Apologies for 'comfort women'

By Maija Rhee Devine

In jest, a friend remarked, “You can never apologize enough to a Korean.”

While one may laugh it off, the opinion seems to fit the apology some former Korean comfort women and their advocacy groups demand from Japan for crimes against Koreans committed during WWII. Since 1991, when Kim Hak-soon became Korea’s first former comfort woman to break the silence she and Korean society had kept for 46 years, Japanese officials delivered apologies (sah-gwa, a regret for less than the gravest offenses) several times ― beginning with Prime Minister Miyazawa Kiichi in 1992, and most recently Shinzo Abe in December 2015.

None of these “regrets,” however, has calmed the comfort women’s most vocal advocates, including the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan. According to them, apologies lack sincerity when not bolstered by what they term “legal” responsibility and compensation from Japanese government’s appropriated funds. So far, only privately raised, humanitarian “sympathy” money ― Peace Funds for Asian Women, matched by Japanese non-legislated government funds ― has been offered. Abe’s agreement to pay $8.3 million, accepted by S. Korean President Park Geun-hye in 2015, also did not fit the Korean activists’ definition of “legal” responsibility.

These hardliners equate comfort women and WWII Holocaust victims and insist that Japan’s apologies match what German Chancellor Willy Brandt offered in 1970 in Poland at a commemoration of Jewish victims of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Brandt knelt in silence, which was interpreted as asking for “forgiveness” (sah-joe ― for the gravest sins) for Germany’s crimes against humanity committed during WWII.

Smashing the views the Korean activists propagated for decades, a few Korean scholars now hold their own countrymen culpable for the part they played in the implementation of the Japanese comfort women system, and they urge that Korea apologize to their comfort women. By depriving women and girls of basic human rights for centuries, Korea primed their women, the scholars say, to become exceptionally vulnerable targets of abduction, deceitful coercion or destitution-driven consent to work as sex workers. Korea also produced thousands who aided the implementation of the comfort women system. And, after the return of their comfort women, Korea slammed shut the gates of its society, leaving them shivering in the cold without food, housing, medical assistance or compassion for what they endured.

Noting Korea’s responsibility is Professor Park Yuha of Sejong University, an author recently ordered by a Korean court to pay $8,262 to each of the nine former Korean comfort women for defaming them in her book by, for one, grouping them with some Korean women who, perhaps destitution-driven, willingly sought employment as sex workers. While disagreeing with Park, some former Korean comfort women and their spokespersons do acknowledge a measure of Korea’s culpability and, according to Park, they sued the Korean government for $300 million ― claiming that to be their share of the $800 million Korea received as war reparations from Japan in 1965.

Some Korean academics stress that Korea’s overdue apology to their own women must be given immediately. However, Professor Bong Gwan-jun of KAIST argues, “We must make Japan apologize and compensate again before we admit our responsibility.” Yet another apology from Japan before Korea does right by its own women?

Jun’s word “again” resonates with the jest about no apology to a Korean being good enough. Attempting to blowtorch out of Japan a Willy-Brandt-on-the-knees-style begging for forgiveness, matched by “legal” funds, may never happen. Meanwhile, the surviving 44 comfort women― of the 238 who registered in S. Korea ― and the non-registered survivors, in their 90s, may die with han, hearts beaten to pulp.

Maija Rhee Devine authored an autobiographical novel about Korea, The Voices of Heaven. Her works-in-progress are a nonfiction book about former Korean comfort women and a novel, Journals of Comfort Women.