Introduction

This volume was first published in Japanese in 2013 by leading Japanese and zainichi Korean scholars as an antidote to the historical revisionism that has become endemic in Japan. Our purpose was to reconfirm the demands advanced over the past 25 years by former comfort women for a formal apology from the Japanese state and legal compensation for brutal wartime treatment. The updated English edition utilizes recent research and the insights of the transnational redress movement to analyze the comfort women issue as it stands today in 2017.

In the late 1990s, neonationalist Japanese political, business, and intellectual elites began to publicly deny the forcible recruitment of women for Imperial military comfort stations during the Asia-Pacific War, decrying what they saw as the promotion of a “masochistic” view of Japan’s modern history. The wave of historical revisionism reached its apex with the second administration of Prime Minister Abe Shinzō, beginning in December 2012. This book was a plea to the Japanese public to see through the factual distortions of the denialist discourse, repudiate “comfort women bashing,” and seek a genuine solution to the ongoing problem of wartime military sexual servitude.

In December 2015, Japan and the Republic of Korea unveiled a one-time diplomatic accommodation intending to end the comfort women dispute. South Korean survivors were not consulted, former comfort women in other countries were excluded altogether, and the controversy persists despite the Japanese government’s claim to have resolved it “finally and irreversibly.” This book deconstructs the historical misrepresentations that sustain revisionism, rearticulates the rights and needs of survivors, and examines the requisites for a settlement of the issue that the victims themselves consider meaningful.