Echoes from Jeju

This article is co-authored by Cathleen Ong and Luo Xuhong. Cover image by Cathleen Ong.

*This article is published in collaboration with Discuss Diglett, a blog run by youths keen on sharing their love for law, politics and economics. For more, check out Discuss Diglett's website and Instagram @DiscussDiglett today!

Pictured here is the Jeju 4.3 Peace Park, a memorial for the victims of the Jeju uprising. Image credit: Visit Jeju

Most people today recognise Jeju Island as an area of relaxation, good food and cultural heritage. However, more lies beyond its surface. As the site of the Jeju Massacre on 3 April 1948, this island may actually bear greater significance to ties between Korea and Japan than expected. This article depicts the frosty relations shared between two countries with a tangled history, and posits that South Korea’s tacit acknowledgement of the Jeju Uprising could signal an improvement for the countries’ deep-seated animosities. 

South Korea and Japan share a convoluted history, with conflicts dating back to the 7th century. The conflict where the flesh of their problems remain lies in the 1940s during World War II, where over 200,000 women from Asia, including South Korea, were enslaved as comfort women for the Japanese soldiers.  While South Korea has been extremely vocal in demanding Japanese accountability for wartime atrocities, it has simultaneously suppressed discussion of its own history of state-sponsored violence for over 5 decades.

Until the early 2000s, its government kept mum on a brutal martial law related crackdown on Jeju Island in 1948 which killed between 25,000 and 30,000 civilians, forming about 10% of the population. Those residing on the island were subjected to a further 5 years of repression, and even after the ban was lifted in 1954, continued to face the threat of marginalisation if they shared about their experiences. Over the years, this has remained a sensitive topic within the South Korean community, and it was only in 2025 that 14,000 of the documents concerning the Jeju repression were added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World register, symbolising a gradual movement towards acknowledgement and acceptance of these atrocities.

Come 2026 and President Lee Jae Myung’s term, progress towards recognition has sped up, with him declaring on the anniversary of the uprising his dedication to eradicating the current statute of limitations for criminal and civil cases, including that of state violence. Coupled with President Lee’s visit to the Jeju Uprising Peace Park in April, and the official release of Chung Ji-young’s film, which explores the inter-generational trauma arising from the years of oppression, South Korea seems to have made substantial effort to address its own dark history. 

Nonetheless, there remain evident issues which President Lee’s administration has to navigate before change is enacted. In 2022, Yoon Suk-yeol’s administration began to remove all mention of the Jeju uprising from South Korea’s textbooks and syllabus. Even though said administration partially restored information on the massacre and causes leading up to it, including the March 1 1947 police shootings preceding it and the military’s scorched-earth operations, consistent discrepancies continue to exist even today. Some textbooks from multiple publishers continue to label the victims as “rebel forces” who sparked a communist uprising, or use inaccurate legal terminology, overall illustrating the continued difficulties which South Korea faces in genuinely admitting its history.

Visitors to Jeju's 4.3 Memorial Park. Image credit: SCMP/ Agence France-Presse

Still, the impact of public pressure and South Korea’s own advocacy relating to Japan has brought about an optimistic outlook for Jeju civilians and their families. At the 71st commemoration of the Jeju uprising, April 3, 2019, the South Korean police and defense ministry apologised for the first time over the massacres. At this point, one probably finds it hard to picture how South Korea’s domestic issues are tangentially linked to its frosty history with Japan. Yet, Jeju’s model of reconciliation offers important lessons for closing another painful chapter of bilateral relations. 

On Comfort Women

While the Imperial Japanese Army may have acquired its notorious reputation from its perpetuation of war crimes during and before World War 2, fewer are aware of the masses forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military. In one of the darkest chapters of Korean history, historians have estimated that up to 200,000 euphemistically termed “comfort women” were manipulated or coerced into serving as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers in military-run brothels called “comfort stations”. Even though women from other occupied Japanese territories across Southeast Asia were similarly subjugated, Korean women formed the majority of victims as then Korea was under Japanese colonial rule from 1910-45.   

Yet, surviving comfort women have faced a persistent lack of accountability. In fact, the 1946 Tokyo War Crimes Tribunals completely glossed over this systemic abuse against Korean comfort women (and often minors) and effectively failed to hold anyone responsible for this episode of state-sponsored human trafficking. Decades of denial followed as successive Japanese governments chose silence over acknowledgement. A glimmer of hope only emerged in the early 1990s with a series of vague admissions and apologies. 

Even then, survivors’ attempts to seek compensation and accountability from the Japanese state also came to nought. Japanese courts have also previously ruled, in dismissing compensation claims, that individuals suing for compensation from a state were incompatible with international law. 

To nobody’s surprise, the 1995 establishment of the Asian Women’s Fund (AWF) to pay out compensation attracted sharp criticism from survivors and victim advocacy groups. The quasi-public organisation sourced its atonement money from various private donors across Japan rather than the national budget. By earmarking its own contributions for various “medical welfare support projects”, the Japanese government was seen to have effectively evaded legal responsibility and sidestepped the process of initiating formal state reparations. As a result, the offer of compensation was roundly rejected by many victims who interpreted the mechanism as a thinly-veiled insult to their dignity. Notably, China (one of the largest nationalities of origin of comfort women) was never party to the AWF process.

10 years on, a breakthrough appeared to have materialised in the form of the Agreement on Comfort Women jointly announced by the South Korean and Japanese governments on the 4th-last day of 2015. Beyond its headline offer of ¥1 billion, the agreement held a confirmation that the issue would be resolved “irreversibly” upon the implementation of “projects for recovering the honor and dignity and healing the psychological wounds of all former comfort women”. 

However, the agreement was harshly criticised once more for leaving survivors outside of what appeared to be rushed negotiations in the lead-up to the announcement with victims insisting that they expected a sincere apology and official reparations from the Japanese government rather than another tranche of private funds. It later emerged that the agreement was also predicated upon the removal of a bronze memorial symbolising comfort women victims in Seoul. 

A memorial to comfort women located outside Japan's consulate in Busan has sparked a diplomatic row between the 2 countries. Image credit: CNN

With Shinzo Abe himself offering a contradictory position to the Japanese National Assembly by stating that “there was no document found that the comfort women were forcibly taken away” just 3 weeks later, the agreement was all but dead on arrival. Ties took a nosedive on the agreement’s one-year anniversary after activists installed a new statue in the coastal city of Busan, followed by Japan recalling its South Korean Ambassador in protest. The statue was temporarily removed but later reinstalled, where it remains today. 

More recently, the 2021 Seoul Central District Court’s decision in Hee Nam Yoo v. Japan has revealed new insights. In Hee Nam Yoo, the judges held that Korea courts indeed had the jurisdiction to try the claims of 12 former comfort women against the Japanese state owing to the shifting interpretation of the law of sovereign immunity over time. 

Another similar case emerged in November 2023, in which the Seoul High Court reversed the district court’s ruling and excluded Japan’s state immunity in a case filed by another group of comfort women and the families of deceased victims. 

Importantly, the High Court in the 2023 case found that the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) ruling in Germany v. Italy (2012) was not applicable on 2 grounds: (1) Japan’s comfort women system did not occur “during an armed conflict” as the Korean peninsula where the victims originated was not actively involved in the war that raged in Southeast Asia and China; and (2) state immunity for illegal acts was “confined to acts committed on the territory of the forum State by the armed forces of a foreign State . . . in the course of conducting an armed conflict”. 

Further, the same High Court’s decision also cited a recent precedent in Brazil (2021) in which the Brazilian Federal Supreme Court ruled that state immunity should be limited in cases of violations of jus cogens (norms that govern customary international law). In tackling the difficult question whether state immunity applies to colonial-era torts, the dual Korean court judgements have kept pace with the gradual shifting of the international community towards a human rights-centered worldview and taken steps to dismantle the once-absolute rule of sovereign immunity.

On the issue of whether comfort women could be considered as constituent members of the Japanese military given the close association of comfort stations with the Japanese army, Seonwha Kim argues that precedent has rejected the notion that war crimes can only be committed against victims of opposing groups and specifically qualified intra-party sexual violence as violations of IHL - as per The Prosecutor v. Bosco Ntaganda, the former Congolese militia leader was found guilty by the International Criminal Court (ICC) of (intra-party) war crimes involving sexual slavery and forced conscription of minors into his own militia. 

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and South Korean President Lee Jae-myung have embarked on a series of bilateral meetings and summits as bilateral ties warm without any signs of historical tensions resurfacing yet. Image credit: The Asahi Shimbun

Progressive judgments aside, the Korean court rulings have reignited a sore point in Japan-Korea relations. The Japanese government has maintained its position in declining to respond to or appeal both rulings (as with other past cases) while the judgments are practically unenforceable owing to diplomatic sensitivities. Moreover, it is especially telling that Takaichi and Lee have avoided the discussion of comfort women almost entirely across their flurry of 4 meetings in the last 6 months and opting to orient discussions around more pragmatic issues of national security and economic cooperation amidst an era of geopolitical turbulence.

Final thoughts

While the suffering of comfort women is well-documented, the underlying legal principles that govern the levers of compensation remain in dispute. Amidst the absence of an acceptable legal resolution, parties should instead consider adopting lessons from the Jeju model to enhance reconciliation efforts. With the growing recognition of the need for public accountability, Seoul and Tokyo should work towards negotiations through a consultative process that accounts for the opinions and inputs by former comfort women that offers the dwindling survivors a final closure before it is all too late. 

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