By Sehaj Saluja,
Abstract
The topic moves beyond the typical historical narratives that often glorify state power and state action to deliberately explore the "flipside of history” , the marginalised human cost and the systematic suppression of truth. The selection of the Comfort Women System is driven by the necessity of challenging official historical accounts that often omit, minimise, or deny atrocities committed by powerful forces. The paper aims to demonstrate a recurring, transnational pattern of systematic denial and victim marginalisation. The core purpose is not just to document the crime, but to analyse how this historical silencing creates a profound and sustained injustice, thereby distorting national memory and eroding the foundations of international accountability for war crimes. This analysis is crucial for achieving a more complete, truthful, and ethically responsible understanding of the past.
Introduction
Comfort women refers to the system of sexual slavery created and controlled by the imperial Japanese government between the years 1932 and 1945. It is the largest case of government-sponsored human trafficking and sexual slavery in Modern History. The term ‘Comfort Women’ is a coined euphemism by the Japanese Military, obscuring the gravity of the crime committed. Estimates vary as to how many women were involved, but most scholars agree that hundreds of thousands of women were forced into sexual slavery, primarily coming from Korea and China and many others from Japan, Taiwan, The Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, East Timor and Dutch East Indies as well as European Women from the Japanese occupied territories, were forced into sexual slavery.
This system was planted when, Japan during the early twentieth century established its power and control over East Asia, including Taiwan (colonised in 1895) , Korea (made a protectorate of Japan in 1905 and annexed in 1910) and Manchuria (a puppet government set up in 1932), clearly Japan witnessed a great rising power as a nation but the same great nation started planting its dark history of the comfort women system, lasting thirteen years (only recorded evidence).
Beginning with the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, and throughout the period of constant warfare from the early 1930s to 1945, the Japanese Imperial Army implemented and maintained, with the help of the government’s funding, the comfort women system.
The documents indicate that senior staff officers of the army typically issued orders to establish comfort stations, and staff officers of subordinate units made a plan and carried it out. This was all done for the ‘pleasure’ of these men; further, the Japanese military used several justifications for creating the system: to boost army morale, to control the behaviour of the soldiers, to contain venereal diseases among the troops and to prevent rapes by Japanese Soldiers, thus avoiding the rise of hostility among the inhabitants of occupied areas.
Comfort Stations were built first in Shanghai in 1932, then in Japan, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaya, basically “anywhere and everywhere the Japanese Military went”.
Research question
"To what extent does the state-sponsored denial of the 'Comfort Women' system reveal a universal pattern of institutional amnesia used by powerful nations to evade war crime accountability, and how does this ongoing 'historical silencing' undermine the pursuit of international justice and the rights of marginalised victims?"
Thesis
"This paper argues that the systematic concealment of the 'Comfort Women' system achieved through document destruction, euphemistic terminology, and educational revisionism is not merely an omission of history but a strategic tool of state power used to preserve national identity and shield the institution from legal liability. By shifting the burden of proof onto survivors and framing sexual slavery as a 'military necessity,' the state effectively institutionalises a secondary form of violence that marginalises victims into perpetuity, ultimately demonstrating that without state-acknowledged historical truth, the foundations of international accountability for war crimes remain profoundly compromised."
Literature Review
The body of scholarship regarding the "Comfort Women" system has undergone a significant transformation since the early 1990s, shifting from a state of general obscurity to an internationally recognised case of wartime sexual slavery. Early research was often fragmented due to a "culture of silence" in both Japan and the survivors' home countries. However, the field was revolutionised by the archival discoveries of historians like Yoshimi Yoshiaki, who unearthed official military documents proving that the Imperial Japanese Army directly managed the recruitment, transportation, and medical regulation of these women. Current research focuses heavily on the "victimised agency," utilising the testimonies of survivors like Kim Hak-sun to humanise the data. Scholars now generally agree that the system was a state-sponsored apparatus designed to maintain military discipline and hygiene, though debate persists regarding the exact number of victims and the varying degrees of direct physical coercion versus deceptive recruitment across different occupied territories.
The literature on this topic is often framed through the lenses of Transitional Justice and Feminist International Relations theory. A central finding in recent scholarship is the concept of the "Second Violence," which refers to the psychological and social harm caused by the state’s denial of the victims' lived experiences. This leads to a fierce debate between "legalistic" and "moral" responsibility. On one side, revisionist scholars argue from a narrow legal perspective, claiming that the absence of explicit "written orders" for abduction absolves the state of criminal intent. Conversely, the mainstream academic consensus—supported by UN reports—argues that the state created a coercive environment where "consent" was impossible. This debate highlights the tension between State Sovereignty (the right of a nation to define its history) and Universal Human Rights (the right of victims to historical truth and reparations).
Despite the wealth of historical data, a significant gap remains in the analysis of the systematic "mechanics of silence" as a recurring political tool. Much of the existing literature is either purely historical (documenting the 1930s-40s) or purely activist (demanding apologies). There is a lack of critical research that connects the "Comfort Women" case to a broader, transnational pattern of how powerful states strategically utilise the destruction of archives and educational revisionism to ensure the long-term marginalisation of victims. This paper addresses this gap by shifting the focus from the crimes themselves to the persistence of the denial. By analysing the "Comfort Women" through the lens of state-sponsored amnesia, this research seeks to demonstrate how historical silencing serves as a deliberate strategy to erode international accountability and distort national memory in the 21st century.
Methodology
The investigation will employ a rigorous methodology centred on multi-sourced historical analysis to effectively analyse the official narratives with the hidden realities. The primary materials will consist of official government and military documents (where available and declassified) related to the comfort women case, serving as the basis for identifying the initial strategies of institutional concealment. Crucially, the paper will rely on survivor testimonies and victim stories—including accounts from Comfort Women survivors- to provide the necessary "flipside" perspective and illustrate the devastating effects of victim marginalisation. These primary sources will be contextualised and corroborated using a review of scholarly research papers and academic articles by historians and political scientists, which provide expert analysis on the patterns of denial, state revisionism, and the long-term erosion of international accountability. This blend of evidence is essential for establishing the systematic nature of the omission across the comfort women system and beyond.
Body and Analysis
The primary evidence of state denial is often found not in outright refusal, but in the strategic use of qualified official acknowledgement, a key technique in the broader framework of historical negationism (Rousso, 1987). In the case of the Comfort Women, the Japanese government issued the 1993 Kono Statement, formally acknowledging military involvement and expressing "sincere apologies and remorse" as detailed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA). However, as scholars observe, this official position was simultaneously designed to limit state liability. By later providing reparations through the quasi-governmental Asian Women's Fund, the state strategically decoupled its moral apology from legal liability, maintaining the argument that all wartime claims were settled by prior treaties. This strategy aligns with negationist techniques of relativisation and trivialization, shifting responsibility away from the state and allowing the narrative to be continuously contested by conservative elements who exploit the lack of direct legal closure. The official Japanese position thus serves as a critical example of an official narrative seeking to manage, rather than resolve, historical culpability.
In the aftermath of conflict, the official narrative is often seized by the victor, leading to a profound distortion of historical memory. This essay posits that the crimes committed against civilians, specifically the Imperial Japanese military's sexual enslavement of Comfort Women, were deliberately suppressed by deliberately suppressing evidence, creating false narratives, and obfuscating judicial processes. These nations achieve the long-term silencing and marginalisation of victims. The persistent denial associated with these cases is not merely an act of historical revisionism, but a sustained political strategy that fatally compromises the pursuit of historical truth and undermines international efforts to achieve accountability for war crimes, allowing a culture of impunity to endure. This pattern represents the dark flipside of history, a deliberate effort to erase state culpability. The systematic nature of state-sanctioned crimes is mirrored by the calculated strategy of their subsequent denial, which is found not in outright refusal, but in the strategic use of qualified official acknowledgement, a key technique in the broader framework of historical negationism (Rousso, 1987). In the case of the Comfort Women, the Japanese government issued the 1993 Kono Statement, formally acknowledging military involvement and expressing "sincere apologies and remorse" as detailed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA). However, as scholars observe, this official position was simultaneously designed to limit state liability, where reparations through the quasi-governmental Asian Women's Fund strategically decoupled the moral apology from legal liability, maintaining the argument that all wartime claims were settled by prior treaties. This strategy aligns with negationist techniques of relativisation and trivialization, allowing the narrative to be continuously contested by conservative elements who exploit the lack of direct legal closure.
The trauma of this systematic denial generates a severe secondary victimisation for the survivors. State denial is profoundly effective because it often exploits pre-existing social and cultural stigma; for the Comfort Women, the state's persistent characterisation of the system as voluntary prostitution amplified the social burden on the women, making them reluctant to come forward for decades due to the intense dishonour associated with sexual violence. State negationism creates a battleground over national memory; in Japan, conservative elements repeatedly attempt to remove or dilute references to the Comfort Women system in school textbooks, ensuring subsequent generations receive a sanitised and contested version of the past. The evidence demonstrates a cyclical process: a military system commits atrocities; the state engages in historical negationism (selective apology, blame shifting, or total omission); and the legal-political system subsequently imposes silence on the victims and the truth. As scholars on human rights assert, this continuous process of denial perpetuates a devastating gap between moral apology and legal accountability (Ling, 2008). The position maintained by the state—that responsibilities are "conclusively met" or that the crime was an isolated event—reflects a rigid state-centric paradigm that continually clashes with the people-based paradigm championed by human rights movements and survivors. The enduring lesson of the Comfort Women is that the struggle for justice requires not just exposing the facts of the crime, but fundamentally challenging the state's power to manipulate history and silence its own victims.
Analysis Through the Lens of the Stories of the Victims
The Story of Yong Soo Lee
Lee lived in Taegu, Korea, under Japanese occupation in the early 1940s. Her family was poor, and she received only one year of formal education. She began working in a factory to support her family at the age of thirteen. In the autumn of 1944, when she was sixteen years old, she and a friend were taken to Taiwan, where they were forced to work as sexual slaves for the Japanese military. She remembers that a Japanese man came to her home and called her to come out. Without knowing where she was going or why, she was taken away by Japanese soldiers. She met three other girls, and they were all put on a train. They went to Kyôngju first, then to P’yôngan Province in northern Korea. During the trip, Japanese soldiers hit and kicked them, and she sometimes lost consciousness. On a ship and again on a train, she was taken to Dalian, Shanghai, and finally Taiwan. Various official documents and testimony verified that comfort women were transported by army cargo ships from Japan and Korea to many places in the Asia–Pacific region. It implies that Japan’s Ministry of War was directly involved in transporting those women to war zones, since it was impossible to use any Japanese military ships without the ministry’s permission. [9]
On the way and at the comfort station in Taiwan, Lee was raped, beaten, and tortured. She had to serve four or five men a day. Some victims testified that they had to serve up to sixty soldiers a day. Lee was never paid for these services. According to the Japanese policy of the time (the so-called “Rules of Use for Military Comfort Stations”), acts of abuse against comfort women were prohibited, but daily violence by comfort station operators or soldiers was common. There were detailed regulations for the use and operation of comfort stations, which is a clear indication that the Japanese military was controlling the system. For example, the regulations of the Huayue-lou comfort station in Nanjing, dated March 6, 1939, includes clauses on the medical examination of those women, the schedule and fees both for soldiers and officers in different rankings, and the requirement to use condoms. [10]
Nevertheless, these regulations were not enforced on-site, particularly at the temporary comfort stations on the frontline, where no strict supervision and an insufficient supply of condoms were problems. Soldiers refused to use condoms, and medical staff was not always available. Many women were forced to work even after they had been infected with sexually transmitted diseases. In some cases, including the Shanghai comfort station, the Japanese military forced the women to receive an injection of Salvarsan or Arsphenamine to prevent syphilis. Salvarsan is extremely toxic, and many women who received it suffered from serious side effects, such as infertility. Also, the fees charged by the comfort stations did not go to the women, but to those who ran the comfort stations. Even though some women could put their savings into military postal savings accounts, they were unable to withdraw their money during and after the war. [11]
For the women, refusal to serve meant immediate punishment and torture. Lee said that the girls were warned that if they tried to venture beyond the confines of the station, they would be killed. As she was so frightened and did not know where she was, she could not think of escape. Another survivor from Korea, Ok-sun Yi, described how strict the surveillance at the comfort station was. She tried to escape once, but was caught by Japanese soldiers and stabbed in the arm and leg. She still has those scars, permanent reminders of what she went through. She said that many women were assaulted, tortured, killed, or committed suicide at the comfort station. Yi commented, “It was not a ‘comfort’ station. It was a slaughterhouse!” [12] The accusation shows the striking contrast between the dictionary definition of the word “comfort” and the horrible reality of the comfort women system. Yi’s point is supported by other survivors’ stories that in comfort stations, including the one in Qhaojiauyan, Hainan Island, China, comfort women who were “too sick to work were killed rather than given medical treatment.” [13] Other survivors testified that they were prohibited from going out or only allowed to go out for specific purposes under heavy surveillance. Even if they were allowed to go out, unfamiliarity with the local languages and geography made it impossible for the women to escape. In addition, those who did attempt to escape were publicly tortured and killed as examples to the others. According to testimony, when comfort women died, they were not properly buried and were instead abandoned in the street. The women were hungry and constantly abused.
“They had stripped me of everything. They had taken everything away from me, my youth, my self-esteem, my dignity, my freedom, my possessions, and my family.”
Lee said that the women were given Japanese names and were not allowed to speak in Korean. If they were caught doing so, they were beaten. Many other Korean survivors similarly testified about being prohibited from speaking Korean. Presumably, it was part of the “Japanization policy” in the 1940s that required all Koreans to change their names to Japanese-style names and to speak only Japanese. But it was also to keep the women from escaping. Some survivors testified that they were ordered to sit apart from each other on carriages or ships while they were transported to war zones so that they could not talk. Other survivors said that at the comfort station, the Japanese soldiers did not allow the women to congregate and talk, as they were afraid that the women might plan an escape together.
Comfort women on the frontlines had to share the fate of the Japanese soldiers. During frequent air raids, these women, along with the soldiers, had to be evacuated and hidden in mountains or caves. Lee described how, after the bombing ceased, the soldiers would set up makeshift tents and make the women serve them. Many women were killed by bombings or drowned in transit when transport ships sank. After the war, many other comfort women were murdered by retreating Japanese soldiers or abandoned. Some of the victims were rescued or captured as prisoners of war by the Allied Forces and eventually sent home. Lee was one of them. After the war, she was in a POW camp and then went home. When her mother saw her, she thought Lee was a ghost and fainted.
Even after coming back to her hometown, Lee suffered from serious psychological trauma and social stigma, in addition to physical injuries, like many other survivors. Lee said that she could not tell her story to anybody for decades and that the shame of her shattered childhood has haunted her through her life. Some people, she said, might think what happened to her sounds like a movie script or a novel, but she assured them that these are true things that really happened to her. She could not think about getting married after all she had experienced during the war. In 1992, Kim Hak-soon, a survivor, testified in public for the first time. Encouraged by Kim’s testimony and by support groups working on behalf of survivors, Lee broke her silence and began to talk about her experiences during World War II. Lee has now become a public figure and an activist for the women’s right movement, pressing the Japanese government for official acknowledgments and apologies to the comfort women to this day. She has attended numerous international conferences and US congressional hearings, and presented her testimony in Japan, the United States, China, and Taiwan to promote public awareness of the comfort women issue.
The Story of Jan Ruff O’Herne
Jan O’Herne is another survivor who testified at the US Congressional hearing in 2007. She was born in Java, in the former Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), in 1923, a fourth-generation member of a Dutch family. She grew up on a sugar plantation. When she was nineteen years old in 1942, Japanese troops invaded Java and interned thousands of Dutch women and children, including O’Herne’s family, in a prison camp. In 1944, when she was twenty-one years old, she was forced into a brothel to become a sex slave for the Japanese military. One day, high-ranking Japanese officers arrived at the camp and ordered all single girls from seventeen years old to line up in the compound. They paced along the line, eyeing the women up and down, and selected ten pretty girls from the camp. O’Herne was one of them. The whole camp protested, and the girls’ mothers tried to pull the girls back. O’Herne embraced her mother, not knowing if she was ever going to see her again. Those girls were thrown into an army truck and taken to a Dutch colonial house in Semarang, which turned out to be a brothel.
Although they protested, the girls were given Japanese names and were dragged away, one by one. She could hear the screaming coming from the bedrooms. She was raped “in a most brutal way,” and there were still more Japanese soldiers waiting. This went on all night, and “this was only the beginning, week after week, month after month.” The girls were “systematically beaten and raped day and night,” O’Herne said. “They had stripped me of everything. They had taken everything away from me, my youth, my self-esteem, my dignity, my freedom, my possessions, and my family.” She was repeatedly abused, beaten, and raped for three months. She was returned to prison camp with threats that her family would be killed if she revealed the truth about the atrocities.
Survivors in the Philippines have also testified that they were forcibly abducted and taken to comfort stations. At many places in the Philippines and China toward the end of the war, the Japanese troops directly secured young women to fill the comfort stations.14 At an interview, a Filipino suvivor, Hiralia Bustamante, said that she was kidnapped by Japanese soldiers on her way home from helping her mother pick rice. She was taken to a house and confined in rooms with two or three other women who were also kidnapped. They were not allowed to talk to each other and ordered to cook and clean during the day. Every night, they were raped by the Japanese soldiers. Nobody could escape. If anyone tried to escape, they would be shot to death on the scene or executed in public. The horror lasted for several months. [15]
It took fifty years for O’Herne and many other survivors’ lives to become a human rights issue. While testifying to the US Congress, O’Herne said that “the war never ended for the comfort women.” In 1992, when the war in Bosnia broke out, O’Herne saw that women were again being violated in an organized way, and she also watched comfort women survivors on TV as they pleaded for justice, for an apology, and compensation from the Japanese government. That was when O’Herne decided to break her silence in order to back up the other survivors and to prevent similar crimes against women. She testified as a witness at the international public hearing on Japanese war crimes in Tokyo, Japan, in 1992.
O’Herne has worked for the plight of comfort women in Australia and other countries and for the protection of women in war. O’Herne highlights that time is running out. After sixty years (as of 2007, when she testified in front of the US Congress), the comfort women deserve justice. Even though their background and experiences vary, those former comfort women have surprisingly similar demands with each other. They have sought a formal apology from the Japanese government, legal compensation and reparations, a thorough investigation of the comfort women system, and recognition of the atrocities that they suffered through the establishment of memorials and museums. They especially want the inclusion of their story in Japanese textbooks. They want future generations to know about this atrocity.
O’Herne has worked for the plight of comfort women in Australia and other countries and for the protection of women in war. O’Herne highlights that time is running out. After sixty years (as of 2007, when she testified in front of the US Congress), the comfort women deserve justice. Even though their background and experiences vary, those former comfort women have surprisingly similar demands with each other. They have sought a formal apology from the Japanese government, legal compensation and reparations, a thorough investigation of the comfort women system, and recognition of the atrocities that they suffered through the establishment of memorials and museums. They especially want the inclusion of their story in Japanese textbooks. They want future generations to know about this atrocity.
The Story of Kim-Hak-sun
Kim Hak-sun (October 20, 1924 – December 16, 1997[1]) was a Korean human rights activist who campaigned against sex slavery and wartime sexual slavery. . Kim was one of the victims who had been forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army between the early 1930s and the end of the Pacific War. She is the first woman in Korea to come forward publicly and testify to her experience as a comfort woman for the Japanese military. Her testimony was made on 14 August 1991. In December 1991, she filed a class-action lawsuit against the Japanese government for the damages inflicted during the war. She was the first of what would become hundreds of women from Korea, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and the Netherlands who came forward to tell their stories of their enslavement to the Imperial Japanese military. She was inspired to finally take her story public after 40 years of silence by the growth of the women's rights movement in South Korea.[3] Kim died in 1997, and her court case was still ongoing.
Encouraged by Kim's testimony, other victims of Japanese military sexual slavery declared themselves as comfort women and began to share their ordeal. Kim's testimony was the starting point for the issue of comfort women coming to light in the world. There were about 200 victims in South Korea and a lot more in other countries such a Philippines, Singapore , and Europe.
On 6 December 1991, Kim and two other victims filed a lawsuit at the Tokyo District Court requiring reparation and apology from the Japanese government ("Case on the Claim for Reparations for Korean Victim in the Pacific War"). The plaintiff delegates also included "13 former soldiers and civilians who were attached to the Japanese military, 1 prison guard, 3 widows, and 15 survivors." In the complaint, they claimed that both the Japanese government and military were responsible for the operation of comfort stations and damage inflicted on the victims, and also they ignored their "mental and physical suffering.
She revealed her suffering in the comfort station in the book of a collection of victims' testimonies, Korean Comfort Women Who Were Taken Away by Force. She actively participated in rallies and protests that were held in front of the Embassy of Japan in Korea.
In 1995, the Asian Women's Fund was established in Japan to provide compensation through private funding for the victims. The Japanese government was criticized that it did not recognising and admitting the crime and compensating the victims properly. The monetary compensation by a private organisation was viewed as a means for the government to avoid fulfilling its duty. Oga Mayako, one of the leaders of the Asian Solidarity Conference, condemned the Japanese government's "pushing" of the Asian Women's Fund as an act of "avoiding legal responsibility" for the crime of sex slavery, and it was "the policy of deception." Kim and other victims raised their voices to refuse to get the money and demanded that Japan atone and legally compensate them. Also, 191 Korean congressmen issued a public statement requiring Japan to admit that sex slavery had been an inhumane war crime, initiate the duty to punish the criminal, and provide legal restitution, and repeal the Asian Women's Fund, which blurred the nature of the problem.
Kim rejected the money. She felt distraught and even regretted making the testimony. "I did not come out with my shameful past because of money. What I strongly demand is restitution, not some money for consolation. I live in an apartment provided by the government, and I receive 250 thousand won of support fund monthly. I do not need money." She was dedicated to sacrifice herself for the comfort women. She claimed to record the fact that Japan had not apologized and compensated on history books.
Counterarguments and Limitations
A significant counterargument often posed in defence of the "comfort station" system centres on the concept of military necessity and the psychological management of soldiers during high-stress wartime conditions. Proponents of this view argue that sexual access was a "functional requirement" for maintaining the morale of troops subjected to the extreme trauma and physical exhaustion of the front lines. This perspective suggests that the provision of sexual services was a pragmatic tool used to prevent "random" battlefield rapes of local populations, which could lead to civilian uprisings and damage the military's strategic reputation. Furthermore, this argument posits that the impulse for sexual relief is a universal biological response to the "heavy stress" of war, a phenomenon not unique to the Imperial Japanese Army but observed across various global militaries throughout history. Under this framework, the establishment of a regulated system is viewed not as an inherent criminal enterprise but as an institutional attempt to stabilise military discipline and ensure the survival and efficiency of the fighting force during a state of total war.
While the argument of "military necessity" seeks to contextualise these crimes as a byproduct of wartime stress, it fails to withstand ethical and legal scrutiny for three primary reasons. First, the systematic institutionalisation of sexual slavery characterised by deception, abduction, and the detention of minors, violates the fundamental principle of non derogable human rights, which cannot be suspended even during times of war. To categorise women as "logistical supplies" for soldier morale is a form of institutional dehumanisation that mirrors the very patterns of "victim marginalisation" this paper seeks to expose. Second, historical evidence suggests that the establishment of regulated stations did not, in fact, curb random acts of violence; rather, it normalised a culture of sexual entitlement that often led to further atrocities against local populations. Finally, the "biological inevitability" argument is frequently weaponised by states to deflect institutional accountability onto individual human nature. By framing the system as a "pragmatic solution" to universal male impulses, the state effectively erases its own role in the deliberate planning and execution of the crime, thereby perpetuating the long-term silencing of survivors whose trauma is dismissed as an "unfortunate necessity" of conflict.
Discussion
The findings of this research suggest that the systematic denial of the Comfort Women system is not merely a historical oversight but a deliberate political strategy designed to safeguard national identity and evade legal liability. This has profound implications for the survivors, as it creates a "perpetual trauma" where the lack of official recognition functions as a secondary form of violence. Furthermore, the reliance on biological or psychological "necessity" as a defence for state-organized sexual slavery sets a dangerous precedent. It suggests that under the guise of "wartime stress," universal human rights can be treated as negotiable, ultimately weakening the moral authority of international humanitarian law.
Beyond the specific case of Imperial Japan, this study is highly relevant to the broader fields of Transitional Justice and Political Science. It highlights a recurring, transnational pattern where powerful states, regardless of ideology, prioritise "national honour" and internal stability over the "Right to Truth." By examining the mechanisms of document destruction and educational revisionism, this research provides a framework for understanding other instances of state-led amnesia, such as colonial cover-ups or modern-day military interventions. It underscores that the silencing of marginalised victims is a foundational tool used by states to maintain a sanitised version of history that supports current power structures.
While this paper focuses on the political and historical mechanics of denial, future research should explore the role of Digital Archiving and social media as tools for counter-narratives. As physical documents are destroyed, can digital testimonies and blockchain-based archives prevent states from "hiding" their crimes in the future? Additionally, further study is needed on the "intergenerational trauma" experienced by the descendants of Comfort Women, specifically looking at how state denial affects the cultural identity of second and third-generation survivors in South Korea, China, and the Philippines. Lastly, a comparative study between the Comfort Women and contemporary cases of conflict-related sexual violence could determine if international accountability mechanisms have truly evolved since 1945.
Conclusion
The systematic silencing of the "Comfort Women" history serves as a sobering testament to how powerful states weaponise memory to evade the consequences of wartime atrocities. This research has demonstrated that the destruction of archives, the use of sanitising language, and the defence of "military necessity" are not isolated historical errors, but rather deliberate components of a state-managed architecture of denial. By prioritising national prestige over the restoration of human dignity, the state perpetuates a "second violence" that strands survivors in a state of permanent marginalisation. Ultimately, the legacy of the "Comfort Women" transcends regional politics; it challenges the very integrity of the international legal order. True reconciliation and the prevention of future war crimes are impossible as long as states are permitted to curate their past by erasing their victims. Therefore, the pursuit of state-acknowledged historical truth remains the only viable path toward achieving genuine accountability and upholding the universal rights of civilians in times of conflict.
References
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Morris-Suzuki, T. (2007). The "comfort women" issue, Japan’s "return to Asia," and the context of the Cold War. The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 5(1). https://apjjf.org/-Tessa-Morris-Suzuki/2367/article.html
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