‘Comfort women’ deal: compensation and apology from Shinzo Abe as rivals South Korea and Japan reach landmark deal on wartime sex slaves
The foreign ministers of South Korea and Japan said Monday they had reached a deal meant to resolve a decades-long impasse over Korean women forced into Japanese military-run brothels during the second world war, a potentially dramatic breakthrough between the neighbours and rivals.
READ MORE: Japan’s 1993 apology for sex slavery won’t be revised, Shinzo Abe says
The deal, which included an apology from Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and a 1 billion yen ($8.3 million) aid fund from Tokyo for the elderly former sex slaves, could reverse decades of animosity and mistrust between the thriving democracies, trade partners and staunch US allies.
The issue of former Korean sex slaves, euphemistically known as “comfort women,” has been the biggest source of friction in ties between Seoul and Tokyo, with animosity rising precipitously since the hawkish Abe’s 2012 inauguration.
Japan appeared emboldened to make the overture after the first formal leaders’ meeting between the neighbours in 3 ½ years, in November, and after South Korean courts recently acquitted a Japanese reporter charged with defaming South Korea’s president Park Geun-hye refused to review a complaint by a South Korean seeking individual compensation for Japan’s forceful mobilisation of workers during colonial days.
READ MORE: Japanese nationalists in war of words over ‘comfort women’
Many South Koreans feel lingering bitterness from the legacy of Japan’s brutal colonial occupation of the Korean Peninsula from 1910-1945. But South Korean officials have also faced calls to improve ties with Japan, the world’s No. 3 economy and a regional powerhouse, not least from US officials eager for a strong united front against a rising China and North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear-armed missiles that could target the American mainland.
