Japan and South Korea Settle Dispute Over Wartime 'Comfort Women' - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...t-women-south-korea-japan.html
japan south korea dispute new york times politics US
![](/images/link.gif)
-
South Korea and Japan reached a landmark agreement on Monday to resolve their dispute over Korean women who were forced to serve as sex slaves for Japan’s Imperial Army.
-
The so-called comfort women have been the most painful legacy of Japan’s colonial rule of Korea, which lasted from 1910 until Japan’s defeat in 1945
-
“We are not craving for money,” said Lee Yong-soo, 88, one of the women. “What we demand is that Japan make official reparations for the crime it had committed.”
- ...6 more annotations...
-
The United States has repeatedly urged Japan and South Korea to resolve the dispute, a stumbling block in American efforts to strengthen a joint front with its Asian allies to confront China’s growing assertiveness in the region, as well as North Korea’s attempt to build a nuclear arsenal.
-
“The issue of ‘comfort women’ was a matter which, with the involvement of the military authorities of the day, severely injured the honor and dignity of many women,”
-
the Japanese government will give the $8.3 million to a foundation that the South Korean government will establish to offer medical, nursing and other services to the women. Japan initially offered considerably less
-
Historians say that at least tens of thousands of women, many of them Korean, were lured or coerced to work in brothels from the early 1930s until 1945. The Korean women who survived the war lived mostly in silence because of the stigma, and many never married. Only in the early 1990s did some of them begin speaking out.
-
Japan has maintained that all legal issues stemming from its colonial rule of Korea were resolved with the 1965 treaty.
-
“The women were missing from the negotiation table, and they must not be sold short in a deal that is more about political expediency than justice,”