On 4 August 1993, Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Kōno Yōhei issued an official declaration on the issue of the so-called ‘comfort women’ - women recruited to work in a large network of brothels operated by the Japanese military during the Asia-Pacific War, where many suffered terrible sexual and other physical and mental abuse, and many died. The declaration, based on a study conducted by the Japanese government, read in part as follows:

According to official figures published by China's National Bureau of Statistics, there were 252.78 million internal migrant workers in China at the end of 2011 – one-third of the country's labor force and its fastest growing sector. These workers, mainly rural migrants to cities and periurban areas, have contributed to China's impressive economic growth, helping generate over two trillion U.S. dollars' worth of exports in 2012. But there is also a less felicitous side to their rise. At the bottom of the Chinese urban hierarchy, migrant workers have formed a new underclass, caught in the urban-rural divide as the country undergoes rapid growth and urbanization. While these internal migrants' cheap labor has fueled urban and industrial growth over the last 30 years, their rural residency permits (hukou) prevent them and their children from accessing the social services that urban governments provide to local city dwellers. Those services include public education.

The ravages of World War II and its aftermath in both Europe and Asia provoked one of the most extensive human migrations hitherto witnessed in world history as refugees scurried to escape the destruction. After the guns of war had been silenced and peace restored, these displaced peoples either by choice or force embarked on a long, and often dangerous, journey back to their homelands. Hundreds of thousands of these refugees, many further fleeing post-World War II battles in “liberated” states, died en route. Ben Shephard, in The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War (London, Bodley Head 2010), dubs this “largely ignored” story the “war's most important legacy” (p. 4). The figures that Shephard provides of European refugees are mindboggling: as many as 17 million foreigners and Germans displaced within Germany; 11 million Germans returning from their country's occupied territories; millions of displaced peoples from German-occupied territories, including Jews released from concentration camps, returning home.