SEOUL – South Korean prosecutors have indicted a South Korean professor for writing a book in which she allegedly defamed Korean women forced into wartime brothels for the Japanese military.

Park Yu-ha, a professor of Japanese literature at Seoul’s Sejong University, was indicted on Thursday without being detained for writing “Teikoku no Ianfu” (“Comfort Women of the Empire”), in which she depicted the so-called comfort women as “prostitutes,” damaging their honor, the Seoul Eastern Prosecutors Office said.

She “is considered to have encroached on the victims’ personal dignity and honor with false facts and deviated from freedom of academia,” the office said.

Park told Kyodo later Thursday that she intends to fight allegations by the prosecutors that she falsified the facts.

Park’s book, published in 2013, has drawn strong criticism for siding with views held by Japan on the contentious comfort women issue.

In June, last year, a group of former comfort women filed a defamation suit against Park and the head of the publishing company. In a ruling handed down in February, the Seoul Eastern District Court ordered the removal of 34 passages from her book. They included one stating that the suffering of Korean comfort women was equivalent to that of Japanese prostitutes, and another part argues that it was not the Japanese military — at least officially — that kidnapped or forcibly took those women to military brothels on Korean soil. Many of the comfort women were from the Korean Peninsula, which was under Japan’s colonial rule from 1910 to 1945.

Keywords

comfort women, Park Yu-ha, South Korea, WWII