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With the recent Russian invasion, China's rise, and North Korean missile launches, there is an increased importance for the United States to strengthen its East Asian allies, South Korea and Japan. These two countries, however, have a long history of disputes that resulted from the legacy of the Second World War. One of them is the comfort women issue. More than 200,000 teenage Korean girls were taken by Japanese soldiers as sex slaves during the 1930s and 1940s. They are called comfort women. In December 2015, the South Korean and Japanese governments reached an agreement to resolve the issue of comfort women, getting an apology from the Japanese government. However, the surviving comfort women showed resentment toward this agreement and condemned the Korean government for reaching the agreement with the Japanese government. Why do the comfort women and many South Koreans reject this agreement? Also, two different understandings of the identically written accord have brought social conflict in South Korea. Where do these discrepancies in understanding the same accord come from? Applying the three conceptual frameworks—emic and etic approaches in cultural anthropology, the inclusive and restricted models of conflict resolution, and different levels of reconciliation—this paper analyzes the discrepancies in how people analyze and approach conflict resolution and highlights the importance of the cultural anthropological approaches in conflict resolution and reconciliation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the decades of work undertaken by the international legal community to attain full and satisfactory reparation for the consequences of Japan's actions during World War II, the emotionally-charged bilateral dispute between Japan and South Korea over the issue of the so-called 'comfort women' continues to this day. This paper is focused on analysis of the discourses surrounding the issue through the lens of a psychoanalytic methodological framework. Based upon the therapeutic work of one of the world's leading sexual trauma specialists Judith Herman and her text Trauma and Recovery (1992), the paper examines the issues at stake in the comfort women issue through the themes inherent to Herman's three stages of recovery for survivors of violent trauma. The research concludes that, while there are limitations in applying psychoanalytic methodologies to diplomatic disputes, there is value in pursuing and campaigning for holistic and therapeutic approaches to historical trauma in the context of feminist legal activisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines three Japan–South Korea postwar compensation cases: the comfort women issue, the Sakhalin Island forced labor issue, and Korean atomic bomb survivor issue. These compensation movements produced vastly different results, even though the basic policy directions for compensation provision in all three cases were similar. Japan's approach toward the comfort women problem has been a complete failure, while its treatment of the Sakhalin forced labor issue and the atomic bomb issues has been more successful. This article's explanation of the different outcomes focuses on the character and geographical base of the civic groups leading these compensation movements. In South Korea, women's rights activists spearheaded the comfort women compensation movement and related victim-relief activities. The Korean non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that assisted the comfort women treated this problem not only as a women's rights issue, but also as a nationalist issue. In contrast, the Red Cross, a politically neutral international organization, promoted the Sakhalin forced labor and atomic bomb issues. In short, the different receptions accorded to those championing the comfort women issue and those promoting the Sakhalin forced labor and atomic bomb issues depended on the principal agent of each compensation process. This article aims to provide some implications for successfully implementing postwar compensation policies. It suggests that, if successful postwar compensation policy depends on successful perpetrator–victim reconciliation, establishing solidarity between perpetrator and victim countries' civic groups is important. This can only be facilitated through the depoliticized and transparent operation of leading NGOs both inside and outside the redressal-seeking nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the ongoing debate over "comfort women" memorials, especially one statue known as the Statue of Peace. Whereas Japanese ultranationalists and their foreign collaborators attack "comfort women" memorials for tarnishing Japan's reputation and spreading historical falsities, progressive scholars sympathetic to "comfort women" victims criticize these memorials for reinforcing female chastity and anti-Japanese nationalism. Examining these varying responses to "comfort women" memorials across the Pacific, this article analyzes how Japanese ultranationalism, anti-Japanese Korean nationalism, US imperialism, and transnational feminism collide in the representation of "comfort women." By pointing out the significance and limitations of "comfort women" memorials, this article concludes with a discussion of how socially engaged memorials can serve as critical sites for building transnational feminist coalitions in shared struggle against both wartime violence and postwar amnesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On January and April of 2021, two contradictory decisions on the comfort women issue were ruled by two courts in the Republic of Korea (ROK), stirring much controversy on the various legal issues concerning the comfort women. In the January decision, the court held Japan accountable for the acts committed against the comfort women and denied Japan's immunity in the courts of the ROK because these atrocities constitute crimes against humanity when Japan illegally occupied Korea. On the other hand, the April decision, which was a case for another group of comfort women victims, dismissed the suit by ruling that Japan was rather immune on this issue in ROK courts because state immunity is considered to be part of customary international law. The court specifically referred to the Jurisdictional Immunities case before the International Court of Justice which found that violations of jus cogens as a substantive norm could not trump over procedural matters such as state immunity. As the April case has been appealed by the victims, this article aims to examine the historical background of the issue of comfort women and the main legal issues of these domestic decisions. The first issue concerns whether Japan is immune in ROK courts for even alleged violations of jus cogens, and the second issue is whether the individual claims of the comfort women are still valid today or whether they have been, as a matter of law, extinguished or waived through the 1965 Claims Agreement and the 2015 Agreement signed by both the ROK and Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2019 South Korean-Japanese trade row made clear that the gap in historical perceptions between Japan and its former colony also had an important linguistic side. South Korea and Japan operate with two mutually incompatible sets of historical terms, especially regarding the most sensitive historical issues. Moreover, both governments have been making conscious efforts in language policing, attempting to control the ways in which their respective media refer to anything supposed to be potentially controversial between the two states. Furthermore, the war between the two language-policing regimes across the Straits of Korea has a civil war aspect as well: right-wing historical revisionists in South Korea have been actively appropriating the terminology of their Japanese colleagues while consolidating their opposition to the preferred terminology of the current South Korean government. They have also been exporting to Japan some of the terms they have coined. The present article deals with all the interrelated aspects of the South Korean-Japanese language war. It attempts to explore the ways in which state-level language management regimes have been operating and the interactions between language policies and media language conventions. At the same time, it proposes solutions for overcoming limitations of state language policing and linguistic nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The US media's coverage of the comfort women issue has primarily focused on three main aspects: human rights, nationalist conflict, and security. First, American newspapers and magazines asked the Japanese government to apologize to the former comfort women by revealing the misery of their lives through a discussion of human rights. However, that discussion not only reflected the East-West power imbalance, but even served to promote voyeurism and sexual fantasies. Second, following the end of the Cold War, as tensions between South Korea and Japan over the issue have escalated, US media have increasingly taken a position as middleman, indifferent to the history of these women. The US media have scolded both South Korea and Japan for their nationalistic conflict. Third, the US media began to employ a security discourse on the comfort women issue as the controversy between South Korea and Japan deteriorated to a level that threatened the interests of the United States in East Asia and disrupted the Obama administration's "Pivot to Asia" strategy. US media have played the role of midwife for the birth of the 2015 South Korea-Japan Comfort Women Agreement by shaping and disseminating a security discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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About 80 percent of the estimated 70,000 to 200,000 "comfort women" Japan took by coercion from 1932 to 1945 were Korean. The issue was long neglected by both countries for pragmatic reasons. When Korean women raised the issue around 1990 and the former com fort woman Kim Hak-sun came out in 1991, it emerged as a point of dispute. Solidarity organizations in both countries have contributed to raise the visibility of the issue. Museums in Seoul and Tokyo educate the public on victims' suffering. However, increased awareness has not succeeded in producing a solution to the issue that satisfies both countries given their fixed positions. Japan has given no official apology to the victims. The crucial issue of legal responsibility remains unresolved. On December 28,2015, Japan expressed an apology and agreed to provide $8.3 million for a foundation to be established by South Korea to support the victims. However, the issue remains unresolved since the victims were not consulted in advance of the agreement, as well as disagreement also on other issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the background of the decades-long international relations dispute over Japan's wartime military "comfort women" system, this article explores one of the scant literary representations of comfort women in Japanese literature. Through a close reading of Yū Miri's Hachigatsu no hate (The End of August , 2004), a family saga written by a female author of Korean descent, the article explores how the novel emerged from, participates in, and critically positions itself with respect to the ongoing ideological battles over war histor(iograph)y. Set mostly in colonial Korea, The End of August presents a challenge to historical revisionism's desire for a single, document-based narrative, for Yū incorporates a multitude of oral accounts of personally experienced history into a nonlinear, highly fragmented narration. Zooming in on an episode in which a young Korean girl is tricked into sexual slavery, The End of August is read against a number of discursive paradigms that govern the debate on comfort women both in Korea and Japan. The article argues that, by drawing on postcolonial ways of understanding history, memory, and trauma, The End of August gives voice to those whose stories previously went unheard, thus allowing for a reading as a statement against the shelving of inconvenient pasts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]