This special issue of The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus on “The ‘Comfort Women’ as Public History,” edited by Edward Vickers and Mark Frost, analyzes the turn since the early 2000s towards “heritagization” of this controversial issue. Papers include testimony from scholars involved in campaigns on behalf of comfort women, or in movements for their commemoration (Shin, Su, Norma); more conventional academic analyses of transnational efforts to secure recognition for comfort women, whether through litigation (Hao) or heritage activism (Vickers, Schumacher); and personal reflections by an academic educator (Heo) and filmmaker (Dezaki) who in different ways have sought to promote international understanding of this issue. An introductory essay by the editors, Frost and Vickers, examines how the reframing of this issue as “heritage” has been accompanied by increasing entanglement with the global politics of atrocity commemoration. Questioning any necessary equation between heritagization and reconciliation, they stress the need for representation of comfort women as public history to pay due regard to nuance and complexity.

In December 2020, Harvard Law School Professor J. Mark Ramseyer circulated his new article “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War” that was accepted for publication in the March 2021 issue of the International Review of Law and Economics. In January 2021, Ramseyer subsequently published an op-ed in Japan Forward describing the “comfort-women-sex-slave-story” as “pure fiction.” In both publications, Ramseyer ignored the extensive literature by Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Anglophone authors, and the documentary record detailing the Japanese military's wartime system of military sexual slavery.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

In December 2020, an article by J. Mark Ramseyer of Harvard University about the so-called ‘comfort women’ issue was published in the International Review of Law and Economics. This article caused widespread controversy amongst scholars, many of whom responded with serious criticisms of its content. On the other hand, some commentators argued that Ramseyer's critics were seeking to suppress his right to express controversial opinions. In the past few years, there has been widespread international debate both about the protection of free speech and about problems of assessing the quality of knowledge and distinguishing well-founded information from ‘fake news’. Against that background, this study aid aims to encourage debate about ways to maintain research integrity while protecting free speech, and uses the example of the Ramseyer article to provide illustrative material. This is the first in a series of responses on the “comfort women” issue prompted by the Ramseyer article.

We, the undersigned, are a transnational group of historians of Japan and its empire. Our research and publications cover the history of prostitution, the history of gender, the history of migration and empire, the history of the Pacific War, and the history of colonial Korea. What is written here is our work, but it was made possible due to the efforts of a much wider network, including historians and colleagues around the globe, who generously contributed their expertise. We base our findings below on our experience reading and interpreting Japanese historical documents, as well as our common investment in producing responsible scholarship.

Earlier this month at the request of the editor of the International Review of Law and Economics, we began to write a critical response to the article “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War,” by Professor J. Mark Ramseyer, at that point released online by the journal with plans for formal publication in March.

For those who read Professor Ramseyer’s article at face value, unseen are assertions that advocate a current Japanese political ideology. This worldview is racially essentialist, revanchist, and history-denying, resonant with similar movements around the world such as Trumpism, LePenism, Modi-ism, and so on. In Japan, among other things the impulse seeks to challenge universalisms that have grounded Japan’s post-World War II legal, economic, and social order. Were it to succeed, for example, its adherents’ proposal for revising Japan’s standing constitution would replace the current preamble, “We, the Japanese people,” for an entirely different one: “Japan is a nation with a long history and unique culture.”