South Korea is committed to advancing relations with Japan but will step up efforts to share with the world its experience of Japanese wartime atrocities, including sexual violence against its women, Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha told Reuters. Kang said South Korea was seeking to host an international conference on
South Korea is committed to advancing relations with Japan but will step up efforts to share with the world its experience of Japanese wartime atrocities, including sexual violence against its women, Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha told Reuters.
Kang said South Korea was seeking to host an international conference on sexual violence in conflict in the first half of this year.
“We feel we have a lot to contribute to the discussion because we have the history of the comfort women and the victims,” she said in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
The two Asian neighbors share a bitter history stemming from Japan’s 1910-45 colonization of the Korean peninsula, the use of forced labor at Japanese companies, and the abuse of’comfort women’ – Japan’s euphemism for girls and women, many of them Korean, who were forced to work in its military brothels during World War II.
“The conference is not to address (the comfort women) issue per se, but to make sure that their historical experience is not lost, and (is) registered in the international efforts to really come to terms with this issue,” Kang said.
