Transnational comparison of ‘comfort women’ advocacy movements in Japan and South Korea

Abstract

This article looks to history to describe and explain a gap emerging in the approach of ‘comfort women’ advocacy campaigners in Japan and South Korea. This gap arises out of competing understandings of the nature of the Japanese military ‘comfort women’ sexual slavery system. From the early 1990s, advocates in the two countries have continually campaigned for recognition, restitution, and reparation for victims of Japanese military sexual slavery in the China and Pacific wars between 1937 and 1945. In their tens of thousands, these ‘comfort women’ were trafficked out of poor villages into Japanese military brothels in Northeast and Southeast Asia, as well as the Southwest Pacific, and mainland Japan itself. While they were initially targeted in Japan and Japan's colonial territories of Korea, Taiwan, and Manchuria, others in occupied and invaded territories like China, the Philippines, and Indonesia were detained, abducted, and coerced in various ways for trafficking into military brothels in the 1940s. This article assesses the contemporary movement in support of victims, and seeks to explain differences arising in the campaigning approaches of advocates in Japan and South Korea on the basis of history. This examination is important to the future direction of the movement, which is currently unstable as it transitions to one no longer incorporating living survivors.