{"id":22010,"date":"2026-05-14T00:44:07","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T00:44:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/22010\/"},"modified":"2026-05-14T00:44:07","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T00:44:07","slug":"japan-south-korea-comfort-women-row-stoked-by-statues-abroad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/22010\/","title":{"rendered":"Japan-South Korea \u2018comfort women\u2019 row stoked by statues abroad"},"content":{"rendered":"

Statues erected by South Korean civic groups on the other side of the world honouring the tens of thousands of women forced into sexual slavery by imperial Japanese forces during World War II have once again succeeded in making Tokyo\u2019s elites deeply uncomfortable.<\/p>\n

The decisions by local governments in Germany<\/a>\u2019s capital and New Zealand<\/a>\u2019s largest city to rescind or decline to renew permits for \u201ccomfort women\u201d memorials have been pounced on by conservatives within Japan\u2019s ruling Liberal Democratic Party<\/a>, who advocate pressing Seoul harder on an issue Tokyo insists was resolved long ago.<\/p>\n

In April, Auckland\u2019s city council reversed a previous decision to allow a memorial\u2019s installation. Berlin similarly ordered the removal of its statue after a limited public display. The ruling survived a subsequent appeal by the South Korean group behind it and the statue is now reported to be on show elsewhere in the German capital.<\/p>\n

\"ActivistsActivists gather around a statue in central Berlin symbolising a Korean \u201ccomfort woman\u201d in 2020. Photo: Kyodo<\/p>\n

A Japanese foreign ministry official briefed a joint meeting of the LDP\u2019s foreign affairs division and its foreign affairs research council about the latest developments on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe should firmly assert Japan\u2019s position,\u201d one attending lawmaker was quoted as saying by the Yomiuri newspaper about the long-running dispute, which has proved a thorn in the side of successive governments in Tokyo and Seoul.<\/p>\n

Kei Takagi, head of the foreign affairs division, added that the ruling party \u201cmust recognise that there are various developments around the world and deal with them properly\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u2018Irreversible\u2019 but unresolvedJapan<\/a> has long argued that such historical issues were resolved through the normalisation of diplomatic relations in June 1965 and the US$300 million in grants and loans it provided South Korea<\/a> to settle colonial-era compensation claims arising from its rule of the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Statues erected by South Korean civic groups on the other side of the world honouring the tens of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22011,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2675,11117,12,11292,2211,8,17,2549,236,1493,636,659,657,488,52,3282],"class_list":{"0":"post-22010","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-japan","8":"tag-auckland","9":"tag-berlin","10":"tag-china","11":"tag-comfort-women","12":"tag-germany","13":"tag-japan","14":"tag-japanese","15":"tag-korean-peninsula","16":"tag-ldp","17":"tag-new-zealand","18":"tag-russia","19":"tag-seoul","20":"tag-south-korea","21":"tag-taiwan","22":"tag-tokyo","23":"tag-ukraine"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22010"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22010\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}