A republication of Keiji Maekawa’s December 2014 Monthly Seiron essay examining why the comfort women issue remained unresolved, focusing on Mitsuko Shimomura’s testimony about the Korean Council’s treatment of former comfort women, opposition to the Asian Women’s Fund, the Asahi Shimbun, and the relationship between anti-Japanese sentiment and South Korean nationalism.

2020-08-19
The following is based on “The Asahi Shimbun and South Korea That Obstructed a Resolution of the Comfort Women Issue,” written by journalist and former Asahi Shimbun Seoul correspondent Keiji Maekawa and published in the December 2014 issue of Monthly Seiron.
What is especially significant about this essay is that it focuses not only on the confrontation between the Japanese government and the South Korean side over the comfort women issue, but also on the relationship between the former comfort women themselves and the Korean Council, which claimed to support them.
The following words of Mitsuko Shimomura, a former director of the Asian Women’s Fund, go to the heart of that issue:

“There is absolutely no need for Japan to compromise with the people of the Korean Council. Those people are trampling on the elderly women who were former comfort women. It is as though those women are being subjected to a second rape by them. And how pathetic the South Korean government is that it cannot control them.”
It is now common knowledge that developments within South Korea, although belatedly, have demonstrated just how correct these words of Mitsuko Shimomura were.

The Asahi Shimbun and South Korea That Obstructed a Resolution of the Comfort Women Issue

Monthly Seiron, December 2014
Keiji Maekawa, journalist and former Asahi Shimbun Seoul correspondent

Former Comfort Women Trampled on by a Support Organization

“There is absolutely no need for Japan to compromise with the people of the Korean Council. Those people are trampling on the elderly women who were former comfort women. It is as though those women are being subjected to a second rape by them. And how pathetic the South Korean government is that it cannot control them.”
It is now common knowledge that developments within South Korea, although belatedly, have demonstrated just how correct these words of Mitsuko Shimomura were.
Even after the Asahi Shimbun retracted erroneous reports and apologized, there was still no sign that the comfort women issue between Japan and South Korea was moving toward a resolution. Why?
To seek an answer, I asked Mitsuko Shimomura, a former director of the Asian Women’s Fund—the “Asian Peace and Friendship Fund for Women,” established jointly by Japan’s public and private sectors in 1995 to help resolve the comfort women issue and dissolved in 2007. Her response was the severe criticism of South Korea quoted above.
The “Korean Council” to which Shimomura refers is the abbreviation commonly used for the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan. It was one of the South Korean civic organizations pressing Japan for a resolution of the comfort women issue and was formed from women’s human-rights organizations.
The organization maintained that “the Japanese government should acknowledge legal responsibility, provide state compensation, and punish those responsible.” It became known for erecting a comfort woman statue in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul and holding weekly “Wednesday demonstrations” around it.
It strongly opposed attempts to reach a settlement through “atonement money” paid to former comfort women by the Asian Women’s Fund and through letters from the Japanese prime minister. In January 1997, immediately after the Fund presented seven former South Korean comfort women with documents for payments of five million yen each, together with letters of apology from then Prime Minister Hashimoto, the organization declared that “accepting money from the Asian Women’s Fund would mean selling oneself once again for dirty money,” and pressured the former comfort women into refusing the payments.
Shimomura also said:

“There was even an occasion when an elderly former comfort woman who had come to Japan with members of the Korean Council telephoned me and said, ‘I am confined to the lodging and told not to go outside. I am sick of it.’ In their hearts, the women resented the Korean Council, but they were afraid of it. If they were told to appear in public, they went; if they were told to demonstrate, they demonstrated. They were vulnerable people deserving of sympathy.”

Anti-Japanese Sentiment on Both the Right and the Left

Under such circumstances, it would hardly be surprising if one were to say that it was the Korean Council itself that was suppressing the former comfort women. What kind of organization was it?
Its former co-chair, Yun Chung-ok, graduated from Ewha Womans University, South Korea’s most prestigious women’s university, and later became a professor there. She was a classmate of the wife of former President Kim Dae-jung. People familiar with the organization have said that its other leading members were likewise drawn from the intellectual elite—university professors, lawyers, scholars, and wealthy individuals. It was an organization led by elite women in South Korean society.
In 1992, the Korean Council and former Asahi Shimbun editorial writer Yayori Matsui were among the central figures behind the Asian Women’s Conference in Seoul. Kikue Takahashi of the Japan Christian Women’s Organization, which later cooperated in staging the 2000 Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal in Tokyo that declared Emperor Showa “guilty,” said that she had first met Yun Chung-ok in the 1980s through movements opposing prostitution and sex tourism in Asia, including South Korea’s kisaeng tourism.
Through these connections, Yun Chung-ok began joint Japanese-South Korean activism over the comfort women issue after South Korea’s democratization, although it has been said that she depended almost entirely on the Japanese side for documentary materials.
At the time, South Korea was one of the world’s poorest countries, and kisaeng tourism was described as a state-backed project under the Park Chung-hee government aimed at earning dollars through South Korean women. Seen in that context, the movement against kisaeng tourism can be regarded not only as an anti-Japanese movement but also as a movement aimed at bringing down the Park Chung-hee government.
The Park Chung-hee government, which normalized diplomatic relations with Japan in 1965, promoted national development with Japanese economic assistance while at the same time advocating intense nationalism.
His daughter, then President Park Geun-hye, asked China to establish a memorial to Ahn Jung-geun, the man who assassinated Hirobumi Ito. In January of that year, a memorial hall was opened at Harbin Station, the site of the assassination, further stimulating anti-South Korean sentiment in Japan. Yet the Ahn Jung-geun Memorial Hall in Seoul had already been established in 1970 with strong backing from the Park Chung-hee government. From Park Geun-hye’s standpoint, the Harbin memorial may simply have represented a continuation of her father’s sentiments.
As an aside, it was also President Park Chung-hee who revived celadon and white porcelain, popular in Japan, as part of the preservation of national culture and established a pottery village in Icheon outside Seoul. One reason for reviving pottery, it is said, was that there were few souvenirs to sell to Japanese male tourists visiting for kisaeng tourism, and Korean officials noticed Japanese enthusiasm for ceramics. It was a remarkably robust piece of commercial thinking.
To digress further, a South Korean ceramics expert once told me that because almost none of the same clay used in earlier eras can now be found in South Korea, it is difficult to reproduce the distinctive qualities of the old ceramics.
The Independence Hall in Cheonan, sometimes called South Korea’s “temple of anti-Japanese sentiment,” is known even in Japan for exhibits showing wax figures of independence activists undergoing brutal interrogation by Japanese authorities, accompanied by sound effects of screams. It, too, was constructed during the military dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan.
In 1992, when the comfort women controversy was intensifying, TV Asahi broadcast a visit to the museum by junior-high-school students from the Japanese school in Seoul. I later heard an account of what happened afterward from the school principal at the time.
A young South Korean studying in Japan sent him a letter saying:

“I believe the Independence Hall is a place that fails to teach South Korean children the history of their own country correctly, emphasizes only the cruelty of the colonial period, needlessly inflames anti-Japanese sentiment, and causes them to mistake hatred of Japan for patriotism. I believe it is a facility built by a military dictatorship, using money solicited from the public, in order to conceal its own wrongdoing.”
In Japan, many people tend to regard the anti-communist governments of Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan as pro-Japanese and progressive left-wing governments as anti-Japanese. Yet this episode shows that both sides contained an anti-Japanese logic used as a means of legitimizing themselves.
Anti-Japanese sentiment and South Korean nationalism have become intertwined. Perhaps this is because a fear that “Japan may someday invade again” lies deep within the South Korean psyche.
As former Dong-A Ilbo journalist Lee Jong-gak wrote in A Social History of Contemporary South Korea published by Akishobo, a saying that became popular immediately after liberation went: “Do not trust the Americans, do not be deceived by the Soviets, and beware, Koreans, because the Japanese will rise again.”