By Park Si-soo
Ear-biting cold and powerful wind slipped Seoul’s mercury to below minus eight degrees Celsius, Wednesday. But it fell short of discouraging two old ladies in their late 80s — Gil Won-ok and Kim Bok-dong — from venturing out for a weekly ritual they have observed since January 1992.
“Japan must apologize for its wartime atrocity against Korean women,” they shouted while exhaling clouds of vapor in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. “We demand the Japanese government enact a law to take liability for its past misdeeds and describe it in textbooks for Japanese students.”
The two were among 63 surviving Korean women who were forced into sexual servitude at frontline Japanese brothels during World War II, euphemistically called “comfort women.”
Roughly 200 activists and teenage students, huddling around them and acting like a windbreak, shouted together at the 1,004th rally, hosted by the Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan. The rally started at noon, as it has done for the past two decades, and lasted 50 minutes.
The doors and windows of the embassy remained firmly shut throughout.
“I hope the two countries (South Korea and Japan) come up with a fundamental solution on the issue this year so that we can stop staging this protest,” said Yoon Mee-hyang, the council’s president, in an interview with The Korea Times.
The weekly protest, widely called “Wednesday rally” in Korea, started on Jan. 8 1992 to demand an apology and compensation to victims of the wartime sexual slavery from the Japanese government, but Tokyo has rejected the calls, claiming the issue was settled in a 1965 treaty normalizing ties between the two countries.
With no concrete resolution in sight, protesters’ outcries had virtually gone unheeded and the government had also stayed idle until August last year when the country’s top court made a landmark ruling favorable to former “comfort women.”
The Constitutional Court stipulated in the ruling that it was unconstitutional for the government to make no specific effort to settle the matter with Tokyo.
The ruling led Seoul’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MOFAT) to establish a task force and propose to its Japanese counterpart to hold a bilateral meeting to discuss the matter.
President Lee Myung-bak has thrown his weight behind the move, urging Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda in an unusually strong tone to resolve the issue during a summit on Dec. 18, calling it a “stumbling block” to relations between the two countries. With Japan showing no sign of accepting the meeting proposal, MOFAT is mulling over referring the case for international arbitration.
“We are considering making more efforts to hold meetings with Japan,” said Foreign Minister Kim Sung-hwan during a press briefing last week. “If we come to the conclusion that this will never happen, we will refer the issue for arbitration.” The minister said no deadline to make the decision has been set.
Yoon urged MOFAT to prepare for the arbitration thoroughly.
“I believe the arbitration result will be favorable to us,” she said confidently. “What matters now is making thorough preparation. I will keep monitoring it.”
She underscored MOFAT should brace for all situations that could arise since Japan is also aware that arbitration will never be favorable to it.
Japan recently moved to coddle victims here with handsome compensation from a state fund, a move designed to resolve the dispute while avoiding a first-hand apology. Yoon said this is never acceptable. “This is not a matter of money,” she underscored. “Ita matter of pride for our country and the victims.”
She said she feels proud that the government is working harder to resolve the issue. “I feel some auspicious news will come this year,” she said smiling.
Yoon’s organization has continued to demand Japan fully disclose details of its wartime sexual enslavement and build a memorial to the victims. In addition to an apology and compensation, the council has also demanded Japan punish those responsible and record the crime in history textbooks.
Historians say roughly 200,000 women, many from Korea, were forced into sexual servitude at frontline Japanese brothels during World War II.
A total of 234 women were registered with the government as former comfort women — of them only 63, mostly in their 80s and 90s, are alive.