¹ Paul Morris, Naoko Shimazu and Edward Vickers (eds), Imagining Japan in Post-war East Asia: identity politics, schooling and popular culture. (New York and London: Routledge, 2013).

² Mark Frost, Daniel Schumacher and Edward Vickers (eds), Remembering Asia's World War Two. (New York and London: Routledge, 2019). Both this network and the one that resulted in the Morris et al volume were funded by the Leverhulme Trust (UK). See here for more on the WARMAP network.

³ Edward Vickers, “Commemorating ‘Comfort Women’ Beyond Korea: the Chinese case,” in Frost et al (eds), Remembering Asia's World War Two. (New York and London: Routledge, 2019): 174-207.

⁴ Vickers, ibid.

⁵ MGIEP, Rethinking Schooling for the 21^st Century: The State of Education for Peace, Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship in Asia. (New Delhi: UNESCO-MGIEP, 2017a).

⁶ Jerry Muller, The Tyranny of Metrics. (Princeton University Press, 2018). With Yoko Mochizuki, I am currently editing a special issue of the journal Compare analysing the politics of UNESCO's education-related work (publication due in 2022).

⁷ MGIEP, op. cit. (2017a).

⁸ See, for example, MGIEP, The Blue Dot, Issue 6. (New Delhi: UNESCO-MGIEP, 2017b).

⁹ Yoko Mochizuki, ‘Introduction,‘ in J. Singer, T. Gannon, F. Noguchi and Y. Mochizuki (eds), Education for Sustainability in Japan: Fostering resilient communities after the triple disaster. (New York and London: Routledge, 2017): 1-24.

¹⁰ Ran Zwigenberg, Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture. (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

¹¹ Ibid., p. 52.

¹² Ray Edmondson, Memory of the World: General Guidelines to Safeguard Documentary Heritage. (Paris: UNESCO Information Society Division, 2002).

¹³ Ryoko Nakano, “A failure of global documentary heritage? UNESCO's ‘memory of the world’ and heritage dissonance in East Asia,” Contemporary Politics 24.4, 1-16 (2018): 6.

¹⁴ Shu-Mei Huang and Hyun-Kyung Lee, “Difficult heritage diplomacy? Re-articulating places of pain and shame as world heritage in northeast Asia,” International Journal of Heritage Studies, 25/2 (2019): 143-159 (147).

¹⁵ Tim Winter, “Heritage Diplomacy,” International Journal of Heritage Studies, 21/10 (2015): 997-1015.

¹⁶ Tomomi Yamaguchi, “The ‘Japan is Great!‘ Boom, Historical Revisionism, and the Government,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 15/6, No. 3 (2017).

¹⁷ Ibid., p. 3.

¹⁸ Quoted in Ibid.

¹⁹ WHC (World Heritage Centre), “Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining,” World Heritage List. UNESCO: WHC (2018). (accessed November 1, 2018).

²⁰ At a Ministry of Foreign Affairs press conference held on July 5, 2015, to mark UNESCO inscription of the ‘Sites of the Meiji Industrial Revolution’, Foreign Minister Kishida Fumio insisted that the expression ‘forced to work’ (to which Japan had agreed) did not imply the use of ‘forced labor’ (accessed February 9, 2021). For more on the controversy surrounding this World Heritage inscription, see Edward Boyle, “Borders of Memory: Affirmation and Contestation over Japan's Heritage,” Japan Forum, Vol. 31 (2019): 293-312. In my own visits to sites or exhibitions relating to this World Heritage bid (e.g. in Kita-Kyushu and Hagi), I have found no reference to Japanese colonialism or the deployment of Korean or Chinese forced labour.

²¹ Nakano, op. cit., p. 11.

²² Rana Mitter, China's War with Japan: 1937-1945. London: Allen Lane (2013): 135.

²³ Maizuru City, “Nomination Form International Memory of the World Register Return to Maizuru Port—Documents Related to the Internment and Repatriation Experiences of Japanese (1945-1956)”. (2014).

²⁴ Associated Press, “Russia Slams Japan for ‘violently distorting’ UNESCO dossier on soldiers held in Second World War,” South China Morning Post. 23rd October, 2014 (accessed March 14, 2020).

²⁵ See Jeff Kingston, “Obama's Pivot to Asia: Rebalance and Reassure,” in The Japan Times, May 3, 2014: (accessed March 24, 2020).

²⁶ The reporting of the agreement by the Japanese press emphasized the removal of the statue as a key objective. See, for example, the Asahi Shinbun report: 日本の１０億円拠出「少女像移転が前提」慰安婦問題 (“Comfort Women Issue: Disbursement of One Billion Yen ‘conditional on removal of the statue of the young girl‘”), December 30, 2015, (accessed March 15, 2020).

²⁷ For discussion of the historical context for this agreement, see Yoshimi Yoshiaki, “The Kono Statement: Its historical significance and limitations,” in Nishino Rumiko, Kim Puja and Onozawa Akane (eds), Denying the Comfort Women: The Japanese State's Assault on Historical Truth. (London and New York: Routledge, 2019): Chapter 1.

²⁸ Heisoo Shin recounts her experience in attempting to pilot this application through UNESCO in her paper for this special issue. See also Edward Vickers 2017, “Japan's Pyrrhic Victory over ‘Comfort Women’ Commemoration,” The Diplomat, November 25, 2017, (accessed March 15, 2020).

²⁹ The Nippon Kaigi was founded in 1997 as part of a right-wing backlash against the ‘apology diplomacy’ of Japanese governments during the early 1990s, which besides issuing official statements of remorse over the ‘comfort women’ issue, had also ensured that this and other wartime atrocities were discussed (albeit briefly) in school history textbooks. For more on the Nippon Kaigi, see Tawara Yoshifumi, “What is the Aim of the Nippon Kaigi, the Ultra-Right Japanese Organisation that Supports Abe's Japan Administration,” in The Asia-Pacific Journal – Japan Focus, Vol. 15/21, No. 1 (2017) (accessed March 24, 2020).

³⁰ Yuka Yamaguchi, 歴史実践としての朝鮮通信使関連文化事業 ―韓国側の取り組みを中心に ― (The Cultural Project of the Chosen Tsushinshi as a Historical Practice – from the perspective of the Korean side), Unpublished MA Dissertation. (Kyushu University: Faculty of Integrated Science for Global Society, 2018).

³¹ Busan Cultural Foundation (ROK) and Liaison Council of All Places Associated with Chosen Tsushima (Japan), Nomination Form: International Memory of the World Register. (2016).

³² Lindsey DeWitt, “Report on the 2017 Inscription of ‘Sacred Island of Okinoshima and Associated Sites in the Munakata Region’ as a UNESCO World Heritage Site,” Journal of Asian Humanities at Kyushu University, Volume 3 (2018): 135-140.

³³ Ibid., p. 139.

³⁴ Shu-Mei Huang and Hyun-Kyung Lee (2019), op. cit.

³⁵ Ito is widely revered in Japan as a leading “moderniser” of the Meiji period, and is celebrated in exhibitions related to Japan's “Meiji Industrial Revolution” World Heritage Sites, for example in Hagi in his native Yamaguchi region.

³⁶ Ibid., p. 11

³⁷ Ibid., 9.

³⁸ However, this was already changing under the Park Geun-hye presidency, when exhibits at the site began increasingly to acknowledge the incarceration of political prisoners there during the period of military rule. Such coverage has been further expanded since the election in 2017 of President Moon Jae-in, as I found on a visit to the prison in late 2019. But the original main exhibition has been retained, with its overwhelming focus on independence activists during the Japanese colonial period.

³⁹ Ibid., 12.

⁴⁰ In this section, I draw on interviews conducted with Su Zhiliang in August 26, 2015; March 2, 2016; September 2, 2016; and November 26, 2016.

⁴¹ Vickers, op cit. (2019): 183-187.

⁴² Eleni Christodoulou, ‘Deconstructing resistance towards textbook revisions: the securitisation of history textbooks and the Cyprus conflict,‘ Global Change, Peace and Security (published online 2018)

⁴³ Vickers, op. cit. (2019): 190-196.

⁴⁴ For more details on both exhibitions, see ibid.

⁴⁵ International Committee, Voices of the ‘Comfort Women’: Their Resonance and Amplification. Proceedings of the International Conference on the ‘Comfort Women’ Documents: Towards UNESCO Documentary Heritage. (Seoul: International Committee for Joint Nomination of Documents on the Japanese Military ‘Comfort Women’ to UNESCO Memory of the World Register, 2016).

⁴⁶ Sarah Soh (Soh Chunghee), The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan. (Chicago University Press, 2008).

⁴⁷ Revisionists in Japan often base their case on a conflation of peacetime state-controlled prostitution and the wartime ‘comfort women’ system, with some dismissing ‘Western’ (and Korean) criticism of prostitution per se as ‘Christian’ cultural imperialism; for a notable example, see the latest manga by the prominent rightist, Kobayashi Yoshinori (小林よしのり), 慰安婦 (Comfort Women). 東京：幻冬舎 (Tokyo: Gentosha, 2020): 249-264. However, this both downplays the extent of the brutality and coercion associated with the latter, and assumes that the system of peacetime prostitution was itself non-coercive, whereas in fact it was underpinned by debt slavery. And while Japan reluctantly acceded in 1925 to an international anti-trafficking convention, having inserted an ‘exception allowing women over 18 to be indentured for prostitution,’ it appears that the vast majority of Chinese and Korean ‘comfort women’ were recruited as minors. See Nishino et al, (eds), op. cit. Also the review of that volume by Jeff Kingston in Monumenta Nipponica 74:1 (2019): 150-157.

⁴⁸ State-Managed Sex: The Silence of Japanese ‘comfort women‘ (国家に管理された性 ：日本人「慰安婦」の沈黙). (Women's Active Museum of War and Peace, Tokyo, 2018).

⁴⁹ See Heather Barr, “China's Bride Trafficking Problem,” The Diplomat (October 30, 2019), (accessed December 23, 2020).

⁵⁰ Caroline Norma, “Abolitionism in the history of the transnational ‘Justice for Comfort Women’ movement in Japan and South Korea”, in Patrick Finney, ed. Remembering the Second World War (London and New York: Routledge, 2017): 115-139.

⁵¹ Ibid.: 135.

⁵² Certainly this issue is addressed in publications for overseas consumption: see Qiu Peipei with Su Zhiliang and Chen Lifei, Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan's Sex Slaves. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). But as his translated paper for this special issue shows, this kind of broader contextualisation appears more difficult in presentations addressed to a Chinese audience.

⁵³ The museum at SNU, however, does have an audio-visual room where visitors can view the documentary film Thirty-two, which focuses on the poverty and discrimination suffered by one former ‘comfort woman’ and her son.

⁵⁴ See Christian Herriot and Noel Castelino, Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai: A Social History, 1849-1949. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Also Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-century Shanghai. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

⁵⁵ See Jiang Lei and Edward Vickers, ‘Constructing Civic Identity in Shanghai's Museums: Heritage, Ideology and Local Distinctiveness,‘ in Vickers and Kumar (eds), Constructing Modern Asian Citizenship. (London and New York: Routledge, 2015): 217-239.

⁵⁶ Soh, op. cit.: Chapter 6.

⁵⁷ Although sometimes, as Frost and I notice in our introductory essay in this special issue, the comparative perspective can veer off in somewhat dubious directions (as with the implicit pairing of Anne Frank and the comfort women).