Footage of Korean women sexually enslaved by Japanese soldiers in WWII revealed for the first time

한국인 ‘위안부’ 증명할 영상자료 나왔다…최초 발굴

Japan’s sexual enslavement of Korean women during World War Two is one unresolved issue that continues to strain relations between the two countries.
However, all these decades later,…. the Japanese government still tries to whitewash its wartime atrocities.
At long last evidence has been found that should aid Seoul’s efforts to corner Tokyo into facing reality.
Lee Ji-won tells us more.
Women,… with faces full of fear,… are lined up against a wall.
A man, presumed to be a Chinese officer, talks to them.

This short 18 second video is of seven Korean women sexually enslaved by the Japanese soldiers in Yunnan province, southwest China, around the end of World War II.
It is the first-ever video footage of Korean victims that has been found.

On Wednesday, Seoul city and Professor Chung Chin-sung of Seoul National University unveiled the video from 1944,… which had been stored in the National Archives and Records Administration of the United States for over 70 years.
Previously,… footage of Chinese comfort women had been found,… but there were only pictures and documents on the Korean comfort women.
But after the professor and his research team were certain that a video on the Korean victims existed, they spent two years searching for the footage,… and they finally found what they were looking for amongst hundreds of film reels last month.
The footage was taken by an American combat photographer just after the region was reclaimed from Japan by the Chinese.

During World War II, an estimated 200-thousand women, mostly Koreans, were kidnapped and forced to become sex slaves for Japanese troops.
While an agreement between Korea and Japan was made by the previous Park Geun-hye administration in 2015,… where Japan financially compensated the victims with one billion yen, or about 8-point-9 million U.S. dollars, thousands of citizens and the surviving victims criticized and refused the deal as Tokyo claimed there was no evidence of the Japanese military forcing the enslavement of women.

But with Korea’s newly elected President Moon Jae-in calling for renegotiation of the deal,… the research team says that they hope the footage will work as a tool to open up such talks.

“We hope the new findings will bring the public’s attention and interest on the matter,… so that when President Moon has his first bilateral talk with the Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, at the G20 summit later this week, an atmosphere for renegotiation can be made.”

With only 38 Korean victims still alive,… the research team stressed their determination to uncover this video evidence of Japan’s sexual slavery so that there’s a chance for the issue to be resolved within their lifetimes.
Lee Ji-won, Arirang News.

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