Best Books on Korea–Japan Relations for Understanding the Comfort Women Controversy

Few relationships in Asia carry as much historical weight as that between Japan and South Korea. The two countries are close neighbors, prosperous democracies and important trading partners. They share strategic concerns, cultural ties and, increasingly, a common interest in the security of the region. Yet the past has a habit of returning to the present.

The history of Japan’s rule over the Korean peninsula between 1910 and 1945 remains deeply contested. Questions of colonialism, forced mobilization, compensation and wartime conduct have repeatedly found their way into courts, parliaments and diplomatic negotiations. They have also shaped the memories passed from one generation to the next.

No subject captures this more clearly than the controversy surrounding the women who worked in Japan’s wartime military brothel system, commonly referred to as “comfort women”.

For readers trying to understand Korea–Japan relations, the subject can be an uncomfortable one. It sits at the intersection of historical evidence and personal testimony, national memory and individual suffering, academic scholarship and political activism. The arguments are often presented as though there were only two possible positions. The historical record is considerably more complicated.

Two books offer particularly useful entry points into this debate: Naoko Kumagai’s The Comfort Women: Historical, Political, Legal, and Moral Perspectives and Ikuhiko Hata’s Comfort Women and Sex in the Battle Zone.

Neither should be treated as the last word. Read together, however, they reveal something important about the controversy: the dispute is not simply about what happened during the war. It is also about how the past is reconstructed, remembered and used in the present.

Why History Still Matters

Japan and South Korea formally established diplomatic relations in 1965. That agreement opened the way to decades of trade, investment and cooperation, and helped transform the economic relationship between the two countries.

But diplomatic normalization did not produce a shared interpretation of history.

The reasons are not difficult to understand. Historical memory does not disappear when governments sign treaties. A legal settlement may determine what governments believe has been resolved, while individuals and communities may continue to regard questions of recognition, responsibility or remembrance as unsettled.

This tension has repeatedly surfaced in Japan–South Korea relations.

The comfort women issue is a particularly revealing example because it combines several questions that are often treated as one. There is the historical question of how the system operated. There is the question of recruitment and coercion. There is the question of the Japanese military’s role. There are legal questions concerning responsibility and compensation. And there is the moral and political question of how the women involved should be remembered.

Keeping these questions separate is essential.

The Comfort Women: Historical, Political, Legal, and Moral Perspectives — Naoko Kumagai

Naoko Kumagai’s The Comfort Women: Historical, Political, Legal, and Moral Perspectives is a good place to begin because it refuses to confine the controversy to a single category.

Published in English by the International House of Japan in 2016, the book considers the historical record alongside questions of law, morality, women’s rights, politics and reconciliation.

That breadth matters. The comfort women controversy has never been solely an argument between historians. It involves governments, courts, campaigners, journalists, scholars and survivors. Each has approached the subject with different questions and, sometimes, different definitions of what constitutes justice.

Kumagai examines the development of the controversy and Japan’s attempts to respond to it, including the Asian Women’s Fund. She also considers the relationship between historical responsibility and reconciliation.

For readers interested in the Japanese side of the debate, the book is valuable because it does not reduce the subject to a question of national honor. It asks instead how society should confront a difficult historical legacy when the evidence is disputed, the memories are painful and the political consequences remain very much alive.

That is a question that extends well beyond Japan and Korea.

Comfort Women and Sex in the Battle Zone — Ikuhiko Hata

Ikuhiko Hata’s Comfort Women and Sex in the Battle Zone approaches the controversy from a more explicitly historical direction.

Published in English by Hamilton Books in 2018, the book is an expanded English edition of Hata’s earlier Japanese research. It examines the wartime comfort-station system, recruitment, military records, the role of private operators and the development of the controversy after 1945.

Hata pays particular attention to the relationship between the military system and Japan’s prewar licensed-prostitution industry. He also examines the evidence surrounding claims about recruitment and coercion, as well as the origins and subsequent influence of historical accounts.

For readers unfamiliar with the historiography, this is where the controversy becomes especially revealing.

The question is not merely whether women suffered. They did, and the existence of the wartime system itself is not seriously in dispute. The more contentious historical questions concern how women entered the system, the circumstances under which different individuals were recruited, the extent and nature of coercion, and the precise relationship between military authorities and civilian intermediaries.

Hata’s interpretation of these questions has itself been challenged by other scholars. That makes the book neither irrelevant nor definitive. It makes it part of the argument.

When Evidence Becomes a Battlefield

Perhaps the most useful lesson from reading the comfort women literature is that historical evidence rarely arrives with its interpretation attached.

Government records can tell us what officials intended to document. Contracts can illuminate commercial arrangements. Military documents can reveal administrative structures. Newspaper reports can show what contemporaries were told. Memoirs and testimony can offer insight into individual experiences.

But each source also has limitations.

A document may reveal the existence of a policy without telling us how that policy was experienced on the ground. A testimony recorded decades later may preserve an important memory while also raising questions about chronology and corroboration. A historian’s interpretation may depend not only on the sources selected but, on the questions brought to them.

This is where the Korea–Japan historical dispute becomes more interesting than the familiar political slogans suggest.

There are competing interpretations of the evidence, but there are also disagreements over which questions the evidence can answer.

For a reader, that means resisting the temptation to approach the subject as a courtroom in which one book must deliver a final verdict.

The more productive question is: what does each piece of evidence actually establish?

Memory Is Part of the History

The politics of memory complicates matters further.

In South Korea, memories of Japanese colonial rule occupy an important place in national historical consciousness. In Japan, meanwhile, there is no single interpretation of the country’s imperial and wartime past. Japanese historians, politicians, journalists and citizens have argued intensely over these questions for decades.

The same is true of South Korea.

This matters because “Japan” and “Korea” are sometimes presented as though each possesses a single historical memory. Neither does.

There are Japanese voices that emphasize apology and responsibility. There are others that argue that Japan’s legal and diplomatic obligations were settled through postwar agreements. In South Korea, there are also different views about the relationship between historical justice, diplomacy and reconciliation.

The resulting arguments can be bitter, but they are also evidence of something often overlooked: historical memory is contested within nations as well as between them.

From Historical Dispute to Diplomatic Crisis

The comfort women controversy has consequently become much larger than a question of wartime history.

It has influenced elections, court cases, diplomatic relations and public demonstrations. It has affected how citizens in both countries perceive one another. And it has repeatedly tested the proposition that governments can settle historical disputes through diplomatic agreements.

The 2015 Japan–South Korea agreement was one such attempt. The two governments described the issue as resolved, while Japan committed financial support to a foundation intended to assist former comfort women.

Yet the controversy did not disappear.

That should not necessarily be surprising. Governments can agree that an issue is settled while communities continue to debate what settlement means. A diplomatic document can close one chapter of a negotiation without closing the historical argument itself.

This distinction between settlement and reconciliation is central to understanding Korea–Japan relations.

What Does Reconciliation Mean?

Reconciliation is a much more elusive concept than diplomatic settlement.

It can involve apologies and compensation, but it can also involve education, commemoration and agreement about how difficult events should be remembered. It requires historical claims to be examined rather than simply repeated.

Kumagai’s emphasis on reconciliation is particularly useful here. Her approach suggests that the comfort women controversy cannot be understood solely through the language of treaties and legal responsibility. Moral questions and questions of memory inevitably enter the discussion.

Hata, by contrast, reminds readers of the importance of getting back to the historical record itself.

The two approaches need not be mutually exclusive.

Indeed, they can be read as complementary. Before asking how societies should reconcile themselves to the past, one must first ask what can reasonably be established about it.

How to Read the Korea–Japan History Debate

For readers beginning to explore Korea–Japan relations, these two books offer a useful starting point precisely because they do not approach the subject in the same way.

Kumagai provides a broad examination of history, law, politics, morality and reconciliation. Hata concentrates more closely on the historical evidence surrounding the wartime system and the evolution of the controversy.

Read them critically and in parallel.

Pay attention to which sources each author relies upon. Ask what evidence is presented and what evidence is left aside. Notice where a historical claim ends and a moral or political argument begins.

Above all, resist the idea that understanding the Japanese or Korean position requires accepting an entire national narrative.

The history of Japan and Korea is too complicated for that.

The comfort women controversy is one of the clearest examples. It is simultaneously a question of history, evidence, memory, law and diplomacy. The arguments surrounding it cannot be understood simply by asking which country is “right”. They require readers to examine how historical claims are constructed, challenged and remembered.

That is ultimately why these books are worth reading.

The relationship between Japan and Korea will continue to be shaped by geography, economics and security. But it will also continue to be shaped by the past. Understanding that past does not require abandoning skepticism or accepting every claim made in its name.

It requires something more difficult: the willingness to read widely, examine evidence carefully and recognize that historical memory can be both deeply personal and politically consequential.

For anyone seeking the best books on Korea–Japan relations, Kumagai’s The Comfort Women and Hata’s Comfort Women and Sex in the Battle Zone provide two important perspectives from which to begin that examination.