South Korean President Lee Jae‑myung publicly denounced a far‑right group on February 1 for allegedly insulting victims of the Japanese military’s wartime sexual‑slavery system and attempting to remove a memorial known as the “Peace Girl” statue. Lee posted on X (formerly Twitter), calling the behaviour “human face, beast heart” and highlighted an ongoing police probe into the group’s recent actions.
Police began a preliminary investigation on January 7 into the organisation that calls itself the National Action to Abolish the Comfort Women Law and its leader, Kim Byeong‑heon (phonetic), after members held an unauthorised rally on January 31 outside Seocho High School. Demonstrators demanded the removal of a school‑front memorial to comfort‑women victims and hung banners that police say amounted to insults of wartime victims, potentially breaching South Korea’s laws on assembly and demonstration.
The confrontation is the latest flashpoint in a long‑running battle over memory and accountability in East Asia. The comfort‑women issue—women coerced into sexual servitude by the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second World War—remains a potent symbol in South Korea, with roadside “Peace Girl” statues and international memorials serving as focal points for survivor testimony and popular grief. Those monuments have also become targets for revisionists and right‑wing activists who deny or minimise the historical record, turning sites of remembrance into contested public stages.
Lee’s strong rebuke frames the incident not only as an affront to victims but as a test of social norms and legal boundaries in a democratic society. He argued that freedom of expression has limits and that speech which vilifies innocent war victims cannot be tolerated. The police investigation will therefore be watched closely as an indicator of how Seoul balances free speech, public order and protection of vulnerable historical actors.
Beyond the immediate legal case, the episode carries wider political and diplomatic resonance. Domestically, it underscores growing polarisation over historical memory and the role of memory politics in electoral competition. Internationally, although the incident is primarily a domestic matter, it feeds broader anxieties about rising historical revisionism in some countries and could complicate low‑level efforts at reconciliation with Japan, where the comfort‑women issue periodically resurfaces in bilateral exchanges.