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Asia's global memory wars and solidarity across borders: diaspora activism on the “comfort women” issue in the United States
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
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Calls for reparations and apologies for crimes committed during the 1930s/40s war in Asia have been major points of contention in East Asia's public memory since at least the 1980s. In recent years, a “history/memory war” over the “comfort women” issue has intensified. At the same time, the battleground has also shifted to the terrain of “heritage” and has increasingly taken on a global dimension. This paper considers an increasingly significant arena for East Asian memory wars, involving diaspora communities in Western countries. Its particular focus is the coordinated “comfort women” activism of Korean American and other Asian American diaspora groups in certain regions of the United States. While their decades-long activism has produced a ‘memory boom’ in its own right and resulted in raising the political profile of Asian Americans, I argue that this has also come at the cost of straining to breaking point post-war arrangements for symbolizing and cementing US-Japanese reconciliation. The paper builds on existing research to delineate the expanding scope of Asia's memory wars and introduces new insights into some of the US activists' inter-ethnic alliance building that underscores the increasingly global nature of these memory conflicts as well as the potentially lasting repercussions for societies far beyond East Asia.
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Notes
1 This article was made possible by a Small Grant from the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation for which the author is very thankful. The author is furthermore grateful to Professor Edward Vickers for sharing his research notes on Asian American diaspora activism in California.
2 Justin McCurry, “Former sex slaves reject Japan and South Korea's ‘comfort women’ accord”, The Guardian, 26 January 2016, accessed on 8 January 2017.
3 Barry Schwartz, Kim Mikyoung, “Introduction: Northeast Asia's Memory Problem”, in idem (eds.), Northeast Asia's Difficult Past: Essays in Collective Memory, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp. 1-30.
4 According to Tomomi Yamaguchi, the term ‘history wars’ was first coined by the Sankei Shimbun, a Japanese nationalist newspaper. See, Tomomi Yamaguchi, “The ‘History Wars’ and the ‘Comfort Women’ Issue: Revisionism and the Right-wing in Contemporary Japan and the U.S.”, in The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus 18.6.3 (2020): p. 2.
5 Daniel Schumacher, “Asia's ‘Boom’ of Difficult Memories: Remembering World War Two Across East and Southeast Asia”, in History Compass 13.11 (2015): pp. 560-577.
6 See, for example, see: Tomomi Yamaguchi, “The ‘History Wars’ and the ‘Comfort Women’ Issue: Revisionism and the Right-wing in Contemporary Japan and the U.S.”, in The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus 18.6.3 (2020): pp. 1-23; Satoko Oka Norimatsu, “Canada's ‘History Wars’: The ‘Comfort Women’ and the Nanjing Massacre”, in The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus 18.6.4 (2020): pp. 1-18; Edward Vickers, “Commemorating the ‘Comfort Women’ Beyond Korea”: The Chinese Case“, in Mark R. Frost, Daniel Schumacher, Edward Vickers, Remembering Asia's World War Two, London: Routledge: 2019, pp. 174-208;; Mary M. McCarthy and Linda C. Hasunuma, ”Coalition building and mobilization: case studies of the comfort women memorials in the United States“, in Politics, Groups, and Identities 6 (2018): pp. 411-434.
7 Welcome additions to the literature include (but are not limited to) Yamaguchi, “The ‘History Wars’ and the ‘Comfort Women’ Issue”; Norimatsu, “Canada's ‘History Wars‘”; Linda C. Hasunuma and Mary M. McCarthy, “Creating a Collective Memory of the Comfort Women in the USA”, in International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 32 (2019): pp. 145-162.
8 Rangsook Yoon, “Erecting the ”Comfort Women“ Memorials: From Seoul to San Francisco”, in de arte 53.2-3 (2018): pp. 70-85; Sierra Rooney, “The Politics of Shame: The Glendale Comfort Women Memorial and the Complications of Transnational Commemorations”, in de arte 53.2-3 (2018): pp. 86-102; Anna Song, “The Task of an Activist: ‘Imagined Communities’ and the ‘Comfort Women’ Campaigns in Australia”, in Asian Studies Review 37.3 (2013): p. 388; Jungmin Seo “Politics of Memory in Korea and China: Remembering the Comfort Women and the Nanjing Massacre, in New Political Science 30.3 (2008): p. 374.
9 Carol Gluck, “Operations of Memory: ‘Comfort Women’ and the World”, in Sheila Miyoshi Jager and Rana Mitter (eds.), Ruptured Histories: War, Memory, and the Post-Cold War in Asia, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007, pp. 47-77.
10 Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010.
11 McCarthy and Hasunuma speak of a “universalizing discourse” that the activists tap into. See, McCarthy and Hasunuma, “Coalition building and mobilization”, p. 2.
12 For the purpose of this article, I will adopt a broad definition that conceptualizes diasporas as communities that dispersed to one or more countries, where they actively “maintain [a] collective identity, cultural beliefs and practices [along with] language, or religion”, and where they “preserve and maintain a variety of explicit ties with their original home country”, See, Inbom Choi, “Korean Diaspora in the Making. Its Current Status and Impact on the Korean Economy”, in C. Fred Bergsten and Inbom Choi (eds.), The Korean Diaspora in the World Economy, Washington D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 2003, p. 11.
13 Ibid.
14 Ministry of Foreign Affairs Republic of Korea, “Overseas Koreans”, 2019, 17 March 2020.
15 Fiona B. Adamson, “The Growing Importance of Diaspora Politics”, in Current History (November 2016): p. 291-297.
16 Ibid.
17 Changzoo Song, “Engaging the diaspora in an era of transnationalism”, in World of Labor 64 (2014): pp. 3, 7.
18 Ibid, p. 5.
19 Ibid., p. 4.
20 Adamson, “The Growing Importance of Diaspora Politics”, p. 297.
21 Ien Ang, “Together-in-Difference: Beyond Diaspora, into Hybridity”, in Asian Studies Review 27.2. (2003): p. 142/143. Tölölyan even speaks of a ‘transnational moment’ that diasporas have entered that make their cross-border activism into the anti-thesis of the modern nationstate. (See, idem, p. 143.)
22 Pamela Thoma, “‘Such an Unthinkable Thing’: Asian American Transnational Feminism and the ”Comfort Women' of World War II Conference“, in Margaret Stetz and Bonnie B.C. Oh (eds.), Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War II, London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 101-127.
23 EunSook Lee and Hahrie Han, “Engaging Korean Americans in Civic Activism”, in Rachel Miyung Joo and Shelley Sang-Hee Lee (eds.), A Companion to Korean American Studies, Leiden: Brill, 2016, p. 617.
24 Shelley Sang-Hee Lee, “After the Watershed: Korean Migration Since 1965”, in Rachel Miyung Joo and Shelley Sang-Hee Lee (eds.), A Companion to Korean American Studies, Leiden: Brill, 2016, p. 37.
25 Kyeyoung Park, “Use and Abuse of Race and Culture: Black-Korean1 Tension in America”, in American Anthropologist, New Series, 98.3 (1996): pp. 492-499; Elaine H. Kim, “Home Is Where the Han Is: A Korean American Perspective on the Los Angeles Upheavals”, in Social Justice 20.1/2 (Spring-Summer 1993): pp. 1-21.
26 Ann H. Kim, “Korean Ethnicity and Asian American Panethnictiy”, in Rachel Miyung Joo and Shelley Sang-Hee Lee (eds.), A Companion to Korean American Studies, Leiden: Brill, 2016, p. 350.
27 Lee, “After the Watershed”, p. 35.
28 Karen L. Ishizuka, Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties, London: Verso, 2016, p. 22.
29 Lee and Han, “Engaging Korean Americans in Civic Activism”, pp. 618f.
30 Pei-te Lien and Rhoanne Esteban, “Korean Americans and Electoral Politics”, in Rachel Miyung Joo and Shelley Sang-Hee Lee (eds.), A Companion to Korean American Studies, Leiden: Brill, 2016, p. 585, 587.
31 The organization is now called the Korean American Civil Empowerment (KACE)
32 McCarthy and Hasunuma, “Coalition building and mobilization”, p. 8-9.
33 Jihwan Yoon, The Korean Comfort Women Commemorative Campaign: Role of Intersectionality, Symbolic Space, and Transnational Circulation in Politics of Memory and Human Rights, PhD thesis (Tennessee) 2017, p. 157.
34 McCarthy and Hasunuma, “Coalition building and mobilization”, p. 8.
35 Ibid., p. 9-10.
36 Both quotations from: H.Res.121 — 110th Congress (2007-2008), accessed on 30 July 2019.
37 Alexis Dudden and H.R. 759, “US Congressional Resolution Calls on Japan to Accept Responsibility for Wartime Comfort Women”, in The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus 4.4 (2006): p. 1.
38 Ibid.
39 Pei-te Lien and Rhoanne Esteban, “Korean Americans and Electoral Politics”, in Rachel Miyung Joo and Shelley Sang-Hee Lee (eds.), A Companion to Korean American Studies, Leiden: Brill, 2016, p. 592-597.
40 Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues, Inc., “WCCW History”, accessed on 1 May 2020; Agnes Constante, “Who are the ‘comfort women’, and why are U.S.-based memorials for them controversial?”, NBC News, accessed on 7 May 2019.
41 Donald Teruo Hata and Nadine Ishitani Hata, Japanese Americans and World War II: Mass Removal, Imprisonment, and Redress, 4th ed., Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
42 A prominent article in the New York Times triggered a host of letters to the newspaper in support of keeping the memorial in Palisades Park and protecting the ‘right to free speech’, free from foreign government interference. See, Kirk Semple, “In New Jersey, Memorial for ‘Comfort Women’ Deepens Old Animosity”, New York Times, 18 May 2012, accessed on 21 February 2014; Dennis P. Halpin, “Palisades Park and the First Amendment”, US Korea Institute at SAIS: Policy Brief, 29 May 2013.
43 qtd. in Semple, “In New Jersey, Memorial for ‘Comfort Women’ Deepens Old Animosity”.
44 Yamaguchi, “The ‘History Wars’ and the ‘Comfort Women’ Issue”, p. 6.
45 Ibid., pp. 6ff.
46 See McCarthy and Hasunuma's argument about “universal messaging” and “coalition building across ethnicities”: “Coalition building and mobilization”, p. 12.
47 Arun Rath, “The Armenian Diaspora Remembers and Mourns”, NPR, 25 April 2015, accessed on 20 April 2020.
48 Thomas J. Ward and William D. Lay, Park Statue Politics: World War II Comfort Women Memorials in the United States, Bristol: E-International Relations Publ., 2019, p. 58.
49 qtd. in: “Glendale Mayor Regrets Installing Comfort Women Statue”, The Rafu Shimpo: Los Angeles Japanese Daily News, 12 November 2013, 2 April 2020.
50 qtd. in: Rafu Staff Report, “Glendale Approves Comfort Women Memorial”, The Rafu Shimpo: Los Angeles Japanese Daily News, 15 July 2013, accessed on 2 April 2020.
51 McCarthy and Hasunuma, “Coalition building and mobilization”, p. 10.
52 Yamaguchi, “The ‘History Wars’ and the ‘Comfort Women’ Issue”, p. 9.
53 Justice for Comfort Women, “Glendale Mayor to Visit Busan to Look at Comfort Women Statue”, Justice for Comfort Women, 5 March 2019, accessed on 8 June 2019.
54 Rana Mitter, “Can Japan Lay Its ‘Comfort Women’ Ghosts to Rest?”, South China Morning Post, 14 January 2017, accessed on 15 January 2017.
55 Justice for Comfort Women, “Glendale Mayor to Visit Busan to Look at Comfort Women Statue”, Justice for Comfort Women, 5 March 2019, accessed on 8 June 2019.
56 Edward Vickers, “Commemorating Comfort Women Beyond Korea: the Chinese Case,” in Mark R. Frost, Daniel Schumacher and Edward Vickers (eds.), Remembering Asia's World War Two. London and New York: Routledge, 2019, pp. 174-207.
57 This refers to how the CWJC have been framing their efforts themselves. See, “Remembrance and Resistance: ‘Comfort Women’ and the US Pivot to Asia”, History, Blog post, 27 June 2016, 16 March 2020.
58 This reflects the CWJC's mission statement: Comfort Women Justice Coalition, “About CWJC”, Blog post, 2017, 16 March 2020.
59 Dana Y. Nakano, “An Interlocking Panethnicity: The Negotiation of Multiple Identities Among Asian American Social Movement Leaders”, in Sociological Perspectives 56.4 (2013): p. 579.
60 Ann H. Kim, “Korean Ethnicity and Asian American Panethnictiy”, in Rachel Miyung Joo and Shelley Sang-Hee Lee (eds.), A Companion to Korean American Studies, Leiden: Brill, 2016, p. 337.
61 Nakano, “An Interlocking Panethnicity”, p. 591.
62 Interview II by Edward Vickers with Julie Tang and Lilian Sing, co-founders of the Comfort Women Justice Coalition, and Phyllis Kim, Board member of Korean American Forum of California, unpublished, San Francisco, 20 April 2019.
63 Interview I by Edward Vickers with Julie Tang, co-founder of the Comfort Women Justice Coalition, Michael Wong, Board member of Veterans for Peace, and Phyllis Kim, Board member of Korean American Forum of California, unpublished, San Francisco, 20 April 2019.
64 Interview II by Edward Vickers, 20 April 2019.
65 Interview I by Edward Vickers, 20 April 2019.
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid.
69 Although the exhibition features endorsements not only from the PRC Consul in San Francisco, but also from the local representative of the Republic of China on Taiwan (which in 2015 still had a Kuomintang president).
70 Interview I by Edward Vickers, 20 April 2019.
71 Carol Gluck, “Memory in Hypernationalist Times: The Comfort Women as Traveling Trope”, global-e, 2 May 2019, 7 April 2020.
72 Interview II by Edward Vickers, 20 April 2019.
73 Norimatsu, “Canada's ‘History Wars‘”, pp. 1-18
74 Gluck, “Memory in Hypernationalist Times”; Hasunuma and McCarthy, “Creating a Collective Memory of the Comfort Women in the USA”, p. 147; Maki Kimura, Unfolding the ‘Comfort Women’ Debates: Modernity, Violence, Women's Voices, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2016, p. 219. One of the earliest organisations that advocated for wartime reparation was the Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues Inc., founded in 1992.
75 Both quotes in Kimura, Unfolding the ‘Comfort Women’ Debates, p. 234.
76 Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, New York: Basic Books, 1997.
77 Interview I by Edward Vickers, 20 April 2019.
78 Ibid.
79 Interview II by Edward Vickers, 20 April 2019.
80 Interview I by Edward Vickers, 20 April 2019.
81 Liang Meichen, “Nanjing Massacre Remembered”, China Daily, 11 December 2017, 7 April 2020.
82 Ibid.
83 Interview I by Edward Vickers, 20 April 2019.
84 California Department of Education, History-Social Science Framework For California Public Schools: Kindergarten Through Grade Twelve, California Department of Education, 2017, p.353. That US education has also become an arena where memories such as these are actively contested is widely known and has attracted comment from many other scholars. See, for example, Hasunuma and McCarthy, “Creating a Collective Memory of the Comfort Women in the USA”, p. 156.
85 California Department of Education, “Superintendent Torlakson Announces Approval of History-Social Science Framework”, News Release, 14 July 2016, 10 March 2020.
86 Ward and Lay, Park Statue Politics, p. 63.
87 Edward Vickers, “Japan's Pyrrhic Victory Over ‘Comfort Women’ Commemoration”, The Diplomat, 25 November 2017, accessed on 30 November 2017.
88 Japan Times, “San Francisco calls Osaka's decision to end sister-city ties over ‘comfort women’ statue ‘unfortunate’”, 4 October 2018, accessed on 1 July 2019. It should, however, be noted that the immediate cause of the break in relations was San Francisco's refusal to accede to a demand from Osaka that the inscription on the memorial refer to ‘tens of thousands’ rather than ‘hundreds of thousands’ of victims. In the end, then, the dispute degenerated into a ‘numbers game’ (Interview I by Edward Vickers, 20 April 2019).
89 In 1953, the Korean War had ended which had seen massive American troops commitment that would result in the US military continuing to maintain a powerful presence until this day.
90 Marek Furmankiewicz, “Town-twinning as a factor generating international flows of goods and people – the example of Poland”, in Belgeo 1.2 (2005): p. 146; Tüzin Baycan-Levent, Seda Kundak and Aliye Ahu Gülümser, “City-to-city linkages in a mobile society: the role of urban networks in Eurocities and Sister Cities”, in International Journal of Sciences Technology and Management 10.1 (2008): p. 85, 87f.
91 From the organisation's mission statement. See, Sister Cities International (SCI), “Connect Globally. Thrive Locally”, 14 March 2020.
92 Furmankiewicz, “Town-twinning as a factor generating international flows of goods and people”, p. 146.
93 Justin McCurry, “Osaka drops San Francisco as a sister city over ‘comfort women’ statue,”, The Guardian, 4 October 2018, accessed on 6 April 2020.
94 Virginie Mamadouh, “Town Twinning: Over the (ir)relevance of the paradiplomacy of Europan cities”, in Virginie Mamadouh and Anne van Wageningen (eds.), Urban Europe: Fifty Tales of the City, Amsterdam: AUP, 2016, pp. 339-346.
95 Fiona B. Adamson, “The Growing Importance of Diaspora Politics”, in Current History (November 2016): p. 291-297.
96 Tomo Hirai, “Osaka mayor terminates sister city ties with S.F. over ‘comfort women’ memorial”, Nichi Bei Weekly, 11 October 2018, 14 March 2020.
97 Yoon, The Korean Comfort Women Commemorative Campaign, p. 157; McCarthy and Hasunuma, “Coalition building and mobilization”, p. 2.
98 Furmankiewicz, “Town-twinning as a factor generating international flows of goods and people”, p. 146; Baycan-Levent, Kundak and Gülümser, “City-to-city linkages in a mobile society”, p. 85, 87f.
99 Gluck, “Memory in Hypernationalist Times”.
100 For similar questions being raised in a broader context, see also Joohee Kim, “Going transnational? A feminist view of ”comfort women“ memorials”, in Asian Journal of Women's Studies 26.3 (2020): pp. 397-409; Mark R. Frost, Edward Vickers and Daniel Schumacher, Introduction: Locating Asia's War Memory Boom: a new temporal and geopolitical perspective“, in idem (eds.), Remembering Asia's World War Two, London: Routledge, 2019, pp. 1-24.
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