Wartime crimes

"Comfort women": Japan's 70-year sex slavery controversy, explained

In August 1910, in a date that to Americans might seem like ancient history but in northeast Asia is remembered as if it were yesterday, the Empire of Japan formally annexed what had once been the sovereign nation of Korea. It is only now, over a century later, that Japan and Korea have formally reconciled one of the darkest legacies of that era: the 1930s and '40s recruitment of Korean women and girls as sex slaves known as "comfort women."

Japan's imperialism in Korea ended in 1945, and Japan re-normalized relations with South Korea in 1965, but the psychological wounds it inflicted there have never fully healed. Japan and South Korea have, ever since, been locked in a sort of unspoken negotiation over this past; over how to remember this chapter in their shared history — a question that is still unresolved within Japan itself.