Policy Analysis Report | konrad.jp Policy Analysis Division April 2026
Executive Summary
This paper analyzes the persistent deadlock over the comfort women issue between Japan and Korea through a structural lens, moving beyond the common but superficial explanation of “differing historical perceptions.” The analytical framework draws on the concept of anti-intellectualism as theorized by American historian Richard Hofstadter in his 1963 work Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Four analytical axes are employed: (1) the formation of a discursive space that refuses empirical verification; (2) the mechanism of legal and social sanctions against academic dissent; (3) the supremacy of minsim (national sentiment, 민심) over intergovernmental agreements; and (4) the possible nexus with North Korea’s united front operations. Through these axes, the paper examines why intellectual dialogue as a mode of conflict resolution is structurally impossible in this context.
The conclusion reached is that Japan’s most rational course of action is not to seek resolution through emotional persuasion, but to maintain a posture of strategic distancing—coldly recognizing the cognitive trap into which the other party has fallen, while managing the relationship on the basis of concrete national interests.
Keywords: Anti-intellectualism, comfort women issue, identity politics, Chongdaehyop/Jeongeuiyeon, 1965 Japan-Korea Claims Settlement Agreement, 2015 comfort women agreement, North Korean wedge operations, cognitive dissonance, Park Yu-ha case
1. Introduction: Framing the Problem
Since Kim Hak-soon’s first public testimony in 1991, the comfort women issue has intermittently destabilized Japan-Korea relations for over three decades. Multiple intergovernmental settlements have been attempted—the 1965 Japan-Korea Claims Settlement Agreement, the establishment of the Asian Women’s Fund in 1995, and the December 2015 foreign ministers’ agreement declaring a “final and irreversible resolution”—yet the issue has shown no sign of subsiding.
When framed through conventional analytical approaches, the deadlock tends to be explained as “differences in historical perception” or “domestic Korean politics.” These explanations are purely descriptive, however, and fail to illuminate the structural reasons why knowledge, evidence, and formal agreement all fail to produce resolution.
This paper applies the concept of anti-intellectualism as systematized by Richard Hofstadter in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963; Japanese translation: Misuzu Shobo, 2003). Hofstadter defined anti-intellectualism as “a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind, and of those who are considered to represent it.” He further demonstrated that this phenomenon does not arise from simple ignorance but from a complex sociopsychological dynamic intertwined with what he called a “goodwill impulse”—an egalitarian resentment rooted in moral sincerity. This paper represents an attempt to apply this analytical framework to historical disputes in East Asia.
2. Theoretical Framework: Anti-Intellectualism and the Politics of Historical Memory
2.1 Hofstadter’s Concept of Anti-Intellectualism
According to Hofstadter, the essence of anti-intellectualism is not simple opposition to science or scholarship. Rather, it is a cognitive tendency that prioritizes a clear moral narrative of good versus evil over the complex and painstaking process of empirical verification—a tendency inseparable from a powerful desire for moral certainty. Daniel Rigney (1991) further refined Hofstadter’s concept into three subtypes: (a) anti-rationalist, (b) instrumentalist, and (c) egalitarian. The anti-intellectualism manifest in historical memory disputes can be understood primarily as a mixture of types (a) and (c).
2.2 The Interface with Identity Politics
Political philosopher Francis Fukuyama, in Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (2018), argued that modern identity politics tends to organize itself around the recognition of collective thymos—dignified selfhood. When a national identity is constituted around historical victimhood, factual information that contradicts that identity is emotionally rejected as “the logic of the aggressor.” The comfort women issue is a paradigmatic case of this dynamic: academic findings that challenge the self-image of “Korea as victim” are structurally excluded regardless of their content.
2.3 The Avoidance Mechanism of Cognitive Dissonance
Social psychologist Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance holds that when individuals or groups encounter information that contradicts their self-concept, they tend to resolve the dissonance not by revising the information but by reinforcing their beliefs. When the historical narrative of “Japan as absolute evil” is embedded at the core of national identity, counter-evidence—such as the absence of government documents ordering the organized coercive recruitment of Korean women—is reinterpreted as “the sophistry of the aggressor,” and actually serves to reinforce the narrative. This is the collective, political expression of what cognitive science calls confirmation bias.
3. Three Dimensions of Anti-Intellectualism Applied to the Japan-Korea Historical Dispute
3.1 The Rejection of Empiricism: Neutralizing Evidence via “Moral Superiority”
One of Japan’s central empirical arguments is that no Japanese government or military document ordering the organized, coercive mobilization of Korean women has been found. Even among Japanese historians, including Ikuhiko Hata (Professor Emeritus, Nihon University) and Yoshiaki Yoshimi (Chuo University), there is substantial scholarly disagreement over the scale and character of the recruitment process.
Korea’s activist leadership, however, dismisses such empirical arguments as “secondary victimization through the logic of the perpetrator,” insisting that moral demands must take precedence. This is a classic pattern of anti-intellectualism: the determination of “who is morally superior” governs public discourse rather than the verification of “who is correct.”
Compounding this is the asymmetric influence of international institutional authority. The 1996 report by UN Special Rapporteur Radhika Coomaraswamy and the U.S. House Resolution 121 (2007) both characterized the comfort women system as “sexual slavery”—a definition that remains contested among international historians. Nevertheless, the mechanism by which this definition has been treated as “established fact” by virtue of institutional imprimatur is a textbook case of how anti-intellectualist discourse spaces exploit authority while bypassing evidentiary scrutiny.
3.2 The Suppression of Academic Space: The Case of Professor Park Yu-ha
The case of Park Yu-ha (Professor Emerita, Sejong University) vividly illustrates how anti-intellectualism does not merely produce emotional reactions, but institutionally destroys the very space of intellectual verification.
In her 2013 book Comfort Women of the Empire: Colonial Rule and the Politics of Memory, Professor Park analyzed the comfort women issue through the structural lens of colonialism and offered a complex historical portrait in which a “comradely” dimension existed alongside coercion in the relationship between comfort women and the Japanese military. This was not an argument exonerating Japan but a deeper critique of colonial structural violence—yet she was immediately branded “pro-Japanese” in Korea.
In November 2015, the Seoul Eastern District Prosecutors’ Office indicted Park Yu-ha on defamation charges, ruling the book’s contents “false.” More than 54 intellectuals from Japan and abroad—including former Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama, Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe, sociologist Chizuko Ueno, Noam Chomsky, and Bruce Cumings—issued a joint protest statement on November 26, 2015, condemning the prosecution as an act of “public authority suppressing academic and freedom of expression on the basis of a specific historical view.”
The first instance court acquitted Park; the second instance imposed a fine of 10 million won. In October 2023, the Supreme Court (Daebeopin) overturned the conviction, ruling that the book’s statements were “appropriately evaluated as scholarly claims or expressions of opinion” and that punishment under defamation law was “inappropriate.” The Seoul High Court’s retrial in April 2024 finally delivered a definitive acquittal.
The structure revealed by this case is unambiguous. Honest historical scholarship that neither exonerates Japan nor conforms to orthodoxy was subjected to criminal prosecution on the grounds that it “propagated an incorrect historical view.” This constitutes organized violence against intellectual freedom—the institutional expression of precisely the “hostility toward intellectuals” that Hofstadter identified as the hallmark of anti-intellectualism. When Korean intellectuals are structurally compelled to engage in self-censorship, the very foundation of scholarly dialogue on historical questions collapses.
3.3 The Subordination of Rule of Law: The Function of the “National Sentiment Law”
The most fundamental anti-intellectualist feature of the comfort women dispute is the phenomenon whereby minsim (national sentiment) effectively supersedes both international law and intergovernmental agreements.
Article 2 of the 1965 Japan-Korea Claims Settlement Agreement explicitly states that property and claims issues between the two countries have been “settled completely and finally.” The December 2015 foreign ministers’ agreement similarly confirmed a “final and irreversible resolution.” Nevertheless, the Moon Jae-in administration declared that “the comfort women issue is not resolved by the agreement” (2021), and a Seoul Central District Court judgment (January 8, 2021) ordered the Japanese government to pay damages in direct contravention of the international law principle of sovereign immunity.
Korea’s legal and political circles justify this under the rubric of “victim-centered justice,” but in substance it amounts to the rejection of the legal order itself—a declaration that international treaties contrary to national sentiment need not be honored. In terms of anti-intellectualism, this is a paradigmatic instance of “the sense of justice” overriding “logic and procedure,” carrying the serious risk of hollowing out the rule-based foundation that underwrites commitments to the international community.
4. Geopolitical Risk and the “Shadow of the North”: The Chongdaehyop/Jeongeuiyeon Problem
4.1 The Origins of Chongdaehyop/Jeongeuiyeon and Their North Korea Nexus
The founding history of the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (Chongdaehyop) and its successor organization, the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (Jeongeuiyeon), is indispensable for understanding the intersection between the anti-intellectualist discursive space and geopolitical risk.
In 1987, at the World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs held in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Korean Church Women United (the predecessor of Chongdaehyop), the Japan Socialist Party, and the Democratic Front for the Unification of the Fatherland (an organization subordinate to North Korea’s United Front Department) reportedly reached an agreement on the direction of their solidarity. When Chongdaehyop was formally established in Korea in November 1990, the line of joint struggle with North Korea was carried forward.
4.2 The Yoon Mi-hyang Affair: The Nexus Between Civic Group Leadership and North Korea
The scandal surrounding Representative Yoon Mi-hyang (Yoon Mee-hyang) that erupted in 2020 was the first major domestic Korean scandal to illuminate, through concrete facts, the connection between the comfort women movement and North Korean intelligence operations. The principal established facts are as follows:
- Yoon visited North Korea as Chongdaehyop’s Secretary-General in 2002 and as its Standing Representative in 2008, attending North Korean-related events.
- In 2011, as head of Chongdaehyop, she sent a condolence telegram upon the death of General Secretary Kim Jong-il.
- Her husband, Kim Sam-seok, and his sister were convicted in a North Korean espionage case (the Siblings Spy Ring case).
- Yoon’s former legislative aide, Cho Jong-hun, was placed under internal investigation by the National Intelligence Service (NIS) for allegedly making contact with a North Korean agent in Vietnam in 2016. He is suspected of having transmitted information to North Korea via the internet from Seoul during his tenure as Yoon’s aide.
- In September 2023, Yoon and the Jeongeuiyeon chair attended a Chongryon-organized event in Tokyo without Korean government authorization, prompting President Yoon Suk-yeol to direct that “anti-state acts be firmly addressed.”
- In 2021, Korean prosecutors sought a five-year prison sentence for Yoon Mi-hyang on charges including embezzlement of donation funds.
4.3 The Strategic Benefit of “Japan-Korea Division”
From a geopolitical standpoint, it is entirely rational for North Korea’s United Front Department to exploit the comfort women issue as a wedge strategy. A functioning Japan-U.S.-Korea trilateral security partnership represents the most significant threat to North Korea; accordingly, the more effectively historical disputes politicize and damage Japan-Korea relations, the more favorable the strategic environment becomes for both North Korea and China.
The ultimate expression of anti-intellectualism lies precisely here. The emotional demand for “moral victory over Japan” takes precedence over the existential national security interest of “deterring North Korea’s nuclear and missile development.” This inversion of priorities is the policy consequence of emotional conviction overriding rational calculus—a condition in which the capacity for cold, interest-based strategic judgment has been operationally disabled.
5. Why “Shared Understanding” Is Structurally Impossible
5.1 The Asymmetry of Games: “Evidence-Based” vs. “Morality-Based”
Japan’s scholarly and diplomatic approach operates fundamentally on the premise of an evidence-based game: the verification of documentary sources, the fulfillment of treaty obligations, the interpretation of international law. All of these presuppose a shared epistemological framework as the basis for communication.
The activist leadership in Korea, by contrast, plays a morality-based game. In this game, the “moral gravity of victimization” supersedes the “empirical sufficiency of evidence.” An epistemological inversion occurs in which the victim-claimant functions as the ultimate witness while the evidence-seeker becomes “complicit with the perpetrator.” As a result, no matter how precise the evidence Japan presents, it can only function as “making excuses.”
In terms of J.L. Austin’s speech act theory, the two parties inhabit “different language games” with an untranslatable asymmetry that dismantles the preconditions for dialogue.
5.2 The Consolidation of Narrative and the Defense of Identity
When the historical narrative of “Japan as absolute evil” functions as a constitutive element of Korean national identity, “acknowledging” counter-evidence is not a mere change of opinion but triggers a crisis of self-identity (identity crisis). According to Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance, counter-evidence is processed through “blocking, denial, and reinterpretation” in order to avoid this psychological cost—and actually serves to reinforce the original belief.
As political scientist Benedict Anderson observed in his theory of imagined communities, national identity is sustained by shared narrative. The “victim nation” narrative surrounding the comfort women issue is deeply embedded in the Korean national community’s self-image, and its revision carries an extremely high political cost.
5.3 The Cost Borne by Internal Critics: The Mechanism of Self-Censorship
As epitomized by the Park Yu-ha case, historical research that challenges the dominant narrative carries the risk of criminal prosecution and social sanction even within Korea itself. The existence of this risk structurally compels self-censorship among Korean intellectuals of goodwill.
In other words, “internal voices capable of promoting change” are institutionally suppressed, and the actors who might otherwise drive autonomous correction of the problem are excluded from the intellectual space. This is the characteristic mechanism by which an anti-intellectualist discursive space self-reproduces.
6. Strategic Responses Required of Japan
6.1 Abandoning the “Persuasion Model”
The most important implication of this paper’s analysis is that the persuasion model—the assumption that presenting accurate facts and logic will lead the other party to understanding—is fundamentally inapplicable to an anti-intellectualist discursive space. Diplomatic communication premised on this model expends enormous resources while producing virtually no results; worse, it risks sending the counterpart a false signal that “room for apology remains.”
6.2 Maintaining Strategic Distance and Managing Practical Relations
The basic principle Japan should adopt is strategic distancing. This does not mean severing the relationship, but rather clearly maintaining legal and diplomatic positions while minimizing emotional interaction and managing the relationship on the basis of concrete national interests: economic cooperation, security intelligence sharing, and coordination on North Korea policy. The following specific orientations are recommended:
- Consistent assertion of legal position: The stance that the 1965 Agreement and 2015 Agreement represent a “final and irreversible resolution” must not change under any political pressure.
- Rejection of additional apologies or compensation: New apologies or compensation would only reinforce the narrative that “the issue is not yet resolved” and are strategically counterproductive.
- Amplifying Japan’s historical position in third countries: Strengthening the dissemination of evidence-based historical information in English and other major languages to compete in the international “arena of narrative.”
- Setting conditions for dialogue: Dialogue on historical matters should be predicated on agreement to a shared epistemological framework of “evidence and logic,” with no participation in the game of confirming moral superiority.
6.3 Strengthening Academic Diplomacy
In a context where Japan-Korea dialogue is mired in emotional traps, the “international consolidation of scholarly fact” through third-country academic institutions and international historical associations is an important medium- to long-term strategy. As the Park Yu-ha case demonstrates, intellectually honest historians do exist within Korea. Developing and supporting the international academic space in which these “internal critics” can operate is one of the few genuinely effective means of driving a wedge into the anti-intellectualist discursive space.
7. Conclusion
This paper has analyzed the deadlock between Japan and Korea over the comfort women issue through a structural lens, with Hofstadter’s concept of anti-intellectualism as the central organizing framework, supplemented by cognitive dissonance theory, identity politics theory, and speech act theory.
The principal findings are as follows. First, anti-intellectualist structures are self-reproducing across three dimensions: the rejection of empiricism, institutional sanctions against scholarly dissent, and the legal supremacy of national sentiment. Second, the links between Chongdaehyop/Jeongeuiyeon and North Korea-affiliated organizations are corroborated by multiple concrete facts, confirming the existence of an external actor that benefits geopolitically from “Japan-Korea division.” Third, the asymmetric game structure that makes intellectual dialogue impossible—the “evidence game” versus the “justice game”—is not amenable to short-term resolution.
Japan’s most rational path is therefore to abandon the optimistic persuasion model premised on the belief that “understanding leads to resolution,” and instead to practice a strategic distancing built on three pillars: unwavering assertion of legal positions, management of practical interests, and international scholarly dissemination. Responding to a space where intellect does not function with intellectual sincerity is a virtue—but it is not a strategy. The most rational prescription for this problem is an institutional and diplomatic architecture designed to recognize the emotional trap clearly and to ensure that Japan is not drawn into it.
Principal References and Sources
Academic Works
- Hofstadter, Richard (1963). Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
- Rigney, Daniel (1991). “Three Kinds of Anti-Intellectualism: Rethinking Hofstadter.” Sociological Inquiry, 61(4), 434–451.
- Festinger, Leon (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
- Fukuyama, Francis (2018). Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- Anderson, Benedict (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
- Park Yu-ha (2013). Comfort Women of the Empire: Colonial Rule and the Politics of Memory. Seoul: Vuki. (Japanese translation: Asahi Shimbun Publications, 2014)
- Hata, Ikuhiko (1999). Comfort Women and Sex in the Battle Zone. Tokyo: Shinchosha. [In Japanese]
- Yoshimi, Yoshiaki (1995). Comfort Women. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. [In Japanese]
- Arai, Satoshi (2017). “Conceptual Analysis of ‘Anti-Intellectualism’: A Study of Perspectives on the Exercise of Knowledge.” Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. 2, No. 6. [In Japanese]
Official Documents and Government Sources
- Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, “Japan’s Efforts on the Comfort Women Issue.” https://www.mofa.go.jp/mofaj/a_o/rp/page25_001910.html
- Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, “Statement by the Foreign Minister Regarding the Republic of Korea’s Failure to Fulfill Its Obligation to Submit to Arbitration under the Agreement on the Settlement of Problems concerning Property and Claims.” July 19, 2019.
- Embassy of Japan in the Republic of Korea, “Lawsuits Filed Against the Government of Japan in the Seoul Central District Court of the Republic of Korea by Former Comfort Women, Etc.” January 23, 2021.
- Agreement on the Settlement of Problems Concerning Property and Claims and on Economic Co-operation between Japan and the Republic of Korea (1965), Article 2.
- Joint Press Conference Statement, Japan-Korea Foreign Ministers’ Meeting, December 28, 2015.
- Radhika Coomaraswamy, Report on the mission to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Republic of Korea and Japan on the issue of military sexual slavery in wartime, UN Doc. E/CN.4/1996/53/Add.1, 1996.
- U.S. House Resolution 121, 110th Congress (2007).
Journalism and Investigative Sources
- Tokyo Shimbun. “Korean Supreme Court overturns guilty verdict for author of Comfort Women of the Empire.” October 26, 2023.
- Tokyo Shimbun. “Comfort Women of the Empire lawsuit: Not-guilty verdict for author.” April 12, 2024.
- Japan In-depth. “Former Chongdaehyop Secretary-General Rep. Yoon Mi-hyang joins Chongryon in joint action.” September 7, 2023.
- Japan In-depth. “The true identity of Jeongeuiyeon’s Yoon Mi-hyang: Spy charges against former Level-4 aide.” January 19, 2023.
- Japanese Society of International Law. “The Issue of Lawsuits by Former Wartime Laborers and the Japan-Korea Claims Agreement.” 2019.
- Wikipedia (Japanese). Entries: “Park Yu-ha,” “Yoon Mi-hyang,” “Comfort Women Agreement between Japan and South Korea.” (Accessed: April 2026)
This report is an independent scholarly and policy analysis document produced by the konrad.jp Policy Analysis Division and does not represent the official views of any political party, government, or organization. All statistics, reports, and documents cited are based on publicly available information as of the date of publication (April 2026).