‘Comfort women must fall’? Japanese governmental responses to ‘comfort women’ statues around the world

Abstract

This article examines Japanese governmental responses to memorial statues dedicated to ‘comfort women’ – women across the Asia-Pacific whom the Japanese military forced into conditions now recognised as sexual slavery before and during World War Two. This article discusses four cases around the world in which Japanese government officials have demanded the removal of comfort women statues: 1) Glendale, California; 2) San Francisco; 3) Manila; and 4) Berlin. The global expansion of comfort women memorialisation is significant to contemporary statue politics and crises of memory in three ways. Firstly, East Asian diasporas have become important actors in the remembrance of Japanese colonialism and the Asia-Pacific War outside East Asia. Secondly, these statues constitute attempts by diasporas to recover and reclaim a traumatic past through material culture. Thirdly, despite the global geographical reach of comfort women memory activism, neither nationalism nor the power of the nation-state have declined in today’s transnational world.

Mnemonic reciprocity: Activating Sydney’s Comfort Women statue for decolonial memory

“…Ruff O'Herne soon became the face of the movement in Australia, giving interviews on television and, in the following decade, speaking at tours organised by Amnesty International Australia and FCWA, which was founded in 2007 by two feminist Korean-Australian activists. The feminist politics of 'comfort women' activism has also been evident in the Korean-American diaspora (Hasunuma and McCarthy, 2019;Ushiyama, 2021Ushiyama, : 1258. Advocating for diasporic activism on behalf of the 'comfort women', FCWA (2011) strategically publicised 'comfort women' testimonies to spur the Korean diasporic community into action, and was later involved in bringing the Comfort Women statue to Sydney.…”

“…The mnemonic reciprocity that is activated around the Peace Statue thereby engenders a doubly decolonial memory. The Comfort Women statue activates the memory of Japan's imperialism in South Korea and beyond -in East Asia and the Asia-Pacific -in the semi-public locality of suburban Sydney (Ushiyama, 2021(Ushiyama, : 1255. In addition, when articulated critically, the Peace Statue can help to decolonise memory in Australia, contributing to intimate, small-scale acts of a reconciliatory nature.…”

“…In the past several years, a growing body of scholarship has explored the Comfort Women issue through the lens of national, regional and transnational memory politics. We identify three dominant lines of enquiry: first, researchers have explored the changing conditions in public memory that have enabled the memory of the Comfort Women to travel transnationally (Gluck, 2021; Mackie and Crozier-De Rosa, 2019); second, they have investigated the divisive, nationalist memory wars between South Korea and Japan, including how these impact on diasporic communities (Morris-Suzuki, 2018; Ushiyama, 2021) and how they are sometimes fuelled by international political organisations such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Lee et al, 2023: 906); third, they have tracked how the Comfort Women are commemorated, especially by Korean-Americans in the diaspora (Hasunuma and McCarthy, 2019; Ward and Lay, 2016). At roughly the same time as the Comfort Women issue was gaining traction in memory studies – valued as a new paradigm of global memory with Asian rather than European roots (Lim and Rosenhaft, 2021: 4) – memory activism was emerging as a vital new research focus.…”

Aum Shinrikyo and religious terrorism in Japanese collective memory

“…As those with first-hand experiences of the Second World War inevitably pass away, these issues have become, first and foremost, about inter generational memory and 'post-memory' . Progressive and conservative memory narratives by children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of those with first-hand experience of Japanese colonialism and the Second World War are constantly emerging and re-emerging (Ushiyama 2021). Likewise, just as the past several years have seen the interventions of Asahara's daughters, discourses of the Aum Affair are increasingly contested as 'post-memory' , as children of victims and perpetrators inherit the trauma of their parents, producing new interpretations in new contexts.…”

Erecting monuments and making meanings: Analysis of the Statue of Peace using actor‐network theory

“…Many scholars have discussed the Statues of Peace in terms of issues of representation and how memories of victimhood have been constructed (Yushiyama 2021; Shim 2021; Carranza Ko 2023). Most have affirmed the need to record the wrongs of the colonial period and to seek justice through the representation in some form of the Comfort Women and their plight.…”