ABSTRACT
This study explores the contemporary South Korean struggles over historical injustice by paying special attention to the comfort women tragedy, which has become perhaps the most internationally sensationalized issue among multiple unsettling legacies of Korea’s colonial history. Owing to the transnational human rights movement, comfort women are now represented as “military sex slaves” of wartime imperial Japan. The term “comfort women” is a translation of the Japanese euphemistic officialese ianfu, which is pronounced wianbu in Korean, and refers to young females of various ethnic and national backgrounds and social circumstances – including Japanese – who were forced to offer sexual services to the Japanese troops before and during the Second World War. Estimates of their total number range between fifty thousand and two hundred thousand.1 It is believed that a great majority were Korean.2
