They were used by Japan for its purposes in World War II
Survivors of forced labor demand restitution of their moral and material rights
Yang claims her literary rights before materialism from Japan.
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One of the women survivors.
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A demonstration demanding an apology for Japan’s past bitterness
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Young Sol Lee stands in front of a memorial in San Francisco that symbolizes the plight of her companions in Japan during the World War.
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In 1944, a 15-year-old Korean girl was cheated after receiving the promise of a better education and a better life in Japan, only to end up working in an ammunition factory as World War II drew to a close.
Now, this woman is waiting for a real apology from the Japanese government.
Yang was the leader of her class at the school, and she excelled in athletics and academies.
Her accomplishments attracted the attention of a Japanese official, who offered her an opportunity to build a better future in Japan, which her modest family could not achieve for her.
Yang recalls: “The Japanese principal said I could go to middle school in Japan, but my father thought he was lying and would not allow me to go with him, but I sneaked out to travel to Japan, and as soon as I got there, I never saw a school door, but I was taken straight to Michobisi. Industries, instead of realizing my desire to be a teacher, I underwent tough work. ”
Yang worked at the Mitsubishi plant in Nagoya from June 1944 to October 1945.
bondage
Between 1937 and 1945, Japan mocked millions of citizens of its colonies in Asia on its lands, and those who were already in Japan as well, and it is estimated that more than 500 thousand South Koreans worked as forced labor in Japan during the war.
According to Yale J.
R. Rommel, 60,000 Koreans died while serving as forced laborers in Japan, with malnutrition being the main cause.
In her latest biography, Yang describes her experience: “The bells wake us up at six in the morning, then we go to the camp to work, for eight or 10 hours, and they forced me to paint the planes. They weren't providing us with ladders, so I was standing on broad boards, and it was a bucket.” The paint is too heavy for me, and to this day one of my shoulder still hurts. ”
Yang continues: “We have lunch at noon, where each of us gets one ball of rice. She does not get fat and does not sing from hunger. We used to go back to work and we were always hungry,” adding that some of her school friends, who escaped with her, were starving at Nagoya.
Yang also suffered during the US bombing of Japanese cities.
"Sometimes, because of the bombing, we couldn't sleep, and we had to spend the whole night in the air strikes shelter, and even when we went outside, we could still hear the sounds of the bombs over and over again, and then we had to go back to work in the morning," she says.
Back to Korea
After the war ended, Yang returned to South Korea, initially subjected to discrimination, and her citizens accused her of being a white slave, she went there to earn money by selling her body to Japanese soldiers.
In the end, Yang was able to establish her life in South Korea, got married, had three children, and ran her own shop to sell dried fish in the village market, but her experience in Japan was always painful and distressing for her.
Yang and other women alive are refusing to give up their moral rights and have campaigned for Japan to offer them a sincere apology and to compensate them directly for the indignity they suffered.
In 2018, South Korea's Supreme Court ordered Mitsubishi to pay nearly $ 90,000 (74,800 euros) to her and four other women.
So far, they have not received any money, and now human rights activists are targeting Mitsubishi assets in South Korea.
The wounds of the past are not healed
Japan has always insisted that it has dealt with these issues appropriately, in the past.
The first case was the 1965 Normalization Treaty, which involved paying $ 500 million in reparations for Japan's dark past in Korea.
Japan announced, since then, that all claims had been "completely and definitively" settled.
At various times, Japanese political leaders apologize for the injustices committed by their country towards the citizens of the countries it colonized in the past.
But those agreements did not cover the case of Yang, who is now 92, who said she was still waiting for a sincere apology from Japan.
More lawsuits
Since the 2018 ruling in Yang's case, dozens of South Korean forced labor victims and their families have filed lawsuits against Japanese companies.
To them, the agreements between the two countries and their political leaders don't seem to mean much to them.
For Yang, who has already won her lawsuit, the monetary compensation she is still waiting for is not really the goal.
She says: “Money is no longer important, but what is important is the humiliation and humiliation that I was subjected to, as the Japanese did not see the Koreans as human beings, and although they said that they would pay us our salaries, I do not want it, I am very old now, I just want to hear their apology. before I die".
Insistence not to apologize
In the early 2000s, the Japanese prime minister at the time, Junichiro Koizumi, repeatedly visited the Yasukuni War Shrine, where 14 Class A war criminals were buried, sparking outrage in South Korea.
Later, former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, when he was prime minister of the Japanese government between 2012 and 2020, questioned the validity of a previous apology, noting that comfort women, and other working women, were not coerced, which sparked anti-Japanese sentiment in Korea. Southern.
As for the Japanese leadership, South Korea's insistence on digging up the past is causing great consternation.
"All the demands of the South Korean side have been resolved, irreversibly," said Tomohiko Taniguchi, professor of economics and history at the Graduate School of Keio University.
"We cannot open this door once it is closed," adds the former foreign policy speechwriter to Prime Minister Abe. "But South Korea continues to try to open the door once every five, 10, or 15 years. It is almost practicing a national pastime."
Apology and compensation
In 1965, the military dictatorship government in South Korea accepted an apology and compensation from Japan for its wartime atrocities.
The government spent that money on national infrastructure and economic development.
It established Pohang Steel and other industrial giants in South Korea, which enabled it to gain remarkable rise as an Asian economic tiger.
Misrepresentation of history
The oldest Japanese newspaper in the English language (The Japan Times) has aroused outrage among those concerned with human rights, and was exposed to allegations accusing it of distorting history, after announcing that it would not use the term "comfort women" to describe women who were forced to serve in brothels on the front lines of the Japanese army, during World War II.
The newspaper also said that it dropped the term "forced laborers" to hundreds of thousands, who were employed in often appalling conditions during the conflict.
On November 30, 2018, the newspaper said in an article that the terms: “comfort women” and “forced labor” are likely to be “misleading”.
It claimed that "the conditions of the workers who worked during that period" and how they were recruited "varied." For this reason, I decided to refer to them from now on as "war workers".
The newspaper added that the definition of "comfort women" was previously understood to refer to women who were forced to have sex with Japanese forces, before and during World War II, but this has been changed.
She added, "Given the diversity of comfort women’s experiences in various fields, throughout the war on a large scale, starting today we will refer to (comfort women) as women who worked in brothels in wartime, including those who did so against their will.”
This article appeared in the newspaper below an article about a ruling issued by the Supreme Court in South Korea, on November 29, 2018, requiring Mitsubishi to pay compensation to a group of Koreans, who were forced to work in the munitions factories and shipyards of the company during the war.
The director of the Ischia Pulse Point Foundation, Mindy Kotler, a foundation that defends the rights of former Allied prisoners of war, many of whom were also forced to work in Japanese factories, described the newspaper's change of its editorial policy, describing it as a "dramatic surrender" to the then prime minister, Junichiro Kyuzumi, Shinzo Abe’s “PR efforts to rewrite history,” fit his political agenda.
"Comfort women" to raise the spirits of Japanese soldiers
Estimates vary widely, but experts say that between 30,000 and 200,000 Korean women were forced into prostitution during Japan's occupation of the Korean peninsula.
Most of them were brought to sites known as "rest stations" military, and many other women were brought from the lands occupied by Japan in the modern era, such as: Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, China, Mongolia, Taiwan, Indonesia, and East Timor, And Papua New Guinea.
The women were called a euphemistic term "comfort women", because they provided "comfort" to the soldiers far from their homes to raise their fighting morale.
However, the Human Rights Report issued by the United Nations in 1996 reached a different conclusion when it recognized that these women were "in the rule of slaves", but Japan objects to this result.
The compensation agreement concluded in 2015 between Japan and South Korea did not address the question of whether the coercion of women was a policy of imperial Japan.
The issue remained a subject of contention between the two countries.
As of March 2020, there are about 18 survivors from South Korea who are still alive.
Japan questions the hypothesis that women have been systematically arrested or kidnapped by representatives of the military, while there are many conservatives in Japan, who say they were merely prostitutes who worked for a good wage.
In an effort to settle the entire issue and build a more constructive and forward-looking relationship with South Korea, Japan agreed to provide 1 billion yen (8.09 million euros) to a South Korean foundation, which then disburses money to those still alive.
Under the terms of the agreement, both governments will stop criticizing each other on this issue in forums such as the United Nations, and will cooperate in projects aimed at "restoring the reputation and dignity" of former comfort women, in order to cure them from psychological wounds.
While the two sides are sticking to their promises about the components of the agreement, the problem has been greatly exacerbated by the political unrest that has engulfed South Korea due to allegations of corruption and the abuse of influence by the government of former President Park Geun-hee.
Among the allegations directed at Park was that she betrayed the comfort women by signing the agreement with Japan, and her failure to do more to elicit an apology from Tokyo.
To underscore the depth of feeling about this issue, a Buddhist monk set himself on fire in Seoul, to protest the settlement plan.
In a notebook found nearby, the monk (whose name was not mentioned) described Park as a "traitor."
Between 1937 and 1945, millions of citizens of its colonies in Asia were mocked in Japan on its lands, and those who were already present in Japan as well.
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