Park Yu-ha

Park Yu-ha is a professor at the College of Liberal Arts, Sejong University. Her research focuses on Japanese-Korean relations. Her 2013 book Comfort Women of the Empire criticized the Korean interpretation of comfort women as exclusively "sex slaves". A Japanese language version of the book was published in Japan in November 2014. Nine former comfort women in Nanume-Jip, seeking to ban sales of the book, filed suit in both civil and criminal court, claiming that the scholar had defamed them. In November 2015, a group of 54 scholars from Japan and the United States issued a statement criticizing South Korean prosecutors for “suppressing the freedom of scholarship and press.” On January 25, 2017, the 11th criminal division of Seoul Dongbu District Court acquitted professor Park on the charges of defaming the comfort women survivors with her book.