Abe assassination resurfaces Japan’s complex legacy in China, South Korea.

SEOUL — For three decades, a crowd has gathered every Wednesday outside the Japanese Embassy in South Korea. In the sweltering heat and the biting cold, they call on Tokyo to acknowledge that imperial Japan’s military coerced Korean women into sexual enslavement during the Second World War. The protesters, who sometimes include now-elderly survivors of repeated sexual assault by Japanese troops, give emotional accounts of serving as “comfort women.” 

The demonstrations offer a glimpse into the historical feud between Tokyo and its closest neighbors. Sympathy from foreign leaders rushed in shortly after former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe was shot on Friday, and some of Japan’s closest international partners have announced plans to fly national flags at half-staff in the assassinated statesman’s honor. But in China and South Korea, which bore the brunt of militarist Japan’s brutality in the first half of the 20th century, the reaction was more complicated.

When serving as premier in 2015, the right-wing Abe signed off on a compact with South Korea, in which Japan acknowledged the “dignity and honor” of women “severely injured during wars.” But during his tenure, Tokyo occasionally denied that it forcibly recruited the women, and has long disputed they were sex slaves. The controversy over Japan’s wartime atrocities, along with Abe’s visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, where some World War II war criminals are honored, has long strained Japan’s relationship with South Korea and China.