Many victim-survivors and scholars say ‘sex slaves’ more accurately describes the abuses the women endured, but governments have been slow to change their view.
South Korea’s Yoon Suk Yeol, left, and Fumio Kishida of Japan.
Kiyoshi Otal/Getty Images
Critics of the South Korean leader accuse him of eroding democracy at home while embracing a historic enemy on the international stage.
Chen Yabian, 74, of Hainan Province, southern China, testifies during the International Symposium on Chinese ‘Comfort Women’ in 2000 in Shanghai that she was 14 when Japanese Imperial Army soldiers forced her to work as a sex slave during the war.
AP/Eugene Hoshiko
US agreements with Germany, France, Switzerland and Austria provide reparations to WWII victims. But an international law scholar writes that the US has failed to address war crimes in Asia.
Beyond her own personal humiliation, the ramifications of Park’s fall are already reverberating from domestic South Korean politics into the fraught geopolitics of Northeast Asia.
Japan claims that the placement of “comfort girl” statues outside the Japanese legations in South Korea violates international law, but state practice and jurisprudence suggests otherwise.
Busan’s controversial Comfort Women statue.
EPA/Yonhap
In 1943, during the height of World War II, fifteen-year-old Liu Mianhuan was tied up and taken away by Imperial Japanese troops from her village in Yu County, Shanxi Province, China. She was confined…