The competition to attain justice for past wrongs: The "comfort women" issue in Taiwan

This article joins the debate on transnational campaigns for Japanese historical wrongs in the Asia-Pacific by highlighting the collective "forgetting" on the part of the victims' society. Focusing on the Taiwanese "comfort women" issue, I argue that the "comfort women" campaign has been overshadowed by identity politics in Taiwan, and has subsequently lost ground to civil society debates about the KMT's repressive past. In the context of democratization and a growing political movement to emphasize a Taiwanese identity, I argue that a Chinese Other has been constructed to emphasize the island's distinctiveness from China. This, however, has entailed drawing attention to historical wrongs committed by the Nationalist Party (Zhongguo guomindang, or KMT) during Chiang Kai-shek's authoritarian rule, as well as the emergence of a new historical narrative that emphasizes (relatively) benign Japanese colonial rule. This has had the unintended effect of drawing greater societal attention towards party political disputes over Taiwan's national identity and how history should be interpreted, rather than the redress for the former "comfort women. " © Pacific Affairs.