South Korea has warned Japan not to undermine a recent agreement on second world war sex slaves, after Tokyo’s deputy foreign minister told the UN there was no documented proof that Japan had coerced women into working in military brothels.
The two countries agreed in December to “finally and irreversibly” settle their long-running dispute over Japan’s use of as many as 200,000 women – most of them from the Korean peninsula – to provide sexual services to troops before and during the war.
Under the agreement, the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, issued a verbal apology to the “comfort women”. “[Abe] expresses anew his most sincere apologies and remorse to all the women who underwent immeasurable and painful experiences and suffered incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women,” Japan’s foreign minister, Fumio Kishida, told his South Korean counterpart, Yun Byung-se, in Seoul.
Japan also agreed to contribute 1 billion yen (£6.1m) to a fund that will be used to support the 46 surviving women, most of whom are in their 80s and 90s.
The accord also included verbal recognition by Japan of the “involvement” of Japanese military authorities in a system of abuse that was “a grave affront to the honour and dignity of large numbers of women”.
This week, however, Japan’s deputy foreign minister, Shinsuke Sugiyama, told a UN panel in Geneva that there was no evidence of Japanese military or government involvement in procuring the women.
“In the early 1990s, when the comfort women issue became a political and diplomatic problem between Japan and the Republic of Korea, the Japanese government conducted a thorough investigation, but there were no documents confirming that the Japanese government or army forced comfort women into sexual servitude,” he told the UN committee on the elimination of discrimination.
Sugiyama added that the claim Japan had forced the women to work in military brothels was based on false testimony given by Seiji Yoshida, a former Japanese soldier.
Yoshida, who died in 2000, recounted in articles published by the Asahi Shimbun in the 1980s and 90s how he had helped “hunt” for women on the South Korean island of Jeju in 1943.
The newspaper retracted the articles in 2014 and acknowledged that Yoshida’s accounts had been discredited by independent investigations.
Mainstream historians, however, have pointed to other evidence to support their claim that the women were coerced, including testimony from the survivors themselves.
Sugiyama’s comments drew an angry response from Seoul.
Japan’s forced recruitment of comfort women was “historical fact”, a South Korean foreign ministry official said, according to the Yonhap news agency.
The official pointed to a 1993 statement by the then Japanese chief cabinet secretary, Yohei Kono, in which he acknowledged the Japanese military’s involvement in recruiting the women, and issued an apology.
Japan should “refrain from words and deeds to damage the spirit and purpose” of the December agreement, the official added.
Japan has been careful not to describe its contribution to the fund as compensation, describing it instead as a humanitarian gesture. Tokyo says all claims were settled in a 1965 treaty that restored diplomatic ties and included more than $800m in grants and loans to South Korea.