Re-membering the Korean Military Comfort Women:

In the late 1980s, after fifty years of profound silence, the issue of Korean Military Comfort Women ¹ began to emerge. Until then, there was virtually no research, investigation, or discussion on the subject in South Korea. Korean government officials often refer to Korean colonial history as “matters of the past” (kwagŏsa). The term suggests that colonial history has relevance only to the past, and is unconnected to current relations between Korea and Japan. This essay calls into question the official move to freeze the history of Military Comfort Women as strictly a matter of the past. Rather events of the past can only be understood through discursive constructions, which reconstitute that past in the present. ²