SEOUL, South Korea — There’s relief among South Korean and Japanese diplomats after the two countries announced an “irreversible” settlement of a decades-long standoff over Korean women forced into sexual slavery by Japan’s World War II military.
But activists and many of the elderly victims were furious.
South Korea high school students look at portraits of “sex salves” who were forced to serve for the Japanese Army during World War II at the House of Sharing, the home for the living sex slaves, in Gwangju, South Korea. (AP PHOTO)
Both sides compromised in Monday’s surprise deal, so neither got everything it wanted. Nationalists in Japan are angry over Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s apology.
Some South Koreans say President Park Geun-hye settled for far too little money — about $8 million — and that Japan still hasn’t taken legal responsibility for atrocities during its colonial occupation of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945.
But the apparent finality of the deal — both sides called the matter “resolved finally and irreversibly,” if faithfully implemented — has been largely accepted so far, after decades in which the issue ruined ties between the two powerful Northeast Asian democracies.
Historians say tens of thousands of women from around Asia, many of them Korean, were sent to front-line military brothels to provide sex to Japanese soldiers.