South Korea and Japan Reach Deal on Wartime ‘Comfort Women’

More than 70 years after the end of World War II, South Korea and Japan reached a landmark agreement on Monday to resolve their dispute over Korean women who were forced to serve as sex slaves for Japan’s Imperial Army.

The agreement, in which Japan made an apology and promised an $8.3 million payment, was intended to remove one of the most intractable logjams in relations between South Korea and Japan, its former colonial master, both crucial allies to the United States. The so-called comfort women have been the most painful legacy of Japan’s colonial rule of Korea, which lasted from 1910 until Japan’s World War II defeat in 1945.

The Japanese and South Korean foreign ministers, announcing the agreement in Seoul, said each side considered it a “final and irrevocable resolution” of the issue.

The deal won praise from the governing party of President Park Geun-hye of South Korea but was immediately criticized as insufficient by some of the surviving former sex slaves as well as opposition politicians in South Korea, where anti-Japanese sentiments run deep.

The United States has repeatedly urged Japan and South Korea to resolve the dispute, a stumbling block in American efforts to strengthen a joint front with its Asian allies to better cope with China’s growing assertiveness in the region, as well as North Korea’s attempt to build a nuclear arsenal.

“The Japanese government bears a heartfelt responsibility for the comfort women issue, which severely injured the honor and dignity of many women, with the involvement of its military,” the foreign minister of Japan, Fumio Kishida, said on Monday, reading the agreement at a news conference in Seoul.

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