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South Korea and Japan Reach Deal on Wartime ‘Comfort Women’ South Korea and Japan Reach Deal on Wartime ‘Comfort Women’
(35 minutes later)
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea and Japan reached a landmark agreement on Monday to resolve the longstanding dispute over Korean women who were lured or forced into sexual slavery for Japanese soldiers during World War II. SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea and Japan announced on Monday that they had reached a “final and irrevocable resolution” of their decades-old historical dispute over Korean women who were forced to serve as sex slaves for Japan’s Imperial Army in the early 20th century.
The agreement was announced in Seoul after a meeting between the foreign ministers of the two countries. The landmark agreement will remove one of the most intractable logjams in relations between South Korea and Japan, its former colonial master, both crucial allies to the United States.
For South Korea, the issue of so-called comfort women is among the most emotional of the disputes stemming from Japan’s colonial rule of Korea from 1910 to 1945. The so-called comfort women have been the most painful legacy of Japan’s colonial rule of Korea, which lasted from 1910 until Japan’s World War II defeat in 1945. Forty-six former comfort women are still alive in South Korea.
Japan apologized for the practice in 1993, and it admitted that its army had recruited women for brothels, but South Korea has insisted that Japan has not properly atoned for its wartime past. “The Japanese government bears a heartfelt responsibility” for recruiting comfort women “with the involvement of its military” and for “severely injuring the honor and dignity of many women,” the foreign minister of Japan, Fumio Kishida, said on Monday, reading the agreement during a news conference in Seoul.
Japan has said that the issue was settled in the 1965 treaty that normalized relations between the two countries. But Seoul contends that under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japan has played down state responsibility for the recruitment of the women, which many historians say involved coercion. Mr. Kishida also said that his boss, the hawkish Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, had expressed “apologies and remorse from his heart.”
Although Japan had previously offered similar apologies, as in a 1993 statement by its chief cabinet secretary at the time, Yohei Kono, the agreement on Monday signaled a compromise for Mr. Abe. As recently as last year, Mr. Abe and his conservative political allies in Japan had advocated reviewing the evidence that led to Mr. Kono’s apology.
Under the agreement, the Japanese government will provide 1 billion yen, or $8.3 million, to a foundation that the South Korean government will establish to initiate various projects to heal the wounds of the women.
The deal was announced after Mr. Kishida met with his South Korean counterpart, Yun Byung-se, in Seoul. Their meeting came after 12 rounds of negotiations the two governments have held since spring last year to narrow their gaps on the dispute.
Mr. Yun and Mr. Kishida said they hoped that the deal would open a “new phase” in bilateral ties, long strained over historical disputes stemming from colonial rule. They also said that Seoul and Tokyo would refrain from criticizing each other over the issue at the United Nations and elsewhere.