The spread of “Comfort Women” memorials across different cities and countries offers insights into both possibilities and the limits of memory activism, especially in an era when the world continues to confront the legacies of colonialism, racism, and historical injustice.
The author – an ethnomusicologist – invites us to listen to “Comfort Women” survivors’ songs as a way to understand their lives and to remember them.
The documentary film <A Boat Departed From Me Taking Me Away>, directed by Cecilia Kang, a second-generation Argentine of Korean descent, follows the journey of the protagonist, Melanie Chong, as she confronts and grows increasingly aware of the issue of the Japanese military “Comfort women.”
Testimony and publishing activities concerning wartime sexual violence and “Comfort Women” carried out by the Association of Returnees from China (Chukiren), which atoned for their perpetrators’ actions in postwar Japanese society.