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Vol. 76/No. 10      March 12, 2012

 
Korea: 1,000th protest
against WWII sex slavery
 
BY SETH GALINSKY  
Twenty years after their first demonstration, Korean women who were forced into sexual slavery during World War II and thousands of supporters held their 1,000th weekly Wednesday protest outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul Dec. 14. Heading into and during the war, the Japanese military forced between 100,000 and 200,000 women and girls into brothels set up for Japanese soldiers in Asia.

When the extent of this sexual slavery first became public, the Japanese government denied involvement, claiming the brothels were organized by private businesses. But in 1993, as more evidence came to light of the Japanese military’s systematic organization of “comfort stations,” including kidnapping some of the women, Tokyo offered a weak apology and later set up the Asian Women’s Fund to offer some compensation from private funds.

Tokyo admits that many were “recruited against their will,” including teenagers, and that “they lived in misery … in a coercive atmosphere.” Many were told they were going to work in hospitals and promised high wages. Eighty percent of the women were Korean, Ahn Seon-mi, a spokesperson for the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery, told the Militant in an email, but there were also Chinese, Dutch, Filipina and Indonesian women.

The full picture will never be known, Seon-mi wrote, because “the Japanese government destroyed most of the documents.”

But the Japanese government has never agreed to government-funded reparations for the survivors. It writes off as exaggerations the accounts by women who say they were forced to have intercourse with a dozen or more men in a day and often beaten and abused.

Tokyo’s position especially infuriated many in Korea, which was a Japanese colony from 1910 until the end of World War II. Tens of thousands of Koreans were killed, wounded or arrested as they fought to free themselves from Japanese imperialist rule.

As the war was ending, Washington replaced Japan as the dominant imperialist power in the region and sent troops to occupy the southern half of the Korean Peninsula. The U.S. forces faced a mass resurgence of the fight for Korean independence and working-class struggles, including the expropriation by peasants of large landlords and the expansion of workers committees, which controlled almost all the Japanese-owned factories in the country. U.S. forces brutally suppressed the movement and returned to power collaborators with the Japanese occupation.

With the agreement of the counterrevolutionary regime in Moscow, the country was divided into north and south in September 1945. That division was consolidated after Washington’s failed attempt to gain control of the entire peninsula during the 1950 to 1953 Korean War.

For the next four and a half decades, South Korea was ruled by a succession of U.S.-backed military regimes.

In the 1980s under the pressure of protests by workers and students against martial law, some of the most blatant repressive measures in the South were loosened. This also opened the door to discussion of previously taboo topics, including the fight for reunification of North and South.

In August 1991 Kim Hak-sun became the first surviving comfort woman to speak out publicly.

During a visit to Seoul by then-Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, 10 people protested outside the Japanese Embassy on Wednesday, Jan. 8, 1992, demanding an apology and reparations. The Wednesday demonstrations have taken place every week since.

The Japanese government must “acknowledge the war crime, reveal the truth in its entirety about the crimes of military sexual slavery, make an official apology, make legal reparations, and punish those responsible,” Seon-mi told the Militant. And it must “accurately record the crime in history textbooks.”  
 
 
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