Japan denied for decades after World War II that its military had operated a systematic system of sexual slavery across occupied territories, dismissing survivor accounts despite estimates that at least 200,000 women were abducted, sold into prostitution, and held against their will in military-run brothels. It was not until the early 1990s, around the time that former comfort woman Kim Hak-sun filed the first legal case against the Japanese government over her wartime sexual enslavement, that Tokyo issued an official apology acknowledging the system had existed. Prior to that shift, Japanese officials had rejected claims that the women had been coerced, insisting instead that the so-called comfort stations were legal, consensual commercial sex operations. The 1993 apology, however, stopped short of providing direct monetary compensation to the victims.
Japan offered medical and welfare assistance alongside so-called atonement money, which was paid from a privately funded, non-governmental source rather than from the state. In 2015, the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe reached what both Tokyo and Seoul described as a final and irreversible resolution with South Korea. The agreement included $8. 5 million in reparations for South Korea’s surviving comfort women, but the funds were not distributed directly to the women themselves.
Instead, the deal specified that the money would finance projects aimed at restoring the honor and dignity of the victims and healing their psychological wounds.