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South Korea
This Week in Asia

Why is a South Korean fringe group backing Japan’s position on WWII ‘comfort women’?

  • End Comfort Women Fraud group says there’s evidence of women signing contracts to work in brothels for Japanese military during colonial rule
  • Four campaigners are heading to Berlin, wanting a comfort woman statue removed ‘to help improve South Korea-Japan relationship’ and other ties

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People gather around a statue symbolising Korean “comfort women” made to work in Japanese wartime military brothels, in Berlin in 2020, in protest against the German city’s decision to rescind approval for it to stand there. The authorities later changed their stance and the statue is still in place. Photo: Kyodo
Julian Ryall

They have been accused of being traitors, found guilty of defamation by courts, threatened online countless times and even assaulted in the street, but a group of South Korean activists and academics refuse to give in to the mainstream belief in their homeland on the issue of “comfort women”.

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The group’s position runs contrary to the United Nations Special Rapporteur’s 1996 report on violence against women.

In that, Radhika Coomaraswamy defined the comfort women system as sexual slavery and urged the Japanese government – which has often called the women prostitutes, not sex slaves – to acknowledge its legal responsibility and to pay compensation to the victims, who were mainly Korean but were also from the Philippines, China and other East Asian countries.

Nevertheless, the End Comfort Women Fraud civic organisation has united several smaller groups that perceive Korea’s history differently, including the Free Youth League, the Korean Society for Modern and Contemporary History and the National Enlightenment Movement Headquarters.

Lee Yong-soo, a South Korean survivor of sexual slavery, with the statue of a girl symbolising the issue of wartime “comfort women” during an unveiling ceremony in Seoul in 2019. Photo: AP
Lee Yong-soo, a South Korean survivor of sexual slavery, with the statue of a girl symbolising the issue of wartime “comfort women” during an unveiling ceremony in Seoul in 2019. Photo: AP

Around 40 people make up the core of the organisation, drawn from academia, politics and activism. And although the group is widely derided in domestic media as being ultra-rightist and revisionist, its members prefer to describe themselves as conservative.

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Four of its campaigners are travelling from South Korea to Germany for weekend talks with Berlin city elders about a statue of a comfort woman unveiled in the Mitte district in September 2020.
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