South Korea plans ‘comfort women’ museum as old war wounds with Japan struggle to heal
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
South Korea’s new gender equality and family minister said Monday a plan has been formed to establish a museum in Seoul to commemorate former Korean women forced into Japanese wartime brothels.
Chung Hyun-back, on a visit to a group home for affected women known as the “House of Sharing”, was quoted by Yonhap as saying the envisaged museum would remind people of the “human rights violations caused by war”.
Speaking to reporters during the visit to the facility in Gwangju, on the outskirts of the South Korean capital, Chung said the so-called “comfort women” issue is “no longer an issue between South Korea and Japan but an international one”.
Chung, a professor of history and a women’s rights activist who took office last Friday, said she hopes that work to construct the museum will begin as soon as a site for the facility is secured.
She also expressed support for efforts to find funding to have comfort women-related documents listed in Unesco’s Memory of the World project.