[Editorial – Korea Human Rights News]

Postwar Order and Racial Politics: Toward an International Forum on the “Comfort Women” Narrative

The international order after World War II was reshaped through the inertia of “memory.” But this memory was neither fair nor universal—as evidenced in the Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials. While Nazi Germany’s Holocaust was elevated to a universal ethical imperative remembered and reflected upon by all humanity, the atrocities of Japanese imperialism were fixed as racialized barbarism and otherness.

At the forefront of this politics of memory lies the issue of the Japanese military’s “comfort women.”

– Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan: A Double Standard for War Criminal States

The postwar international community treated the two war criminal states—Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan—differently. Germany was positioned as a fascist evil rooted in Europe, and was considered to have taken responsibility through internal reflection and external reconciliation. In contrast, Japan was stigmatized as non-Western “civilized barbarism,” and its image as a war criminal became entangled with racial prejudice.

The issue of the Japanese military’s “comfort women” was thus transformed into a uniquely “Japanese” atrocity. This reflected the racially biased framework of human rights and war crimes propagated by the United States, the United Nations, and other international bodies at the time—one that excluded the sexual commerce involving Nazi and Allied troops from scrutiny.

– The Globalization of the Comfort Women Narrative and the Politics of Race

Korean civil society groups, including the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance (Previous Women's Workforce Countermeasures Council), globalized the comfort women issue as a matter of women’s human rights. In this process, evangelical moralism fused with Third World feminism, reducing the women to the symbolic figure of the “sex slave.” This became both a moral indictment of East Asian imperialism by the West and a reflection of the West’s own redemption-seeking “ideology of purity.”

In various Asian countries, individuals with experiences of wartime sexual violence began to identify with the comfort women narrative and joined the globalization effort led by the Korean Council. However, this movement often simplified or distorted the historical realities and contexts of each nation.

– South Korea’s Role and the Power of Memory

South Korea positioned itself as the global “curator of memory” for the comfort women narrative. In doing so, a singular “victim” discourse became dominant, while the complex lives and experiences of the women—many of whom were sex workers—were erased from public memory.

Meanwhile, within South Korea, state-centered feminists—particularly those aligned with radical feminism—instrumentalized the comfort women issue for political purposes, leading to the enforcement of archaic sexual norms in modern law and institutions, including the Special Law on Prostitution.

– Decolonizing Memory, Confronting Racism, and Convening a Global Forum

Now is the time to look beyond the issue of Japanese imperial responsibility and confront the racial politics and memory structures embedded in the postwar international order. When memory becomes a form of power, the voices of actual victims are often distorted or instrumentalized.

South Korea must move away from a politicized “civilization of memory” toward a humanistic “decolonization of memory,” restoring the dignity of victims and transcending racialized frameworks. A truly global forum—bridging East and West—must be organized to address the contradictions of racial politics in postwar historical discourse. The globalization of the comfort women narrative must come to an end.

July 24, 2025