Talk About the Discomfort: Addressing the Japan-South Korea Feud
By: Connie Ryu
As my dad and I are driving on the highway, the radio station we’re listening to begins to play the Korean news channel. Yesterday, it talked about a celebrity being criticized for posting the Japanese confederate flag on their social media, and today the anchor could speak about the ongoing boycott on Japanese products in Korea, but none of this would faze me or my dad. For nearly a century, the two countries had never been at peace, at least politically and economically.
According to a BBC poll in 2013, 67 percent of South Koreans have a negative view of Japan. Such anti-Japanese sentiment in South Korea has continued since the Japanese colonization of Korea in 1910. Generally, the hostility grows with every previous generation, because the older generations lived during this time period and experienced Japanese imperialism firsthand. Under Japanese rule, Koreans were forced to only learn and use Japanese and take Japanese names to replace their Korean ones. Besides Japan’s strict cultural assimilation policy, the controversy surrounding comfort women still exists today and continues to fuel the feud between the two nations.
Comfort women is a Japanese euphemism for the approximately 200,000 women, mostly Korean, who were forced into sexual slavery by and for the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II. Women and children as young as 14 were forcefully coerced or lured with employment opportunities and taken to “comfort stations”. While living in extremely harsh conditions at these brothels, the women were repeatedly raped by Japanese soldiers and when they resisted, they were beaten or even murdered. An estimated 90 percent of comfort women did not make it to the end of World War II, with many dying from sexually transmitted diseases or other medical issues from the physical abuse, and some committed suicide or were executed by the Japanese. The victims who did survive were never able to fully recover – most suffered from physical disabilities and complications, such as sterility, mental illnesses, and were ostracized by their own family members and their communities.
Several decades passed before the issue was brought to the public’s attention as victims began to step out and speak publicly of their traumatic experiences. After initially denying the existence of such comfort stations, the Japanese government acknowledged their horrific actions in 1993. However, the controversy persists today as many South Koreans demand an apology and compensation to the victims from the Japanese government, who have yet to admit legal responsibility for the war crimes. On the other hand, Japan asserts that South Korea has no intentions of reconciliation and is exploiting the victims’ experiences for ulterior motives.
I must disclose that this piece comes nowhere close to extensively covering what the comfort women truly experienced or how Korean and Japanese citizens truly view the topic and one another, because I am neither and a Korean-American. However, through this, I would like to bring attention back to the central focus of the issue, as it seems to have become lost over the years. Instead of the resentful, stubborn political dispute full of misunderstandings between the two nations, the fundamental issue at hand is the human rights violation that happened, but what is currently being done to right wrongs? What is the right way for both countries to remember the past and step forward in the future? While it may be difficult at first, these are the real questions that should be asked – a little discomfort today is worth a future of peace.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070307095928/http://www.cgs.c.u-
https://www.history.com/news/comfort-women-japan-military-brothels-korea
https://www.britannica.com/topic/comfort-women
https://thediplomat.com/2020/09/south-korea-and-japan-resolving-the-comfort-women-issue/