Seoul to give Japanese funds to sexual slavery victims

SEOUL (AA) – Seoul’s foreign ministry revealed Thursday that around $90,000 in Japanese funds will be provided to every surviving South Korean woman who had been coerced into serving in imperial Japan’s military brothels.

The funds will come from the 1 billion yen ($9.96 million) that Japan is due to transfer to the Reconciliation and Healing Foundation, launched by South Korea last month to support the “comfort women”, as part of a deal that Tokyo and Seoul reached in December.

A South Korean foreign ministry official said Thursday that besides the funds to be allocated to the around 40 survivors, the families of others who have already passed away would receive 20 million won ($18,000).

"The cash provision is intended to restore honor and dignity of the comfort women victims and to heal their wounds," the official was quoted as saying by local news agency Yonhap.

After a trilateral meeting between the foreign ministers of Japan, South Korea and China in Tokyo on Wednesday, Tokyo’s Fumio Kishida told reporters that he and his Seoul counterpart Yun Byung Se “agreed to sincerely implement the [December] deal”, according to Kyodo News.

The deal has been rejected by several elderly victims of colonial-era sexual enslavement and civic activists as stopping short of a legal apology by Tokyo.

Aside from the agreement’s failure to account for victims from other former Japanese colonies, it has been criticized in South Korea for not being legally binding.

There has also been a sense in the South for some time that right-leaning Japanese politicians -- including Prime Minister Shinzo Abe -- are in denial about the brutal realities of Tokyo’s imperialist past, which saw as many as 200,000 women and girls forced into service at military brothels during the last century.

Japan had maintained for years that colonial era issues related to South Korea were resolved under a 1965 bilateral treaty, and Abe’s indirect apology delivered by his foreign minister in December did little to persuade critics that he had undergone a change of heart.