Roundup: S. Korea urges Japan to refrain from words damaging wartime sex slavery deal

South Korea on Wednesday urged Japan to refrain from words and actions that would damage an agreement reached between the two countries on Japan's sexual slavery of Korean women during World War II.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Cho June-Hyuck told a press briefing that Seoul repeatedly urged Tokyo to refrain from worlds and actions that can damage the spirit and intention of the "comfort women" deal reached in December.

Comfort women is an euphemism referring to Korean women coerced into sexual servitude for Japanese military brothels before and during World War II.

Historians say that as many as 200,000 women, mostly from the Korean peninsula as well as from China and Southeast Asian nations, were forced into sex enslavement. Among 238 South Koreans who identified themselves as former sex slaves, only 46 are alive. Nine victims passed away in 2015 alone due to their old age.

Cho said Japan should show into action its position of curing scars and restoring dignity and honor of the South Korean victims.

The comments came after a Japanese delegation to a United Nations panel session denied Japan's "forcible" recruitment of Korean women into sex slavery.

Shinsuke Sugiyama, Japan's deputy foreign minister, claimed on Tuesday at a session of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women in Geneva that no documents have been found to confirm the forcible recruitment by Japanese military or government authorities of the comfort women.

Japan sent a document denying the forcible recruitment to the panel last month.

Japan and South Korea reached an agreement on Dec. 28 in Seoul after a foreign ministers' meeting. Japan renewed an official apology for the wartime sex slavery, expressing Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's sincere apology and remorse from his heart toward the immeasurable and incurable physical and mental wounds of the comfort women.

Japan pledged to pay 1 billion yen (about 8.3 million U.S. dollars) from its state funds to build a new foundation in South Korea to support the former comfort women. In return, South Korea agreed on a "final and irreversible" resolution on the issue.

Advocate groups for the comfort women and some of news organizations in South Korea condemned the agreement, saying it failed to take into consideration the opinions of the comfort women victims.

The South Korean victims and advocacy groups have continued rally to protest the deal every Wednesday in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul. They said the agreement must be nullified and renegotiated, while the victims expressed reluctance to receive the funds from Japanese government coffers.

The Japanese premier Abe also denied the forcible recruitment of comfort women in January, saying that there was no change in the Japanese government's position that "no forced" recruitment has been found in any documents that Japan has discovered.

Seoul's foreign ministry said that comfort women was forcibly recruited against their will by the Japanese military and government, a fact proved by victims' testimonies, documents of the allied nations and other documents of governments and international agencies.

Japan also denied an internal acknowledgement of forcible recruitment by the late Seiji Yoshida, who was in charge of recruiting Korean women into sex servitude during the devastating war.

In 1982, Yoshida wrote a book, which includes his testimony about deceptively and forcibly taking Korean women from South Korea's southern resort island of Jeju into sex enslavement for Japan's military brothels before and during World War II.

Japan's Asahi Shimbun, which acknowledged the forcible recruitment based on Yoshida's accounts, retracted the relevant articles in 2014. Enditem