Unacceptable for Tokyo to add insult to injury again

Film footage discovered by a team of scholars from the Republic of Korea at the US National Archives and Records Administration was released by Yonhap News Agency on Tuesday. It adds to the existing documentary evidence that the Japanese military brought 30 Korean “comfort women” with them to Tengchong in Southwest China’s Yunnan province, and that the women were killed on Sept 13, 1944, before the Japanese troops surrendered to Chinese forces.

The film was released after Japan made a formal complaint on Monday following the raising of the issue of comfort women at the United Nation’s Human Rights Council by ROK Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha, who said there should be a “victim-centered approach” to the issue.

Although former ROK president Park Geun-hye and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe signed an agreement to resolve the issue in December 2015, as a matter of expediency to improve relations. The government of her successor, Moon Jae-in, has urged follow-up measures to the agreement because it was reached without the consent of the surviving victims.

The new evidence on the comfort women issue reinforces the case for the ROK government to renegotiate the issue with Japan.

However, Junichi Ihara, Japan's ambassador to the UN in Geneva, said that Kang’s raising of the issue at the UNHRC was “totally unacceptable”.

What is really unacceptable is the repeated attempts by some in Japan to sweep under the carpet, whitewash or outright deny their country’s wartime crimes, such as the coercing of woman into sexual slavery.

Many of the women who were forced to work as slaves for the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II came from the Korean Peninsula, although tens of thousands of women were also from many other parts of Asia, including China.

The issue has repeatedly soured Japan’s relations with its neighbors in recent years because Abe has continually sidestepped offering an apology to the comfort women, and sought to wriggle away from acknowledging any unpalatable truths about Japan’s wartime activities in occupied countries.

Abe and others who have followed his lead should know the more they try to rewrite Japan’s wartime history to portray the country in a better light, the more they tarnish its image as a responsible and respectable member of the international community.