North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un is nothing if not consistent. His incompetent (and unremittingly cruel) leadership extends not only to his miserable domestic record. Kim is proving to be a disaster on the international scene as well.
Consider: The North Korean dauphin has managed to push South Korean president Park Geun-hye and Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe into each other’s arms. This despite the fact that the two have what can only be described charitably as a “frosty” relationship, owing to Prime Minster Abe’s record of historical revisionism and occasional outright denial of his country’s crimes against Korea in the first half of the twentieth century.
Still, so disturbing is North Korea’s nuclear program that President Park and Prime Minister Abe met on the sidelines of the “nuclear summit” that occurred in Washington last week. And the meeting came on the heels of a landmark agreement that the two countries struck regarding comfort women – the tens of thousands of Korean women who were used as sex slaves by the Japanese imperial army. Last December, Japan finally agreed to offer an apology and pay reparations to a fund that would support the 44 surviving South Korean comfort women. It is widely speculated that concerns over North Korea pushed Japan towards pursuing a rapprochement with Seoul.
And yet, in the months since Seoul and Tokyo inked their deal, Japan has taken steps that have thrown its sincerity into question. Earlier this year, at the United Nations, Japan refused to admit to the forcible nature of its comfort women scheme. And, as part of the agreement, Tokyo has insisted on the removal a memorial in Seoul that commemorates the victims. (It’s as if, after World War II, Germany had said it would offer its victims compensation only on the grounds that no memorials to the dead were erected.) As a result of these and other issues, enforcement of the deal is stalled.
And then there’s the matter of comfort women in other countries. While South Korea is notable for the scale of its victimization at the hands of the Japanese imperial army, Japan maintained comfort women from scores of countries across Asia.
A number of Taiwanese women, for example, were also raped repeatedly by Japanese forces. Taipei has lately been lobbying Japan for an apology and for some form of reparations for the four surviving comfort women from the island. Outgoing president Ma Ying-jeou has made the issue a priority. But despite (or perhaps because of) Taiwan and Japan enjoying warm relations – certainly much warmer than between South Korea and Japan – Tokyo has refused to address the matter.
An apology to Taiwan’s surviving comfort women would not only be the morally right thing to do, but might also help to convince skeptical South Koreans (among others) of Japan’s sincerity. Otherwise, despite Tokyo’s hopes, this issue is not going to go away.
