Only 5 'Comfort Women' Survivors Remain: KBS Chronicles the Fight to Keep Their Memory Alive

Thirty-five years have passed since the late Kim Hak-soon became the first survivor to give public testimony about her experience as a Japanese military 'comfort woman', and today, only five survivors remain alive in South Korea. That thinning witness community is at the center of a new KBS documentary, Memory War: After the Comfort Women Testimonies Stop, which airs Tuesday night on KBS 1TV's long-running current-affairs program Sisagiheuek Chang at 10 p.m.

The timing of the broadcast carries weight beyond the anniversary. In Japan's recent House of Representatives election, the conservative Liberal Democratic Party secured a decisive victory, and analysts have begun discussing, for the first time in decades with serious traction, whether Japan could pursue constitutional revisions that would allow it to exercise military force more broadly, a change that would mark a significant departure from the postwar framework in place for roughly 80 years.

The documentary does not limit its focus to the bilateral tensions between South Korea and Japan. Across multiple countries, the 'Statue of Peace', the seated young girl figure created to honor comfort women survivors, has faced repeated removal. The Manila installation in the Philippines was taken down in 2018. In Germany, a statue at the University of Kassel was removed in 2022, and a Berlin installation was pulled in 2025. Each removal has followed diplomatic pressure, a pattern the program examines in detail.

The statues occupy an unusual position in international memory politics. Unlike official monuments governed by state agreements, they are largely installed by civil society groups and Korean diaspora communities, which makes them legally and politically vulnerable in ways that formal war memorials typically are not. Their repeated removal illustrates how the dispute over how wartime sexual violence is remembered has expanded well beyond the Korean peninsula.

Sisagiheuek Chang has covered the comfort women issue in previous episodes, but this installment focuses specifically on the question of what institutional memory looks like after firsthand witnesses are no longer available to speak, and what alternatives, from recorded testimony archives to the statues themselves, are being built to carry that record forward.