Families of comfort women create association to disclose Japan’s brutality

The families of comfort women will launch an association to help military sex slave victims under the Japanese colonial rule.

According to a civilian shelter in Gwangju in Gyeonggi Province on Thursday, the families of 12 comfort women will launch an association on Saturday. The association will report Japan’s war crime and urge Japan for an official apology and compensation. In addition, it will help victims give testimonies and conduct commemoration projects.

The family members of two late victims – Kim Sun-deok and Choi Seon-soon – and 10 comfort women who live in the civilian shelter will participate in the association. As the surviving victims can hardly join rallies and make testimonies due to their deteriorating health and old age, their families stepped up instead. The association will open an office in a comfort women victims’ human rights center near the shelter when the center is built around 2017.

The shelter will host a memorial service for comfort women including Bae Chun-hee who died in August last year with a memorial service for the 96th anniversary of March 1st Independence Movement Day on Saturday.