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Post by Admin on Oct 29, 2018 18:08:24 GMT
South Korea is considering abolishing the fund Tokyo paid into as part of the landmark 2015 agreement to resolve a lingering dispute over Japan’s wartime sexual slavery of women. The government said it will deliver its decision on the matter soon and what it plans to do with the roughly $9 million in it. However, whatever plans Seoul has are likely to run afoul of the wishes of many surviving victims of Japan’s wartime sexual slavery, widely referred to as “comfort women.” In his bilateral summit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe September 25, South Korean President Moon Jae-in said the Reconciliation and Healing Foundation has “failed to function properly due to objections from the comfort women survivors and the South Korean public.” Abe urged Moon to uphold the bilateral agreement, and according to Moon’s spokesman, the president said he will neither abandon, nor demand its renegotiation. The Reconciliation and Healing Foundation was formed to distribute money wired from Japan to pay surviving comfort women and relatives of deceased victims, as stipulated in the 2015 bilateral agreement between Seoul and Tokyo. South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported there had been allegations of mismanagement in the fund’s administration and possible irregularities in selecting recipients. The situation was exacerbated when a majority of its board resigned, including the chairperson, effectively rendering it useless. To offset any money that was spent during the program, the South Korean government injected more money into the fund to cover money that was wired from Japan. Now Seoul is left with the question of what to do with the nearly $9 million that’s been allocated for distribution. Gender Equality Minister Jin Sun-mee said she will make the final decision on the fund’s fate soon and is considering multiple options, but did not disclose what they may be, other than the ministry would consult with survivors and undertake “unprecedented care” in making it.
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Post by Admin on Nov 26, 2018 17:54:11 GMT
Known to empower youngsters with its uplifting music and social awareness, it’s fans, lovingly known as Army, have shown support for the victims of sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army of yesteryear. According to Koreaboo, an international fan had recently shared a post on Twitter which encouraged BTS lovers to help Korea’s comfort women, called “halmonies” (or grandmothers) who were victims of sexual slavery before and during World War II. The post which included a link to donate money quickly saw fans contributing to the House of Sharing, the nursing home for living comfort women. The home was established in 1992 and is currently located in the outskirts of Seoul. House of Sharing had indicated that it received over 2 million KRW (about RM7,500) in three days beginning Nov 16.
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Post by Admin on Mar 6, 2019 17:50:46 GMT
I recently met former “comfort woman” Lee Yong-soo, 89, at a rally in Seoul held at the site where the contentious comfort woman statue is located. Afterwards I joined her on a trip to the House of Sharing, where 10 other former comfort women are currently residing. During our journey we conversed mostly in Japanese about her hellish experiences in a Japanese military brothel, with some help from a Korean interpreter. It is a poignant saga of abduction from her village at age 16 and ending up on an air base in Taiwan, where she initially resisted her captors who beat and tortured her (with electricity) until she succumbed. One young kamikaze pilot nursed her wounds, and they became so close to each other that not long before his final departure he composed a song for her, saying he would become a star in the heavens and always be there for her. He taught her this and some other Japanese songs that she sang for me in a soulful tenor.
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Post by Admin on Mar 7, 2019 17:12:27 GMT
At one conference, after she sang this song he composed for her, a Taiwanese lady stood up and said that the “Shinju” in the lyrics must refer to the air base in her town, which is now used by the Taiwanese military. This led to an investigation that corroborated Lee’s story. After 2½ years, she finally made it home around May 1946. When she arrived at her family’s house they were conducting a memorial service for her, not knowing anything about her fate; her mother fainted upon seeing her, fearing she was a ghost. A Korean woman had lured her outside her home in 1943 when they were kidnapped together, but they were later taken to separate destinations. Her friend also made it home after the war, and one day stopped by to apologize for her complicity in the abduction. Soon after, she committed suicide. Over the years Lee only told her mother about her ordeal, because she could not bear the thought of marriage and needed to explain why she fended off pressures to wed. She began to learn Japanese from a boarder at her family home, a journalist who had split from her husband when he was diagnosed with Hansen’s disease (leprosy). Later, she continued her Japanese language studies at university. Lee dislikes the expression “sex slave” because she finds the words so degrading, and insists that she be described as a comfort woman, defying the preference of activist groups. I think she has earned the right to be called whatever she wants.
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Post by Admin on May 29, 2019 18:48:59 GMT
A professor whose book about Japan’s World War II-era military brothels angered Korean women who once worked there was acquitted on Wednesday of defaming the women. The professor of Japanese literature at Sejong University in Seoul, Park Yu-ha, published “Comfort Women of the Empire” in 2013. She has since faced civil and criminal complaints from nine South Korean women who said they were forced to work at the brothels during the war. A year ago, Ms. Park lost a civil lawsuit when a court said she had defamed the women with “false” and “distorted” content in her book and ordered her to pay each of the nine 10 million won, or about $8,500. But on Wednesday, Ms. Park won the criminal case. In a case closely followed by the South Korean news media, a judge in the Eastern District Court in Seoul ruled that her academic freedom must be protected. “The opinions the defendant expressed in her book can invite criticism and objections and can even be abused by those who deny that the comfort women were forcibly mobilized,” said the justice, Lee Sang-yoon. “But academic expressions must be protected not only when they are right but also when they are wrong.” Justice Lee said Ms. Park’s book should ultimately be judged by academics and citizens through free debate. In her book, Ms. Park called for a more comprehensive view of the women in the brothels, euphemistically referred to by the Japanese as “comfort women.” They have been widely described in official South Korean history as young women forced or lured into sexual slavery. Ms. Park argues that such a picture was only partly true. She wrote that there was no evidence that the Japanese government was officially involved in, and therefore legally responsible for, forcibly recruiting the women from Korea, then a colony of Japan. She said Korean collaborators, as well as private Japanese recruiters, were mainly responsible for placing Korean women, sometimes through coercion, in the “comfort stations.” She also said that life there included both rape and prostitution, and that some women developed a “comrade-like relationship” with Japanese soldiers.
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