This article examines how Berlin’s Statue of Peace, created through transnational feminist civil society, became entangled with South Korean Minjung nationalism during the 2024 removal controversy. Installed in 2020, the statue connected Japanese military sexual slavery to wider struggles against wartime sexual violence, racism, migration, and colonial violence, yet remained vulnerable to nationalist reframing. The article argues that this vulnerability was activated not only by Japanese diplomatic pressure and Berlin-Mitte’s administrative logic, but also from the Korean side, as opposition lawmakers and first-generation migrants reinterpreted the statue through Minjung nationalism, revealing how resistant nationalism can re-nationalize transnational feminist memory.

In September 2020 a Statue of Peace was installed in the German capital Berlin. The Japanese government attempted to prevent the installation of the statue, but in the end, it was allowed to remain. Based on participant observation and interviews, this article introduces the background and motives of the coalition of civic groups that installed the statue, how they frame the statue's meaning, and how the statue has acquired new meanings through unplanned interactions with the local population in Berlin. Summarizing the events related to the installation of the statue, this article examines how the conflict between a national and a transnational understanding of the “comfort women” experience played out in Berlin.