This article examines how the Asian Women’s Fund was affected by South Korean activist organizations including Chong Dae Hyup, the Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung administrations, and media coverage in both Japan and South Korea. Drawing particularly on statements by Professor Yasuaki Onuma, it considers reporting that favored direct state compensation for former comfort women, the political influence of South Korea’s extra-governmental activist forces, and the broader impact of comfort-women reporting on Japan–South Korea relations.

August 19, 2020
South Korea’s Political Climate, in Which “Extra-Governmental” Forces Become the Next Holders of Power
Leaving that aside, how could a single civic organization go so far as to move the government itself and even bring about a ban on someone’s entry into the country?
The reason was that the influence of anti-government groups that had played a leading role in the democratization movement rose dramatically after democratization was achieved in 1987.
With the inauguration of the Kim Young-sam administration in 1993, Japan began moving from the issuance of the Kono Statement toward the establishment of the Asian Women’s Fund as a proposed means of resolving the issue.
Professor Onuma recalled: “This issue had already been settled under the Agreement on the Settlement of Problems Concerning Property and Claims attached to the Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea, but from a moral standpoint the Asian Women’s Fund was created.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Kozo Igarashi of the Murayama Cabinet personally explained this to President Kim Young-sam.
The South Korean side responded that it would neither criticize nor obstruct the initiative, but as soon as the project began in earnest, support organizations such as Chong Dae Hyup strongly opposed it, and their opposition was amplified by the media in both Japan and South Korea.”
In 1996, after the Coomaraswamy Report was submitted to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, defining the comfort women as “sex slaves” and demanding state compensation from Japan, support organizations aligned with Chong Dae Hyup gained still greater momentum.
Amid this storm, the Kim Young-sam administration wavered repeatedly, ultimately leading to the refusal of entry to the representative of the Hakkiri-kai, an organization that was virtually alone in supporting the Asian Women’s Fund.
In South Korea, anti-establishment and opposition forces of a given period are often referred to as “jaeya,” or the extra-governmental opposition, and as the “activist camp.”
South Korea, divided between North and South and marked by intense overlapping conflicts involving region, conservatives and progressives, generations, and social classes, has a political climate in which today’s loser may become tomorrow’s winner.
The “jaeya” forces are a product of this confrontational society, in which virtually any one of today’s outsiders may become tomorrow’s holder of power.
It can be said that the fate of the Asian Women’s Fund was effectively decided with the birth of the left-progressive Kim Dae-jung administration in 1998.
That was because Chong Dae Hyup, which included people who had participated in Kim Dae-jung’s struggle against dictatorship under the military-authoritarian governments, had itself effectively become part of “power.”
In an interview published in the October 1998 issue of the magazine Sekai, President Kim Dae-jung, shortly before visiting Japan, stated, “We opposed the halmoni [grandmothers] receiving money from the national fund,” emphasizing that his side had overturned the arrangement represented by the Asian Women’s Fund.
On the Korean Peninsula, where new administrations have long tended to assert their own legitimacy by completely repudiating their predecessors, this also provides an example of the power that can be exercised when extra-governmental activist forces become integrated with political authority.
Yet when matters reached this point, how did the Japanese government and the people involved respond?
That, too, must be examined.
President Kim Dae-jung is often credited, together with then Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, with improving Japan–South Korea relations through the declaration of the “Japan–Republic of Korea Joint Declaration: A New Japan–Republic of Korea Partnership towards the Twenty-First Century.”
Yet, at least when viewed through the comfort-women issue, one might also ask whether he was a president who, under pressure from the “jaeya power” that formed fertile political ground for his administration, contributed to the serious confrontation between Japan and South Korea seen today.
Even so, the greatest factor may have been Japan’s lack of the force and determination needed to persuade those extra-governmental forces.
Professor Onuma, Chief Cabinet Secretary Igarashi, Bunbei Hara, the first chairman of the Asian Women’s Fund, and attorney Kenichi Takagi of the Tokyo military comfort-women lawsuit had previously worked on the issue of Koreans remaining on Sakhalin.
Separate from the outcome of the lawsuit itself, they succeeded in enabling those Koreans to return permanently to South Korea using Japanese government funds.
Some have argued that they placed too much faith in applying that successful experience to the Asian Women’s Fund.
When asked about this, Professor Onuma replied, “The difference from Sakhalin was whether or not a bipartisan group of Diet members emerged to support the project.”
Why did no such group emerge?
That, too, remains a subject for future examination.
Professor Onuma expressed regret that the Asahi Shimbun continued, mainly in its social-affairs pages, to portray the Asian Women’s Fund’s “atonement money” negatively while advancing the view that “state compensation paid directly to individual former comfort women is the correct solution.”
Shimomura likewise took the view that, given the Claims Agreement concluded at the time diplomatic relations were normalized, state compensation of the kind advocated by Chong Dae Hyup was not possible.
Of particular interest is that, in the earlier interview with Professor Onuma, South Korean journalists themselves cited as a point of reflection on their comfort-women reporting the fact that they had “accepted Chong Dae Hyup’s claims uncritically.”
Does this not suggest that South Korean media organizations were influenced by the reporting stance and editorial line of Japanese media such as the Asahi Shimbun, thereby giving Chong Dae Hyup’s assertions still greater persuasive force within South Korea?
For a long period in South Korea, Japanese reporting carried greater influence than domestic media.
This reflected, among other things, the experience of censorship under military-authoritarian rule, when pursuing facts could make publication impossible, a consequent tendency to undervalue “facts,” and suspicions of an overly close relationship between newspaper capital and political power.
Immediately before then Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa’s visit to South Korea in January 1992, the Dong-A Ilbo reported an unsupported story claiming, among other things, that the Japanese military had made an eleven-year-old Korean girl into a comfort woman and abused her.
South Korean society reacted with outrage.
This appears to be one example of erroneous reporting that clearly drew its outline from the fabricated “Yoshida testimony.”
The Asahi Shimbun has said that a third-party committee would examine the impact on Japan–South Korea relations of its erroneous reporting concerning the “Yoshida testimony” and other matters.
However, unless the entirety of its comfort-women coverage—including editorials and columns—is examined, it may be impossible to understand how the Asahi Shimbun’s reporting on the comfort-women issue came to be imprinted upon South Korean society.
According to South Korean university professors cited in the original text, criticism of Chong Dae Hyup was growing within South Korean society, and its influence was declining amid allegations and controversies concerning people connected with the organization, including its then representative, Mee-hyang Yoon.
[The remainder is omitted in the source provided.]