[Column] Rethinking how we represent ‘comfort women’ victims

On Might 6, 2026, the barricade that had enclosed the Statue of Peace honoring victims of Japan’s wartime system of sexual slavery exterior the outdated Japanese Embassy in Seoul was eliminated after standing for six years. (Choi Hyeon-su/Hankyoreh)

By Yang Hyun-ah, professor emeritus of social principle at Seoul Nationwide College

Modernity is alleged to have been born from the standardization of time and house. In 1884, the sprawling, unexplored areas and occasions of the world turned entrapped by a single system of measurement devised by the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London.
 
Nonetheless, in accordance with postmodernism, which emerged within the Sixties, time shouldn’t be merely a linear factor that flows in a single path from the previous to the long run — the previous is recalled to the here-and-now and rewrites the current. Postmodernists criticized the standardization of space-time, accusing it of entailing oppression and exclusion.
 
Immediately, I want to look at Japan’s wartime sexual slavery system, victims of that are additionally also known as “consolation ladies,” within the context of multilayered space-times.
 
#Area-time 1: On April 10, 2026, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung posted the next on X: “The pressured mobilization of consolation ladies, massacres of Jews, and wartime killings aren’t any completely different.”
 
The Israeli International Ministry responded instantly, criticizing the remark for downplaying the Holocaust of Jews throughout WWII, however this remark is monumental in that it positioned the “consolation ladies” subject in the identical class as genocide. That’s, it considered the wartime sexual slavery system from a totally common perspective, appropriately considered. 

Certainly, to the ladies dwelling in Korea beneath Japan’s colonial rule, that system exhibited lots of the facets related to genocide: the systematic mobilization of police, troopers, and civilians; pressured deployment to the huge Asia-Pacific, the place Japan was waging warfare; beatings and torture; genital mutilation; and reproductive violence.
 
It was masterful of Lee to label the human rights abuses in opposition to “consolation ladies” not merely as sexual violence however as “pressured mobilization.”
 
#Area-time 2: The Ladies’s Worldwide Conflict Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Army Sexual Slavery was held Dec. 8-12, 2000, in Tokyo, Japan. Round ten Asian nations participated within the tribunal.
 
As a individuals’s tribunal, it lacked the authority to implement its suggestions, however we should always give this courtroom its due, because it stood on the forefront of up to date worldwide prison regulation, human rights, and the authorized rules governing wartime violence to compile historic proof to show the world a historical past lesson.
 
The tribunal concluded that the crimes dedicated beneath Japan’s navy sexual slavery system constituted “crimes in opposition to humanity,” and held Japanese Emperor Hirohito, together with the highest-ranking officers and navy commanders of the time, personally liable for the crimes. It additionally discovered the Japanese authorities culpable on the state degree. 
 
Very like how Iranian youngsters have been massacred in a warfare that was not theirs to combat, an estimated 80,000 to 200,000 Korean women and girls who by no means had an oz. of company within the happenings of WWII, have been dragged from their properties to turn out to be intercourse slaves, in accordance with analysis by Chung Chin-sung in 2024. The destiny of solely a tiny handful of survivors turned identified; the experiences of the remainder of these ladies have remained unknown for over 80 years.
 
Many of the Korean victims mobilized on the time have been 16 or 17 years outdated. The place did all of these younger ladies go? Crimes in opposition to humanity, just like the Holocaust, are prison acts dedicated as a part of widespread or systematic assaults in opposition to civilians, no matter whether or not they happen throughout warfare or peace. Such offenses are thought-about crimes based mostly on the authorized logic that they represent acts opposite to humanity and human dignity.
 
As such, any dedication of such crimes should discover universality inside specificity, and treatments for victims should be righteous. The Rome Statute of the Worldwide Felony Courtroom stipulates that homicide, extermination, enslavement, deportation or forcible switch of inhabitants, torture, rape, sexual slavery, and persecution in opposition to any identifiable group, represent crimes in opposition to humanity.
 
#Area-time 3 & 4 & 5: In August 2011, the Constitutional Courtroom of Korea dominated that the South Korean authorities’s failure to take diplomatic motion to resolve the “consolation ladies” subject, even supposing the victims retained the fitting to assert compensation beneath Korea and Japan’s 1965 Treaty on Fundamental Relations, was unconstitutional.
 
This ruling is considered as a postcolonial determination that explicitly acknowledges the continued influence of unlawful acts dedicated through the colonial interval and the accountability of the South Korean authorities, successfully declaring that the duty for redressing the hurt suffered by the victims of the Japanese navy’s sexual slavery system lies not solely with Japan but additionally with Korea.

A memorial to “consolation ladies” on Miyako Island in Okinawa, Japan. (courtesy Yang)

 
Following negotiations between South Korea and Japan, the overseas ministers of the 2 nations declared that they reached an settlement on the “consolation ladies” subject in December 2015, however lots of the Korean survivors balked on the deal and filed a lawsuit in opposition to the Japanese authorities in search of damages.
 
The plaintiff victims on the Seoul Central District Courtroom and the Seoul Excessive Courtroom gained their instances in January 2021 and November 2023, respectively, overcoming the precept of state immunity beneath customary worldwide regulation, in accordance with litigation whitepapers by Minbyun – Attorneys for a Democratic Society.
 
#Area-time 6: The barricade surrounding the Statue of Peace in entrance of the outdated Embassy of Japan in Seoul was eliminated on Might 6, 2026. This barricade was put in on the request of the Korean Council for the Justice and Remembrance for the Problems with Army Sexual Slavery by Japan, which has led over 1,700 weekly Wednesday Demonstrations, after varied far-right organizations denied that there ever was a Japanese sexual slavery system and tried to maim the statue itself.
 
With 150 statues in South Korea and 35 in 9 nations overseas, as of 2025, the Statue of Peace could be described as a collective image that resonates with individuals all over the world. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim as soon as outlined the legal guidelines and guidelines of a group because the manifestations of the collective consciousness; the Statue of Peace could be considered as a manifestation of the Korean collective consciousness representing unresolved colonial oppression and violence in opposition to ladies. On the identical time, it’s a image that would probably constrain that consciousness.
 
#Area-time 7: Is the Japanese navy’s sexual slavery system confined to the previous? To 80 years in the past? Ought to the problem additionally embody the time from the 2000s, when victims started to take steps towards justice, to at present? Is that this an issue distinctive to Korea, or is it one thing that would happen anyplace else on this planet?
 
It’s a extensively identified indisputable fact that victims of the Japanese navy’s sexual slavery system usually are not solely present in Korea, however are current in Taiwan, China, Japan, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Malaysia, the Philippines, East Timor, and different Pacific islands.  
 
The character of the struggling of every area’s victims and the processes by which such struggling was addressed are comparable but additionally exhibit completely different traits. As such, South Korea’s predominance within the rhetoric surrounding “consolation ladies” has been criticized as making an attempt to deal with the struggling of Koreans as being absolutely the commonplace.  
 
I want to end this piece by mentioning the ceremony that takes place in entrance of the Arirang Monument on Okinawa’s Miyako Island each early September. The residents of Miyako Island keep in mind that a lot of the victims have been Korean ladies and sing the standard Korean people music, the Arirang, throughout their memorial ceremony, however the monument shows writing in additional than 10 completely different languages — the languages of the nations to which the “consolation ladies” victims belonged.
 
I imagine that the residents of Miyako Island are actually residents of the world and Asians who embody the worth of common human rights. Is it not time to erect symbols commemorating the “consolation ladies” victims from the 10-odd nations exterior of Korea subsequent to the Statue of Peace? Is it not time to put symbols representing the deaths of the harmless elementary college college students of Iran?
 
When Koreans symbolize the younger victims of sexual slavery as each Koreans and residents of the world, the “consolation ladies” subject shall be remembered by humanity as essentially the most delicate however persistent crime in opposition to humanity.

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