South Korea to build 'comfort women' museum in Seoul

South Korea intends to build a museum in memory of wartime sex slaves for Japanese troops, a government minister said Monday, re-igniting a perennial diplomatic thorn in the two neighbors' sides.

The plight of the so-called "comfort women" who were forced into sexual slavery for Japanese troops during World War II is a hugely emotional issue that has marred ties between the U.S. allies for decades.

Mainstream historians say up to 200,000 women - mostly from Korea but also other parts of Asia including China - were forced to work at Japanese army brothels across the region during the 1939-1945 conflict.

"We are planning to build a 'comfort women' museum in Seoul," said new gender equality minister Chung Hyun-Back at a shelter for a shrinking number of survivors, who now number only 38 in total.

The "House of Sharing", in a rural area south of Seoul, has a memorial hall but Chung said the country needed a museum in the capital with better public access.

She did not elaborate on when it will open or what kind of materials it will display.    

Japan maintains that there is a lack of documentary proof that the women were forcibly made to work at the brothels.  

In late 2015, under now-ousted president Park Geun-Hye, Seoul and Tokyo reached what they described as a "final and irreversible" agreement under which Japan offered an apology and a one-billion yen ($8.6 billion) payment to South Korean survivors.  

Critics of the accord, including some survivors, say the deal did not go far enough in holding Japan legally responsible for wartime abuses during its 1910-45 colonial rule over the Korean peninsula.

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