Japan's Denial of WW2 Sex Slavery and Other Atrocities Continue to Escalate

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Wearing a woolen coat, knitted hat and school-marm glasses, Kim Bok-dong shuffled haltingly into a tiny auditorium in Seoul and sat down on the folding chair to tell her wartime horror story once again to a group of foreign visitors.

Kim, now 89, said she was only 15 in 1941 when a local official came to her village in South Korea and took her away. She was told she was being drafted to work in a factory that made military uniforms. Instead, she was sent to a military brothel, one of thousands the Japanese Imperial Army set up for its troops across Asia from the late 1930s until the end of World War Two. For the next four years, Kim said, she worked from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. six days a week—a half day on Saturday—as a traveling “sex slave” for Japanese soldiers. When Tokyo surrendered in September 1945, she was in Singapore.

Only 30 or so women like her are still alive in South Korea, officials say. (The number in North Korea is unknown.) And the few who are able to speak, like Kim, insist on telling their stories publicly—to the great chagrin of officials in Japan, and to some extent even South Korea, which has a deeply conflicted relationship with its former occupier and, for the past six decades, military ally and, more recently, economic rival.

The issue remains prickly mostly due to what critics refer to as Japan’s growing historical revisionism. On Friday, the nation’s largest newspaper, the conservative Yomiuri Shimbun, sparked an uproar in South Korea by apologizing for using the explicit term “sex slave” instead of the softer, fuzzier expression “comfort women” that Japanese officials and media have long employed. Some articles, the paper added, also mistakenly “defined comfort women in such terms as ‘forced into prostitution by the military,’ as if coercion by the Japanese government or the army was an objective fact.” The paper and its associated website, The Japan News, said it “apologizes for having used these misleading expressions and will add a note stating that they were inappropriate to all the articles in question in our database."

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