A record of pressure placed on former comfort women who accepted payments from the Asian Women’s Fund, the entry ban imposed on Japanese supporter Keiko Usuki, and Professor Yasuaki Onuma’s criticism of how the Korean Council handled the issue.

August 19, 2020
Let us return to the comfort women issue. Shimomura was not the only person associated with the Asian Women’s Fund who pointed to responsibility on the Korean side, including the Korean Council.
Yasuaki Onuma, a trustee of the Fund and a specially appointed professor at Meiji University, responded to an interview by a visiting delegation of South Korean media in August of that year. He said, “There is a feeling in Japan that no matter how much Japan apologizes, South Korea will never be satisfied.” It was reported in South Korea that he had cited “the cold response on the Korean side to Japan’s efforts to resolve the issue as one of the reasons for Japan’s shift to the right” (August 31, Yonhap News Agency web edition).
Professor Onuma also pointed out that the Korean Council had taken the comfort women issue not from the standpoint of “resolving it in order to make the elderly women who had been comfort women happy,” but instead “turned it into an anti-Japanese issue deeply rooted in South Korean society.”
I directly asked Professor Onuma what he had truly intended by his remarks to the South Korean media.
He explained that the gist of what he had said was: “I had expected South Korean civil society to be mature. I was disappointed to find that it was not. But let us not give up on one another to the very end, and for that to happen I also want the South Korean media to reflect on its conduct.”
The South Korean media delegation had also reportedly confided to Professor Onuma, “There was a problem with the fact that we, too, simply accepted the Korean Council’s claims at face value.”
Former comfort women filed the “Tokyo Wartime Comfort Women Lawsuit” in 1991, seeking state compensation from Japan.
Keiko Usuki, head of the “Association to Clarify Japan’s War Responsibility,” which had continued to support the lawsuit on the Japanese side, was banned from entering South Korea by the South Korean authorities approximately six months after Korean former comfort women first received “atonement money” and other payments in January 1997.
Usuki described the denial of entry as follows:

“Before I was denied entry, I was contacted by the Korean Embassy. I had meetings concerning the lawsuit, and I asked why someone working for Korea should be denied entry. I was told that the Korean Council had petitioned the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade not to allow Usuki into the country because she was working to persuade the women to accept the Fund.”
The elderly former comfort women who defied the Korean Council and accepted the money were subjected to severe harassment.
Threatening telephone calls continued without end, and Japanese supporters each contributed 10,000 yen so that their telephones could be replaced with models equipped with recording functions.
However, it seems the elderly women did not simply remain passive in the face of such treatment.
Usuki recounted:
“The women became angry because the official at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade was looking only toward the Korean Council and suppressing their opinions. They went to the Ministry, and there was even an occasion when they pulled the official’s necktie in front of the elevator.”
The entry ban may also have resulted from suspicions that Usuki was behind such actions.
One of the elderly women who had been berated by members of the Korean Council because she had accepted Japan’s “atonement money” reportedly expressed her frustration in these words:
“If my mother had not died when I was young, I too could have graduated from a university like Ewha Womans University, just as Chung-Ok Yun did.”