This chapter scrutinizes the rationales for omissions and denials of the ‘comfort women’ in wartime historiographies in Japan. By demonstrating how the contracting argument reduces the comfort women’s subjugation to regular business transactions to privatize the responsibility for the ‘comfort women’ system and how the controversial Yasukuni Shrine and its adjacent Yūshūkan War Memorial Museum contextualize the war as a product of Japan’s pre-war history of humiliation to reframe the comfort women issue as a question about resisting international subjugation, the chapter suggests that the contracting argument’s denial of gender violence and the Yasukuni and the Yūshūkan’s omission of the comfort women establish the nation-state at the survivors’ expense and that human rights activism involuntarily ends up serving the populists’ ends no matter which actions they undertake.

Survivors of the ‘comfort’ system, the state-sponsored regime of military sexual exploitation and a core institution in the expansion of the empire of Japan from 1932 to 1945, continue to go unrecognised almost 80 years past 1945 and 30 years after the breakthrough by human rights activists in 1991. That such a brutal regime of sexual exploitation remains unrecognised by the state is remarkable and merits attention. In this thesis, I suggest that the ‘comfort women’ issue remains stuck in a deadlock that freezes it in the inter-state framing of a status quo. As a result the comfort women, the survivors and supposed protagonists, are rendered as mere tiles in a series of inter-state conflicts between the State of Japan and its neighbours in Northeast Asia as one of the fiercest battlegrounds in this region’s ‘history wars’. My purpose in the thesis is to offer possibilities to rethink the comfort women issue beyond this deadlock. To this end, I (1) identify the dynamics that sustain and reify the deadlock (Paper 1 and Paper 2) and (2) unsettle these dynamics (Paper 3 and Paper 4). 

As ‘comfort women’ are omitted from history textbooks, the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace in Tokyo remains the only permanent educational venue about the ‘comfort system’ in Japan. Meanwhile, the influential Yasukuni Shrine with its adjacent Yūshūkan War Memorial Museum, also in Tokyo, continues to deny ‘comfort system’ history. While ‘comfort women’ discourse organises these two museums as competitors over history, this chapter scrutinises the claims that are made in each museum and concludes by suggesting that ‘comfort system’ history can co-exist with official mourning in one history if mourning is disentangled from bereavement, since bereavement, but not mourning, enables the ideological appropriation of the war-dead that forms the core of the militarism advocacy that denies ‘comfort system’ history.