¹ Tim Winter, “Heritage diplomacy”, International Journal of Heritage Studies (2015), 21:10, 997-1015, DOI: 10.1080/13527258.2015.1041412

² See, for example, Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Mariner Books, 2000); David Rieff, In Praise of Forgetting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016); and Lea David, The Past Can't Heal Us (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

³ Carol Gluck, “Operations of Memory: ‘Comfort Women’ and the World,” in Jager and Mitter (eds), Ruptured Histories: War, Memory and the Post-Cold War in Asia (Harvard University Press, 2007), 47-77.

⁴ 城田 すずこ(Shirota Suzuko), 「マリアの賛歌」(In Praise of Mary). 東京：日本基督教団出版局 (Tokyo: Board of Publications of the United Church of Christ in Japan).

⁵ Keith Howard (ed.), True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women: Testimonies (London: Cassel, 1995).

⁶ In the case of the Philippines, women were also increasingly trafficked to Japan from the 1970s as Japayuki, travelling on ‘entertainers’ visas, but mostly working in the illegal but widely tolerated domestic commercial sex industry. See Mark Maca, ‘Education Governance Reform and Skills Certification of Filipino Entertainment Workers Exported to Japan (1994-2004),‘ International Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies (2019), 15/2, 89-115.

⁷ Mark Maca, “Education, Governance Reforms and Skills Certification of Filipino Entertainment Workers Exported to Japan, 1994-2004,” International Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2019), 89-115. DOI: 10.21315/ijaps2019.15.2.4

⁸ Bill Mihalopoulos, “The making of prostitutes: the Karayuki-san,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 25:1 (1993), 41-56, DOI: 10.1080/14672715.1993.10408345, 41.

⁹ Yoshimi Yoshiaki (trans. Suzanne O'Brien), Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Yuki Tanaka, Japan's Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II (London: Routledge, 2002); C. Sarah Soh, The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

¹⁰ Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, “Comfort Women: Beyond Litigious Feminism” (review essay), Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 58, No. 2 (2003), 223-258, p. 249.

¹¹ Soh, op. cit.

¹² Wakabayashi, op. cit., 223.

¹³ Ueno Chizuko 上野千鶴子, “Jendashi to rekishigaku no hoho” (ジェンダー史と歴史学の方法), in Shinpojiumu: Nashonarizumu to “ianfu” mondai (シンポジウム：ナショナリズムと「慰安婦」問題), ed. Nihon no Senso Sekinin Senta (日本の戦争責任センター) (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1998), cited in Wakabayashi, op. cit., 238.

¹⁴ This shift can be evidenced by the number of researchers who have made extensive use of oral testimony in their work on comfort women. These include Yoshimi Yoshiaki's work (cited above); Dai Sil Kim-Gibson in her 1998 documentary film, Silence Broken; and Peipei Qiu (with Su Zhiliang and Chen Lifei) in Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan's sex slaves (Oxford: OUP, 2013). But it is important to remember that comfort women activism has never reflected any crude gender divide: as Field and Watanabe emphasize, men (former soldiers and scholars) as well as women played an important role as witnesses in the 2000 Women's Tribunal in Tokyo. See Mina Watanabe and Norma Field, “Reopening the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, Fifty-Four Years Later: As Recorded in the Documentary Video, Breaking the History of Silence,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, February 15, 2021 Vol. 19, Iss. 4, No. 1

¹⁵ This is discussed by Yoshida Takashi, “A Battle over History: The Nanjing Massacre in Japan,” in Joshua Fogel (ed.) The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 70-132.

¹⁶ See, for example, the work of the popular rightwing manga artist, Kobayashi Yoshinori (小林よしのり), most recently his publication 慰安婦 (Comfort Women). 東京：幻冬舎 (Tokyo: Gentosha, 2020): 249-264.

¹⁷ For both, Su Zhiliang (a contributor to this special issue) served as an advisor.

¹⁸ See Vickers 2019, op. cit. for a fuller discussion of Chinese comfort women exhibitions.

¹⁹ Jan Assmann, “Communicative and Cultural Memory,” in Peter Meusburger, Michael Heffernan, Edgar Wunder, Cultural Memories. The Geographical Point of View (Knowledge and Space 4) Dordrecht; Heidelberg; London; New York 2011, S. 15-27; p. 18.

²⁰ Ibid., 17.

²¹ He is vague, however, as to the distinction (if any) between this “cultural memory” and history as a scholarly discipline.

²² Typically state to state arrangements which Japan did not acknowledge as war reparations, but locally touted as such, in the form of aid, development loans, or in Malaysia's case naval ships.

²³ When a WARMAP conference was held at the National Museum of Singapore in late 2017, approval was withheld for an invitation to Su Zhiliang to attend as a keynote speaker. This conference coincided with the controversy over the Voices of the Comfort Women application to the UNESCO MOW Register.

²⁴ In 2018, the Philippines government, at the request of the Japanese Embassy, ordered the removal of a comfort woman statue that had been erected on the coastal path along Manila Bay.

²⁵ Ran Zwigenberg, Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

²⁶ Edward Vickers, “Remembering and Forgetting War and Occupation in the People's Republic of China, Hong Kong and Taiwan,” in Patrick Finney (ed.), Remembering the Second World War (London and New York, Routledge, 2018), 52-54.

²⁷ Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans. (London: Penguin Random House, 2019), 265. Originally, Chinese-American activists in San Francisco began campaigning for their local Nanjing Massacre memorial at around the same time as the Californian writer, Iris Chang sought to establish the global status of the Nanjing Massacre as China's “Forgotten Holocaust”.

²⁸ Karishma Luthria, Liam Thorne and Annie Zhang, “Academic Boycott of Caroline Norma at USyd Conference”, Honi Soit. (2018) (accessed December 1, 2020).

²⁹ Efforts noted in Dezaki's documentary film, Shusenjo. See also Esther Brito Ruiz, “Before #Me Too, There Were The ‘Comfort Women‘”, The Diplomat. (January 10, 2020). Accessed December 8, 2020.

³⁰ J. Mark Ramseyer, “Contracting for sex in the Pacific War,” International Review of Law and Economics, 65 (2021, 1. (This paper has been removed from the journal website, but the original is still accessible via a link in Tessa Morris-Suzuki's “Study Guide” in the supplementary special issue of Japan Focus, “Academic Integrity at Stake: the Ramseyer Article”.)

³¹ As Morris-Suzuki points out in her paper, Ramseyer ignores sources pertaining to China, the main arena of conflict involving Japanese troops. Su Zhiliang's paper for this special issue provides evidence of official Japanese involvement (denied by Ramseyer) in recruiting women for “comfort stations” in China; Morris-Suzuki cites further evidence of this kind.

³² Ibid., 4.

³³ See the supplement to this special issue, “Academic Integrity at Stake: the Ramseyer Article”.

³⁴ Stanislav Andreski, Social Sciences as Sorcery. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974).

³⁵ See Dolan's powerful public reflections on plans to commemorate Ireland's decade of war and revolution (1912-23). Also see Dolan's talk.

³⁶ Novick, op. cit., 8; Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010).

³⁷ Novick, op. cit., 14.

³⁸ Neiman, op. cit., 263.

³⁹ Tae-jun Kang, “South Korean NGO's role in supporting ‘comfort women’ questioned”, The Diplomat, (May 13, 2020), (accessed December 7, 2020).

⁴⁰ Wakabayashi, op. cit., 250.

⁴¹ Besides problems of anachronism and historical distortion, and further stoking of Japanese defensiveness, a reductionist commemorative approach also risks unnecessarily raising the stakes for UNESCO in determining whether, or how, to recognize the “universal significance” of this issue. Persuading UNESCO to recognize the comfort women system may be a worthwhile enterprise, but both the success of the campaign, and its symbolic value, will likely depend on how this phenomenon is contextualized in relation to global histories of sexual slavery. Emphasizing how the patriarchal societies of 20th-century East Asia were jointly, if unequally, responsible for the oppression and sexual exploitation of many of their most vulnerable women offers a way forward here. The symbolism of the comfort women system then derives from its status as an extreme manifestation of a much wider pathology, extending well beyond the spatial and temporal boundaries of wartime Japan.