The women who refuse to be erased: On Japan’s surrender anniversary, the fight over wartime sexual slavery continues

BUSAN, South Korea — On the day Japan marks the 81st anniversary of its surrender in World War Two, a conference room in Busan’s city council building has become the latest front in a battle over memory.

Allan Wilson, Journalist

Last month, on 23 July, academics, activists and lawmakers gathered here for a symposium on one of the war’s most painful legacies: the estimated tens of thousands of women — euphemistically labelled “comfort women” — forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army. The event was co-hosted by the Carter Human Rights Center’s Asia division and the Korean Women’s Forum.

“The records of the Japanese military’s comfort women are historical assets that the international community must preserve together,” Nam Myung-sook, the Busan city councillor who co-organised the symposium, told the gathering. “Social consensus must be broadened.”

Her words were aimed at more than the audience in the room.

For three decades, survivors and their advocates have pressed Japan for a full and unequivocal accounting. They have met a familiar pattern: moments of apparent progress — the 1993 Kono statement acknowledging military involvement, the 2015 bilateral agreement with South Korea — followed by retreat. Japanese officials continue to dispute the term “sexual slavery.” Textbooks soften the language. Senior politicians visit Yasukuni Shrine, where convicted war criminals are honoured alongside the dead.

The symposium came as UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee convened in Busan, and the timing was deliberate. One of the gathering’s stated goals was to revive the push to have comfort women records inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register — an effort Japan has repeatedly blocked.

“Our aim is to reaffirm the historical facts of comfort women (受害) to the international community and explore directions that contribute to peace and human rights,” said Yu Ying-mo, senior adviser to the Carter Human Rights Center’s Asia region, in remarks prepared for the event.

A statue, a warning

The symposium also addressed an incident that has become a diplomatic flashpoint: the recent removal of a comfort women memorial statue in Taiwan.

The statue, one of dozens erected across East Asia and beyond, was taken down in recent months. Organisers in Busan described the removal as “an erroneous approach that erases historical wounds and weakens collective memory,” according to the symposium’s programme.

For advocates, the Taiwan case illustrates what happens when political pressure is allowed to dictate historical memory. “Statues, memorial halls, and archives related to comfort women are important spaces of memory that testify to the victims’ suffering and history,” the Carter Human Rights Center said in its written address. “They must be respected.”

Dozens of comfort women memorials now stand in cities from Seoul to San Francisco to Berlin. Each has become a site of diplomatic friction: Japan’s government has consistently objected to them, arguing they perpetuate what it calls an inaccurate narrative.

The shrinking window

Time is running out. Of the few hundred women who came forward in the 1990s, the number of surviving registered victims in South Korea has dwindled to single digits.

This demographic reality has injected new urgency into the preservation effort. Shim Ok-ju, a research professor at George Mason University Korea, told the symposium that the focus must now shift from oral testimony — soon to be lost — to documentation and education.

Seo Kyung-soon, a professor at Pukyong National University, presented findings from the so-called “Gwanbu Trial” records — a series of postwar legal proceedings in which comfort women sought compensation through Japanese courts. The documents, she argued, contain incontrovertible evidence of state orchestration.

A designated discussant panel followed, bringing together Kim Tae-wan, a political science professor at Dong-eui University; Kim Kyung-hee, an independent researcher; and Ahn Jun-young, a journalist from the Busan Ilbo newspaper. The format was designed to bridge academia and public consciousness — to test whether scholarly findings could survive the scrutiny of working journalists and political scientists.

The international dimension

The comfort women issue has never been purely bilateral. In 1996, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women concluded that the system constituted “military sexual slavery.” In 2022, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women urged Japan to “ensure that the issue is accurately reflected in school curricula.”

Yet the gap between international consensus and Japanese government policy remains wide. Prime ministerial statements offer “apologies and remorse” but stop short of accepting legal responsibility. Reparations have come from private funds, not the state.

For organisers of the Busan symposium, the path forward runs through multilateral institutions. UNESCO recognition, they argue, would make historical revisionism harder to sustain. But Japan has made clear it will oppose any such move, as it did when Chinese documents related to the 1937 Nanjing Massacre were inscribed in 2015.

“Facing history squarely and respecting it is a fundamental value that the international community should share,” the symposium’s organisers concluded.

This 15 August, as Japan observes its National Memorial Service for the War Dead, the women who survived — and those who did not — will be remembered in rooms like the one in Busan. Their numbers are dwindling. The question is whether their story will outlast them.