Unhealed Wounds: When the "Comfort Women" Tragedy Became a Geopolitical Minefield for Seoul and Tokyo
In East Asia, history is never just the past; it is a living, breathing political battlefield. The "comfort women" issue represents the deepest structural fault line between South Korea and Japan—the exact point where the pursuit of historical justice and the cold calculus of geopolitical realpolitik violently collide, with no easy equilibrium in sight. 1. Roots and Tragedy: From War Crime to Structural Trauma The term "comfort women" ( Jugun Ianfu ) under the Imperial Japanese Army’s apparatus in the 1930s and 1940s was not merely a byproduct of war. It was a system of "institutionalized sexual slavery" engineered to sustain imperial expansion. As the war machine rolled from Japan into China and Southeast Asia, the military relied on deception, coercion, and forced conscription to trap local women—predominantly Korean and Chinese—into this brutal apparatus. While historians estimate the victim toll at 100,000 to 200,000 (a figure Japanese conservati...