Women’s Studies International Forum 95 (2022) 102652

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Women's Studies International Forum

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Transnational comparison of ‘comfort women’ advocacy movements in

Japan and South Korea
Caroline Norma
RMIT University, GPO Box 2476, Melbourne 3000, Australia

A B S T R A C T

This article looks to history to describe and explain a gap emerging in the approach of ‘comfort women’ advocacy campaigners in Japan and South Korea. This gap
arises out of competing understandings of the nature of the Japanese military ‘comfort women’ sexual slavery system. From the early 1990s, advocates in the two
countries have continually campaigned for recognition, restitution, and reparation for victims of Japanese military sexual slavery in the China and Pacific wars
between 1937 and 1945. In their tens of thousands, these ‘comfort women’ were trafficked out of poor villages into Japanese military brothels in Northeast and
Southeast Asia, as well as the Southwest Pacific, and mainland Japan itself. While they were initially targeted in Japan and Japan’s colonial territories of Korea,
Taiwan, and Manchuria, others in occupied and invaded territories like China, the Philippines, and Indonesia were detained, abducted, and coerced in various ways
for trafficking into military brothels in the 1940s. This article assesses the contemporary movement in support of victims, and seeks to explain differences arising in
the campaigning approaches of advocates in Japan and South Korea on the basis of history. This examination is important to the future direction of the movement,
which is currently unstable as it transitions to one no longer incorporating living survivors.

Introduction
Over the last ten years, some Japan-based campaigners, as this article
will describe, have come to link the historical problem of wartime
Japanese military sexual slavery to systems of prostitution operating
both in the past and the present (see Vickers, 2019; Frost & Vickers,
2021). They link the wartime system to the problem of prostitution in
recognition of survivors of Japanese nationality who were trafficked out
of Japan’s pre-war licensed brothel districts into military comfort sta­
tions abroad in the 1930s and 1940s (see Kinoshita, 2017, 9). These
victims, through their association with prostitution, were left out of
‘comfort women’ campaigning from the early 1990s. So, Japanese re­
searchers in the 2000s worked to reinstate their place within the
contemporary movement (see Nishino et al., 2019). This newly devel­
oped view of wartime sexual slavery as a problem of prostitution spread
among Japan-based campaigners. The country’s top historians,
including Yoshimi Yoshiaki and Kim Puja, now call even for recognition
of victims of Korea’s colonial-era licensed prostitution sector exploited
by occupying Japanese troops. They call for recognition of these victims
as ‘comfort women’ of equal standing to others trafficked out of
households and other non-sex industry sources (e.g., Kim & Kim, 2018).
This newly developing perspective is different from the approach taken
by South Korean advocates since the 1990s, and this article examines its
ramifications for the unity of the East Asian ‘comfort women’ advocacy
movement.
Advocates in South Korea (herein, ‘Korea’) from the 1990s mobilised
against the Japanese military’s historical abduction, trafficking, and
detention of women in comfort stations during the war, rather than the
prostitution the venues facilitated (see Kinoshita, 2017; Nishino, 2010;
Murph, 2018; Pak, 2016). This approach developed from 1991 when the
first Korean victim made contact with advocates and spoke out publicly
in both Korea and Japan (see Northeast Asian History Foundation,
2014). Other survivors came forward soon after, and brought a number
of civil suits against the Japanese government (see Yoshimi, 2000).
These victims had not been trafficked out of Korea’s sex industry, even if
a couple did have small connection to traditional entertainment venues
(see Howard, 1995). So, advocacy on their behalf from the earliest stages
of the campaign emphasised wartime sex trafficking as a result of
abduction and detention (see, for example, Dolgopol & Paranjape,
1994). In the 1990s, this approach to advocacy was replicated trans­
nationally, especially because of strong connections to Korea among
Japan-based advocates who had zainichi Korean backgrounds, and also
because of the early frequency of speaking tours in Japan by Korean
survivors and their supporters (see Seo, 2017).
From the outset, campaigners in both countries took a defensive
stance towards prostitution in their advocacy (see Norma, 2017). This
persists today on the Korean side, as reflected in the suggestion that
‘Korean efforts to acknowledge memories and the creation of the com­
fort women peace monument are meant to correct unilateral assertions
from Japan that the women were voluntary prostitutes’ (Kim, 2014, 84;

E-mail address: Caroline.norma@rmit.edu.au.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2022.102652
Received 12 April 2021; Received in revised form 9 September 2022; Accepted 29 October 2022
Available online 10 November 2022
0277-5395/Crown Copyright © 2022 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
C. Norma
see also Shim, 2017). Rather than harms of prostitution, contemporary
advocates see victims as having sustained ‘violence against women
during armed conflict’ (Roman, 2011) akin to that of present-day Con­
golese, Yazidi, and Nigerian women and girls. They borrow this
approach from international organisations advocating in support of the
former ‘comfort women’ out of considerations like ‘peace’, and as part of
efforts against sexual violence in war (see, for example, Mukwege
Foundation, 2019). They see the ‘comfort women’ as victims of sexual
violence akin to that suffered in contemporary conflicts in places like
Uganda. However, this latter characterisation of the ‘comfort women’
issue has not been taken up by Japanese campaigners. From the second
decade of the twenty first century these campaigners instead began to
explore sexually abusive and exploitative aspects of Japanese society
that gave rise to the wartime sexual slavery scheme ( see Muta, 2016).
Their approach is described shortly.
The approach on the Korean side is easily understood, and perhaps
even defended, on the basis of decades-long attacks, both from within
Korea as well as from Japan, by parties seeking to downplay the history
of Japanese military sexual slavery. On the Korean side, these attacks
come from groups who view the history as shameful to the nation (see N.
Park, 2021), or, more recently, from those who campaign against so-
called ‘anti-Japan tribalism’ (Yang, 2021) and want to forge cross-
country ties with Japanese conservative groups and parties. On the
Japanese side, they come from groups hostile to Korea and to women
who equate ‘comfort women’ with ‘prostitutes’ seeking personal gain
(see Yoon & Asahina, 2021). Denying any connection between the
‘comfort women’ and prostitution was, therefore, in the face of argu­
ments characterising victims as wartime camp-followers, a strategically
necessary campaigning tactic.
But it was a tactic that emphasised the history of Korea’s colonisa­
tion, and the structural vulnerability that this occupation generated for
local women and girls. This emphasis led to some merging of the
‘comfort women’ problem with the history of Korean nationalist liber­
ation (see Seo, 2008). As a result, Korean campaigners came under
criticism from Japanese liberal feminists like Ueno Chizuko for being
‘nationalistic’ in their approach to advocacy (see Ueno & Yamamoto,
2004). This criticism, in turn, prompted the Korean movement to
embark upon international outreach efforts, including to Vietnamese
victims of Korean military sexual abuses during the Vietnam War (see
Kwon, 2020). More recently, outreach to victims of sexual violence in
conflict in African countries reflects a continuing effort among Korean
campaigners to cast off aspersions from the first decade of the twenty-
first century that their advocacy was insular and nationalistic (see
Drinck & Gross, 2007).
Any number of scholars have examined these contemporary dy­
namics on the Korean side, including Na-young Lee, 2014 as the current
director of the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the
Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (the Korean Council). They
nearly all emphasise the focus of the Korean justice movement on war,
militarism, and sexual violence in conflict (see Molony & Nelson, 2017).
Accordingly, the discussion herein differently focuses on the alternative
perspective of Japan-based advocates that military prostitution can be
understood as a phenomenon arising out of practices of commercial
sexual exploitation.
This perspective is less well-known than the Korean ‘sexual violence
in conflict’ approach, and tends to be mischaracterised (for example,
Kingston, 2019). It was earliest written about in 1999 (and published in
English translation in 2017) by Japan-based political theorist Morita
Seiya. He explained that ‘comfort women’ were required to ‘service the
sexuality of conscripts and officers, and buffer their wholesale raping of
local women’, and that ‘[t]his task was held up as their essential wartime
mission, and the women were viewed as nothing more than a sexual
resource who were collectively suited to be used in this way’. Crucially,
the reason the ‘comfort women’ were viewed in this way was because,
‘[i]n Japan’s male dominant culture, prostitution is not perceived as
systematised sex discrimination or exploitation; at worst, it was seen as a
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Women’s Studies International Forum 95 (2022) 102652
necessary evil’ Morita, 2017. The Japanese military’s ‘comfort women’
scheme therefore developed out of social license afforded Japanese men
to prostitute women in peacetime, which was systematically arranged
for wartime enlistees in the same way it had been for civilian men in pre-
war Japan. Focusing on this perspective now prevalent among Japan-
based advocates permits exploration of future directions in the trans­
national East Asian campaign as it transitions to a movement no longer
incorporating living survivors (see Lee, 2014).
This article first describes the history of ‘comfort women’ cam­
paigning in Korea in respect of its early and foundational links to a
parallel domestic movement in support of victims of American military-
base prostitution in ‘kijichon’ camptowns. This movement developed
locally just before the ‘comfort women’ advocacy movement emerged,
and shares many of its originating campaigns and campaigners. It began
as a movement seeking justice and rights for women in post-war military
sex industry districts around US bases, as Kim & Lee, 2017 explain:
As anti-American sentiments increased during the Chun [Doo-hwan]
administration, the attitude toward US bases became more hostile
and nationalistic, especially after 1992, following the gruesome
murder of a camptown prostitute by an American soldier. Her
murder led to mass protests against camptown prostitution and other
“US crimes against Koreans.” The groups that were important in
organizing against camptown prostitution included Korean Church
Women United (Han’guk kyohŏe yŏsŏng yŏnhap, founded in 1967),
My Sister’s Place (Durebang, founded in 1986), and The United
Voice for the Eradication of Prostitution (Hansorihoe, founded in
1987). In the 1990s, feminist views that regarded prostitution as a
form of violence against women which should not be tolerated by
society increasingly dominated the discussion of the issue.
‘Comfort women’ advocates subsequently broke away from these
kijichon activists through shedding an anti-prostitution perspective, as
will be described. The article then discusses the contemporary cam­
paigning of ‘comfort women’ advocates in Korea as excluding an anti-
prostitution perspective as a result of this early movement break with
kijichon activists. In parallel to this, though, has been the successful anti-
prostitution movement in Korea from the turn of the century, and this
movement is shown to have influenced the approach of ‘comfort
women’ advocates in Japan today who understand the history of Japa­
nese military sexual slavery to have been primarily a problem of pros­
titution. The article concludes with observations of a turning point in the
politics of East Asia towards the development of a redress movement
that is influenced by an increasingly influential women’s movement
against sexual exploitation.
Analysing perspectives on the ‘comfort women’
The widening gulf separating Korean and Japanese activists cam­
paigning in support of the former military ‘comfort women’ that this
article observes is empirically established through data collected in
Japan and Korea over the years 2017–2020. The author, as a participant-
researcher, joined 15 feminist conferences, rallies, book launches, and
seminars in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Pusan and Seoul over 18 months. She
gained access to these sites through visiting fellowships held at two
universities in Japan, which afforded introductions and letters of
recommendation to groups and activists, as well as via the Korean-
language publication of her book on the topic of the ‘comfort women’
(Norma, 2020), which came with publisher-arranged meetings with
Korean activists. The researcher was already known to respondents as a
long-time activist in the field, but arrangements were made to have her
details and the research’s objectives circulated to all event participants
beforehand. Materials collected at the events, as well as pre-event
advertising, post-event publications, and notes of conversations with
participants, were assessed for their indication of campaigning di­
rections and philosophical approaches of activists. The author’s long-
term involvement in the international feminist movement against
C. Norma
prostitution drove the subsequent analysis of the materials, which were
examined for their extent of anti-prostitution perspective. Namely, their
linking of wartime sexual slavery to any practice of prostitution in the
past or present. This assessment was motivated by the political context
in which the transnational ‘comfort women’ advocacy movement has
operated globally since the early 1990s. The landscape is marked by
growing polarity and contestation between feminists over a view of
prostitution as either male sexual violence or work (Ekman, 2013; Jef­
freys, 1997; Raymond, 2013). The extent to which the Japanese and
Korean advocacy movements are ideologically divided is significant in
light of Pyong Gap Min’s (2020, 72) understanding that ‘more citizens
and organizations in Japan have supported the redress movement for the
victims of Japanese military sexual slavery than those in any other
country, with the exception of South Korea’. This influence of the Japan-
based movement on global campaigning makes assessing features of its
contemporary ideological formation important for both the Korean
movement and the future of the global advocacy movement broadly (see
also Chun, 2016).
The observation this article makes of a political divide opening up
between Korean and Japanese ‘comfort women’ advocates challenges a
body of academic literature developing since the early 1990s that alleges
cooperative cross-country relations among activists. Earliest among
these analyses in English is Alice Yun Chai’s (1993) emphasis of trans­
national relations of harmony. She observed that, ‘[f]or the first time in
the history of Korea-Japan relations, Korean and Japanese women have
engaged in formally organized coalition activities with the common goal
of recovering and correcting Japan’s official accounts of its colonial
history’ (84). More than fifteen years later, researchers continue to
highlight unity in the cross-country relationship, and use terms like
‘transnational advocacy network’ to describe coordinated campaigning
among activist groups of the two countries (see Roman, 2011; Cheah,
2013). In 2009, researchers concluded that campaigners had success­
fully cultivated a ‘transnational collaboration network’ through ‘con­
necting the comfort women issue to experiences of war and violence all
across East Asia’ (Kern & Nam, 2010, 227). But this assessment over­
looks anti-prostitution strains of the ‘comfort women’ justice movement
that have been historically present in both countries since the 1970s
(Norma, 2017). The cross-country unity observed of the contemporary
movement overlooks, moreover, in the present day, the recent court
victory of anti-prostitution kijichon camptown campaigners against the
Korean government over historical injustices against women prostituted
in US military base red-light districts (see Eigenraam, 2018), as will be
further explained.
The field of feminist international relations (IR) in which this opti­
mistic scholarship is found produces analyses of what it calls ‘sexual
violence against women in armed conflict’. Jacqui True (2012), for
example, defines such violence as ‘part of the continuum of gender-
based violence that transgresses familiar soldier-civilian, male-female,
state-nonstate perpetrator, and war-peace boundaries and thrives under
conditions of globalized conflict’ (123). Definitions like these are,
however, criticised for downplaying the sexual nature of the violence in
favour of analyses that prioritise instrumental views of rape as a ‘weapon
of war’ or a tool of ‘ethnic cleansing’ (Krulisova, 2015, 141; see also
Baaz & Stern, 2018). Casting sex crimes in this amorphous, big-picture
way removes them from their normal civilian context in which their
perpetration is common and linked to social relations of inequality be­
tween men and women, Sara Meger (2016) argues.
Meger herself, though, applies no similar insight to prostitution in
her book explaining the ‘political economy of sexual violence in armed
conflict’, which nominates peacetime rape and domestic violence (but
not prostitution) as overlooked contexts and consequences of wartime
sex crimes. This is a surprising admission; one might expect military
prostitution, of all forms of wartime sexual violence, to be pertinent to
discussion of conflict’s political economy, given its commercial and
transactional basis. To be fair, though, this kind of gap is normal for the
field: leading lights such as Dagmar Herzog (2009) even describe
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Women’s Studies International Forum 95 (2022) 102652
prostitution in war as leisure rather than violence (3–5; see also Bumet,
2012, Jennings, 2014). The research of the current article offers a
perspective different from both the prostitution-tolerant analysis of
Herzog, as well as the ‘violence against women’ generalisations of True,
in its examination of the contemporary direction of the transnational
‘comfort women’ movement in East Asia. It differently connects military
sexual exploitation and its social movement critics to the contemporary
anti-prostitution movement, which it suggests is a growing political
force in East Asia.
The anti-prostitution roots of the Korean movement for the
former ‘comfort women’
The movement in support of the former ‘comfort women’ did not
emerge in Korea in isolation or without precedent. Two researchers have
identified historical links between Korea’s ‘comfort women’ movement
emerging in the late 1980s and a parallel domestic women’s movement
that supported ‘camptown’ kijichon military prostitution victims. The
work of Na-Young Lee and Katharine Moon shows a ‘comfort women’
advocacy movement developing in Korea in the late 1980s that did not
necessarily exclude an anti-prostitution perspective. Lee explains that a
facility in support of camptown military prostitution victims emerged in
Korea in the form of an organisation called Durebang (in English, ‘My
sister’s place’) in 1986 near the American Camp Stanley army base
(2011). The following year, in 1987, a second organisation called
Hansori emerged to coordinate several anti-prostitution NGOs working
against the sex industry in both its military and civilian forms, including
Durebang. Hansori was joined ten years later in 1996, moreover, by an
organisation that had broken away from Durebang called Saeumto
(literally, ‘sprouting land’) that formed near Camp Casey. Durebang
undertook ground-breaking work as Korea’s first organisation support­
ing victims of American military prostitution, mainly through the cre­
ation of a bakery as an alternative means of livelihood for survivors. The
bakery’s success arose not just from the employment opportunities it
offered, but also from the attention it drew from university students to
the problem of American military base prostitution. It did this because,
as Lee explains, ‘student activists deeply involved in the democratization
movement delivered and sold bread from the bakery to students on
campus’. As a result, in the summer of 1990, Durebang accepted its first
tranche of volunteer activists, which included students from Ewha
Womans University and Hanshin University. Lee cites the view of
Saeumto’s former director that volunteering led students to ‘recognize
and resolve the problems pertaining to kijich’on, including issues per­
taining to women, children, and the regional community, caused by the
unequal relationship between Korea and the U.S., the U.S. military, and
the patriarchal practice of prostitution’. In Lee’s view, the volunteer
work exposed middle class students to ‘the reality of military prostitu­
tion’, and therefore ‘created a bridge between two different classes of
women, breaking down college women’s prejudice against military
prostitutes’. In turn, ‘it led to societal awareness of military prostitution
as well as a recognition of the kijich’on movement, which, in turn,
encouraged others to become activists and volunteers’. Importantly, the
volunteer work promoted critical views of Korea’s sex industry in gen­
eral, according to Lee (2011), who explains that a ‘sense of women’s
rights as human rights led them to awareness regarding the domestic sex
industry and eventually to the burgeoning women’s movement against
prostitution since the late 1990s’. Indeed, the current director of the
National Solidarity against Sexual Exploitation of Women, Mirye Jeong,
writing with Hayoung Lee, notes that prostitution was not a focus of
feminist activism in Korea before the year 2000 (Jeong & Lee, 2019,
307). It was not until the turn of the twenty-first century that feminist
and Christian anti-prostitution activists, often trained through volunteer
work in camptown areas, came of age, and these former students went
on to create a movement against civilian, peacetime prostitution in
twenty-first century Korea. They, together with democracy-era activists
like Youngsook Cho, and later-generation feminists like Yunmi Lee,
C. Norma
Jeonghee Byun and Hyejung Park, led campaigning for anti-sex industry
laws in 2004, as will be discussed (see Seol, 2004; Lee and Furuhashi,
2017). While early efforts in support of women in US military-base
prostitution in Korea took the form of shelters rather than feminist
activism, therefore, from the turn of the century a movement rallying in
support of victims from an anti-prostitution perspective additionally
developed in parallel to Korea’s existing ‘comfort women’ movement.
This early history of camptown prostitution victim advocacy is
important to understanding the context in which the ‘comfort women’
advocacy movement developed in Korea. As mentioned, this develop­
ment occurred in the same period, and with early overlap between ac­
tivists, organisations and events held by both kijichon and ‘comfort
women’ advocates. These overlapping origins are shown in Katharine
Moon’s account of the early formation of Korea’s ‘comfort women’
justice movement. Moon writes that this formation occurred in 1988
with the presentation of Ewha University’s Yun Chong Ok’s research on
the ‘chongsindae’ ‘comfort women’ at an International Seminar on
Women and Tourism held on Korea’s Jeju Island in April 1988. Signif­
icantly, Moon notes that, at this conference, ‘[a] kijich’on woman also
gave her own testimony about her ordeals’ of military prostitution in
Korea. The conference was not solely devoted to the issue of the former
‘comfort women’, and so Korea’s ‘comfort women’ justice movement
emerged out of activist efforts to understand and criticise systems of
prostitution in wholistic, interrelated terms, including systems of mili­
tary prostitution and sex tourism. Despite their circulation at the time of
the movement’s formation, however, ‘comfort women’ advocates did
not incorporate anti-prostitution ideas in their subsequent internation­
ally influential campaigning. Some members early on did attempt to
instil such a perspective. Yun Chong Ok, for example, as the ‘comfort
women’ movement’s intellectual founder in Korea, in the early 1990s
called on local activists to ‘completely change the social conceptions of
women’s sexuality’ to stop the marginalisation of ‘fallen women’, ac­
cording to Moon. Nonetheless, the movement she helped found persisted
in ‘a traditional understanding of acceptable female sexual behavior’.
Critically, according to Moon, “[m]any of the leaders and survivors
emphasized that the former ‘comfort women’ were innocent victims
whereas kijich’on women were not”. So, despite Yun’s efforts (Yama­
shita & Yun, 1992), and also those of Yamashita (2011), they explicitly
rejected a view of prostitution systems as interconnected and unjustified
on the basis of female free will. This was in spite of camptown prosti­
tution being similarly perpetrated by military men, and in fact some­
times targeting victims who had formerly been in wartime comfort
stations (see Moon, 1997). Leaders of the movement in support of
camptown prostitution victims, in contrast, ‘viewed the situation of the
majority of kijich’on women as the outcome of economic coercion (in
addition to physical coercion for some), and therefore not a matter of
exercising one’s own free will’. This difference of opinion, Moon writes,
was ‘the major cause of the kijich’on movement leaders’ initial disso­
ciation with the chongsindae [comfort women] movement’ (Moon,
1999, 319).
Prostitution in the contemporary campaigning of ‘comfort
women’ advocates in Korea
This early break-away history of the ‘comfort women’ advocacy
movement in Korea continues to be reflected in the contemporary
activism and public statements of activists and organisations today who
reject an anti-prostitution perspective in their activities. Korea’s na­
tional organisation representing wartime survivors, the Korean Council
for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by
Japan (the Korean Council), on its website describes the commemora­
tive ‘Korean girl’ Statue of Peace in Seoul as having been erected in order
to ‘call for apology and remembrance for the Japanese military sexual
slavery issue and to hope for prevention of sexual violence in armed
conflict across the world’ (Korean Council, ‘Commemoration’). Rather
than a symbol of resistance against systems of sexual trading of women
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Women’s Studies International Forum 95 (2022) 102652
and girls in wartime and peace, in other words, the statue represents
hopes relating specifically to ‘armed conflict’, and, very generally, to
‘sexual violence’ arising in war. Mohita Roman in 2011 observed of this
situation that Korean activists have come to align themselves with a
‘global movement for the elimination of violence against women during
armed conflict paradigm’. Not, in other words, with the anti-sexual
exploitation paradigm that is now more common in Japan.
Since Roman’s writing on the topic, some efforts have been made to
bridge the divide between the ‘comfort women’ and the anti-military
prostitution movements. Former ‘comfort women’ have made public
visits to Korean ‘camptown’ kijichon areas to speak with former victims
of US military prostitution. For example, in 2009, survivor Gil Won-ok
visited survivors and supporters at the US military camptown in
Anjeong-ri (Na-Young Lee, Korean Council 30th Anniversary Sympo­
sium, 14 November 2020, which the author attended online from
Tokyo). In turn, survivors of US military prostitution, including Kim
Sook-ja and Cho Myung-ja, have attended events alongside wartime
survivors, such as a preview screening in 2018 of the documentary film
My Name is Kim Bok-Dong (seminar notes on file with author, Na-Young
Lee, Osaka, October 2019). The above-mentioned former ‘comfort
woman’ Gil Won-ok later in 2010 released a public statement in support
of kijichon survivors and their civil case against the South Korea gov­
ernment, and her filmed message was posted online by the former di­
rector of the Korean Council, Meehyang Yoon (‘Gil Won-ok halmoni ga
gijichon halmoni-dul ege’, 2016). These efforts towards solidarity with
Korean survivors of other forms of military prostitution begin to repair
two decades of estrangement between the ‘comfort women’ and kijichon
survivor movements, which, as explained, both emerged in Korea in the
late 1980s but split over forced-free distinctions arising in relation to
prostitution (Moon, 1999). In spite of these recent efforts, though, at the
time of writing, the website of the Korean Council still includes no words
of solidarity with military prostitution survivors, nor any mention of
their successful court action (see Jeong & Lee, 2019). Instead, it em­
phasises Council solidarity with contemporary survivors of ‘sexual
violence in conflict’ around the world.
More than with Korean victims of prostitution, in other words, the
Council currently embarks on efforts to cultivate solidarity with over­
seas victims of sexual violence in military conflict. ‘Comfort women’
survivors affiliated with the Council established a ‘Butterfly Fund’ on
International Women’s Day in 2012 to ‘support women who still suffer
from sexual violence in conflict’ (Korean Council, ‘Prevention of sexual
violence in conflict’), and the Council currently raises funds for the
construction of a ‘Kim Bong-dong Center’ in Uganda to assist victims of
wartime sexual violence (Korean Council, ‘Korean Council Newsletter
July 2019’). The former Mun Jae-in government pledged Overseas
Development Assistance Funds towards these efforts (personal commu­
nication, Shin Heisoo, Fukuoka, September 2019). These outreach ac­
tivities consolidate the popular framing in Korea of Japanese military
sexual slavery as an historical phenomenon of ‘wartime sexual violence’,
but they also contribute to the widening ideological gap between the
movements pursued in Korea and Japan.
Contemporary anti-prostitution activism in Korea
The perspective of Korea-based ‘comfort women’ advocates that
their movement is not one of anti-prostitution advocacy but, rather, a
campaign against ‘violence against women during armed conflict’, as
Roman describes it, is a stance that fails to reflect the movement’s his­
torical origins intertwined with the movement against camptown mili­
tary prostitution that Lee and Moon describe. It also fails to incorporate
much of the landscape of political activism in Korea today. For two
decades, Korean feminists, Christians, and liberal social workers have
campaigned against the country’s civilian sex industry. In 2004 they
achieved laws against prostitution similar to legislative models, referred
to broadly as the ‘Nordic’ model, currently enacted in Sweden, Norway,
Iceland, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Canada, France, Israel, and Hawaii
C. Norma
(Bindel, 2017; Governor of the State of Hawai’i, 2021; Banyard, 2017).
These countries and jurisdictions implement legal and welfare regimes
that decriminalise people in the sex industry while criminalising sex
industry profiteers like pimps, as well as sex-buying customers (see
Korsvik & Stø, 2013). Korean activists were successful in having similar
laws enacted in 2004, even if they imperfectly retain provision for the
prosecution of victims (see Jeong & Lee, 2019). While Korea-based
‘comfort women’ advocates do not affiliate themselves with these
groups and individuals campaigning against the local sex industry, the
enduring presence of this successful, government supported, anti-
prostitution women’s movement nonetheless creates a useful political
environment in Korea in which ‘comfort women’ advocates are sup­
ported in their activism by a social environment generally hostile to­
wards sexual exploitation, and at the highest government levels. For
example, the Women’s Human Rights Institute of Korea oversees na­
tional initiatives both in support of contemporary prostitution victims as
well as the former ‘comfort women’. This semi-government organ is
administered by the South Korean Ministry of Gender Equality and
Family, and is central to efforts of public support and awareness raising
in relation to both forms of sexual exploitation in Korea.
Anti-prostitution ideas in ‘comfort women’ advocacy in Japan
No similar anti-prostitution movement against peacetime, civilian
forms of the sex industry exists in Japan, let alone one that has operated
for two decades to achieve major legislative reform. There was a strong
anti-prostitution movement in the country before the war and shortly
after (see Hayashi, 2017), and the Anti-Pornography and Prostitution
Research Group has campaigned in the country since 1999. But,
different from Korea, Japan hosts a large-scale pornography production
industry, and weak internet regulation in the country means that online
sex industry businesses are prevalent and profitable. This comparatively
prostitution-tolerant environment has prevented anything like the
achievements of Korean anti-prostitution activists occurring in Japan.
Ironically given this relatively stronger anti-prostitution environment in
Korea and permissive environment in Japan, some Japanese advocates,
different from their counterparts in Korea, adopt an explicitly anti-
prostitution stance in their writing and campaigning. They have,
moreover, recently begun collaborating with Korea-based groups in
these activities, as described below. It is an ironic feature of the trans­
national movement that these Japan-based ‘comfort women’ advocacy
groups collaborate with Korean anti-prostitution activists while the
Korea-based justice movement mostly does not.
This shift in Japan is the outcome of a trend that grew over ten years
from the turn of the century that was propelled by the country’s most
authoritative historians of the wartime ‘comfort women’ system.
Members of the Violence Against Women in War Research Action Center
(VAWW-RAC) led the transformation, but were supported in their
research and campaigning by members of other organisations, including
the Center for Research and Documentation on Japan’s War Re­
sponsibility and the Women’s Active Museum (WAM), ‘Fight for Jus­
tice’, and Kibo no Tane Kikin. WAM’s hosting of an installation over the
years 2017–2019 documenting Japanese victims of the wartime system
was a notable contribution. This exhibition was followed in 2019 by
VAWW-RAC’s hosting of three leading Korean anti-prostitution activists
from Seoul, Pusan and Taegu (respectively, Jeong Mirye, Jeonghee Byun
and Jin-Young Shin-Pak) to speak about Korea’s anti-prostitution laws.
Among the high-ranking historians involved in VAWW-RAC is Tokyo
University of Foreign Studies professor Kim Puja. Her co-authored 2019
book reflects the anti-prostitution approach to the history of the wartime
military sexual slavery system that circulates in Japan. Kim’s views are
of interest for the challenge they pose to Korea-based ‘comfort women’
advocates; namely, Kim, as a Korean-background Japanese scholar, calls
for victims of Korea’s colonial-era licensed prostitution districts, who
were exploited by Japanese military men garrisoned on the peninsula, to
be historically recognised as ‘comfort women’. In other words, Kim’s
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Women’s Studies International Forum 95 (2022) 102652
historical work argues for a wider range of historical forms of prostitu­
tion to be recognised within the category of ‘Japanese military sexual
slavery’.
She argues that “‘prostitutes’ of the colonial [Korean] licensed
quarters, as well as the ‘comfort women’ of the wartime comfort sta­
tions, were subjects of daily sexual violence, and so should both be seen
as sexually enslaved” (Kim & Kim, 2018, 215). Kim further finds direct
historical link between, firstly, the development of settlement-era Jap­
anese prostitution districts in pre-colonial Korea, and, secondly,
colonial-era prostitution districts, and, finally, the wartime comfort
stations that operated on the Korean peninsula (212). This continuity
and similarity between semi-civilian, military, and wartime brothels/
comfort stations brings into new consideration large populations of
women historically prostituted in commercial sex industries as victims
of Japanese military enslavement. She writes that interest in, and voices
calling for, justice for women prostituted in colonial licensed districts
and others sexually exploited during Korea’s years of occupation have
not been heard in the context of the justice movement. This is in contrast
to campaigning on behalf of recognised ‘comfort women’ for whom
restitution has been pursued (213). In the book co-authored with Kim
Yon, she describes Korea’s colonial licensed prostitution districts as
mainly patronised by the Japanese military, and urges reconsideration
of the currently popular view of ‘comfort stations’ as having been
located only outside those districts, and as not including venues origi­
nally established for civilian purposes (i.e., later taken over by the
Japanese military). In other words, Kim sees brothels patronised by
Japanese military men in occupied Korea as ultimately functioning in
the same way as ‘comfort stations’, regardless of their location and de­
tails of commercial operation. This function was simply one of sexually
enslaving colonised women for the sexual use of Japanese officers and
troops. She explains that,
[i]f we define comfort stations as places that the military set up,
managed, recruited for and used, then we can’t say licensed-district
venues qualify as comfort stations. But, given that colonial Korea was
a rear base for perpetrating the war for the Japanese military, and
considering the militarisation of Korea at the time, licensed brothels
operating under these circumstances have a great deal in common
with comfort stations, and should be seen as having existed on a
continuum with them. They played the same role in the interests of
the Japanese military as comfort stations in overseeing the sexuality
of troops. On this basis, we need to see women in these venues as
‘comfort’ women, and see their situation in light of broader military
policies of sexual control, sexual violence and the general conditions
of the occupation of Korea (153–154).
Kim’s discussion shows the extent to which Japan-based ‘comfort
women’ advocates have developed their thinking, and their campaign­
ing goals, in a direction different from those of advocates in Korea.
Earlier, Nishino (2010) wrote of the importance of “[c]learly recognis­
ing and acknowledging the victimisation of [prostituted] Japanese
‘comfort women’” as a means of “overcoming the gender prejudice that
afflicts the ‘comfort women’ issue” (113). In Japan, therefore, there has
elapsed a decade of intellectual and activist efforts devoted to forging an
understanding of prostituted victims as equally deserving of historical
recognition as ‘comfort women’. These efforts over a decade now pro­
duce a wide philosophical and activist gap between the Japan-based
movement and that of Korea.
Japan’s most authoritative historian of the ‘comfort women’ system,
Yoshimi Yoshiaki, shares the view, moreover. Yoshimi (along with
Hayashi Hirofumi) uncovered the archival documents that forced the
Japanese government in the early 1990s to begin investigating the
country’s wartime history in relation to the ‘comfort women’. He then
authored a major book on this history in 1995 that was released in
English translation in 2000. While this early work did not dismiss Jap­
anese and other prostituted victims of comfort stations, its historical
C. Norma
framing of the wartime scheme reflected the ‘forced trafficking’ para­
digm that Kinoshita observes of the early-period scholarship and
activism to which the book belongs (Kinoshita, 2018). However, in
2019, Yoshimi published a second monograph that offers an entirely
different view of the context and origins of the military scheme, as can
be gleaned just from its title: Imperialist prostitutor nation: roots of the
Japanese military ‘comfort women’ problem. This book’s discussion
broadens the historical context in which the military scheme is viewed:
Yoshimi describes it as reflecting the nature of the modern ‘prostitutor’
Japanese state that oversaw large-scale systems of sexual trading of
women before the war, and persisted in this commitment in an extreme
way during the war in its support for the creation of the military sexual
slavery system. After the war and occupation, the state failed to reform
itself in the transition to democracy, and persisted as a ‘prostitutor
nation’ through subscribing to the idea of women’s freely chosen sexual
exploitation. Yoshimi explains that the Japanese government retained
systems of sexual trading even as the imperial state fell, the country
succumbed to allied occupation, and even after the government was
made to dismantle its former licensed prostitution system because of
concerns on the part of the occupying allied command about sexual
slavery. But, Yoshimi continues,
even after having experienced these events, the Japanese govern­
ment and its military continued to evade responsibility for its past,
and supported the continued operation of prostitution businesses in
Japan on the basis of women willingly having chosen to sell them­
selves. A major reason for the continuing failure to resolve the
problem of the military ‘comfort women’ in the present relates pre­
cisely to this fact (245).
Significantly, in concluding his monograph, Yoshimi refers to
Korea’s anti-prostitution laws, and compares Japan’s continuing
adherence to the idea of ‘free choice’ in relation to prostitution unfav­
ourably to the stance taken by Korea (247).
Yoshimi’s shift in theorising occurred in line with a shift in activist
approach in Japan. Among other political activities over the past five
years, in July 2018 VAWW-RAC members, including Yoshimi, as well as
Kim Puja, Onozawa Akane, Kitahara Minori and the journalist Okamoto
Yūki, travelled to Korea to meet with like-minded colleagues. Signifi­
cantly, the like-mindedness of these activist colleagues related not to
their commonly shared advocacy on behalf of the former ‘comfort
women’, such as that pursued by members of the Korean Council with
whom VAWW-RAC members had longstanding connections. Rather,
they had in common efforts against prostitution and the sex industry.
Activists who have worked over two decades to implement Korea’s anti-
prostitution laws of 2004, and run government-subsidised shelter and
welfare facilities to aid women’s exit from the local sex industry, were
the colleagues VAWW-RAC members travelled to meet (personal
communication, VAWW-RAC event participant, March 2019). Among
other people, the four delegates visited the director of Salim Center,
Byun Jeonghee, in Pusan, which has been a hub of feminist anti-
prostitution organising and thinking in Korea (together with the group
National Solidarity for Resolving the Problem of Prostitution) since its
founding by feminist activists Lee Yunmi, Pak Hyejung, and Cho
Gyongsuk at the turn of the century (personal communication, Byun
Jeonghee, Seoul, June 2018).
Crucial to the cultivation of connections among Japan’s top histo­
rians and Korea’s feminist anti-prostitution movement has been the
activism and journalism of Kitahara Minori who is involved in a range of
political groups in Tokyo, including the major Japanese ‘comfort
women’ advocacy group Kibo no Tane Kikin, and, until recently, the
Tokyo-based anti-prostitution Organization for Pornography and Sexual
Exploitation Survivors (PAPS). As a journalist and businesswoman,
Kitahara travels to Korea to interview anti-prostitution activists and to
document developments in Korean legal and campaigning efforts
against the domestic sex industry (personal communication, Tokyo,
6
Women’s Studies International Forum 95 (2022) 102652
June 2019). Kitahara’s work has been one means by which VAWW-RAC
members have come to learn about, and make connection with, Korean
activists who maintain a similar perspective on prostitution.
There is, however, yet little indication of similar change among
Korean ‘comfort women’ activists or historians towards an anti-
prostitution viewpoint. This divergence of opinion among ‘comfort
women’ advocates in the two countries does not, though, represent a
weakening of ties between them. Rather, it is has led to strengthened
transnational connections among anti-prostitution activists in East Asia.
Further, it has strengthened the Japan-based anti-prostitution move­
ment because its members have had greater opportunity to interact with
Korean counterparts via VAWW-RAC and other connections. While anti-
prostitution activism in Japan remains decades behind that of Korea,
links forged between Japanese and Korean campaigners over the history
of the ‘comfort women’ strengthen its base.
Conclusion
This article has developed a contemporary picture of the Japan-
Korea transnational ‘comfort women’ advocacy movement different
from that described by researchers to date (such as Min, Chung, & Yim,
2020). While unity in this cross-country movement is shown to be
lacking, it was suggested that common ground nonetheless exists among
advocates in East Asia in relation to a shared anti-prostitution perspec­
tive. The current transnational social movement against prostitution is
reversing the split that occurred among activists in Korea in the early
1990s. While Korea-based ‘comfort women’ advocates have not fully
restored ties to the kijichon camptown prostitution movement, elderly
survivors have made efforts to lend support, even if the Korean Council
has not yet officially done so. In contrast, activists in Japan have not
followed Korean counterparts in developing a ‘sexual violence in con­
flict’ perspective on the ‘comfort women’ issue that links the history to
contemporary problems of rape in war. Instead, these activists have
forged an understanding of Japanese military sexual slavery as histori­
cally linked to systems of prostitution and sexual exploitation. The
cultivation of this perspective has tied Japanese ‘comfort women’ ad­
vocates more closely to Korea-based anti-prostitution activists who have
had a strong political presence in the country since the turn of this
century. Ultimately, therefore, rather than disunity, this article has
found that contemporary developments herald a new era in the trans­
national East Asian feminist movement. This movement, which is tran­
sitioning into one no longer populated by ‘comfort women’ survivors, is
changing into a region-wide struggle against prostitution in all its forms,
both civilian and military, in wartime and peace. This is a welcome
development in a world in which sexual exploitation, in both cyber and
material form, threatens women and girls, especially in the peacetime
countries of East Asia where military conflict might be absent but sex-
based conflict escalates.
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