No comments:
Post a Comment