{"id":87911,"date":"2026-09-08T01:56:08","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T01:56:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/87911\/"},"modified":"2026-09-08T01:56:08","modified_gmt":"2026-09-08T01:56:08","slug":"can-japan-south-korea-move-past-the-comfort-women-issue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/87911\/","title":{"rendered":"Can Japan, South Korea move past the \u2018comfort women\u2019 issue?"},"content":{"rendered":"

South Korean citizens\u2019 groups have called for the abuse of wartime \u201ccomfort women\u201d to be recognised by Unesco<\/a>, as analysts say the ongoing feud between Seoul and Tokyo threatens to upset recent improvements in their relations.<\/p>\n

They also suggest that the two nations would benefit from working together at a time of unprecedented regional and global security and economic challenges, although they admit that may be impossible.<\/p>\n

On Sunday, a coalition of South Korean citizens\u2019 groups called on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation to move forward with the listing of documents about wartime comfort women on its Memory of the World Register.<\/p>\n

The request was made at a press conference in Seoul more than a decade after groups from eight countries first requested that Unesco collate and preserve victims\u2019 testimonies and other paperwork related to the sexual slavery of women from across Asia imposed by Japanese troops.<\/p>\n

It comes after the Korean Supreme Court on August 12 dismissed an appeal by Japan<\/a>\u2019s Nippon Steel against a lower-court ruling in South Korea<\/a> that ordered the company to pay 80 million Korean won (US$59,528) to the family of the late Min Moon-sik for forced labour in 1942. The previous month, Unesco passed a resolution at its World Heritage Committee meeting in Busan insisting that Japan present the \u201cwhole history\u201d of forced labourers \u2013 including more than 1,500 Koreans \u2013 who worked during Japan\u2019s colonial era at a mine on the Japanese island of Sado.More than 80 years after the end of the second world war<\/a>, it is unlikely that the two nations will see eye-to-eye on their shared history \u2013 and particularly the years of Japan\u2019s often brutal occupation of the Korean peninsula in the early decades of the last century, according to analysts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"South Korean citizens\u2019 groups have called for the abuse of wartime \u201ccomfort women\u201d to be recognised by Unesco,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":87912,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[11292,55557,8,17,10321,2549,2237,1922,55559,659,657,52,3525,55558,3899],"class_list":["post-87911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tokyo","tag-comfort-women","tag-dokdo-island","tag-japan","tag-japanese","tag-korean","tag-korean-peninsula","tag-nippon-steel","tag-north-korea","tag-scientific-and-cultural-organisation","tag-seoul","tag-south-korea","tag-tokyo","tag-unesco","tag-united-nations-educational","tag-yasukuni-shrine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87911","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=87911"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87911\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}