In 1991, after fifty years of silence, the forced sexual enslavement of Korean women and girls at the hands of Japan’s Imperial Army during World War II emerged as an embarrassing blight upon Japan’s otherwise enviable profile as a political and economic miracle. The case against Japan’s alleged trafficking of women meandered through the courts of Japan and the United States. It also became an issue for United Nations Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay in August 2014. However, no satisfactory solution has been found. Beginning in 2005 efforts began in the United States to raise public awareness of the conditions that Korean women were subjected to at the hands of Japan. Strong resistance emerged in certain Japanese-American communities to the Korean and Korean-American accounting of events but especially from Japanese government officials who have visited the United States. Japan does not dispute that Korean women and girls served as Comfort Women; however, its disputes the methods of recruitment and the numbers of women indicated in the Korean narrative. We thus find two competing narratives, that of Japan and that of Korea, being disputed in the United States. In most places the Korean narrative has prevailed but in places such as Buena Vista, California and Queens, New York, it has not. This text argues that the “Comfort Women” controversy may undermine Korea-Japan-US relations in Northeast Asia. The President of Korea made it clear in December 2014 that relations with Japan will not improve without addressing this. This article speaks of ways to do indicating the need for an objective review of both narratives and, most likely, the articulation of an American narrative
