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).