From migrant activism to transnational “comfort women” advocacy in Berlin

Since Kim Hak-soon’s public testimony in 1991, the “comfort women” movement has grown from a survivor-centered redress movement in South Korea into a transnational movement and discourse on wartime sexual violence and women’s human rights. This development coincided with the rise of global rights activism in the 1990s and continued into the 2000s, as the issue gained wider international visibility through events such as the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery in 2000 (Vickers and Frost Reference Vickers and Frost2021: 5; Crozier-De Rosa and Mackie Reference Crozier-De Rosa and Mackie2019: 1; Gluck Reference Gluck and Jager2007: 69–75).

The Statue of Peace, first installed in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul on December 14, 2011, to commemorate the 1,000th Wednesday Demonstration, became one of the most visible material expressions of this “comfort women” memory. To date, roughly 150 statues stand in Korea and more than 30 abroad, including in the United States, Germany, Italy, and China (AG “Trostfrauen” n.d.; Korean Council n.d.-a). Through overseas resolutions, memorial projects, and diaspora activism, the statue has circulated beyond Korea as a symbol of justice, accountability, women’s rights, and historical remembrance. Scholars have shown how Korean diasporic communities, particularly in cities such as Glendale, California, mobilized inherited memories of colonial trauma to install these monuments and connect them to broader struggles against racialized and gendered violence (Hasunuma and McCarthy Reference Hasunuma and McCarthy2019; Crozier-De Rosa and Mackie Reference Crozier-De Rosa and Mackie2019; Schumacher Reference Schumacher2021; Shin Reference Shin2020). Berlin occupies a distinctive place within this transnational landscape because its “comfort women” activism was rooted not only in Korean diasporic memory, but also in long-standing Korean–Japanese migrant women’s exchanges, West Berlin’s post-1968 political milieu, and later multiethnic feminist networks.

Recent scholarship has interpreted the Berlin statue as the product of civil-society alliances that connected Korean diaspora activism with feminist, anti-racist, and human rights movements, with particular attention to developments since the 2010s (Mladenova Reference Mladenova2022; Schumacher Reference Schumacher2021; Ushiyama Reference Ushiyama2021). My interviews with migrant activists, together with a report submitted by Korea Verband to the National Institute of Korean History, suggest that the networks that later sustained “comfort women” activism in Berlin had roots in earlier migrant, feminist, and solidarity initiatives predating the 1990s (Han et al. Reference Han, Lee and Yoon2022). This section, therefore, traces the Berlin-based migrant and feminist networks that made later “comfort women” advocacy possible. The following section turns to how the Berlin Statue of Peace crystallized these networks as a transnational memory practice.

The “comfort women” movement in Berlin was rooted in earlier exchanges between first-generation Korean and Japanese migrant women whose political consciousness was shaped by the specific milieu of post-1968 West Berlin. Korean nurses and miners had arrived as guest workers in the 1960s and 1970s and gradually became embedded in German society (Thränhardt Reference Thränhardt1988). Japanese migrants who came for study or business likewise formed part of broader Asian diasporic communities in West Berlin, where many women encountered the political atmosphere shaped by the New Left, feminist, and Third World solidarity movements after 1968 (Hamada et al. Reference Hamada, Norris and Lenz2022: 136). Through these encounters, they became engaged with broader sociopolitical questions, including gender discrimination, racism, and migrant rights.

By the late 1980s, exchanges between Korean and Japanese migrant women had opened spaces for discussing shared experiences of migration, discrimination, and gender inequality. A key moment was Japanese artist Tomiyama Taeko’s exhibition in Berlin in 1988, after which Japanese migrant women invited Korean and German women into a trilateral discussion on migrant women’s experiences and gender inequality (Han et al. Reference Han, Lee and Yoon2022: 6; Hamada et al. Reference Hamada, Norris and Lenz2022: 136). Tomiyama’s own work, including her engagement with Korea’s democratization movement and the Japanese military “comfort women” from the mid-1980s, further linked these exchanges to anti-imperial and feminist memory politics (Manabe Reference Manabe2021; Tomiyama Reference Tomiyama2025). These gatherings addressed both the differences between Japanese and Korean women and their shared experiences of migration, gender inequality, and discrimination as Asian women in Germany.

It was also in this context that Korean and Japanese migrant women in Berlin organized a joint seminar on “kisaeng tourism” in November 1986. At a time when Japanese male sex tourism in Korea was increasingly criticized, participants discussed it as a form of gendered and imperial exploitation, linking it to the Japanese military “comfort women” issue, which had not yet become widely known but had begun to circulate through several publications and writings in Japan and Korea in the 1980s. While the “comfort women” issue had not yet entered public discourse in the form it would take in the early 1990s, these debates laid important groundwork for later efforts in Berlin to reinterpret wartime and postwar sexual exploitation from the perspective of women’s human rights (interview by Hong Reference Hong2022b: 8–9; Han et al. Reference Han, Lee and Yoon2022: 6–8).Footnote ⁵

Following Kim Hak-soon’s public testimony in 1991, solidarity activities around the “comfort women” issue also began in Berlin. “Comfort women” movement activists, mostly migrants, organized signature campaigns, conferences, and public events demanding truth, accountability, and redress. One significant example was the 1993 conference “Human Dignity, Women’s Dignity,” which brought together survivors of Japan’s military sexual slavery system from Korea, Indonesia, the Netherlands, and North Korea (interviews by Hong Reference Hong2022a: 7–8, Reference Hong2022c: 20, Reference Hong2023: 19–20; Han et al. Reference Han, Lee and Yoon2022: 6, 10). In the following years, Korean and Japanese migrant groups in Berlin continued to organize solidarity actions. In 1995, they launched a “letter action” campaign addressed to the Japanese prime minister; in 2000, they held street demonstrations and informational events in solidarity with the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal. In 2005, on the 60th anniversary of the end of the war, they staged a silent protest in front of the Japanese Embassy in Berlin, and in 2006, they held a local rally to commemorate the 700th Wednesday Demonstration (Han et al. Reference Han, Lee and Yoon2022: 6, 10; Hamada et al. Reference Hamada, Norris and Lenz2022: 143).

These activities show that the “comfort women” issue entered German public space not simply through the later global circulation of the Statue of Peace, but through migrant women’s networks that had already been shaped by feminist, anti-imperial, and reunification politics. The participation of North Korean survivors in the 1993 conference in Berlin is particularly significant in this regard. The early 1990s were a period in which North Korean actors also participated in transnational “comfort women” solidarity movements. In 1992, the “Conference on Asia’s Peace and Women’s Role” was held in Pyongyang, and in 1993, the same year as the Berlin conference, North Korean activists took part in the Asian Solidarity Conference in Tokyo (Kim Reference Kimn.d.). These events indicate that the Berlin conference formed part of a wider moment of transnational exchange in which North Korean survivors and activists could also be included.

At the same time, their presence in Berlin must also be understood in relation to the city’s specific political context after German reunification in 1990. Berlin, a city formerly divided by the Wall, offered a distinctive setting in which questions of division, peace, and reunification resonated with parts of the Korean migrant community, shaping their engagement in Korean reunification activism. Interviewees stated that some Berlin-based activists had already met North Korean “comfort women” survivors in Pyongyang, deepened their understanding of the issue there, and later interacted with North Korean survivors when they visited Berlin (interviews by Hong Reference Hong2022a: 19–20, 31–3; Reference Hong2023: 21–5).

The invitation of North Korean survivors, therefore, suggests that, in Berlin, activism around the “comfort women” issue could be articulated together with broader political concerns, including peace, anti-imperial solidarity, and Korean reunification. In this sense, the early Berlin movement was embedded from the outset in wider transnational and local political networks, rather than being confined to a narrowly bilateral Korea–Japan frame; as later sections will show, these networks also intersected with South Korean democratization politics and reunification activism.

The late 2000s marked a generational and institutional transition in Berlin-based “comfort women” activism, culminating in the establishment of the Working Group on “Comfort Women” (AG “Trostfrauen”) within Korea Verband in 2009. Founded in 1990, Korea Verband is a Berlin-based non-governmental organization that has long worked on Korean-German civic exchange, human rights, and historical memory, and continues to provide the institutional home for AG “Trostfrauen” (Korea Verband n.d.-a). During this period, survivor Gil Won-ok visited Berlin as part of Amnesty International’s 2007 European speaking tour (Amnesty International 2007), which sought to build support for the European Parliament’s later call for the government of Japan to “acknowledge, apologize, and accept historical and legal responsibility” for the “comfort women” system (European Parliament 2007). She returned to Berlin in subsequent years for further testimony events, including a 2008 event at Freie Universität Berlin, and these visits created opportunities for exchange with Asian migrant communities and drew greater attention from German media (Han et al. Reference Han, Lee and Yoon2022: 17; Schmid Reference Schmid2010).

At the same time, a new generation of Korean migrants began to participate in the movement in ways that differed from the earlier generation. One of the most important figures in this transition was Nataly Jung-hwa Han, chair of Korea Verband’s board since 2012 (Korea Verband n.d.-b). A 1.5-generation Korean migrant who moved to Germany as a child, Han grew up and was educated in Germany. Her mother had moved to West Germany and worked as a nurse. Nataly Jung-hwa Han later recalled that, when she herself began studying at Freie Universität Berlin in the late 1980s, she encountered Korean migrants who addressed political and social issues in Korea from a progressive perspective and connected these concerns to social movements in Berlin (interview by Hong Reference Hong2022c: 3–13).

Figure 1:

Public activities around the Statue of Peace in Berlin. Photo by Choi Mi-yeon, reproduced with permission.

Figure 1: Long description

The image contains one photo. The photo shows a group of people gathered around a statue. The statue is of a seated woman with a crown of flowers on her head. Several people are placing flowers on the statue. The participants are holding large signs with black-and-white photographs of elderly women and text in German. The signs are mounted on wooden frames. The atmosphere appears to be one of remembrance and respect. The event seems to be taking place outdoors, possibly in a park or public space, as indicated by the trees and buildings in the background. The text on the signs and the flowers suggest a commemorative or protest event.

Nataly Jung-hwa Han and other activists carried forward the work of the previous generation while also reshaping it for a German public. Their activities included public education, exhibitions, workshops, and the institutionalization of “comfort women” advocacy within Korea Verband. This shift is particularly visible in the composition and orientation of the Working Group on “Comfort Women” (AG “Trostfrauen”). Composed of participants of various backgrounds, including German, Japanese, Korean, Congolese, and Filipino members, the group chose not to frame the “comfort women” issue merely as a historical dispute between Korea and Japan. Instead, it connected the issue to broader questions of sexual violence, racism, colonialism, and human rights in Germany and beyond (AG “Trostfrauen” 2021; Mladenova Reference Mladenova2022: 5).

By the late 2010s, therefore, Berlin-based “comfort women” activism had become both institutionally anchored in Korea Verband and politically articulated through a multiethnic, anti-racist, and transnational feminist language. It was this networked field of activism that made the installation of the Berlin Statue of Peace possible in 2020. The next section turns to how the statue itself came to operate as a transnational memory practice in Berlin.

The Berlin Statue of Peace as a transnational memory practice

The installation of the Berlin Statue of Peace in 2020 built directly on the activist repertoire developed by AG “Trostfrauen” in the late 2010s. Before the statue was erected, the organization had already framed the “comfort women” issue through campaigns linked to international days of action on women’s rights and violence against women. Through these campaigns, AG “Trostfrauen” has consistently emphasized that wartime sexual violence is not merely a historical event, but an ongoing problem that persists into the present. One of its major initiatives, the annual “Action Week” (Aktionswoche), launched in 2018, illustrates this approach particularly well. The event deliberately bridges two commemorative dates only days apart: August 3, marking the 2014 ISIS genocide against the Yazidis in Sinjar (Şengal) and the sexual enslavement of Yazidi women, and August 14, the International Memorial Day for the Japanese military “comfort women” established to honor Kim Hak-soon’s 1991 testimony. Under slogans such as “Stop the continuity of violence against women” and “Transnational resistance against patriarchy” (AG “Trostfrauen” 2022), activists frame these two histories as part of a single, ongoing pattern rather than as discrete events. In the context of refugee arrivals in Germany after 2015 (Engler Reference Engler2019), this framework allowed activists to place the history of the “comfort women” alongside ongoing experiences of sexual violence, displacement, and racialized vulnerability. As a result, the issue was increasingly articulated within a broader transnational feminist network that brought together Asian, African, and Middle Eastern women activists in Berlin (Han et al. Reference Han, Lee and Yoon2022: 18–20; Mladenova Reference Mladenova2022: 5–6). This repertoire of linking the “comfort women” memory to other histories of gendered violence provided the immediate conceptual basis for the statue’s later public meaning in Berlin.

Building on these efforts, AG “Trostfrauen” proposed in 2019 to install a Statue of Peace in Berlin and obtained an installation permit from the Berlin-Mitte district authorities. The goal was not only commemorative but also pedagogical: the statue was intended as a public educational tool on sexual violence and colonialism, especially for younger generations. Its placement on Bremer Straße in Moabit, a residential street in central Berlin, also allowed the monument to address sexual violence not as a distant or exceptional event, but as a social problem embedded in everyday life (interview by Hong Reference Hong2022c: 32–3; Mladenova Reference Mladenova2022: 7–9). Unveiled on September 28, 2020, in Berlin-Mitte, the statue thus emerged from a locally grounded and transnationally connected feminist civil society (AG “Trostfrauen” n.d.).

The unveiling of the statue was followed immediately by diplomatic pressure from the Japanese government, including Foreign Minister Motegi Toshimitsu’s request for its removal in October 2020 and later renewed pressure from Prime Minister Kishida Fumio in May 2022 (Hansen Reference Hansen2020; Ziegler Reference Ziegler2022). Japan framed the statue as a bilateral diplomatic problem rather than a civic act of remembrance. On October 8, 2020, only ten days after the unveiling, the Mitte District Office issued an order to remove the statue, following Japanese diplomatic pressure. Yet these efforts triggered rapid mobilization by civil-society actors in Berlin: a 300-person demonstration on October 13, 2020, an online petition titled “Die Friedensstatue muss bleiben!” (“The Statue of Peace must stay!”), and active support from German civic groups including Omas gegen Rechts (interview by Hong Reference Hong2022c: 27; Korea Verband 2022). The statue initially remained in place through temporary permits repeatedly extended under public pressure—though, as discussed in later sections, this precarious legal status would generate renewed crises in subsequent years. The conflict also revealed that the monument had already become embedded in local networks of feminist, migrant, and civic solidarity (Mladenova Reference Mladenova2022).

Since its installation, and especially during periods when it came under threat of removal, the activities taking place around the Berlin Statue of Peace have not been limited to the historical remembrance of Japan’s military sexual slavery system. First, the statue became a site of participatory education on gender, memory, and anti-violence awareness. Since 2022, pupils from a local secondary school have incorporated the issue into history classes, producing poems, letters, and artworks inspired by survivors’ stories. These activities demonstrate that the statue had become a site of participatory memory education (Fritz-Karsen-Schule 2024). Second, the statue developed into a memory space for migrant communities and communities of color more broadly. During the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-Asian racism intensified, while attacks such as the Hanau shooting in Germany in 2020 and the Atlanta spa shootings in the United States in 2021 gave renewed urgency to discussions of racialized and gendered violence. Ceremonies for the victims of Hanau and Atlanta were held in front of the statue, and Asian community groups used the site to voice experiences of racial discrimination and gendered violence (Han and Müller Reference Han and Müller2024: 136–9; Mladenova Reference Mladenova2022: 19–20). Third, the statue was reinterpreted as a symbol of decolonial solidarity. Following the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, activists of African descent drew connections between Japanese imperialism and broader histories of colonial violence, including European colonialism. Activists working on the “comfort women” issue also began to collaborate on Germany’s colonial legacies in Africa, for example, by participating in campaigns to rename colonial-era streets (interview by Hong Reference Hong2022c: 33; Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) 2025). These layered forms of public engagement around the statue are shown in Figure 1.

These practices can be understood through the framework of multidirectional memory, which emphasizes how different histories of violence interact, evoke, and reinforce one another rather than competing for recognition (Henderson and Lange Reference Henderson and Lange2017; Levy and Sznaider Reference Levy and Sznaider2006; Rothberg Reference Rothberg2009). The Berlin Statue of Peace demonstrates that the memory of the “comfort women” can also function multidirectionally (Ushiyama Reference Ushiyama2021: 1256–9). Ceremonies for the victims of Hanau and Atlanta, alliances with decolonial activists, and educational projects with local students did not displace the memory of Japanese military sexual slavery. Rather, they expanded its public meaning by connecting it to other histories of war, colonialism, sexual violence, racism, and displacement. Through a shared feminist and anti-racist vocabulary, these practices made it possible to identify historical parallels and connections across otherwise distinct histories of violence (Ushiyama Reference Ushiyama2021: 1257). Following Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory, these memories did not compete for recognition; they became mutually reinforcing (Rothberg Reference Rothberg2009: 1–3).

The “comfort women” memory that emerged around the Berlin statue can, therefore, be understood as a transnational feminist politics of memory produced through migrant activism. The statue does not function as a fixed monument to a singular national past, but as an open platform where different memories encounter one another, are reinterpreted, and become politically articulated. In this process, the statue became a venue for feminist education, a space of mourning and resistance for migrant communities affected by racialized violence, and a point of connection with decolonial activism. It thereby shows how migrant actors can transform urban public space into a site where multidirectional memories are articulated and politically mobilized.

While multidirectional memory explains how different histories of violence became connected through the statue, transnational urbanism helps explain how migrant actors transformed these connections into an intervention in Berlin’s urban public space. Read through the lens of transnational urbanism, the Berlin case illustrates how migrants act not merely as recipients of their host society’s structures, but as political actors who intervene in the social and symbolic fabric of the cities in which they live (Smith Reference Smith2001: 145–56). The Korean and Japanese migrant women who shaped the early “comfort women” movement in Berlin did not simply transfer a memory rooted in Korean–Japanese history onto German soil. Rather, they worked within Berlin’s specific historical and political context: migrant women’s experiences of discrimination, post-1968 civic activism, and the city’s Cold War history of division and reunification. For Korean migrants whose own peninsula remained divided, this context offered a distinctive resonance. Within it, activists built a transnational field of social relations that cut across ethnic and national lines. AG “Trostfrauen”’s Action Week exemplifies this agency from below: in the context of Germany’s refugee reception after 2015 and the racialized debates that followed, activists connected the memory of Japanese military sexual slavery to contemporary struggles against sexual violence, racism, and displacement.

The Berlin Statue of Peace can, therefore, be understood not simply as a memorial transferred from Korea, but as the outcome of migrant activism that reshaped urban public space in Berlin. Through educational programs, petitions, coalition-building, and negotiations with local authorities, activists turned the statue into a locally embedded site of memory that also linked Berlin to wider transnational feminist networks. Germany has already become a post-migrant society, in which migration is recognized as a social reality and becomes the object of ongoing social and political negotiation (Foroutan Reference Foroutan2010). In this context, migrants engage not only with issues concerning their countries of origin, but also with problems in their host society, especially the discrimination they themselves face. They actively participate in reshaping the social and political structures of the cities in which they live, extending even to the physical landscape of urban monuments. The Statue of Peace exemplifies this process by making migrant agency visible in the redefinition of public memory, urban space, and Berlin’s commemorative landscape.

Yet it would be premature to conclude that the Berlin statue represents a solely transnational memory practice (Ushiyama Reference Ushiyama2021: 1259). The transnational solidarity described above did not eliminate the persistent nationalist framing of the “comfort women” issue. Rather, the monument remained vulnerable to diplomatic intervention, competing national narratives, and administrative restrictions. Strong opposition from the Japanese government appeared repeatedly in official settings: Foreign Minister Motegi Toshimitsu requested the statue’s removal in October 2020, Prime Minister Kishida Fumio renewed pressure in May 2022, and in May 2024 Foreign Minister Kamikawa Yoko discussed the disputed memorial with Berlin’s Governing Mayor Kai Wegner, who subsequently announced the need for a “solution” and rejected a “one-sided representation” (Hansen Reference Hansen2020; Senatskanzlei Berlin 2024; Ziegler Reference Ziegler2022). These interventions also resonated with broader historical-revisionist campaigns by right-wing nationalist actors operating across borders (Yamaguchi Reference Yamaguchi2020: 1261).

This fragility became especially visible in 2024, when Berlin’s political landscape shifted and the statue once again faced removal. Although residents and district-level actors mobilized petitions and resolutions in its defense, the final decision rested with the district administration, which chose not to renew the permit (DIE LINKE Fraktion in der BVV Mitte von Berlin 2020; Halliday Reference Halliday2024). By treating the statue primarily as a source of diplomatic conflict, the Berlin-Mitte authorities risked reproducing Japan’s framing of the issue as a bilateral dispute and obscuring the underlying colonial and gendered violence that the statue seeks to make visible (Lenz Reference Lenz2023: 110–1). From this perspective, the case illustrates how feminist and decolonial claims can be marginalized when municipal actors prioritize diplomatic manageability over the demands of transnational civil society.

The case, therefore, reveals a central ambivalence: the Berlin Statue of Peace operates as a politically layered site where migrant activism, feminist solidarity, anti-racist struggle, and decolonial critique converge, yet it remains exposed to nationalist reframing. Various actors continue to reconstruct nationalist boundaries around the transnational memory that civil society has sought to open up (Mladenova Reference Mladenova2022: 3–5, 15–6; Ushiyama Reference Ushiyama2021: 1258–60; Yamaguchi Reference Yamaguchi2020). This tension—between transnational feminist solidarity and nationalist reappropriation—raises the question addressed in the following section: how did the Berlin Statue of Peace, born from transnational feminist civil society, become entangled with South Korean Minjung nationalism?

The “comfort women” movement between feminist redress and Korean patriarchal nationalism

The “comfort women” movement that emerged in South Korea in the late 1980s and early 1990s was shaped by feminist attempts to redress the gendered violence of Japanese imperialism. Yet because it developed within a colonial and postcolonial context, it was also shaped by the patriarchal and nationalist structures that had long informed Korean public discourse. To understand why survivors remained silent for nearly half a century after liberation—until the women’s movement in late-1980s South Korea created the conditions for them to break that silence—we must first examine how colonial patriarchy constructed women’s bodies as symbols of national honor and transferred the burden of imperial violence onto women themselves. A clarification is necessary here. This section does not reduce the “comfort women” movement as a whole to nationalism. As the previous section showed, the movement has long developed into a transnational feminist and human rights movement that connects Japanese military sexual slavery to broader struggles against wartime sexual violence, racism, migration, colonialism, and gendered injustice. The reason for returning to its early genealogy is to identify the nationalist grammar that entered the movement through its emergence from the women’s wing of South Korea’s democratization movement. This genealogy helps explain why the Berlin Statue of Peace could be reinterpreted in 2024 through a Minjung-nationalist vocabulary of historical justice, anti-colonial memory, and national dignity.Footnote ⁶

Colonial nationalism in Korea, like imperial nationalism more broadly, was inherently patriarchal. As bell hooks has shown, colonized men, unable to attain the power and masculinity of the colonizer, may develop a collective sense of emasculation and seek to restore masculine identity by reproducing patriarchal domination over women within their own communities (Hooks Reference Hooks1982: 90–101). In Korea, this dynamic manifested in nationalist men asserting sexual and social dominance over women, who were mobilized as reproducers and symbols of the nation while their individual agency was denied. Kwon describes this as the gendered structure of Korean patriarchal nationalism: women symbolize the collective unity and honor of the nation, yet are simultaneously excluded from its political subjectivity (Kwon Reference Kwon2019: 16).

This gendered structure was reinforced by a powerful ideology of female chastity. Choi Chungmoo (Reference Choi, Choi and Kim1998) argues that patriarchal colonial nationalists, in order to conceal their own impotence in the face of imperial violence, intensified the ideology of female chastity. Within this logic, women who had been raped were rendered unchaste, their violation recast as personal dishonor rather than imperial violence—thereby transferring responsibility for the nation’s failure from colonial men to the women themselves. At the same time, the violation of women’s bodies was reinterpreted as the defilement of the purity of the Korean nation (Choi Reference Choi, Choi and Kim1998: 12–3). As Yang Hyunah further clarifies, chastity within this framework is not a matter of virginity as such, but of the “belongingness” of female sexuality: a married woman’s sexuality belongs to her husband; an unmarried woman’s, to her future husband; and in general, Korean women’s sexuality belongs to Korean men and, by extension, to the masculine nation (Yang Reference Yang, Choi and Kim1998: 131). Within this gendered logic, as Kwon further notes, “women having sex with foreigners is considered to be a defiling of the nation’s ethnic purity,” and Korean “comfort women” were consequently silenced “because they were considered a national shame and anathema to Korean social norms and patriarchal nationalism” (Kwon Reference Kwon2019: 16).

The consequence for “comfort women” survivors was a double silencing. The issue of the Japanese military “comfort women” originated from imperial violence that affected women from various countries, yet within Korean patriarchal-nationalist discourse, it was often perceived less as a violation of women’s human rights than as a symbol of national suffering—and more specifically, Korean national suffering. Within this nationalist-patriarchal framework, shame rather than pride became, in Yang Hyunah’s phrase, “a psychological vehicle through which women connect their sexuality with the possibility of belongingness,” such that survivors who considered speaking publicly feared bringing disgrace not only upon themselves but upon their families and the imagined purity of the nation (Yang Reference Yang, Choi and Kim1998: 131–2). The survivors were, therefore, doubly silenced: first by the violence of Japanese imperialism, and again by a Korean patriarchal-nationalist framework that rendered their experiences shameful and politically difficult to articulate. This silence would remain largely unbroken until the political transformations of the late 1980s.Footnote ⁷

The end of military dictatorship in South Korea opened a period of expanded political freedoms. Within this opening, part of broader changes in the 1980s and early 1990s that included the strengthening of civil society (Shim Reference Shim2023: 665), feminist scholarship and women’s activism grew rapidly, providing both the intellectual resources and the organizational networks that would soon make the “comfort women” movement possible. On November 16, 1990, thirty-seven women’s, religious, civic, and student organizations came together to establish the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (hereafter the Korean Council) (Lee Reference Lee2016). The following year, on August 14, 1991, Kim Hak-soon became the first survivor to publicly testify under her own name, transforming the issue into a feminist human rights discourse and catalyzing a wave of activism, legal actions, and international attention (Korean Council n.d.-b).

Yet the movement did not emerge in a vacuum, nor was its framework purely feminist from the outset. As Lee Hyo-jae, one of the Korean Council’s founding co-chairs, explicitly stated in a 1992 essay, the Korean Council was formed with “the Korean Church Women’s Alliance and the Korean Women’s Associations United—which had led the women’s movement within the broader national-democratic (Minjok-Minju) democratization movement aimed at establishing an autonomous, democratic government and overcoming national division—as its main constituents” (quoted in Lee Reference Lee2016). The “comfort women” movement thus emerged in close connection with the broader Minjung-Minjok milieu of the 1980s democratization movement, which combined anti-dictatorship, anti-imperialist, and nationalist orientations. While this lineage provided the organizational infrastructure and moral legitimacy necessary for the movement’s rapid emergence, it also meant that the movement inherited the nationalist frameworks within which Korean democratization had been articulated. This genealogy can also be understood through what Lee describes as Minjung feminism: a current within the broader Minjung movement that linked women’s exploitation in export industries and the sex industry to South Korea’s authoritarian developmental state, U.S. imperialism, and national division. Within this framework, the “comfort women” issue emerged not only as a question of gendered violence, but also as a problem of class, colonialism, and national sovereignty (Lee Reference Lee2024: 4).

This inheritance shaped the movement from within. Female activists who had been central to Korea’s democratization struggle now found themselves pressured to subordinate women’s issues to prior national goals of democratization, anti-imperialism, and national unification. As Lee Na-young records, Yun Mee-hyang, a former representative of the Korean Council who was active in both the democratization and “comfort women” movements, recalled that “in those days, we were all supposed to be nationalists—at least in public” (Lee Reference Lee2014: 80). The “comfort women” movement, in other words, did not simply encounter Korean nationalism as an external force; it was constituted in part through the nationalist orientations of the democratization movement from which it sprang. The tension between feminist aspirations and nationalist imperatives was thus built into the movement’s foundations—a tension that would become still more pronounced as nationalist forces entered the public arena in the early 1990s and began to appropriate the issue for their own purposes.

Once the silence broke in the early 1990s, the “comfort women” issue did not enter the public sphere as a feminist or human rights discourse alone. As Yang Hyunah observes, “the issue was quickly framed within the pre-existing nationalist discourse” (Yang Reference Yang, Choi and Kim1998: 128). That pre-existing discourse operated through a familiar dichotomous structure—Koreans and Japanese, us and them, victim and offender, good and bad—within which Korean national identity was constructed almost entirely upon the position of victimhood (Yang Reference Yang, Choi and Kim1998: 129). Lee Na-young’s analysis of the early 1990s movement reaches a parallel conclusion: when nationalist forces entered the public arena, they mobilized a unified national sentiment against Japan through dichotomous framings of “us versus them,” “comrade versus enemy,” and “victim versus offender,” producing the dominant image of the “comfort women” as innocent and pure victims (Lee Reference Lee2014: 81–2). Within this structure, the complexity of survivors’ experiences was rendered illegible, while the moral force of Korean victimhood was mobilized as a vehicle of national pride. This tension became visible even within the institutional practices of the Korean Council itself, most notably in its response to the 1993 Kono Statement.

The Kono Statement, issued on August 4, 1993, was the first official acknowledgment by the Japanese government that the wartime “comfort women” system had involved the Japanese military, directly or indirectly, in the establishment and management of comfort stations and in the transfer of women. It also recognized that, in many cases, women had been recruited against their will through coaxing and coercion, and that the recruitment, transfer, and control of women from the Korean Peninsula were conducted “generally against their will” under Japanese rule (Kono Reference Kono1993). The Korean Council issued its own statement in response on the same day, in which it drew a sharp distinction between Korean and Japanese “comfort women”: Korean women, the statement asserted, had been “sex slaves” forced by state authority to provide sexual comfort to the military, whereas Japanese “comfort women” had “received money, concluded contracts, and were able to leave the ‘comfort women’ life once their contracts ended” (quoted in Yamashita Reference Yamashita2024: 71–2). Within this framing, the Korean Council established a categorical dichotomy: Korean women appeared as victims of imperial violence, while Japanese women were cast as voluntary participants in a commercial transaction.

This critique is particularly significant because it emerged from within the movement itself. Yamashita Yon’e, the Zainichi Korean activist tasked with translating the Korean Council’s statement into Japanese, recalls being shocked upon reading the relevant passage; she requested its removal, and although the Korean Council refused, it consented to deleting the section from the Japanese-language version (Yamashita Reference Yamashita2024: 72). Her critique was threefold: by treating the absence of prior sexual experience as the marker of authentic victimization, the statement reproduced the very patriarchal logic of virgin versus prostitute that it claimed to oppose; by characterizing Japanese “comfort women” as mere contracted prostitutes, it obscured the “comfort station” system itself as an apparatus of gendered violence that also victimized Japanese women; and it risked erasing the lowest-class women of colonial Korea who had been sexually exploited under the colonial licensed prostitution system before being trafficked into wartime “comfort stations” (Yamashita Reference Yamashita2024: 72–3).

Soh’s ethnographic work substantiates Yamashita’s analysis by documenting the lived experiences of the very survivors whom the Korean Council’s framing excluded. Soh records survivors such as Kil Won-ok, who had been sold into brothels multiple times before the war; other women had worked in sex industries prior to mobilization, while still others returned to “comfort stations” under conditions of extreme poverty and constrained choice (Soh Reference Soh2009: 25–6). These narratives contradicted the nationalist image of the innocent victim and were systematically excluded from public discourse. The dominant image of the “comfort women” as helpless young virgins forcibly recruited by the Japanese military thus arbitrarily marginalized the personal experiences of survivors whose paths into the “comfort” system had been more varied and complex. The “comfort women” movement, in its institutional form, thus occupied a contradictory dual role: it served as a catalyst for feminist resistance, while also reproducing elements of patriarchal nationalism that could erase the very women in whose name it spoke. To understand this contradictory dual role, we must turn to the specific form that “nationalism” took in 1980s South Korean society—the Minjung-Minjok orientation in which the movement was so deeply embedded.

From Minjung nationalism to the Statue of Peace: democratization, anti-imperial memory, and gendered iconography

This section examines the relationship between nationalism and the contemporary activism surrounding the Statue of Peace. By situating the statue within the framework of Minjung nationalism, a core ideological concept of the South Korean democratization movement, this section places the monument within the political and visual vocabulary of Minjung art. To provide a theoretical foundation for this reinterpretation, this section first traces the socio-political origins of Minjung nationalism and Minjung art, before turning to the iconography and reception of the Statue of Peace.

The Statue of Peace can be read as inheriting a political vocabulary first developed in the Minjung art movement, which emerged from South Korea’s experience of authoritarian rule and incomplete decolonization. After the Korean War, Park Chung-hee’s military dictatorship undermined democratic principles and deepened social inequality and political repression. Park Chung-hee’s government consolidated power, prioritizing rapid industrialization under a growth-first policy while neglecting distributive justice (The Academy of Korean Studies n.d.). Workers’ rights were systematically violated (Shin Reference Shin2008). Under the banner of national security, anti-communist ideology intensified, suppressing leftist ideas about distributive justice by equating them with the threat of North Korea (Lee Reference Lee2015: 30). The 1965 normalization of relations with Japan, which included a financial settlement but neither Japan’s acknowledgment of legal responsibility nor formal reparations for colonial rule, deepened a sense among activists that Korea remained structurally dependent on foreign powers (Hong et al. Reference Hong, Park and Jeong2018: 100–6; Lee Reference Lee2015: 66). In this framework, democratization was not understood merely as a struggle against domestic authoritarianism. It was also imagined as a continuation of anti-colonial liberation, because authoritarian rule itself was interpreted as a product of unresolved colonial structures and foreign dependency (Hong et al. Reference Hong, Park and Jeong2018: 110).

This pattern continued under Chun Doo-hwan’s dictatorship, which similarly relied on anti-communist ideology and U.S. and Japanese backing to consolidate authoritarian rule (Hong et al. Reference Hong, Park and Jeong2018: 223–6; Oh Reference Oh2025: 255). The violent suppression of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, also known in South Korea as the May 18 Democratization Movement, became a defining trauma, radicalizing a generation of students, workers, and artists who came to view democratization and decolonization as inseparable struggles (Lee Reference Lee2015: 30).

Central to this movement was the concept of Minjung—the oppressed and marginalized within political, economic, and cultural structures, encompassing workers, farmers, the urban poor, and other marginalized groups, including women (Ye Reference Ye2024: 148–9). By the mid-1980s, Minjung had come to be understood in movement and historiographical discourse as the subject of history and the principal agent of social transformation (Lee Reference Lee2015: 83; Ye Reference Ye2024: 143, 148), even as later critics questioned the category’s ideological construction (Lim et al. Reference Lim, Choi and Lee1999: 78–9).Footnote ⁸

This understanding of Minjung as the subject of history was grounded in Minjung activists’ reinterpretation of modern Korean history. They viewed Japanese colonialism as the root cause of Korea’s political, social, and psychological crises, and argued that true independence had never been achieved since 1945 (Lee Reference Lee2015: 23–5, 77–8). The continued presence of U.S. troops, economic subordination, and unpunished pro-Japanese collaborators were regarded as the structural legacy of colonial rule that had enabled authoritarianism (Lee Reference Lee2015: 25; Lim et al. Reference Lim, Choi and Lee1999: 72–4). Consequently, Korea was described as an independent state in name only, possessing merely nominal sovereignty. Choi Chungmoo characterized this condition as one of “multilayered colonialism,” arguing that formal liberation had not brought substantive decolonization. In this context, nationalism functioned as a discourse of resistance against both colonialism and imperialism (Lim et al. Reference Lim, Choi and Lee1999: 70–4).

As one leading student activist, Kim Minseok, declared in 1985, “Only the Minjung are truly national, and only the Minjung are truly democratic”—a conviction that historical legitimacy belonged not to the authoritarian state, but to the oppressed people understood as the authentic bearer of the nation (Lee Reference Lee2015: 55). Activists, therefore, felt a duty to correct what they understood as a “failed history”—one in which Japanese colonialism remained the unresolved root of Korea’s ongoing political and psychological crises (Lee Reference Lee2015: 27, 30). They reconstructed an alternative narrative linking the anti-colonial struggle during the Japanese colonial period with the contemporary democratization movement, and defined Japanese and American imperialism as hostile “others” (Lee Reference Lee2015: 106–9).

This effort to recover Minjung history also generated a new cultural mission: to represent the oppressed as the subjects of history and to transmit that history to future generations. It was precisely this impulse—to represent and preserve the lives and struggles of the Minjung—that gave rise to Minjung art as both a political and pedagogical practice. Even after democratization, confronting Japan’s colonial legacy remained central to history education and national identity formation (Lim et al. Reference Lim, Choi and Lee1999: 70).Footnote ⁹

Minjung art transformed this political consciousness into visual form, especially in the aftermath of the Gwangju Uprising (Hong Reference Hong2020: 190). Like the democratization activists, Minjung artists interpreted 1980s South Korea as a neo-colonial condition, viewing the division of Korea and military dictatorship as remnants of unresolved colonialism (Kim Reference Kim2011: 69–70, 85). They sought to represent the lives and struggles of the Minjung through a vernacular, anti-elitist, and distinctly national aesthetic—reinterpreting traditional visual language to overcome colonial residues while strengthening resistant nationalism (Kim Reference Kim2011: 69–70).

One important strand of Minjung art developed a recognizable visual grammar of anti-imperial nationalism, in which the United States and Japan appeared as aggressors and Korean people as wounded but enduring subjects. This grammar relied on easily legible symbols—such as the Stars and Stripes, the Rising Sun flag, and caricatured images of foreign power—to mark external domination. By contrast, Korean people and sovereignty were represented through vulnerable yet persistent motifs, including figures in the traditional Korean dress (hanbok) and sacred natural imagery marked by trauma, suffering, and endurance. Across these works, Minjung art fused aesthetic practice with political resistance, establishing a visual language through which national trauma and anti-imperial struggle could be collectively expressed and transmitted (Kim Reference Kim2011: 78–80, 87).

The sculptors Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung were formed within this Minjung artistic vocabulary and political sensibility. Kim Seo-kyung, a student of Minjung artist Oh Yoon, had been engaged in Minjung activism since high school, and upon entering Chung-Ang University’s Department of Sculpture in 1984, she participated in protests and joined the Association of Minjung Artists (Minmihyup) (Go Reference Go2022a). Her classmate Kim Eun-sung, also a 1984 entrant, became the first student activist leader of the College of Fine Arts and organized the exhibition “Minjung’s Land” together with students of painting, photography, and writing (Go Reference Go2022b). The two met during this period and began collaborating, inheriting the political and aesthetic ideals of Minjung art. Although their major public memorials were produced after formal democratization, their work continued to draw on the Minjung art concern with unresolved histories of state violence, foreign domination, and unacknowledged victims.

The continuity between Minjung art and the Statue of Peace becomes clearest in the artists’ long engagement with victims of imperial and military violence. Their 2002 Memorial for the Victims of the U.S. Armored Vehicle Incident honored two middle-school girls killed by a U.S. military vehicle in Yangju, an event that sparked widespread protests against Korea’s unequal alliance with the United States (Choi et al. Reference Choi, Ahn and Shin2021). The Statue of Peace, created in 2011, can be read as one of the most visible contemporary expressions of this Minjung lineage, extending a similar anti-imperial commemorative logic from U.S. military violence to Japanese colonial sexual violence (Insa Auction Co., Ltd. n.d.). This connection is not merely retrospective. In a 2016 book co-authored with Kim Eun-sung, Kim Seo-kyung described the girl statue as representing the “daughter” of the colonial Minjung, referring to the daughters of the poor and powerless colonized workers and peasants who were most vulnerable to colonial and gendered exploitation (quoted in Lee Reference Lee2024: 8). Read in this way, the statue condenses class, gender, and colonial domination into the figure of a young Korean girl.

The iconography of the Statue of Peace can be read as translating elements of Minjung nationalism into a gendered national image. As Elizabeth Son (Reference Son2018) argues, the statue contains layered nationalist affects. The most prominent symbol is the traditional Korean dress (hanbok): although “comfort women” existed across Asia, the hanbok identifies the figure specifically as Korean. The white jacket (jeogori) and black skirt (chima) resemble school uniforms worn by girls during the colonial era and evoke a nationalist ideal of femininity associated with virtue and modesty (Son Reference Son2018: 155). The hanbok thus functions as a signifier of nationalist femininity, evoking virtue, modesty, and chastity.

The choice of a young girl further reinforces this symbolism. Although many of the victims were adults, the artists explained that the statue was intended to commemorate the youth they had lost. The figure’s youth and innocence heighten the emotional impact of the Japanese military’s crime, its deceit, and its exploitation of the young and vulnerable (Son Reference Son2018: 154). In this sense, like the Minjung artists before them, Kim Eun-sung and Kim Seo-kyung visually reconstruct nationalist emotion by centering the suffering of Korean women: the violated young girl can become the symbolic condensation of the violated nation.

At the same time, this iconographic reading has been contested in Korean public discourse. This figuration resonates with what C. Sarah Soh has identified as the dominant postcolonial Korean public narrative of the “comfort women” as helpless young virgins forcibly mobilized by Japan, a framing that marginalized more complex survivor experiences (Soh Reference Soh2009: 24–6). Similarly, V.S. Kwon (Reference Kwon2019) notes that some critics and scholars interpret the statue as reproducing the Korean Council’s constructed image of the pure Korean girl-victim, thereby reinforcing gender stereotypes and nationalist sentiment. Yet Kwon herself argues that this interpretation misidentifies the source of such associations. In her reading, the seated girl is not a passive victim but an artistic representation of the elderly survivors who had protested at that site for decades—an assertive activist rather than an object of protection. Kwon thus shifts the analytical focus from the sculpture’s iconography alone to the patriarchal nationalist gaze through which audiences may read it (Kwon Reference Kwon2019: 18–9).

The significance of the Statue of Peace, then, lies precisely in this tension. It cannot be reduced either to nationalism or to feminism alone (Kwon Reference Kwon2019: 23). Audience reception reflects the entanglement of feminist resistance and nationalist discourse: the “comfort woman” figure has come to represent not only individual victims of Japanese violence but also the collective Korean nation. As the movement evolved, survivors were reimagined as feminist fighters against imperialism—symbols of both gendered suffering and national resilience (Son Reference Son2018: 156). For many activists educated through anti-colonial history and the Minjung tradition, the statue’s installation continues the mission of resisting Japanese oppression and correcting the “failed history” that the democratization movement sought to overcome. Conversely, the threat to remove it is perceived as a repetition of that failure—a renewed capitulation to imperial pressure. This reading provides the basis for analyzing the actions of first-generation Korean migrants and opposition lawmakers in Berlin in the following sections. Their defense of the statue can be understood not merely as a response to a threatened memorial, but as an expression of a historical consciousness rooted in Korea’s democratization movement, anti-colonial memory, and the Minjung tradition. It is this consciousness—inherited from the Minjung tradition and sustained through decades of anti-colonial activism—that the following sections examine in greater detail.

Democratization-line politicians and the moral capital of historical justice

Building on the previous section’s discussion of Minjung nationalism and the Statue of Peace as an affective signifier, this section turns from symbolic formation to political mobilization. It examines how democratization-line opposition politicians reactivated this nationalist grammar during the 2024 controversy over the Berlin Statue of Peace. The visit of DPK and RKP lawmakers to Berlin in September 2024 should, therefore, not be understood merely as an act of solidarity with a threatened overseas memorial. It was also a performative act of memory politics through which opposition politicians positioned themselves as heirs to South Korea’s democratization movement and its unfinished project of historical justice. For them, the Berlin Statue of Peace was not only a transnational feminist memorial addressing wartime sexual violence, but also a symbol of anti-colonial redress, resistance to Japanese historical revisionism, and democratic moral legitimacy.

This political positioning was rooted in the post-democratization trajectory of the Democratic Party lineage. After formal democratization, many former activists entered party politics, government ministries, and civil society institutions, especially under the Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun administrations (Lee Reference Lee2015: 475). The Democratic Party and its affiliated political currents thereby came to claim a particular form of moral authority: they presented themselves as the political heirs of anti-dictatorship struggle, historical justice, and resistance to colonial and authoritarian legacies. In this political tradition, Japan-related historical issues such as the “comfort women” issue were not merely diplomatic controversies (Kim Reference Kim2018). They were treated as questions of whether South Korea had completed the historical task of democratization and decolonization.

The “comfort women” issue occupied a particularly powerful position within this memory politics. As discussed in the section on the “comfort women” movement between feminist redress and Korean patriarchal nationalism, it was framed as a question of women’s human rights and justice for survivors. Yet, as the “comfort women” movement of the 1990s also demonstrates, the issue was repeatedly articulated through a nationalist vocabulary of colonial victimhood, national dignity, and historical redress—an interpretive vocabulary that later became available to democratization-line politicians (Lee Reference Lee2014: 80–82; Yang Reference Yang, Choi and Kim1998: 128–9). The Statue of Peace condensed these meanings into a visible and emotionally powerful form. It represented individual survivors of Japanese military sexual slavery, but it also came to symbolize the suffering, endurance, and moral legitimacy of the Korean nation (Kwon Reference Kwon2019: 18–23; Son Reference Son2018: 154–6).

This political lineage is particularly visible in the figure of Choo Mi-ae, one of the lawmakers who visited Berlin in 2024. Long associated with the Kim Dae-jung tradition, Choo Mi-ae had repeatedly framed the “comfort women” issue as a matter of victims’ dignity and historical justice. She attended the Wednesday Demonstrations and criticized the 2015 Korea–Japan “comfort women” agreement as invalid because it failed to reflect the voices of the victims (Lee Reference Lee2017). During debates over the possible removal of the Seoul statue, she further argued that the statue “peacefully condemns Japan’s enslavement of women from a nation deprived of sovereignty” and that, if Japan were to truly repent and apologize, there would be no reason for the issue to escalate into a diplomatic conflict (Lee Reference Lee2018).

These biographical details are not important simply as personal backgrounds. Rather, they show how the lawmakers’ intervention in Berlin drew upon a shared political grammar. Within this grammar, democracy was tied to historical rectification, anti-colonial justice, and criticism of attempts to minimize Japan’s colonial and wartime violence (Lee Reference Lee2015: 25–7, 106–9; Lim et al. Reference Lim, Choi and Lee1999: 70, 89). The Berlin Statue of Peace, therefore, became a stage on which democratization-line politicians could perform their inherited moral role beyond South Korea’s national borders. In Korean media coverage and political statements, the threatened removal of the statue was not framed merely as an administrative dispute in Berlin-Mitte. It was interpreted as part of a longer struggle over Japan-related historical memory, attempts to minimize or obscure colonial and wartime violence, and the Korean state’s responsibility to protect the dignity of colonial victims.

At the same time, this intervention cannot be separated from the domestic political context of 2024. Even before the declaration of martial law in December 2024, the Yoon Suk-yeol administration of the conservative People Power Party (PPP) had already been criticized by opposition politicians and civic actors for its Japan policy and increasingly confrontational style of governance (Yim Reference Yim2024). Its third-party compensation plan for colonial-era forced labor victims, its response to Japan’s UNESCO listing of the Sado Mines, and its broader efforts to strengthen Korea–U.S.–Japan security cooperation were widely interpreted by critics as excessive accommodation toward Japan. The controversy intensified when Kim Tae-hyo, deputy director of the National Security Office, stated that what mattered was “Japan’s feelings,” a phrase that critics read as privileging the perspective of the former imperial perpetrator over that of colonial victims. The appointment of figures whom critics associated with the unresolved legacy of colonial-era collaboration further reinforced the opposition’s accusation that the Yoon Suk-yeol government was abandoning historical justice. Though justified as efforts to strengthen the Korea–U.S.–Japan alliance, these actions recalled the pro-U.S. and pro-Japan-oriented foreign policies of the Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan regimes (Kim Reference Kim2024).

Against this background, the Berlin Statue of Peace became a symbolic site through which opposition lawmakers could contrast their own commitment to historical justice with what they described as the government’s silence or excessive accommodation toward Japan. Formally, the Yoon Suk-yeol administration’s non-intervention policy toward the Berlin statue could appear reasonable. It emphasized respect for the authority of a German local district government, maintained the tacit principle established under the Moon Jae-in administration that the matter should be left to civil society and local authorities, and sought to prevent the issue from escalating into a diplomatic dispute with Japan (Shin Reference Shin2024b). Yet in the political climate of 2024, this non-intervention was not read simply as diplomatic prudence. For opposition politicians, it came to signify moral cowardice, excessive diplomatic accommodation, and the state’s failure to defend the dignity of colonial victims.

The subsequent martial law crisis of December 2024 retrospectively intensified this interpretation. Yoon Suk-yeol’s declaration of martial law on December 3, 2024, followed by his impeachment and removal from office in April 2025, made it possible for opposition actors to frame his government not only as historically conciliatory toward Japan but also as a broader pattern of authoritarian regression (Park Reference Park2025; Yoon Reference Yoon2025). Although these events occurred after the lawmakers’ Berlin visit, they are important for understanding the political meaning that the visit acquired afterward. They strengthened the opposition’s claim that its defense of historical justice belonged to the same moral lineage as the earlier struggle against dictatorship. In this sense, the Berlin statue became more than a memorial to colonial sexual violence. It became a site where opposition politicians could reenact the posture of democratization-era resistance: defending victims, criticizing attempts to minimize Japan’s colonial and wartime responsibility, and confronting a conservative government increasingly associated with authoritarian rule.

The threatened statue allowed opposition lawmakers to connect the defense of historical justice with criticism of conservative diplomacy, Korea–U.S.–Japan security alignment, and authoritarian regression. In this sense, the visit combined moral conviction with political calculation. It allowed opposition politicians to reaffirm their identity as heirs of democratization and anti-colonial justice while also mobilizing criticism of the conservative government. More specifically, the Berlin statue functioned as an affective medium through which opposition lawmakers could speak to and mobilize constituencies critical of Yoon Suk-yeol’s Japan policy and his increasingly authoritarian style of governance. Rather than operating as a conventional campaign issue, the statue offered a morally charged symbol around which historical victims, the democratic opposition, and “the people” could be articulated against a government portrayed as indifferent to colonial injustice. This dynamic resonates with Jaeyeon Lee’s analysis of the girl statue movement as a left-wing nationalist-populist formation, in which the statue links Minjung democratization memory, anti-imperialist sentiment, and anti-Japanese historical justice through affective identification (Lee Reference Lee2024: 1–3, 5–7).

This does not mean that the lawmakers’ concern for the statue was merely opportunistic. Their intervention was grounded in a historical consciousness shaped by the democratization movement and its critique of unresolved colonial legacies. Yet the political form of that intervention mattered. By approaching the Berlin statue primarily through the language of Korean historical justice, national dignity, and criticism of attempts to minimize Japan’s colonial and wartime responsibility, the lawmakers risked narrowing the meaning of a monument that Berlin-based activists had worked to develop as a transnational feminist site of memory. A memorial that had connected Japanese military sexual slavery to contemporary sexual violence, racism, migration, and decolonial struggles was thus drawn back into a Korea–Japan-centered narrative of national injury and national defense.

The significance of the lawmakers’ visit lies precisely in this ambivalence. It expressed solidarity with a threatened memorial and challenged attempts to minimize Japan’s colonial and wartime responsibility, but it also reactivated a nationalist grammar inherited from the democratization movement. Within this grammar, the Statue of Peace became a symbol of Korea’s unresolved history, democratic legitimacy, and resistance to authoritarian regression rather than an open platform of transnational feminist memory. This re-nationalization was not embraced by all Berlin-based activists. Yet for many first-generation Korean migrants in Berlin, it resonated deeply with their own political biographies. The following section, therefore, turns to the diasporic Minjung nationalism through which these migrants interpreted the statue and welcomed the lawmakers’ visit.

First-generation Korean migrants and diasporic Minjung nationalism

Why did many first-generation Korean migrants in Berlin not only support the movement for the Statue of Peace, but also welcome the visit of Korean lawmakers with such visible enthusiasm? Their response cannot be explained simply by ethnic solidarity or by attachment to a Korean national symbol. Rather, it must be situated within a longer history in which Korean migrants in Germany came to understand themselves as political subjects within a Minjung-centered vocabulary of labor rights, anti-dictatorship activism, the memory of May 18, reunification, and historical justice. For many of them, the lawmakers’ visit did not appear as an external intervention into a local Berlin controversy. It appeared as a belated recognition of their own diasporic political biography.

The first political formation of this generation emerged from the conditions of labor migration itself. Korean nurses and miners arrived in West Germany from the 1960s onward within a postwar labor migration regime shaped by industrial expansion, labor shortages, and Cold War geopolitical alignments (BPB 2019; Lee Reference Lee2015: 324–6). Yet these migrants were treated primarily as temporary labor. After the 1973 oil crisis, when foreign workers were increasingly deemed “no longer needed,” many Korean nurses faced the threat of repatriation. As a first-generation Korean nurse recalled, they felt treated “like commodities,” with their human dignity ignored (interview by Hong Reference Hong2023: 8–10).

Their struggle against repatriation and for residence rights transformed many from economically motivated migrants into collective political actors. Korean nurses organized protests, gathered more than 10,000 signatures, and petitioned for permanent residence and family reunification. Their campaign contributed to changes in residency regulations that allowed many to remain (interview by Hong Reference Hong2023: 10–13; Bauer Reference Bauer2017: 12). In the 1970s, this politicization also led to new organizational forms, including the Koreanische Frauengruppe (Korean Women’s Group in Germany), which emerged in the context of the campaign against forced repatriation and later became an important site for women’s activism (Solidarity of Korean People in Europe 2001). What began as a struggle over labor, residence, and dignity thus became a formative experience of collective political subjecthood.

First-generation Korean women in Germany neither simply assimilated into German society nor preserved a fixed Korean identity. Instead, they constructed diasporic belonging through everyday practices, memories, political organizations, and community ties. Political participation became one of the resources through which Germany was made into a home, while their relationship to Korea was simultaneously reworked (Kim Reference Kim2019: 251–3). In this sense, the later involvement of the Koreanische Frauengruppe (Korean Women’s Group in Germany) in “comfort women” activism and in supporting the Berlin Statue of Peace was rooted not in abstract nationalism alone, but in an earlier migrant experience in which labor rights, residence, dignity, and political solidarity had already become inseparable.

This politicization was intensified by experiences of authoritarian violence from the homeland. The East Berlin Affair of 1967 revealed that the violence of Park Chung-hee’s military regime could reach Korean migrants even beyond national borders. Korean students, intellectuals, and workers in Germany were accused of espionage partly because they had visited East Germany or shown interest in North Korea and reunification, activities that the anti-communist South Korean state treated as political threats. Agents of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) abducted Korean residents in West Germany and forcibly transported them to South Korea, where they were imprisoned and interrogated. This violation of West German sovereignty prompted diplomatic protest (Chang Reference Chang2020; Hwang Reference Hwang2017; Lee Reference Lee2015: 161–2; Lee Reference Lee2015: 329–33). The incident, therefore, made the dictatorship’s violence tangible within the diaspora itself, turning Germany from a place of distance into a site directly entangled with South Korean authoritarian rule. In retrospect, this experience can be read as one of the conditions under which Korean migrants in Germany came to participate in a diasporic Minjung political grammar: they were not merely observers of authoritarianism in South Korea, but subjects exposed to the reach of state repression across borders.Footnote ¹⁰

The Gwangju Uprising of May 1980 provided another crucial moment of political transformation. German television reports on the brutal military crackdown and the subsequent demonstrations by Korean migrants in Berlin, including on Kurfürstendamm, turned Gwangju into a transnational memory (interview by Hong Reference Hong2023: 14; Kim Reference Kim2024: 99; Lee Reference Lee2015: 335). May 18 was not merely remembered abroad; through emotional connections and cultural practices, it reshaped migrants’ identities and sustained their transnational aspirations for democracy, human rights, and reunification (Jung Reference Jung2023: 50–55). In this sense, May 18 became a structure of feeling through which migrants interpreted both Korean history and their own political responsibility across borders.

In this sense, their political identity developed at the intersection of immigrant politics and homeland politics. Kwon and Nam’s discussion of Korean immigrant activism in Germany helps clarify this intersection. Drawing on Østergaard-Nielsen’s distinction, they show that migrant activism may address rights, legal status, and discrimination in the host society, while also engaging democracy, human rights, reunification, and political struggles in the society of origin. They also summarize constructivist and affect-oriented approaches to collective action, according to which activism is driven not only by instrumental interests but also by symbolic and emotional motives such as grievance, moral obligation, anger, attachment, solidarity, and loyalty (Kwon and Nam Reference Kwon and Nam2023: 7–9). Seen through this framework, the two processes of politicization discussed above—the struggle against exclusion in Germany and the confrontation with authoritarian violence from South Korea—drew first-generation Korean migrants in Berlin more deeply into homeland politics. They also helped constitute these migrants as diasporic Minjung subjects: people who experienced the reach of authoritarian repression across borders, while also acting as participants in the pro-democracy movement from abroad.

Through these experiences, many first-generation migrants came not only to identify emotionally and politically with South Korea’s democratization movement, but also to develop their own pro-democracy activism in Germany during the 1970s (Lee Reference Lee2015: 161). Even while living in Germany, they hoped for democratization in Korea and built solidarity networks with activists, pastors, workers, students, and intellectuals who opposed the military dictatorship. This orientation was institutionalized through migrant organizations and related movements, including workers’ education initiatives, reunification networks, and women’s groups (interview by Hong Reference Hong2023: 20–25; Kwon and Nam Reference Kwon and Nam2023: 10–12; Solidarity of Korean People in Europe 2001).

This political orientation is especially visible in the activities of the Solidarity of Korean People in Europe (한민족 유럽 연대, Hanminjok Europe Yeondae).Footnote ¹¹ For decades, the organization and its predecessors have sustained pro-democracy activism, campaigns for peace and reunification on the Korean Peninsula, annual May 18 commemorative rites as a Minjung ritual of remembrance (민중제, Minjungje), and more recent activism around the “comfort women” issue and the defense of the Statue of Peace. A 2001 founding statement, circulated under the provisional name Yureop Minjujuui Yeondaegigu (유럽 민주주의 연대기구, “European Organization for Democratic Solidarity”) as the group prepared to establish itself, linked the peaceful reunification of the homeland, democracy in everyday life, and the task of “setting history right” (Solidarity of Korean People in Europe 2001). In this milieu, the Minjung-nationalist grammar of South Korea’s democratization movement was not merely observed from abroad. It was adopted, reworked, and sustained as a diasporic political identity.Footnote ¹²

The “comfort women” issue entered this diasporic political field not as an isolated women’s rights issue, but as part of a broader constellation of democratization and historical rectification. As discussed earlier in section 2–1, the Koreanische Frauengruppe collaborated with Japanese women’s organizations and participated in the early “comfort women” movement, helping to develop a transnational feminist discourse on wartime sexual violence. Yet within the broader diasporic Minjung-nationalist milieu, the issue was also understood as a matter of historical justice, colonial responsibility, and the imperative not to repeat the failures of history. Against this background, support for the Berlin Statue of Peace was not a sudden or isolated act. For many first-generation migrants, the statue linked migrant rights struggles, anti-dictatorship activism, the memory of Gwangju, reunification activism, and the internationalization of the “comfort women” issue. It could, therefore, be embraced not only as a memorial to the victims of Japanese military sexual slavery, but also as a continuation of their own history of political engagement.

This explains why the visit of Korean lawmakers could be welcomed so warmly. For first-generation migrants who had often acted from the margins of both German society and South Korean official politics, the presence of DPK and RKP lawmakers at the Berlin statue could be experienced as a form of recognition. These politicians appeared not merely as party representatives, but as institutional heirs to the democratization movement with which the migrants had long identified. The emotional intensity of this reception should, therefore, be understood as a moment of diasporic recognition: a confirmation that their long-standing struggles for democracy, reunification, and historical justice had not remained outside Korean history, but could be symbolically folded back into it.

The metaphor of abandonment and orphanhood used by one first-generation migrant is revealing in this regard. As noted in the introduction, the participant recalled that the community felt “abandoned, like orphans” because Japan had lobbied for the statue’s removal while the South Korean government had done nothing, and expressed gratitude that the lawmakers had come to encourage them (Korea Verband 2024: 1). This family metaphor suggests not simply personal affection, but a national-affective structure in which homeland politicians were imagined as members of a moral national family. Patricia Hill Collins’s discussion of the “national family” can help clarify this point: the family is not only a private form of belonging, but also a metaphor through which nations naturalize hierarchy, loyalty, and affective obligation (Collins Reference Collins1998). In the Berlin case, the metaphor made the lawmakers’ visit emotionally legible as a delayed response from the homeland to its long-neglected diasporic children. Yet this also reveals the nationalist structure of the affect involved. The joy of recognition was simultaneously a joy of being reabsorbed into a moral community imagined in familial and national terms.

The enthusiasm of first-generation Korean migrants for the lawmakers’ visit should, therefore, not be dismissed as simple nationalism. It emerged from a long history of migrant labor, political marginalization, anti-dictatorship activism, and transnational memory work. At the same time, it shows why the re-nationalization analyzed in the previous section could be so persuasive in Berlin. The nationalist grammar activated by South Korean opposition politicians did not arrive in an empty space. It resonated with a diasporic Minjung nationalism that had already connected democracy, anti-authoritarian struggle, reunification, and historical justice across the spaces of Korea and Germany. This resonance helps explain why the lawmakers’ intervention was not experienced by many first-generation migrants as an external political intervention into a transnational feminist memorial, but as the continuation and recognition of their own political history.

From civic memory to diplomatic dispute: the limits of resistant nationalism

The lawmakers’ visit had consequences that exceeded the intentions of its organizers and supporters. As discussed in the previous sections, the visit could be experienced by many first-generation Korean migrants as a moment of recognition and diasporic affirmation. Yet it also changed the political visibility of the Berlin Statue of Peace. What had been sustained by Berlin-based activists as a civic and transnational feminist site of memory became increasingly legible to public officials and media actors as an object of Korea–Japan diplomatic conflict. This section, therefore, examines the limits of resistant Minjung nationalism: while it mobilized historical justice and anti-colonial memory, it also risked displacing the statue’s broader feminist and civic meaning.

This danger had already been identified by younger Korean migrant activists before the lawmakers arrived in Berlin. In a meeting of the Solidarity of Korean People in Europe, some activists warned that the opinions of organizations and individuals who had long worked for the Statue of Peace had not been sufficiently considered in preparing the visit. They also feared that, if the visit were perceived as an official act of the South Korean state, Japan could use diplomatic channels to demand the statue’s removal, thereby placing the movement in a more vulnerable position (Solidarity of Korean People in Europe 2024).Footnote ¹³ These concerns were not merely procedural but reflected a distinct generational formation. Unlike the first generation, shaped by the democratization movement, younger Berlin-based activists had built their political identities through the multiethnic, anti-racist, and feminist milieu of post-2010s Berlin analyzed in the earlier section, from migrant activism to transnational memory practice in Berlin. In this context, the statue’s political force depended precisely on its capacity to transcend a national frame, rather than being drawn into homeland party politics.

The controversy that followed confirmed the activists’ concern that the visit could be interpreted through a diplomatic rather than civic frame. According to Korean media reports, Choo Mi-ae emphasized during the meeting that the Statue of Peace was not only a matter of Korea–Japan history, but also a symbol of ongoing wartime sexual violence, and therefore should not be treated merely as a legal or administrative issue (Shin Reference Shin2024a). In this account, the lawmakers’ intervention still appeared as a defense of the statue’s transnational feminist meaning. Yet the German public controversy developed differently. Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (RBB), the public broadcaster for Berlin and Brandenburg, reported that the lawmakers had pressured Berlin-Mitte District Mayor Stefanie Remlinger by linking the statue’s removal to South Korea’s possible position on support for Ukraine (Grieger and Tran Reference Grieger and Tran2024). Whether one accepts this report or the lawmakers’ denial, the important point is that the visit became publicly readable as political pressure from South Korean actors.Footnote ¹⁴

This shift was reinforced when the controversy entered official and diplomatic arenas. Korea Verband demanded an explanation from the lawmakers and the Korean Embassy, which had reportedly provided interpretation support, but both dismissed the RBB report as false without offering further public clarification. RBB then reaffirmed its original reporting, and Mayor Stefanie Remlinger later stated publicly at the Berlin-Mitte District Council that both Korean and Japanese politicians had exerted pressure on her (Linksfraktion Berlin-Mitte 2024). The Japanese Ambassador Yanagi Hidenao’s subsequent remarks further consolidated this diplomatic framing. By claiming that Korean opposition lawmakers had interfered in German domestic affairs and that the statue could not be separated from anti-Japanese sentiment and bilateral conflict, he recast the memorial as evidence of Korea–Japan antagonism rather than as a civic site of feminist and decolonial memory (Yanagi Reference Yanagi2024).

The significance of this episode lies less in determining which actor’s account was correct than in analyzing the frame displacement it produced. Before the visit, Berlin-based activists had worked to present the Statue of Peace as a local civic memorial connected to wartime sexual violence, racism, migration, and decolonial feminist solidarity. After the visit, however, public discussion increasingly focused on whether Korean or Japanese politicians had pressured German officials. In this process, the statue’s transnational feminist message did not disappear, but it was overshadowed by a state-centered narrative of diplomatic pressure and Korea–Japan conflict.

In this sense, the episode confirms the structural vulnerability discussed in the earlier section, from migrant activism to transnational memory practice in Berlin. The Berlin Statue of Peace has always been a transnational feminist memory site exposed to diplomatic pressure, administrative restrictions, and competing national narratives (Lenz Reference Lenz2023: 110–1; Mladenova Reference Mladenova2022; Ushiyama Reference Ushiyama2021: 1258–60). The lawmakers’ visit did not create this vulnerability, but it activated it from the Korean side. By entering the controversy through the language and performance of South Korean party politics, it made the statue more easily legible as a Korea–Japan dispute rather than as a transnational feminist memorial. In doing so, it also strengthened nationally centered readings of the statue: in Japan, as an anti-Japanese symbol; in Germany, as an administrative problem with diplomatic implications; and in Korea, as a site of resistant national memory.

This outcome reveals the limits of resistant Minjung nationalism. Through their visit, the lawmakers sought to challenge efforts to render Japan’s colonial and wartime violence less visible and to defend the dignity of victims. Yet because their visit entered the Berlin controversy through the language and performance of South Korean party politics, it also enabled opponents to reframe the statue as an anti-Japanese symbol and a source of bilateral conflict. The lawmakers and many first-generation Korean migrants were connected by a shared Minjung-nationalist grammar formed through South Korea’s democratization movement. For both groups, the Statue of Peace signified anti-authoritarian struggle, anti-colonial justice, historical rectification, and national dignity. It thus became, for the lawmakers, a stage for performing historical justice against Japan and a conservative government seen as abandoning that justice; and, for first-generation migrants, a site where their diasporic political history was recognized.

Yet precisely this shared Minjung-nationalist grammar also generated the tension at the heart of the Berlin controversy. For first-generation Korean migrants, the visit offered recognition and emotional comfort. For younger and more transnationally oriented activists, however, it threatened the strategy that had sustained the statue in Berlin: grounding it in local civil society, feminist solidarity, and universal claims against wartime sexual violence. The visit thus demonstrated a central contradiction of Minjung-derived resistant nationalism abroad: it can mobilize powerful affective solidarity around historical justice, but it can also re-nationalize a memory site whose political force depends precisely on its capacity to transcend the nation.