South Korean groups seek UNESCO recognition for wartime comfort women amid Japan-South Korea tensions

South Korean citizens’ groups have called for the abuse of wartime ‘comfort women’ to be recognised by Unesco, as analysts say the ongoing feud between Seoul and Tokyo threatens to upset recent improvements in their relations.

They also suggest that the two nations would benefit from working together at a time of unprecedented regional and global security and economic challenges, although they admit that may be impossible.

On Sunday, a coalition of South Korean citizens’ groups called on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation to move forward with the listing of documents about wartime comfort women on its Memory of the World Register.

The request was made at a press conference in Seoul more than a decade after groups from eight countries first requested that Unesco collate and preserve victims’ testimonies and other paperwork related to the sexual slavery of women from across Asia imposed by Japanese troops.

It comes after the Korean Supreme Court on August 12 dismissed an appeal by Japan’s Nippon Steel against a lower-court ruling in South Korea that ordered the company to pay 80 million Korean won (US$59,528) to the family of the late Min Moon-sik for forced labour in 1942. The previous month, Unesco passed a resolution at its World Heritage Committee meeting in Busan insisting that Japan present the “whole history” of forced labourers – including more than 1,500 Koreans – who worked during Japan’s colonial era at a mine on the Japanese island of Sado.

More than 80 years after the end of the second world war, it is unlikely that the two nations will see eye-to-eye on their shared history – and particularly the years of Japan’s often brutal occupation of the Korean peninsula in the early decades of the last century, according to analysts.