To understand the comfort women issue, it is necessary to understand more than the wartime system that gave rise to the controversy. The dispute has become one of the most enduring sources of tension between Japan and South Korea, moving from archives and academic journals into courtrooms, classrooms, museums and diplomatic negotiations. It has also become part of a larger argument over national identity: how Japan understands its imperial past, how South Korea remembers colonial rule, and how both countries decide which parts of history belong at the centre of the national story.
That makes the comfort women issue difficult to approach through a single book. The historical questions are important, but so are the questions that came later. How did particular accounts of the past become influential? Why did the issue become more prominent decades after the Second World War? How did survivor testimony change the political debate? And why have efforts by governments to settle the dispute failed to produce a lasting consensus? For readers looking for a comprehensive grasp of the controversy, one particularly useful — and controversial — place to begin is Anti-Japan Tribalism: The Root of the Japan-Korea Crisis.
Anti-Japan Tribalism and the Politics of Historical Memory
Anti-Japan Tribalism: The Root of the Japan-Korea Crisis was published in South Korea in 2019 by a group of scholars led by Lee Young-hoon. The book became a major publishing phenomenon and provoked a substantial debate. Its central argument is that elements of South Korean historical consciousness have been shaped by what the authors call “anti-Japan tribalism”, a form of nationalism in which opposition to Japan becomes intertwined with national identity. The authors challenge a number of established interpretations of Korea’s colonial experience and argue that some historical narratives have been distorted by nationalism, politics and education.
The book addresses Japanese colonial rule, forced mobilisation, compensation and the comfort women controversy, among other subjects. Its importance for readers is not necessarily that every argument should be accepted, but that it provides a window into a debate within South Korea itself over the country’s historical narrative. That distinction is often lost when Japan–South Korea relations are described as a dispute between two unified national positions. Neither country has a single view of the past, and the disagreements within each society can be as revealing as the disagreements between them.
The Comfort Women as a Question of Collective Memory
The comfort women controversy offers an unusually clear example of how national narratives are constructed. A national narrative is not simply a list of historical facts; it is an interpretation of the past that helps explain who a society believes it is. For South Korea, Japanese colonial rule occupies an important place in the country’s modern historical identity, closely connected to ideas about independence, sovereignty and national survival. Japan’s postwar identity developed along a different path, as the country emerged from defeat and occupation, adopted a new constitution and became one of the world’s major economic powers, while continuing to debate how its imperial and wartime past should be understood.
These different historical experiences help explain why the same events can acquire different meanings. The comfort women issue became especially prominent in South Korea in the late 20th century, when survivor testimony and activism brought renewed attention to the wartime system. The controversy subsequently became linked to international debates about sexual violence and women’s human rights. The historical events themselves had not changed, but their place in public memory had, illustrating how historical events can acquire new political significance as societies reinterpret the past.
Why Collective Memory Matters
Collective memory refers to the ways societies remember the past through institutions and public life: schools, monuments, museums, commemorations, political speeches, newspapers and popular culture. It is not the same thing as individual memory. A survivor remembers an experience, while a society decides over time how that experience will be represented and what meaning it will have.
This distinction matters in the comfort women debate because the controversy developed over several decades. Testimonies were recorded, historical studies were published, governments issued statements, activists organised campaigns and memorials were constructed. Each development influenced the next, producing a history layered on top of history: first the events of the colonial and wartime period, then the postwar effort to understand them, and finally the political struggles over how they should be remembered. Anti-Japan Tribalism is particularly interested in this latter process, asking why particular interpretations became influential and how they became embedded in South Korean historical consciousness.
Evidence and Interpretation
Any serious examination of the comfort women issue eventually encounters a basic problem: historical evidence does not interpret itself. Researchers have drawn on government records, military documents, newspaper accounts, contracts, photographs, memoirs and oral testimony, and these sources can illuminate very different aspects of the past. A government document might establish that a particular policy existed without revealing how every person affected by it experienced it, while personal testimony can provide information unavailable in official records but may also raise questions about chronology, translation and corroboration when recorded many years after an event.
The resulting disagreements are therefore not limited to questions of fact. Historians can also disagree over what a particular fact means and how different sources should be weighed against one another. This is particularly important in the comfort women controversy, where historical, legal and moral claims have frequently become intertwined. The question is not simply whether evidence exists, but what that evidence can reasonably establish and how much interpretation is required to move from a documented fact to a broader historical conclusion.
The Question of Coercion
One of the most consequential disputes concerns the circumstances under which women entered the comfort station system. The historical record includes evidence of recruitment by private intermediaries, contracts and commercial arrangements, as well as evidence concerning military involvement and coercive conditions, while the experiences of individual women were not necessarily identical.
This is one reason the subject has generated such intense disagreement. Some interpretations place the coercive character of the wartime system at the centre of the story, while other scholars have emphasised the prewar prostitution system, private recruiters and contractual arrangements, and have disputed broader claims about the nature and extent of Japanese military responsibility. Anti-Japan Tribalism belongs to this revisionist strand of the debate, arguing that some widely accepted accounts have been shaped by nationalist assumptions and that the historical record deserves closer scrutiny. Other scholars reject important aspects of that interpretation, making the disagreement itself instructive: the controversy cannot be understood simply by identifying a single document or testimony and treating it as the final answer.
National Identity and the Past
The deeper question is why these disagreements matter so much in the present. Historical disputes become particularly powerful when they are connected to identity. For South Korea, the colonial period is inseparable from the story of national independence, while for many Japanese, arguments over wartime history can raise questions about whether postwar generations should bear responsibility for the actions of an earlier imperial state. These are not symmetrical historical experiences, but they can nevertheless produce competing political demands.
One side may see remembrance as a necessary acknowledgment of historical suffering, while another may see the continued political use of the past as an obstacle to normal relations. The disagreement can therefore persist even when both sides agree that historical events occurred; they may simply disagree about their meaning, their consequences and the responsibilities that follow from them.
When History Enters Diplomacy
This helps explain why the comfort women issue has repeatedly complicated Japan–South Korea relations. The two countries established diplomatic relations in 1965, and their economic and strategic relationship subsequently expanded dramatically, yet historical disputes continued. Japan issued statements acknowledging aspects of its wartime conduct and participated in initiatives intended to address the comfort women issue, while South Korean governments have attempted at different times to manage the dispute within their broader diplomatic relationship with Japan.
The 2015 agreement was one prominent effort. The two governments described the issue as resolved, but the agreement did not end public disagreement. That outcome illustrates the difference between diplomatic settlement and historical reconciliation. Governments can negotiate an agreement, but collective memory is harder to negotiate because historical interpretation is embedded in education, public commemoration, family histories and national identity.
Why Read Anti-Japan Tribalism?
For readers interested in Japan and Korea, Anti-Japan Tribalism is useful partly because it challenges assumptions that are often treated as settled. But it should be approached as an argument rather than a neutral textbook. Its authors have a clear interpretation of South Korean nationalism and of the historical narratives they believe have emerged from it, while other scholars dispute elements of their analysis and conclusions.
That makes the book particularly useful for readers interested in competing interpretations. A comprehensive understanding does not come from reading only books that confirm an existing view; it comes from identifying where historians disagree, examining the evidence they use and understanding the assumptions behind their interpretations. In that respect, Anti-Japan Tribalism is valuable even for readers who ultimately reject some of its conclusions, because it shows that the history debate is not simply Japan versus Korea. It is also a debate within Korea, within Japan and within the international academic community.
What Else Should You Read?
Anti-Japan Tribalism is best considered a starting point rather than an endpoint. Readers interested in the comfort women issue should place it alongside other perspectives, including C. Sarah Soh’s The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan, which examines the subject through gender, colonialism, social structures and postcolonial memory; Naoko Kumagai’s The Comfort Women: Historical, Political, Legal, and Moral Perspectives, which connects historical questions with law, morality, politics and reconciliation; and Ikuhiko Hata’s Comfort Women and Sex in the Battle Zone, which focuses more closely on historical evidence concerning the wartime comfort station system, recruitment and the roles played by military and civilian institutions.
These books do not offer identical interpretations, and that is precisely their value. Reading across those differences makes it easier to distinguish historical evidence from interpretation, and interpretation from political argument. It also provides a better sense of why the comfort women controversy has survived as a political issue long after the events themselves.
Four Questions to Keep in Mind
A reader trying to develop a comprehensive understanding of the comfort women issue can keep four questions in mind: What does the surviving evidence establish? Where do historians disagree about its interpretation? How did particular interpretations become part of national narratives? And why have those narratives remained politically important? These questions provide a useful framework not only for the comfort women controversy but for the broader history of Japanese-Korean relations.
They also help explain why the subject remains so difficult to resolve. The past is not simply a record of events; it is also a source of identity, and historical identity can influence the way societies understand their obligations to the present.
A Starting Point for Understanding the Controversy
For anyone asking which books to read to gain a comprehensive grasp of the comfort women issue, Anti-Japan Tribalism: The Root of the Japan-Korea Crisis is an important book to include. Its most useful contribution may be the challenge it presents to conventional assumptions about South Korean historical memory and the role of anti-Japanese nationalism.
But understanding a controversy requires more than understanding one side of it. The most productive approach is comparative: read the competing accounts, examine their evidence, pay attention to the points where they agree as well as where they diverge, and distinguish the historical record from the political meanings later attached to it.
The comfort women controversy is ultimately a story about more than wartime history. It is a story about what nations remember, what they choose to forget and how historical memory becomes part of political identity. For Japan and South Korea, those questions remain deeply consequential, which is precisely why anyone seeking to understand the relationship between the two countries should approach the subject through a broad and competing body of literature.