This paper seeks to explain the process of collaboration among civil society organizations towards preserving the voices of the “comfort women” and registering related documents with UNESCO. The 14 civil society organizations from 8 countries, mostly those that suffered Japanese invasion and occupation, but also including one from Japan itself, have worked together to compile a dossier of “comfort women” documents for the submission of a joint nomination proposal to UNESCO. However, this project was threatened first by the political deal between South Korea and Japan in December 2015, and later by attempts to use money and state power to subvert UNESCO’s Memory of the World program (MoW). The resulting temporary freeze on the MoW program, talk of changes to its statutes and regulations, and UNESCO’s continued delay in implementing its own decisions raise serious doubts concerning the legitimacy and meaning of the program. A more fundamental question concerns whether and how the voices of victims of violation or discrimination, in this case of the “comfort women”, will be heard, preserved and transmitted to future generations to prevent the recurrence of such atrocities. If the efforts of the recent civil society movement end in failure, what alternative strategies are open to us?

While much scholarly attention has been devoted to analyzing governments' attempts to determine ways of remembering or forgetting the past, little is known about how the politics of remembrance affect the process of reconciliation. To what extent does conflict remembrance actually influence the shaping of collective (national) identities? Does remembering the painful past lead to reconciliation? If not, what does it do? This article addresses these questions by reflecting on the author's experience of teaching multinational groups at her university in Japan, and discussing fraught issues relating to the Asia-Pacific War (including the “comfort women”) with her classes. Drawing on class observations and student essays from 2016 to 2019, she discusses the often conflicting narratives and identities that students bring to the university classroom and the pedagogical challenges involved in negotiating these. The paper illustrates how highly selective narratives of the national past (learnt at school or absorbed from the media) affect collective identity (the way we perceive the self versus the other), and discusses implications for East Asian reconciliation and peace.

Twenty years ago, in December 2000, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (the IMTFE, also known as the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal or the Tokyo Trial), was “reopened” in Tokyo to address unfinished business: the crime of holding women as sex slaves for the Japanese imperial army. The women's tribunal was at once the culmination and launch of a renewed effort by international civil society to address war crimes that fester to this day. Norma Field and Watanabe Mina reflect on that occasion and urge readers to view the documentary record of that historic event, Breaking the History of Silence, easily accessed online until December 2021.

In this article, translated and abridged (with an introduction) by Caroline Norma, Morita advances a view of the “comfort women” system not simply as an isolated war crime, but as an extreme symptom of institutionalised, pervasive and persistent violence against women that extends to peacetime as well as wartime. Norma argues that Morita’s paper, first published in 1999, prefigures a “feminist turn” in interpretation of the comfort women system that has more recently been embraced by Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Kim Puja and other scholars and activists. Both Norma and Morita argue that the comfort women system can only be understood in the context of ingrained societal attitudes towards women, and that it is therefore closely related to phenomena such as pornography and the commercial sex industry. For both scholars, campaigning for recognition of wrongs committed against comfort women in the past is thus intimately linked to efforts to abolish institutionalised violence and discrimination against women in the present.

J. Mark Ramseyer's 2020 article “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War” provoked numerous highly critical responses from the general public and the scholarly community. Our group composed a report that analyzed the article and concluded that it should be retracted because it misused and distorted evidence. After more than two years of investigation, during which Ramseyer published a response to his critics, the editors of the International Review of Law & Economics decided not to retract the article, but to keep a statement of concern attached to the final published version. In this follow-up report, we explore the legacy of the original article as it relates to problems of academic integrity and historical denialism in public discourse. We highlight Ramseyer's persistent strategies of obfuscation and suggest how historians might continue to address the problem of deliberately misleading scholarship masquerading as “academic freedom.”

This Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus special issue on “The Comfort Women as Public History” concludes with documentary filmmaker Miki Dezaki in conversation with Edward Vickers and Mark R. Frost. Dezaki's film Shusenjo, released in 2018, examines the controversy over “comfort women” within Japan, as well as its implications for Korea-Japan relations. Dezaki, himself Japanese-American, also devotes considerable attention to the growing ramifications of this controversy within the United States, as an instance of the increasing international significance of the comfort women issue. In this discussion, he, Frost and Vickers reflect on the messages of the film, the experience of making and distributing it, and what this reveals about the difficulty - and importance - of doing public history in a manner that respects the complexity of the past.

Triggered by globalization, internationalization, and multiculturalism, Japanese ultra-nationalist groups spread hate targeting Zainichi Koreans and other minorities. The focus of this paper is not the traditional manifestation of hate speech between the socially powerful and the seemingly powerless, but women who openly perform hate speech in the name of love of country. It examines Japanese women's groups whose objective is to nurture patriotic awareness under the guise of sustaining culture and tradition. They discover a sense of legitimate social empowerment aiming to restore “historical truth” and uphold their country's honor and dignity for their children's sake.

This edited transcript of conversations among a group of scholars and practitioners is the culmination of a multi-year, multi-platform dialogue intended to capture the work and motivations of memory activists towards addressing both historical justice and current social and political needs of Asian American communities.

In this introductory essay to the special issue of The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus on “The Comfort Women as Public History,” we analyze the turn since the early 2000s towards “heritagization” of this controversial issue. After reviewing the political, cultural and historiographical background to ongoing disputes over “comfort women,” we examine how the reframing of this issue as “heritage” has been accompanied by increasing entanglement with the global politics of atrocity commemoration, and associated tropes. Prominent among such tropes is the claim that commemoration fosters “peace”. However, following recent critical scholarship on this issue, and drawing on the papers that comprise this special issue, we question any necessary equation between heritagization and reconciliation. When done badly, the drive to commemorate a contentious issue as public history can exacerbate rather than resolve division and hatred. We therefore emphasise the need for representation of comfort women as public history to pay due regard to nuance and complexity, for example regarding the depiction of victims versus perpetrators; the transnational dimension of the system; and its relationship with the broader history of gender politics and the sexual subjugation of women.

In this transcription of a webinar from October 2023, speakers Kevin Blackburn (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), Katharine McGregor (University of Melbourne, Australia), and Sachiyo Tsukamoto (University of Newcastle, Australia) talk about their new books on the “comfort women.”

In October 2017, the application to list the Voices of the Comfort Women archive on UNESCO's “Memory of the World Register” was rejected (or “postponed”). In this paper, I set that decision in the context of other recent instances of “heritage diplomacy” in East Asia, highlighting the tensions between nationalistic agendas and UNESCO's universalist pretensions. I then discuss the nature and extent of similar tensions in the framing of the “comfort women” issue, as manifested in “comfort women museums” (institutions closely associated with the preparation of the 2016-17 Memory of the World application). I focus especially on the case of China, where the Xi Jinping regime first sought to weaponize this issue against Japan, only to pull back in 2018 as Sino-Japanese ties warmed. I conclude by considering how the story of the comfort women might be reframed to underline its global significance (or “outstanding universal value”), in a manner that makes it more difficult for Japanese nationalists to portray the campaign for recognition and commemoration as an anti-Japan conspiracy.

In the wake of the explosion of the “comfort women” issue, with the help of lawyers and activists, Chinese comfort women instigated four class-action lawsuits against the Japanese government. However, how the lawyers represented the history of comfort women and what happened in the courtroom have remained obscure. Unlike the conventional verdict-centered approach to civilian trials involving comfort women, this research adopts a procedural approach by delving into the court transcripts, legal briefs, and other evidentiary materials tendered to the court. It argues that although the plaintiffs lost every case, through the court proceedings the victims and their lawyers managed to carve out an official space for knowledge transmission and recognition. These proceedings have the potential to serve as an exemplary model for future civil trials adjudicating injustices (historical or otherwise) involving sexual and gender-based violence.

In this paper, I look into the lesser-known history of “comfort women” in the Philippines. I engage with the following questions: how did the trafficking and sexual exploitation of Filipino women emerge as part of state policy in the Japanese Empire? How was it dealt with in the aftermath of the war, especially in the face of shifting post-war alliances and the changing place of Japan in the geo-politics of the Cold War? How did events in the international arena, in turn, affect diplomatic relations between the Philippines and Japan, specifically with respect to aid and trade? Finally, how did the market forces at play affect state policy in the Philippines?

Since 1991, scholars from all over Asia have sought to reconstruct the history of the Japanese military’s “comfort women” - that is, to recover the facts relating to this system of sexual slavery - by analysing documentary records and interviewing survivors. As a result, an international consensus has emerged concerning the status of this system as a wartime atrocity involving large-scale violation of human rights, for which Japan ought to apologize. However, within Japan many persist in denying responsibility for the invasion [of China and associated atrocities]. Therefore, no effort should be spared to pass on the memory of this history to future generations, through discussing this atrocity of sexual slavery in school textbooks, applying for a [UNESCO] Memory of the World inscription, producing documentary films, or building museums, memorials and so forth. Other Asian countries thus continue their intense disputes with Japan over the nature and scale of the comfort women system, and the appropriate terminology for describing it.

A recent decision by the Supreme Court of Japan has dealt the conservative right another blow in the comfort women issue. In this article, David McNeill places the court's decision to uphold an order forcing the city of Nagoya to pay its promised share of the budget for the 2019 Aichi Triennale — despite the controversial artworks displayed there — in the context of a broader campaign by the right to realign history in accordance with Japanese government objectives.

Calls for reparations and apologies for crimes committed during the 1930s/40s war in Asia have been major points of contention in East Asia's public memory since at least the 1980s. In recent years, a “history/memory war” over the “comfort women” issue has intensified. At the same time, the battleground has also shifted to the terrain of “heritage” and has increasingly taken on a global dimension. This paper considers an increasingly significant arena for East Asian memory wars, involving diaspora communities in Western countries. Its particular focus is the coordinated “comfort women” activism of Korean American and other Asian American diaspora groups in certain regions of the United States. While their decades-long activism has produced a ‘memory boom’ in its own right and resulted in raising the political profile of Asian Americans, I argue that this has also come at the cost of straining to breaking point post-war arrangements for symbolizing and cementing US-Japanese reconciliation. The paper builds on existing research to delineate the expanding scope of Asia's memory wars and introduces new insights into some of the US activists' inter-ethnic alliance building that underscores the increasingly global nature of these memory conflicts as well as the potentially lasting repercussions for societies far beyond East Asia.

Feminist thought leaders Onozawa Akane and Kitahara Minori discuss in dialogue the contemporary relevance of the Japanese military scheme of wartime sexual slavery. They identify the recruitment tactics of Japan's pornography and prostitution businesses today as similar to those used in the wartime trafficking of women, and suggest that low level comprehension of women's human rights means male demand for prostitution continues unhindered in Japan, as it has throughout modern history. The two authors suggest that the social context of women's prostitution, which occurs in conditions of gender equality, must be emphasized in order to combat victim-blaming ideas about women's ‘choice’ and voluntarism in being sexually exploited. They canvass policy alternatives against prostitution like the law currently in operation in South Korea and France that penalizes sex industry customers.

The growing focus on the agency of norm violators has led to new insights on various rhetorical strategies that states accused of norm violation deploy. However, few studies have simultaneously examined both specific rhetorical devices that enable norm evasion and their social psychological underpinnings. Building on International Relations (IR) research on norm evasion and social psychological research on in-group wrongdoings, this paper conceptualises states’ rhetoric of norm evasion as a social psychological coping strategy: aimed at protecting in-group esteem. Empirically, the paper offers a systematic analysis of Japan’s rhetoric of norm evasion regarding its colonial and wartime past, as well as its social psychological underpinnings. Five rhetorical strategies of norm evasion are identified: (1) claiming legality, (2) claiming the inapplicability of relevant treaties, (3) claiming the inapplicability of relevant norms, (4) equivocating, and (5) citing non-disparagement pledges. These strategies, as well as the psychological disengagement they enable, have culminated in the promotion of non-remembrance, or behavioural manifestations of norm regress.

How do states as social actors cope with stigma-induced status anxiety? I propose the concept of “stigma shifting” as a way in which status-anxious states overcompensate for their stigma-induced inferiority and reaffirm their place in the world: by seeking identification with higher-status states and differentiation from lower-status states. In identifying with the desired group of states, stigmatized states engage in approval-seeking behavior and reaffirm their in-group status in areas where they feel discredited. In differentiating themselves from the undesired group, stigmatized states engage in distinction-seeking behavior, claiming their superiority over this “lesser” group in areas that gave rise to their status anxiety in the first place. Stigma shifting, in other words, allows a stigmatized state to take the role of a stigmatizer. To demonstrate the concept's depth and analytical utility, I draw on the case of East Asia in three disparate issue areas: colonial redress, nuclear disaster, and international order making. Japan, stigmatized in all three areas, has reaffirmed its status by shifting the stigma onto its significant but “lesser” others: China and Korea. Ultimately, stigma shifting solidifies status hierarchies in the world—not just the hierarchy as represented by the “Western” dominance of international society but also the regional hierarchies of the non-Western world.