page_title: Japan–Korea disputes
section_title: Comfort women
hierarchical_section_title: Japan–Korea disputes / Historical issues / Comfort women
caption_attribution_description: English: Comfort Women, rally in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, August 2011 (2)
context_page_description: There have been disputes between Japan and Korea on numerous issues over the years.
  Korea was ruled by the Imperial Japanese government starting with the Japan–Korea Treaty of 1910 until the Japanese Instrument of Surrender in 1945 which ended World War II. South Korea refused to trade or open diplomatic relations with Japan until 1965, after which trade links expanded dramatically. Today, Japan and South Korea are major trading partners, and many students, tourists, entertainers, and business people travel between the two countries, whereas North Korea's political and economic relations with Japan are not developed.
context_section_description: Many South Koreans have demanded compensation for "comfort women", the women who were forced to work in Imperial Japanese military brothels during World War II. Enlisted to the military "comfort stations" through force, including kidnapping, coercion, and deception, the Korean comfort women, most of them under the age of 18, were forced to serve. As the few surviving comfort women continued to demand acknowledgement and a sincere apology, the Japanese court rejected their compensation claims.
  In November 1990, the Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan was established in South Korea. As of 2008, a lump sum payment of 43 million South Korean won and a monthly payment of ₩0.8 million won were given to the survivors by the Korean government. In 1993, the government of Japan officially acknowledged the presence of wartime brothels, and set up a private Asian Women's Fund to distribute donated money and issue official letters of apology to the victims. Today, many of the surviving comfort women are in their 80s. As of 2007, according to South Korean government, there are 109 survivors in South Korea and 218 in North Korea. The survivors in South Korea protest every Wednesday in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul, Korea. The protest was held for the 1000th time in December 2011.
  In July 2007, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a non-binding resolution calling for Japan to apologize for forcing women into sex slavery during World War II. The resolution was sponsored by Mike Honda (D-CA), a third-generation Japanese-American. On December 13, 2007, the European Parliament adopted a resolution demanding that the Japanese government apologize to the survivors of Japan's military sexual slavery system. This resolution was passed with 54 ayes out of 57 parliament members present.
  On December 28, 2015, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe and South Korean President Park Geun-hye reached a formal agreement to settle the dispute. Japan agreed to pay ¥1 billion (₩9.7 billion; $8.3 million) to a fund supporting surviving victims while South Korea agreed to refrain from criticizing Japan regarding the issue and to work to remove a statue memorializing the victims from in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul. The announcement came after Japanese foreign minister Fumio Kishida met his counterpart Yun Byung-se in Seoul, and later Abe phoned Geun-hye to repeat the apologies already offered by Japan. The South Korean government will administer the fund for elderly comfort women. The agreement was firstly welcomed by the majority of the former comfort women (36 out of 47 existed former comfort women at that time) and the payment was received by them.  However, Moon Jae-in utilized the criticism against the agreement for his presidential election supported by an activist group, the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, which criticized the agreement and persuaded the women to deny the payment.
  After Moon Jae-in become the president, South Korea government decided again keep the issue of "Comfort Woman" as a dispute between the two countries by discarding the 2015 agreement and shut down the Japan-funded comfort women foundation which was launched in July 2016 to finance the agreement's settlement on November 21, 2018.
  In 2020, a former comfort woman Lee Yong-soo accused the the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan and Yoon Mee-hyang, the former head of the council, of misusing funds and embezzlement. Some newspapers criticize the council and Yoon Mee-hyang because they seemed to amplify the problem by just criticizing Japan and exploited the former comfort women, although they said they are working for resolve the dispute and working for the former comfort women.
caption: Surviving comfort women (in middle row) at a 'Wednesday demonstration' in front of Japanese Embassy in Seoul
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