Reframing Reparative Justice: Comfort Women Through the Lens of Structural Injustice and Transnational Memory Politics

By Tanisha Lamichhane

Source: AP

In November 2023, a South Korean appellate court ruled that Japan must compensate 16 women who were forced into sexual slavery during the Second World War. In response, Japan's Foreign Minister, Yoko Kamikawa, called the ruling "extremely regrettable and absolutely unacceptable", stating it "strongly urges the Republic of Korea to immediately take appropriate measures to remedy the status of its breaches of international law". This instance highlights the ongoing dispute over the comfort women case, one of the most contentious and recurring issues of reparative justice in Asia, with many survivors still awaiting justice and compensation.

Nationalism, Honour, and the Politics of Responsibility

The ‘comfort women’ is a term used to refer to the approximately 200,000 women, primarily from Korea but also from China, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Taiwan, recruited and coerced into sexual slavery and repeatedly subjected to violence, torture, and harsh living conditions by the Japanese imperial army during the Pacific War. In 1991, former comfort woman Kim Hak-sun became the first to testify about the Japanese government's role in organising and implementing the comfort system. Still, her testimony was met with outright denial, with Japan dismissing the allegations due to a lack of evidence, asserting that the system was licensed prostitution. However, amidst growing international pressure and persistent activism by comfort women movements, particularly the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, the Japanese government eventually established the Asian Women's Fund in 1996, disbursing 510 million yen to former comfort women in South Korea. Japan's approach to reconciliation has since been largely framed through economic cooperation and bilateral agreements, whether by paying 1 billion yen in reparations whilst declaring it a “final and irreversible” solution or by continuing to deny involvement in establishing the comfort system.

The above raises a critical question: Why have these efforts failed to deliver meaningful justice?

Many survivors and activists argue that financial compensation and treaties alone cannot constitute justice without formal apologies, symbolic redress, and official legal accountability. Additionally, the current legal mechanisms have failed to provide justice for comfort women because state-centric interpretations of responsibility constrain them. For instance, under the principle of state immunity in international law, Japan has argued since 2021 that it is not subject to lawsuits filed by comfort women in South Korea, effectively shielding itself from legal action.

This has been a key point of criticism from the Korean Council, which has stated that the comfort women issue is a matter of "restoration of national pride, national existence in a struggle against war, and the recovery of the victims' honour”, suggesting that reconciliatory efforts must move beyond financial compensation and bilateral agreements. Another crucial point is raised: whilst reconciliation is important to achieve reconciliation, how it is imagined and implemented is equally important. However, by invoking concepts of nationhood, pride, and women's honour, the council obscures the patriarchal complicity of South Korea itself. Many victims of sexual exploitation continue to face deep stigma, and many have had to hide their experiences and forego marriages, considering themselves inadequate to become suitable wives. Within this context, re-establishing the association of women's purity with national honour hinders efficient reintegration and healing.

Comfort Woman Statue, Source: NPR

Beyond State-Centric Approaches: Militarised Masculinity and Colonialism as Structural Injustice

In Colonialism as Structural Injustice: Historical Responsibility and Contemporary Redress, Catherine Lu argues that colonial injustices must be looked at through the lens of ‘structural injustice’, which occurs when societal processes systematically subject large groups of people to the threat of domination or deprivation, hindering their ability to develop and utilise their capacities. Likewise, Iris Marion Young suggested that responsibility models need to move beyond a liability-based approach, which emphasises guilt by identifying a single agent for accountability, to a ‘social connection’ approach, which identifies the harm caused by the involvement of individuals in institutions and background conditions.

It has been noted that the Korean military, the government, the elite and entrepreneurs were also involved in facilitating the comfort system, making it difficult to identify the Japanese government as the sole perpetrator. Further testimonies of victims have shown that many of them had been recruited through employment fraud, sold by their parents, or blackmailed. Some were also forced into the system after being disowned by their families and ostracised for defying patriarchal norms, such as pursuing education or rejecting traditional gender roles.

War atrocities against women cannot merely be looked at as disastrous and incidental consequences of war or military aggression. In these cases, the military had intentionally and systematically institutionalised sexual violence by framing it as a reward for soldiers and a way to prevent rape. This practice was deeply embedded in the ideology of militarised masculinity, which reinforced aggression, dominance, and male entitlement over women's bodies. More than just an act of violence, it reflected broader structural and ideological forces that normalised sexual exploitation, positioning women as instruments of military morale rather than as individuals with agency and rights amidst a context that structurally denied their autonomy.

The systemic nature of this violence can be witnessed in how this practice persisted beyond the Second World War. During the Cold War, as the US military presence in South Korea expanded, the South Korean government actively facilitated prostitution for American soldiers, despite its illegality under domestic law. South Korean authorities exempted ‘camp towns’ (where such activities were concentrated) from the 1961 Anti-Sexual Corruption Law to maintain US security cooperation and ensure the influx of American dollars. The continuity of state-sanctioned sexual exploitation suggests that militarised violence against women is not confined to a single historical moment and one instance of war but is rather sustained by structural conditions that transcend national and temporal boundaries.

This understanding fundamentally alters how we look at reparations: if the moral responsibility of colonial injustices towards women is imagined beyond state-centric and agent-specific notions to include systemic and structural violence, the answer to reconciliation must also incorporate a structural redressal approach that seeks to address the very system that facilitates such power relations.

Memory as a Site of Contestation and Resistance

A transnational form of memory activism has emerged through the ‘Statue of Peace’ movement, where statues of comfort women have been established in 14 different parts of the world apart from Korea since 2011. These statues have faced significant opposition from the Japanese government; for instance, in September 2020, following their installation in Berlin's Mitte district, the Japanese government pressured local authorities to remove them, arguing that they falsely accused the former Japanese military of crimes, allegedly lacking sufficient evidence. This is a new phenomenon and a continuation of Japan's longstanding efforts at historical revisionism. Since the end of World War II, Japan has sought to cultivate a pacifist image, often by omitting or altering aspects of its history in textbooks. This debate over historical memory and erasure raises questions about who has the power to define the past and shape public narratives of traumatic events.

Memory activism, such as the Statue of Peace movement, has attempted to move beyond state-centric approaches to challenging historical revisionism and reasserting public memory. This decentralised memorialisation and commemoration confronts the Japanese government's structural denial of responsibility and other states' complicity in the issue. At the same time, these movements have adopted discourses of human rights, feminism, and postcolonialism, situating the issue within a broader global discourse. Ushiyama has argued that these statues can act as an emblem of ‘liquid time’—a temporality that resists fixed historical narratives by bringing past injustices to the present and spatially surpassing national boundaries. Thus, recognising the comfort women issue as a transnational site of memory and resistance highlights how memory activism challenges state narratives, fosters global solidarity, and reshapes historical accountability beyond national boundaries.

There is still a long way to go in dismantling the institutional mechanisms that enable historical denialism, addressing the ongoing legacies of gendered violence, and ensuring that survivors are not only remembered but meaningfully included in shaping justice itself. However, acknowledging the comfort women issue as a form of structural violence—rather than an isolated historical atrocity—allows for a reconceptualisation of a truly restorative framework, one that interrogates the persistence of militarised masculinity, colonial legacies, and gendered oppression.

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Tanisha is a second-year Master of International Relations student at the University of Melbourne. Her primary interests include gender and security, international humanitarian law, post-colonialism, and national identity politics. Her past publications have explored topics such as colonialism and sex work, as well as the intersections of art and political movements. She currently works at the Graduate Student Association as a policy and advocacy staff member, where she is committed to strengthening efforts that address the diverse challenges faced by graduate students.