South Korea’s president says the issue of ‘comfort women’ cannot be settled by 2015 compensation agreement

Japan and South Korea are set on a diplomatic collision course after South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, dismissed as unworkable a 2015 agreement on Japan’s wartime use of sex slaves.

Moon said in a statement on Thursday the agreement was “seriously flawed” and “cannot solve” the countries’ longstanding dispute over the “comfort women” – a euphemism for tens of thousands of women and girls, mostly from the Korean peninsula, who were coerced into working in Japanese military brothels before and during the second world war.

“This runs afoul of the established universal principle of the international community for settling history issues, and above all, it was a political agreement that excludes the victims themselves and citizens,” Moon said of the deal, according to Yonhap news agency.

“Along with citizens, I, as president, make it clear again that the comfort women issue can’t be settled through this deal.”

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Moon’s comments came a day after a South Korean government taskforce said the agreement, in which Japan agreed to provide funds for the dwindling number of survivors, had failed to take into account the former sex slaves’ feelings.

That drew an angry response from Japan’s foreign minister, Taro Kono, who warned that bilateral ties would become “unmanageable” if Seoul failed to honour the agreement, in which both sides pledged to resolve the dispute “finally and irreversibly”.

Kono said in a statement: “The Japan-South Korea agreement is between the two governments and one that has been highly appreciated by international society.

“If the South Korean government ... tried to revise the agreement that is already being implemented, that would make Japan’s ties with South Korea unmanageable and it would be unacceptable.”

Under the accord, endorsed by the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, and Moon’s conservative predecessor, Park Geun-hye, Japan apologised to surviving victims and provided 1bn yen ($8.8m) to a welfare fund. Moon, a left-leaning liberal, hinted that he was preparing to reconsider the agreement soon after he became president in May. He has said several times that the deal is not supported by the South Korean people.

The countries resolved to refrain from criticising each other over the issue at international forums, and South Korea agreed to “make efforts” to secure the removal of statues honouring the women, including one outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul.

The South Korean taskforce, however, concluded that the dispute could not be “fundamentally resolved” because the victims’ demand for official compensation from Japan had been omitted from the agreement.

While it was prepared to provide money as a humanitarian gesture to help heal the women’s “psychological wounds”, Japan insists all compensation claims arising from the war were settled by a 1965 bilateral peace treaty.

South Korea’s foreign minister, Kang Kyung-wha, conceded the deal had not reflected the feelings of the victims. “I apologise for giving wounds of the heart to the victims, their families, civil society that support them and all other people because the agreement failed to sufficiently reflect a victim-oriented approach, which is the universal standard in resolving human rights issues,” Kang said.

The government will use the taskforce’s findings to form a new policy after consulting survivors and their supporters, she added.



There is disagreement on the exact number of women forced into sexual slavery by Japan during its 1910-1945 colonial rule of the Korean peninsula. Campaigners say as many as 200,000 women – mostly Koreans, but also Chinese, south-east Asians and a small number of Japanese and Europeans – were forced or tricked into working in military brothels between 1932 and Japan’s defeat in 1945.

Yonhap reported that 36 out of 47 survivors who were alive when the agreement was reached in December 2015 have received, or said they plan to receive, money from the Japanese fund.

But Oh Tai-kyu, who heads the comfort women taskforce, said receiving the money did not necessarily mean the recipients supported the agreement. “I think we should look into whether the logic holds true here that if you receive money, then you support a deal,” Oh said, according to Yonhap. “Receiving money does not mean that a crime is forgiven.”