慰安婦申遺 (weìānfù shēnyí): Inscription of 'comfort women' into Memory of World Register

The 40th session of World Heritage Committee, which was scheduled to run from July 10 to 20 in Istanbul, Turkey, ended on Sunday evening according to a statement on UNESCO's website. Social organizations from China, the Republic of Korea and several other Asian countries and regions jointly applied to include the historical facts of the Imperial Japanese Army forcibly recruiting "comfort women" to provide sex to its troops during its war of aggression as part of UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.

The organization's Memory of the World program has been collecting important world documents since 1992.

This is the second bid to include "comfort women" in the register. China in 2014 applied for "comfort women" to be included in the register along with the Nanjing Massacre, the mass murder and rape of the inhabitants of Nanjing by Japanese troops over six weeks starting in December 1937. The massacre was included but the bid to include "comfort women" failed because of lack of sufficient materials.

The Japanese government, however, is doing everything it can to prevent the bid from being successful. Yet as Kyodo News said, if Japan continues denying the historical facts and preventing them from being listed in the Memory of the World project that will truly ruin its international image.