POHANG, South Korea – Each day, 97-year-old Park Pil-geun sits on a well-worn green chair in the shade of her veranda, watching the occasional car pass by her home in rural Wolpyeongri, a village that is a 45-minute drive from Pohang city in the south-east of South Korea.
She wonders if she will have any visitors; sometimes, she says, the loneliness does get to her.
She tries her best to fight against sad memories bubbling up and causing tears “that will fill the Han River if I let them flow”, she said.
Madam Park, one of the last surviving comfort women in South Korea, was born into a life of luxury in 1928, before it was all taken away from her one fateful day when she was 16.
Her father was a wealthy farmer who owned most of the land in the village. Her family had two servants, she recalls.
One day, while her parents were out working in the fields, she was ambushed at home by Japanese soldiers, who “dragged her like a dog” into a truck. She was then forced onto a ship at Busan that sailed for Japan, and told that she would be working for a textile company.
It was a lie. Instead, she became one of the estimated 200,000 to 400,000 women across Asia forced into providing sexual services to Japanese Imperial Army troops during World War II, from 1939 to 1945.
They were forced to serve the soldiers in military-run or military-supervised brothels known as comfort stations, which were set up to boost the soldiers’ morale and minimise the backlash from widespread rapes by the military.
While no official figures are available, most estimates suggest that there were around 1,000 comfort stations scattered across Japanese-occupied territories in Asia and the Pacific.
Most of the women were from Korea, a Japanese colony at that time, and China, which was invaded by Japan in 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Others came from countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Myanmar, then East Timor, and modern-day Papua New Guinea.
Today, the number of surviving comfort women is dwindling fast, and survivors are now mostly in their 90s.
South Korea has six known survivors.
In China, from 358 survivors who came forward with testimonies of their ordeals in the 1990s, the number is now down to seven.
And in the Philippines, where some of the girls trafficked were as young as eight, there are about 40 known surviving comfort women left, now in their 80s and 90s.
Time is running out for these elderly grannies – known as “halmoni”, “nai nai” and “lola” in their respective countries – who continue to demand closure.
As the world commemorates the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in 2025, the issue continues to rankle governments in North-east Asia, as well as their people.
In particular, it is among the top historical grievances that bedevil the relationship between South Korea and Japan, cropping up with regularity even as both countries have sought new rapprochement in recent years amid geopolitical turbulence.
As recently as 2019, frictions were reignited over Seoul unilaterally nullifying a 2015 agreement with Tokyo to “finally and irreversibly” resolve the comfort women issue.
Adding to the relationship nadir was another historical grievance of wartime forced labour coming to the fore, when South Korea’s Supreme Court ruled in November 2018 that Japanese companies should pay compensation to the victims, a decision that prompted retaliatory trade actions from Tokyo in August 2019.
Meanwhile, China and the Philippines have been less confrontational than South Korea, mindful of the importance of economic cooperation over historical grievances.
While the Chinese government has morally condemned the Japanese for the atrocities against the Chinese people, including comfort women survivors, it has never taken steps to seek compensation for them.
The Philippines has long pointed to the 1965 post-war agreement with Japan, under which Tokyo provided US$550 million in grants and loans, as a full settlement of wartime claims. But the package was used by the Philippine government as economic aid to rebuild the country, not reparations for victims of sexual slavery.
South Korea is undoubtedly the most vocal of the Asian countries affected by the comfort women issue, mainly because of the country’s “much stronger feminist movement and more vibrant civil society of protest and demonstration”, said historian Kevin Blackburn of the National Institute of Education in Singapore, who has studied the history of the Japanese occupation of South-east Asia extensively.
“In South Korea, the comfort women narratives fit more easily into existing national narratives of a national struggle against Japanese imperialism,” he told The Straits Times.
South Korean civic groups have also rallied international support to install comfort women statues to advocate for justice for survivors, despite protests from Japan. The statues can be found in countries such as Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Germany, the Philippines and the United States.
This statue of a young girl – representing victims forced to work in Japanese military brothels during World War II – has sat facing the Japanese Embassy in Seoul since December 2011. It is the first of many such statues installed around the world that Japan strongly opposes and whose removal it has demanded.
This 2m-high statue, which represents an estimated 1,000 Filipino comfort women victims, was unveiled in Manila in December 2017. It was removed in April 2018 after protests by Japan, with then President Rodrigo Duterte saying it was not the Philippines’ policy to “antagonise” other nations.
Depicting women from South Korea, China and the Philippines, this memorial was unveiled in San Francisco in September 2017. Osaka reacted strongly and unilaterally dissolved “sister city” ties with San Francisco in October 2018. But the statue remains today, alongside 13 others in states such as New York and Michigan.
Germany is home to five comfort women statues, some of which have been moved over the years because of objections from Japan. This statue found its permanent place in Bonn in June 2025, after moving from Dresden to Cologne.
Another statue in Berlin, unveiled in 2020, is now facing eviction. Local city officials, citing diplomatic concerns, had ordered its removal in 2024 but met with objection from Korea Verband, the group that launched it. A court injunction was issued allowing it to remain in place until the end of August 2025.
While leaders recognise the need to move on, emotional scars continue to spur survivors and their supporters to view the matter as anything but settled.
In a survey in 2023, 58.6 per cent of 1,000 South Korean respondents said the comfort women issue should be resolved between Seoul and Tokyo, according to the study by the Seoul-based East Asia Institute think-tank. In the same survey, 29.4 per cent of Japanese respondents agreed.
Sixty-one per cent of South Korean and 47.3 per cent of Japanese respondents also believed that bilateral relations can improve only by resolving the historical disputes between the two countries.
South Korean high school students Hailey Yoon and Katherine Kim formed the group Education for the Justice of Comfort Women in 2022 with another friend, after learning about the issue in elementary school.
Katherine, 16, said there is a need to continue raising awareness of the issue, given how human trafficking and sex trafficking still happen in this day and age.
Agreeing, Hailey, 17, said women will always be targeted in times of war, such as the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and the Israel-Gaza war.
“History repeats itself. So we wanted to start something to educate everyone about the wrongs of history so that this will never happen again,” she said.
In China, comfort women survivors have filed lawsuits since the mid-1990s seeking apologies and reparations from the Japanese government, but none has ever been successful.
Anger over Japanese wartime atrocities and what many see as Tokyo’s failure to show genuine remorse contribute to enduring hostility among Chinese people towards Japan. A survey by Japanese think-tank Genron NPO in December 2024 found that 88 per cent of Chinese respondents had a negative impression of Japan, the highest in more than a decade.
‘I want the Japanese government to apologise’
Time is running out for the comfort women to seek what they crave: unequivocal acknowledgement of the wrong done to them, adequate compensation and full-throated apologies.
Madam Park’s legs used to bear prominent scars from where she was beaten and burned after her first attempt to escape from where she was held.
Over time, the scars may have faded, but the anger has not.
She still sleeps poorly at night, and used to swear in Japanese whenever she was agitated, using derogatory language to refer to the Japanese.
Over in Yueyang city in Hunan province, China, Madam Peng Zhuying, 96, was blinded at the age of nine from the mustard gas bombs dropped by the Japanese army during the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1945.
When she was 15, Japanese soldiers dragged her to a house they had appropriated and turned into a comfort station, where she was forced to serve two to three officers a day for 10 to 20 days, before she was released.
When she tried to fight back during her ordeal, one soldier smashed a rifle butt onto her foot, shattering two toes.
Her sister, Peng Renshou, who was older by four years, was also a comfort woman. She died in 2018.
“Of course, I hate (those Japanese soldiers). As my younger brother would say, we hate them so much that we could even drink their blood!” Madam Peng told ST.
“I want the Japanese government to apologise and compensate those of us who suffered in China, but I haven’t heard from them.”
In Korea, 16-year-old Lee Young-soo was catching snails by the riverbank with a neighbour in her home town of Daegu when they were approached by a Japanese soldier, who promised them a better life where they would have red dresses and leather shoes.
She ended up being trafficked to Taiwan, where she was forced to serve kamikaze pilots.
Now 97, Madam Lee remains the most active and vocal comfort woman survivor in South Korea, and a tireless campaigner.
“I am still active, but most of the surviving grannies are all wearing (tubes) in their noses and barely breathing. We don’t know when they will take their final breaths,” she told ST at Daegu’s Heeum – Museum of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan.
Despite her advanced age, Madam Lee is in relatively good health and makes regular appearances at the weekly Wednesday demonstrations in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul to seek redress for survivors.
“Words can’t describe how heartbroken I feel,” she said. “Many grannies across the world hold unresolved pain. That should not be the case. We need to solve this issue quickly and make the world a brighter and more peaceful place.”
Human rights expert Shin Hei-soo was instrumental in bringing the plight of South Korean comfort women survivors to the attention of the United Nations in 1992, and had successfully lobbied for the International Commission of Jurists to conduct an investigative mission on the comfort women issue in 1993.
While Professor Shin acknowledged that many Japanese prime ministers from 1992 to 2015 have apologised for the comfort women issue, this would be quickly negated by the other Japanese Diet members who would bring up how Japan has helped other Asian countries advance in their development while glossing over the fact that these countries were invaded by Japan in the first place.
“So you have the prime minister as an individual saying ‘we are sorry’, but on the other hand, you have these Cabinet members who say all the wrong things. This makes the apology insincere,” said Prof Shin.
‘Consolation money’, not compensation
The first comfort woman to come out publicly with her story after suffering in shame for years, Madam Kim Hak-sun, broke her silence out of indignation over Japanese denials of the wartime crimes.
She spoke out on Aug 14, 1991, now marked as the memorial day for comfort women, sparking off a movement that saw other survivors from around the world coming forward with their own stories.
Japan’s official stance at the time was that the comfort stations were run by private contractors and the military had no involvement.
But a Japanese historian’s discovery of official military documents as evidence later that year prompted then Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa to give the first-ever apology on the comfort women issue during a state visit to South Korea in January 1992.
In August 1993, then Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono released a statement on behalf of the government, thereafter known as the Kono Statement, admitting that the Japanese military was “directly or indirectly” involved in the establishment and management of the comfort stations.
The statement extended “its sincere apologies and remorse to all those, irrespective of place of origin, who suffered immeasurable pain and incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women”.
In 1995, the Asian Women’s Fund was established by the Japanese government as an atonement fund for the comfort women survivors.
Though backed by the Japanese government, the funds were from private donations, leading to criticism that it was a way for the government to avoid official state responsibility and legal reparations.
By the time the fund was dissolved in 2007, it had disbursed two million yen (about S$25,600 based on 2007 rates) each to 285 comfort women survivors, mostly in the Philippines, followed by South Korea and then Taiwan.
Professor Lee Na-young, who chairs the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, told ST that the fund created conflict among the survivors. Some chose to accept it out of financial hardship, while others, such as Daegu’s Madam Lee, refused it on principle.
The council, a leading non-governmental organisation behind the Wednesday demonstrations in Seoul, pushes for the resolution of comfort women issues in South Korea.
The problem lay in how the payment was framed, said Prof Lee, who is also a sociology professor at Seoul’s Chung-Ang University.
“If you are the survivor of sexual violence and the perpetrator chooses to just give you money to absolve the crime, how would you feel?” she said.
Professor Lee Na-young, chairwoman of the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan:
“The payment of two million yen is small money compared with the depth of the survivors’ sufferings.”
Professor Su Zhiliang, who heads the Chinese Centre for Comfort Women Research at Shanghai Normal University, told ST that none of the Chinese comfort women survivors wanted to take the money.
“This is not ‘compensation money’ but ‘consolation money’. It carries no admission of legal responsibility, only the sense that ‘oh you’re so pitiful, here’s some money to console you’,” he said.
Eighty-nine-year-old Maria Quilantang was just eight years old when she and other young girls from the small farming town of Mapaniqui in Pampanga, north of Manila, were rounded up by Japanese soldiers and marched to the Bahay na Pula, better known as the Red House – a red-painted mansion in the nearby town of San Ildefonso – where the girls were beaten and raped over three days.
Madam Quilantang managed to escape with her younger sisters, avoiding rape, but many of her neighbours were not as fortunate.
Now the president of the Malaya Lolas (Free Grandmas) organisation, Madam Quilantang is frustrated that the survivors from the Red House were excluded from the atonement money because they were not stationed in an official military-run comfort station.
“It is as if our pain was less than that of other comfort women,” she told ST.
Lawyer Virginia Lacsa Suarez, who represents Malaya Lolas, called that exclusion a cruel irony, adding that rape is rape.
Civil society and survivors push on
Despite positive signs at the leadership level, survivors and activists continue to push for a sincere and acceptable resolution of issues.
The governments of Japan and South Korea have signalled that while the scars of history are painful, the two countries should now look ahead, given new geopolitical realities.
The Japanese government maintains that claims between Japan and South Korea “were settled completely and finally” in a 1965 agreement signed between the two countries.
Under the agreement, Japan had provided a US$300 million grant and US$200 million concessionary loan paid over 10 years, which funded South Korea’s key infrastructure projects such as the highway linking Seoul to Busan, and the setting up of the Pohang Steel Mill, now known as Posco, which has since grown into one of the world’s largest steelmakers.
This was essentially seed money for South Korea’s economic take-off in the 1960s, says retired South Korean veteran diplomat Shin Kak-soo, who served two terms each in the US and Japan as ambassador.
In 1993, then South Korean President Kim Young-sam accepted the Kono Statement and declared that Seoul would not call for pecuniary reparations from Japan. This, Mr Kim believed, was key to the two countries moving forward on bilateral relations.
The Comfort Women Victims Act was enacted in 1993, allowing a lump-sum grant of 43 million won, in addition to monthly allowances of about 1.8 million won and caregiving costs.
Out of the 240 registered comfort women survivors in South Korea, 207 of them have received the lump-sum grant, based on ST’s checks with South Korea’s Gender Equality Ministry.
In 2015, on the occasion of 50 years of normalisation of relations between the two countries, and with the goal of resolving the comfort women issue “finally and irreversibly”, South Korea and Japan, then led by the conservative governments of President Park Geun-hye and Premier Shinzo Abe, respectively, agreed on a resolution.
Japan offered one billion yen to a fund for comfort women survivors, along with the acknowledgement of responsibility of the Japanese government and military and an expression of “sincere apologies and remorse”.
The agreement included a request for the removal of the comfort woman statue erected in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul in 2011, which had become a focal point for weekly demonstrations.
But this agreement provoked strong protests from survivors and civic groups, who said they were not consulted on the deal, and triggered a public backlash.
The fund was dissolved in 2018 by liberal then President Moon Jae-in, who succeeded Ms Park after she was ousted.
South Korean liberal governments traditionally adopt a more hostile stance towards Japan, with historical grievances more likely to become political flashpoints whenever a liberal government is in power.
But newly elected President Lee Jae Myung, a liberal firebrand prior to his election, has since pledged a pragmatic diplomacy under his administration, acknowledging the importance of “future-oriented” ties with Tokyo to buttress the trilateral security cooperation with Washington in countering the rise of China’s regional influence and nuclear threats from North Korea.
He has since walked the talk in his first summits with both Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba on Aug 23 and US President Donald Trump on Aug 25.
On Aug 21, in an interview with Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper ahead of his summit with Mr Ishiba, President Lee acknowledged that while the 2015 agreement was “very difficult” for South Koreans to accept, “it is a promise as a nation, so it is undesirable to overturn it”.
Following the summit, he hailed Japan as South Korea’s “optimal partner”, saying that the two countries should act as “neighbours who share the same yard rather than being divided by sensitive issues”.
Even President Trump has taken a personal interest in the issue, having met Daegu’s Madam Lee at a state banquet hosted by then President Moon in 2017, during Mr Trump’s first presidential term.
In a summit with current President Lee on Aug 25, 2025, Mr Trump raised his concerns that the thorny comfort women issue could get in the way of trilateral cooperation with Japan.
Mr Lee reassured Mr Trump that the trilateral cooperation remained “very important” and that he understood that “better South Korea-Japan relations are also important for the South Korea-US relationship”.
Former ambassador Shin welcomes the changed tack on President Lee’s part, as he was known for his anti-Japan rhetoric prior to his election as president.
Mr Shin credits this to the “changed external environment of South Korea, including especially the Trumpian pressures from Washington”.
The Lee government seems to believe that the close Seoul-Tokyo relationship would help Seoul in dire situations gain some leverage against Washington’s exorbitant economic and military demands.
“Of course, Beijing’s formidable economic and military prowess in this region also drives Seoul to give more consideration to the importance of its sound and stable relations with Tokyo than before,” added the veteran diplomat.
Mr Shin, whose last tour of duty was in Tokyo before his retirement in 2013, sees the 2015 agreement as the best opportunity for both Seoul and Tokyo to move on from the issue.
A lingering issue
Even as the comfort women dwindle in number, the issue is unlikely to die with them.
In 2024, the children of 18 late former Chinese comfort women filed a historic lawsuit against Tokyo in the high court of China’s Shanxi province, seeking financial compensation of up to two million yuan (S$360,000) each, along with a formal public apology. The ongoing case is the first suit to be filed in a Chinese court.
They were inspired by South Korean courts, which have ruled three times – in 2021, 2023 and most recently in April 2025 – in favour of survivor families’ lawsuits against Tokyo for compensation of 100 million won (S$92,600) to 200 million won. However, Japan maintains the position of sovereign immunity, which refers to the right of a state to be immune from foreign court jurisdictions.
The stark reality is that, in the last stretch of their lives, the comfort women survivors are unlikely to get the justice they have fought for their entire lives.
Today, there are at least four privately funded museums in South Korea dedicated to preserving the memories of the comfort women survivors.
Apart from the Korean Council’s War and Women’s Human Rights Museum near Hongdae in Seoul, there is the Heeum – Museum of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan in Daegu and a small memorial hall in Busan preserving artefacts of survivors from the city.
Over in Gwangju, in Gyeonggi province, two hours away from Seoul, the House of Sharing, a residential facility and memorial museum, used to be filled with the laughter and chatter of comfort women survivors as they bonded over their past ordeals and sought healing through art therapy classes.
But the place has fallen quiet and empty, with the last three halmonis moved to nursing hospitals in March 2024 owing to frail health.
At the newly opened second hall of the Museum of Sexual Slavery by Japanese Military located on the same grounds, photos of the grandmothers line a wall, while individual panels of their stories fill another section.
While most of the halmonis have died, their memories need to be preserved for future generations, said Mr Seo Byeong-hwa, whose late mother Lee Yong-nyeo was sent first to Taiwan, then Singapore, and then to Myanmar as a comfort woman.
The 65-year-old Mr Seo, an active volunteer turned employee at the House of Sharing, told ST: “Even my own son doesn’t quite approve of me doing this. To him, it is all in the ‘grandmothers’ era’. But I continue to do this because I want young people to understand the history.”
Together with the Gyeonggi province government, the House of Sharing unveiled on Aug 9 an artificial intelligence rendition of late survivor Kim Soon-deok, based on her past oral and video testimonies, allowing real-time conversation with visitors as part of the memory preservation.
The House of Sharing’s chief curator Hong Eun-mi told ST that the team there is working on preserving and cataloguing materials to become the “hub for the study of the history of comfort women survivors, as part of our country’s cultural heritage”.
“The grandmothers left behind so much. Oral and video testimonies, paintings of their experiences, these are precious collections that are unprecedented elsewhere in the world,” said Madam Hong.
In Hunan, Madam Peng’s nephew Peng Zifang has co-authored a book, Never Forgotten, and set up a small private museum that displays artefacts from the occupation era.
“I hope the more aware we are about the horrors of war, the more determined we can be to never allow such horrors to be repeated,” Mr Peng said.
Pohang City Council member Kim Eun-ju, who spent four years interviewing Madam Park for an oral history project, still visits the halmoni occasionally. She has noticed Madam Park’s faltering strength and memory in recent months.
Once hopeful for an apology, Madam Park no longer expects one within her lifetime.
“When I die, everything will be over. What I want is for others to live well, unlike me,” she told ST.