During the Asia-Pacific War, the majority of victims of the Japanese military “Comfort Women” system came from colonial Korea. Yet the North Korean dimension has remained largely obscured or unknown from the international view. The division of the peninsula after liberation, the Korean War, Cold War dynamics, and ongoing diplomatic constraints have limited verification, circulation of evidence, and cross-border collaboration between advocacy groups, even though scholars reasonably assume that victim numbers in the North were comparable to those in the South.

This article—among the few to address the topic directly—traces how North Korea has treated the “Comfort Women” issue and how its discourse has evolved. Historian C. Harrison Kim, a specialist in North Korean history, follows a trajectory from early revelations and survivor testimonies, through North Korean participation in 1990s transnational solidarity movements, to recent cultural representations, including a novel. His research shows that discussion inside North Korea has been in dialogue with developments abroad—especially in South Korea and Japan. The analysis highlights both commonalities and divergencies with South Korea in state engagement and the evolving redress movement.

First Emergence of the “Comfort Women” Issue as Public Memory

In the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea), the year 1991 marks an important moment in the formation of the “Comfort Women” issue as public memory. The November 28 issue of Rodong Sinmun (로동신문 Workers Daily) reported on the second Conference on Asia’s Peace and Women’s Role (아시아의 평화와 여성의 역할 토론회) taking place in Seoul (November 25 to 30). The North Korean delegation was led by the prominent politician Ryeo Yeon-gu (려연구), Vice Chair of the Supreme People’s Assembly and daughter of the famed independence activist Lyuh Woon-hyung (여운형 Yeo Un-hyeong). The article describes the Japanese politician Shimuzu Sumiko’s (清水澄子) speech, where she apologizes on behalf of the Japanese government for the crime of military sexual slavery. The article also mentions that between one hundred seventy thousand and two hundred thousand young women were made into “Comfort Women” (위안부) in the name of “voluntary corps” (정신대) to serve the Japanese military.^[1] Although the details are scant, this article may have been North Korea’s first instance of publishing about “Comfort Women.”

What is interesting is that the first conference, which took place in Japan in May, was not reported. But the watershed event that took place in August that year—the former “Comfort Woman” Kim Hak-sun’s (김학순) public testimony on August 14 in South Korea—must have prompted the North Korean government to reveal the issue to the public. Within two months of that November article, North Korea was fully on board. The January 16, 1992, issue of Rodong Sinmun reported on a range of information surfacing at the time, including the South Korean survivors’ lawsuit against the Japanese government in December 1991, the existence of “Comfort Women” documents at Japan’s National Institute for Defense Studies, as discovered by the Chuo University historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki (吉見義明) on January 10, the direct involvement of the Japanese military in creating and operating the comfort stations during WWII, and the Japanese prime minister Miyazawa Kiichi’s (宮澤喜一) apology made on January 14.^[2] From this moment, North Korea’s media would regularly publish reports, opinions, and statements on the issue, always with the intention of demanding justice and the Japanese government’s direct accountability. North Korea’s number of media items on the issue is far smaller than South Korea’s, but the strength of its reproachful tone against Japan does not fluctuate, even during times of precarious international politics.^[3]

First Emergence of the “Comfort Women” Issue as Public Memory

While North Korea’s public memory of the “Comfort Women” issue begins to emerge in the early 1990s, the first inkling of awareness of the crime of sexual slavery during the colonial period can be traced back three decades earlier. In 1964, as a way of criticizing South Korea’s impending normalization treaty with Japan, the problem of Imperial Japan’s wartime sexual slavery was featured in a small way in the popular magazine Joseon Nyeoseong (조선녀성Korean Women). In an article titled “Let Us Not Forget the Barbarity of Imperial Japan,” one Kim Ok-seon (김옥선) recalls the awfulness of the “Taiwan House” (대만관 Daemangwan) located in Anju, South Pyeongan Province. It was a holding house from which many young Korean women, taken from villages all over the country, were shipped across the empire, to “South China, Hong Kong, Manila, and Singapore, wherever the evil hand of Imperial Japan reached.”^[4] Kim Ok-seon’s memory may only a be whisper, but when the fact that ParkYeong-sim (박영심)—the well-known survivor-activist from the DPRK whose photo as a young pregnant “Comfort Woman” in Myanmar, in one of the earliest authentic “Comfort Women” documents, shocked the world—was also from the same province, a picture begins to emerge of South Pyeongan Province as a major hub from which young Korean women were detained and shipped abroad.

One immediate observation about North Korea’s discourse is that the authority of Kim Il Sung is consistently found in the public memory of the “Comfort Women” issue. In fact, the entire process of problematizing the “Comfort Women” history and calling for victims’ justice find legitimacy through Kim Il Sung’s words. A speech of Kim Il Sung that is frequently cited—and considered the first to mention Imperial Japan’s crime of sexual slavery—is one he gave to the leaders of the Women’s League on May 9, 1946. In the speech, he says, “during the Greater East Asian War [another term for WWII in Asia], the Japanese imperialists forcibly took Korea’s young women, locked them up in caves and cages like criminals, and enslaved them like animals for the purpose of producing war supplies. Moreover, Imperial Japan took them to the battlefields and committed all kinds of beastly crimes on them. Because of imperial fascists’ inhumane oppression, exploitation, and unbearable physical abuses, the number of Korean women who lost their youth and life is countless.”^[5] This phrase is found, for instance, in the Preface of The Cries of Trampled Lives (짓밟힌 인생의 웨침), North Korea’s first book of survivors’ testimonies, published in August 1995.

Party-State, Civil Society, and Diplomacy

Because North Korea’s civil society is always a reflection of the party-state, its messages on the “Comfort Women” issue are naturally tied to the objectives of the state. After all, North Korea’s main “Comfort Women” justice organization the Committee on Measures for Compensation to Sexual Slaves of the Japanese Army and Drafting Victims (조선일본군성노예 및 강제련행피해자문제 대책위원회) is a branch of the Korean Workers’ Party. This organization, by the way, used to be called the Committee on Measures for Compensation to Former Comfort Women for the Japanese Army and Drafting Victims (조선일본군위안부 및 강제련행피해자문제 대책위원회), from 2000 to 2014; before that, it was called the Committee on Measures for Compensation to the Former Comfort Women for the Japanese Army and Pacific War Victims (종군위안부및태평양전쟁피해자보상대책위원회), formed in 1992. The change in the name indicates a progression of North Korea’s preferred terminology, from “military comfort women” to “military sexual slave.”

The closeness between the civic organization and the party-state is a situation contrary to the one in South Korea, where the voice of justice and rebuke as delivered by the Korean Council is consistently independent from the government—a government that, at times, have different aims from that of the Korean Council. The highly influential role of the party-state in North Korea has been a restraint on civil society’s freedom of expression, but this relationship reveals something remarkable about North Korea’s stance on the “Comfort Women” issue. With the voices of the party-state and civil society in unison, the struggle for “Comfort Women” justice in North Korea has, for the past three decades, sustained the message of demanding direct accountability from the Japanese government for the war crime of sexual slavery. In other words, the “Comfort Women” issue in North Korea has been astoundingly resilient to international politics, and the party-state and civil society have shared the unwavering voice of criticism and justice even as international political climate fluctuated.

This is true even as North Korea and Japan were negotiating for diplomatic normalization and economic cooperation throughout the 1990s. During the first phase of negotiations for normalization, in 1991 and 1992, when Japan stated that any claims related to colonial matters are not valid for discussion, North Korea, rather than compromising, brought into the talks the unresolved issue of military sexual slavery, subsequently derailing the talks.^[6] Then in the late 1990s, when Yokota Megumi’s (横田 めぐみ) abduction case made headlines, in February 1997, and North Korea launched a rocket that was perceived as a missile, in August 1998, the relationship between the two countries, which seemed to be improving in the aftermath of the Agreed Framework of 1994, once again deteriorated. Instead of making concessions, North Korea dissented loudly saying Japan has no moral right until the “Comfort Women” issue is resolved. A statement by the Committee on Measures for Compensation to the Former Military Comfort Women and Pacific War Victims is quite telling. The statement reads, “The anti-Korean stance of Japan’s rightwing reactionaries about our satellite launching is becoming extreme. We will be fine if we do not achieve diplomatic normalization with Japan. To obtain apologies and compensation for the past crimes, however, is our resolute will and right.”^[7]

When compared with the concessionary actions of the South Korean government, the difference is stark. South Korea’s 1965 normalization treaty^[8] with Japan was only possible when the Park Chung Hee administration accepted the condition of not making any claims related to colonial suffering. The amount of $300 million dollars Japan gave South Korea was thus not a compensation for war crimes but an economic grant. The 2015 December Agreement^[9] between South Korea and Japan, too, had the compromising provision of treating the “Comfort Women” issue as fully resolved and thus no longer an object of criticism. For the South Korean government, diplomatic and economic relationship with Japan has always been prioritized over the issues of justice and claims for Imperial Japan’s war crimes. For the North Korean government, which shares a unified voice with civil society, any relationship with Japan seems to be built on the foundation of resolving the issues of the past. North Korea and Japan have not established normalization to this day.

Transnational Engagement and Contemporary Representations

In terms of actual activities, North Korea’s “Comfort Women” justice movement has been at times aligned with South Korea’s movement and at other times on a different trajectory. For instance, while North Korean activists did participate in the Asian Solidarity Conference (아시아연대회의), which was held fifteen times between 1992 and 2018, they only attended one conference in-person, the Tokyo Conference in October 1993. On the other hand, North Korea was quite active in the Conference on Asia’s Peace and Women’s Role, although it was short-lasting, with only four meetings between May 1991 and April 1993. The North Korean delegation attended all four meetings and even hosted one, in Pyongyang from September 1 to 6, 1992.

The Pyongyang Conference in September 1992 is where four North Korean survivors participated in a forum—Ri Gyeong-saeng (리경생), aged 76, Ri Bok-nyeo (리복녀), aged 73, Kim Yeong-sil (김영실), aged 69, and Kim Dae-in (김대일), aged 77.^[10] Ri Gyeong-saeng is the first North Korean survivor to speak to the public (North Korea’s version of Kim Hak-sun, one could say), when she gave an interview on Korean Central Television on May 3, 1992, outraged after reading about a Japanese soldier who said “Comfort Women” swindled money from the soldiers. Ri Gyeong-saeng’s case is highly intriguing. She testified that she was forcibly taken in 1929 at the age of twelve to a Japanese munitions factory in Changwon City in South Gyeongsang Province, in Korea proper. She was forced to serve as a “Comfort Woman” until she escaped in 1933. This story was first stated in the May interview and retold in the “Statement of Accusation” announced by the Committee on Measures for Compensation on the first day of the September Pyongyang Conference.^[11] A more detailed version her story is found in the 1995 book of testimonies The Cries of Trampled Lives.^[12] Ri Gyeong-saeng’s testimony suggests that, while official “Comfort Stations” are considered to have begun to be established in 1931, informal “Comfort Stations” were likely operating at various sites (not just military camps), including industrial facilities. In North Korea, Ri Gyeong-saeng’s testimony is the reason why “Comfort Stations” are described as having originated in the 1920s (See Image 3).

On the matter of criticizing Asian Women’s Fund (아시아여성기금), North Korea has been in agreement with South Korea. An article in Rodong Sinmun in 1995 reflects this position. It states that “the Japanese government and “Comfort Women” have a legal relationship, where the former is the perpetrator and the latter are victims. The Japanese government as the perpetrator must compensate the “Comfort Women” as victims. This is how the Japanese government should carry out its responsibility and duty as a legal entity. However, Japan has ignored this and set up a fund to gather money from civilians and distribute it to surviving “Comfort Women” as charity. This is ultimately a sordid plot to avoid state responsibility.”^[13] That the Japanese government is circumventing full accountability is an on-going problem for the justice movement.

Another area in which North Korea and South Korea are in accord is the treatment of the “Comfort Women” issue as a global human rights issue. The 2018 North Korean detective novel Four Blocks of Ice (네 덩이의 얼음), by Jeon In-gwang (전인광), approaches the “Comfort Women” issue as having complex transnational features.^[14] With the title referring to the four main islands of Japan, the novel is set across Asia with characters from North Korea, South Korea, Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, and China. Two main characters are police officers from Japan and Thailand who work together to solve a murder. In the process, the “Comfort Women” issue is rightfully elevated as a matter of global human rights. Four Blocks of Ice is, to date, the only North Korean novel about “Comfort Women.”

Strengths and Limits of North Korea’s Approach to the “Comfort Women” Issue

North Korea’s movement for “Comfort Women” justice is commendable for its strong and unwavering critique and demands. The closeness between civil society and the party-state is one reason why this is so. However, this close relationship is also the reason why discursive advancement in North Korea has been slow. In South Korea, the debates surrounding the “Comfort Women” issue have led to sophisticated and necessary research and discursive production, especially through the epistemological terrain of radical feminism that enables universalistic thinking and programs. That the “Comfort Women” issue simultaneously raises the enduring problems of patriarchy, nationalism, market primacy, and state power is an aspect irrefutably essential to the “Comfort Women” debate today. For instance, the movement is keenly aware that the “Comfort Women” issue is no longer separate from the global problem of how violence, repression, and exploitation in human trafficking and sex work—perpetrated by both state and capital—is operationalized through individual choice, in which empowerment and exploitation often share the same ontological space. This kind of inquiry, essential to the movement, will be difficult in North Korea as long as critique of its own party-state is restrained.

This documentary on North Korean “Comfort Women” was produced by Arirang TV in January 2019. 
(Credit: Arirang TV, “The Waning Light: ‘Comfort Women,’” YouTube, January 24, 2019)