The First #MeToo Activists: Contemporary Campaigning in Support of the Former Japanese Military “Comfort Women”

Activists today continue to rally around the history of the Japanese military's sexual enslavement of women and girls in the China and Pacific wars of the 1930s and 1940s. Their activism is undertaken mostly to extract state‐level apology and reparation from the Japanese government for these crimes of enforced prostitution or “military sexual slavery.” It is undertaken on behalf of, together with, and in the name of survivors and their descendants. Recently, though, with declining numbers of elderly former “comfort women” able to join campaigning, there have emerged other rationales for continuing with the movement for justice. South Korean activists now mobilize against “sexual violence in war” wherever it occurs in the world, as reflected in an installation of the War and Women's Human Rights Museum in Hongdae that commemorates, in spite of its name, specifically the history of Japanese military sexual slavery and activism by survivors. Walking through the museum, visitors eventually end up on a floor exhibiting crimes of sexual violence in conflicts like that in the Congo. This framing of the contemporary movement aligns with international efforts to spotlight crimes of rape in war, which recently culminated in the awarding of the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize to a doctor and a survivor who have “helped to give greater visibility to war‐time sexual violence.”