Seoul's new research center to delve deeply into Japan's wartime sexual slavery

Visitors view an exhibition about victims of the Japanese Army's wartime sexual enslavement, at Kwanhoon Gallery in Insa-dong, Jongno-gu, on Wednesday. Yonhap

South Korea will this week launch a research center to compile and commission works on the history of the Imperial Japanese Army's wartime sexual enslavement of Korean women, the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family said Thursday.

Under the wing of the state-run Women's Human Rights Institute of Korea, the research center will open Friday to engage in the excavation and compilation of historical records over the Japanese wartime atrocity and build a database on the issue, according to the ministry.

It will also look into related historical records from outside the country, including Japan, China and Southeast Asian nations, in a bid to centralize information regarding the wartime issue, the ministry said.

The new center will serve as a hub for research of the "comfort women" issue, according to the ministry.

The Minister of Gender Equality and Family Chung Hyun-back speaks during the exhibition's opening ceremony at Kwanhoon Gallery on Wednesday. Yonhap

Another key function of the state-run center will be to give lessons to future generations on the dark history through the publication and dissemination at home and abroad of the records the center will be compiling, the ministry said.

"It is important to compile and centralize the results of objective, empirical research projects that private groups and other researchers have carried out so far and systemically conduct research works to follow up with them so that the next generations can correctly understand history and learn lessons not to repeat past wrongdoings," the Minister of Gender Equality and Family Chung Hyun-back said.

The latest move is in keeping with the Moon Jae-in government's reversal of the 2015 South Korea-Japan deal to settle their diplomatic feud stemming from the history issue, signed under the impeached President Park Geun-hye.

Up to hundreds of thousands of Asian women, many of them Koreans, were forced to serve at frontline brothels for Japanese troops during World War II, while the Korean Peninsula was under Japan's colonial rule.

In the deal to settle the diplomatic conflict, Japan paid 1 billion yen ($9 million) to support the victims and their families, in return for Seoul putting the issue behind once and for all, but the Moon administration dismissed the deal as ineffective, citing the deal's lack of regard for the victims' opinions. (Yonhap)