I’m always amazined when President Trump weighs in opn a topic he knows almost nothing about but seems to suggest he’s an expert.
For example, this past Monday’s Oval office meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae-myung. Trump decided it was a good time to discuss the forced prostitution of Korean women by the Japanese military in World War 2.
“The whole issue of the women. Comfort women,” Trump said. “Very specifically, we talked and that was a very big problem for Korea, not for Japan. Japan was, wanted to go, they want to get on. And—but Korea was very stuck on that, you understand.”
So, a comment about this from a reader on social media interpets Trump’s remarks as “Yeah, Japan kept your grandmothers as sex slaves but they’ve moved on. Don’t know why you Koreans can’t just shut up about it.”
So, we did a quick search for comments from Rep. Young Kim (CA-40) to see if the President’s remarks about Korean comfort women warranted somwe sort of …disappointment; asking her to criticize Trump is just a bridge too far. No comment from Kim on this matter, but she’s spoken out on the issue in 2021.
From her Congressional website, this:
A Korean American politician in the U.S. has publicly rejected claims regarding the wartime sex slavery which were made by J. Mark Ramseyer, Mitsubishi professor of Japanese legal studies at Harvard Law School, in his paper “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War.”
Young Kim, U.S. representative for California’s 39th congressional district, criticized the paper in a recent tweet and urged him to apologize. “Professor Ramseyer’s claims are untrue, misleading & disgusting. I worked on comfort women issues for years & his claims are offensive to victims. We must support victims of human trafficking & slavery, not tear them down. I urge him to apologize,” Kim’s tweet read. “Comfort women” is a euphemism for sex slaves of imperial Japan.
And this:
Korean congressman Young Kim, who publicly criticized Harvard Law School professor Ramsey, who wrote a dissertation that distorted the comfort women victims into ‘prostitutes’, called for the Japanese government’s apology and compensation for the Japanese military comfort women issue 14 years ago. The fact that it played a role in the resolution’s passing through Congress is being revised.
In 2015, Japanese government officials apologized to the South Korean victims. They reached an agreement with South Korea to give 1 billion yen—about $6.8 million—in reparations for surviving comfort women who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military making it the largest case of human trafficking in history. For Koreans, the continued use of the phrase continues to be a source of criticism as it softens the harm caused to these victims by the Japanese military.
While Kim has not directly addressed Trump’s specific remarks from the 2025 meeting—where he described the “comfort women” issue as a “very big problem for Korea, not for Japan” and suggested Korea was “stuck” on the issue—her broader track record suggests she would likely view any minimization of the issue with concern. Trump’s comments were noted for drawing attention to a sensitive historical issue, and the term “comfort women” itself has been criticized for downplaying the atrocities, a point Kim has historically aligned with by advocating for proper recognition of the victims’ suffering.
Rep. Kim needs to call on the President for an apology regarding his comments on these Korean sex slaves. But let’s be real. She won’t.
And while she’s not in office, where the hell is former Congresswoman Michelle Steel on this?