People gather for the Wednesday Rally in Seoul, South Korea on February 5. Photo: Park Gayoung/GT

Every Wednesday at noon, a couple of hundred people gather in front of the Japanese Embassy in downtown Seoul in a scene that has happened weekly for the last 22 years.  

Sitting in the middle of the crowd are Kim Bok-dong and Gil Won-ok, committed participants of the gathering dubbed Wednesday Rally. The pair are former "comfort women" who were forced into sexual slavery by Japan in World War II.

At the 1,112th Wednesday Rally on February 5, in freezing weather, high school and college students joined the event, dancing and singing to please 88-year-old Kim and 85-year-old Gil.

Yang Yu-jin, a 17-year-old high school student in traditional Korean dress, bowed before Kim and Gil to wish them a happy lunar new year before she burst into tears. "It's been such a long time since liberalization but grandmothers are still living in pain without any compensation," she said.  

The rally, organized by the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (KCWDMSS), is registered with Guinness World Records as the longest protest on a single theme. The protest began in January 1992 and marked its 1,115th rally on Wednesday.

The title comes at the cost of the rally's goals - an official apology and legal reparations from the Japanese government.

While the rally has broken its own record since 2002, many "comfort women" have since died with their demands unmet.

Kim and Gil lost one more friend recently and became two of just 55 surviving victims in South Korea.

The number of officially registered former "comfort women" in South Korea is 234, but the estimated number of sexual slavery victims by the Japanese military during WWII varies from 40,000 to 200,000, mostly from Asian countries.

Despite these high estimates, the "comfort women" issue only rose to the surface in 1991. Kim Hak-sun, then 67, came out with her testimony in August 1991 to a society where a strong sense of virtue was appreciated and thus some took the existence of "comfort women" as national humiliation - partly why many victims have remained silent to this day.

Kim's testimony allowed activists to gather momentum and begin the Wednesday Rally, although they never thought it would continue for 22 years. 

International attention

The KCWDMSS marked its 1,000th rally on December 11, 2011 by erecting a bronze statue in front of the Japanese Embassy of a girl with bobbed hair in traditional Korean dress. She represents the victimized "comfort women."

While the Japanese government demands the removal of the statue, other international communities, mostly Koreans, have supported the movement.  

The Korean-American community in Glendale, South California, erected the same statue in a public park in June last year. But Japanese residents filed a lawsuit to remove the statue on February 20. Another effort to draw international attention has led to designating a worldwide memorial day for "comfort women."

In December 2012, the KCWDMSS declared August 14 - the day Kim came forth - as the day to honor "comfort women." It marked its first anniversary last year. 

Having been criticized for not pressuring the Japanese government, the Korean government jumped in. Earlier this month, the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family unveiled a plan to commemorate the victims officially.

On February 9, scholars from South Korea, China and Japan decided to register documents related to "comfort women" with the UNESCO Memory of the World program.

"The movement is to ensure that history is not forgotten - those documents will be preserved for good so that generations to come can have access to them for education," Su Zhiliang, director of the "Comfort Women" Research Center at Shanghai Normal University, told the Global Times on Friday.

"Once listed by UNESCO, more attention will be paid to the issue," Su expected.

Slim chance of apology

Despite movements going beyond the territories of South Korea and Japan, the chance that former "comfort women" will get an apology any time soon seems slim. 

In January, comments by Japanese politicians infuriated former "comfort women" and their supporters. The new head of Japan's public TV network NHK, Momii Katsuto, said the practice of drafting women into military brothels was common for any country at war.

"Japanese people were more sympathetic to the 'comfort women' in the past. But more and more Japanese people are prone to believe the right-wing view, which is that the majority of 'comfort women' were voluntary prostitutes," a Japanese media expert, who estimates more than 80 percent of the "comfort women" became prostitutes for a living, told the Global Times on condition of anonymity. It is because right-wing politicians have gained popularity in Japan amid growing tensions between Japan and South Korea, he noted. 

The Japanese government also claimed that the issue of compensating "comfort women" was already settled when the two countries signed a normalization treaty in 1965, but the South Korean government and victims deny that claim.

Yang Xiyu, a senior research fellow at the China Institute of International Studies, said Monday at the Chosun Ilbo-Global Times Roundtable that "compensation for Japan's war and colonization are totally different from many specific issues" such as "comfort women" and forced labor. He noted that "comfort women" should be treated as a crime against humanity.

This was echoed by Kim Dong-hee, secretary-general of the KCWDMSS. Kim pointed out that the 1993 statement by Japan's then-chief cabinet secretary Kono Yohei, which includes a personal apology and an acknowledgment of the Japanese military's involvement in coercing "comfort women" based on the testimony of 16 victims, was not observed in Japan.

The Japanese government said on February 20 that it might reassess the Kono statement and the testimony of the 16 victims.

"The same thing will repeat unless the 'comfort women' issue is treated in accordance with the international law on crimes against humanity," Kim said.

Sun Xiaobo contributed to this story