Comfort women agreement was always political maneuver

Hwang Kyung-moon

By Hwang Kyung-moon

The findings of the South Korean government task force on the December 2015 “comfort women” agreement with Japan confirmed what observers like me suspected all along: the accord was first and foremost an expedient political move, not a sincerely thorough effort to resolve a complicated historical conflict. It therefore never had a chance to become a lasting “irreversible” solution.

It turns out that then-President Park Geun-hye was directly involved, even against the advice of some of her diplomats, in pushing for some kind of deal before the end of 2015. The task force investigation suggests strongly that this insistence on the timing compromised South Korea’s negotiating position.

When task force chairman Oh Tai-kyu was interviewed on JTBC news on Wednesday evening, he and the interviewer seemed puzzled by Park’s eagerness to finalize the agreement in the 50th anniversary year of the 1965 treaty that normalized diplomatic relations between South Korea and Japan. The significance of a possible comfort women agreement, after all, far surpassed such superficial considerations.

I beg to differ. The anniversary had everything to do with the agreement’s timing, negotiations, content, and character. As I noted in this column the week after the agreement was announced, the 50th anniversary year of the original normalization treaty, which Park’s father, former President Park Chung Hee, pushed through over fervent protests in and outside the government at the time, commemorated much more than a single historic event. It has become integrated into the ongoing conflicts over historical understanding that divide South Korean society today.

The late 2015 agreement, in sum, was a centerpiece of Park Geun-hye’s efforts to legitimize her father’s reign from 1961 to 1979 through interventions in public memory and national history. It was designed to shore up her core base of political support, mostly the elderly and residents of North Gyeongsang province, as conflicts over history became critical in both reflecting and driving political differences.

As I noted in a follow-up column in early 2017, the Park administration’s legitimization of the military dictatorship period also included reinforcing and validating South Korea’s longstanding place in the American-led Northeast Asian order. In terms of the comfort women issue, this effort glossed over the long, powerful history of sexual exploitation in Korea, including under her father’s rule, in service to dominant participants such as the government.

In moving forward, then, there appear two options: cancel the agreement by letting it die, or renegotiate. The Japanese government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was in power two years ago as well, has vociferously insisted on maintaining the original agreement. But Abe, whose grandfather was part of the militarist World War II government that perpetrated the actions of imperial Japan, will eventually have to leave office.

Perhaps this fact can prompt more Japanese citizens to face directly the most persistent source of international tension in East Asia _ the Japanese empire’s aggression from the late 19th century to 1945. Little will improve fundamentally in this regard until Japan, like Germany, not only acknowledges but embraces its responsibility for what happened.

For South Korea, I hope that, regardless of whether there is another formal agreement, the government can quietly disassociate itself from the comfort women statues and other memorializing projects, and just let private groups pursue them. Allowing these statues to be erected in front of Japanese diplomatic compounds, such as embassies and consulates, is inflammatory and frankly juvenile. Can one imagine the government of Israel or France letting statues that commemorate the victims of the Nazi regime to go up in front of German embassies? That would be outrageous.

Second, as I suggested in my column a year ago, I hope the government can lead or join South Korean society as a whole in taking this episode as an opportunity to consider honestly the shameful history of sexual exploitation and gender discrimination in Korea, and how this history contributed to both the comfort women phenomenon and the ways it has been politicized.

Hwang Kyung-moon (khwang3@gmail.com) is a professor at the Department of History, University of Southern California. He is the author of "A History of Korea _ An Episodic Narrative" (second edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).