Wartime photographs and film footage of ‘comfort women,’ taken without their consent, carry a heavy ethical burden. While these images serve as evidence of the Japanese military’s forced sexual labor system, they also embed colonial, gendered, and patriarchal power dynamics that victimized the women. This essay argues for the removal of such imagery from public circulation and display in academic, journalistic, museum, and digital contexts because of their potential to cause harm.

By wartime ‘comfort women’ imagery, I refer to depictions of women as prisoners, captives, or deceased victims, particularly when these images risk exposing individual identities, retraumatizing survivors and their descendants, or violating the dignity of those who cannot consent. This argument excludes postwar imagery created with survivors’ consent, such as advocacy portraits, as well as contemporary artistic representations like statues or paintings.

The ethical concerns at the heart of this issue are twofold: first, the potential for continued violation caused by using non-consensual imagery; and second, the risk that such photographs may perpetuate underlying structures of violence and degradation. Many of the women in these images chose to hide their pasts to ensure their safety and reintegrate into postwar Korean society. Yet their likenesses, captured and placed into public record without their consent, remain widely circulated in the name of historical evidence and justice.

Susan Sontag asserts in Regarding the Pain of Others that images of extreme suffering demand ethical consideration, for looking without the means or the will to alleviate suffering risks turning victims into objects of voyeuristic consumption.² I advocate for the replacement of such images with carefully considered verbal descriptions, survivor testimonies, and contextualized historical evidence. This method can fulfill evidentiary and educational roles while minimizing the risk of inflicting further harm. By prioritizing survivor voices over exploitative visual evidence, we shift the focus to the lived experiences of the many women who shared their stories, while also respecting the silence of those who chose not to disclose their traumatic wartime pasts.

U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NA) photograph 111-SC-230147 is the best-known image of ‘comfort women’. It is one of two that has achieved emblematic status as evidence of the forced sexual labour system operated by the imperial Japanese military in the Second World War.^3, The fact that three of the four Korean women in the photograph never revealed their identities as ‘comfort women’ raises the risk that its circulation could cause further harm to them or their families. Furthermore, because it was forced upon the subjects by a male soldier at a moment of extreme vulnerability, it embeds violent colonial and patriarchal cultural codes that, as will be discussed below, persist in contemporary Korean society and elsewhere.⁴

Here, the call to remove from circulation haunted photographs, to describe their contents but avoid showing them, is not simply an acknowledgment of their potential to injure. It is a deliberate approach to avoid reducing former ‘comfort women,’ alive or deceased, to degraded bodies subject to scrutiny and judgment.⁵ It represents a choice not to allow the viewer to study the women’s dazed and downturned faces, to guess at their nationalities and ages, to imagine the demeaning travails they suffered, and to wonder if they are still alive and where they might be now.

My analysis was instigated by research professor Pak Chŏng-ae’s ethical concerns regarding the February 2018 release by the Seoul City Government and Seoul National University’s Human Rights Centre of newly discovered American military film footage of naked and mutilated ‘comfort women’ corpses. The footage, presented by a research group that included Pak, drew significant public attention. The Korean newspaper Han’gyŏre, which published three frame captures from the footage along with an uncaptioned reproduction of NA 111-SC-230147, described the material as follows:

The researchers seeking new documentary evidence of the wartime ‘comfort women’ system acted with good intentions.^7, Yet Pak raised concerns about circulating material that only supplemented existing evidence but risked violating the privacy, dignity, and psychological safety of ‘comfort women’ victims. She commented to the Han’gyŏre reporter who covered the story: “There is already abundant material to demonstrate the culpability of the Japanese government, so it is time for us to discuss ways to protect the personal information and human rights of comfort women before releasing such material.”⁸

Pak’s misgivings about releasing the grisly footage and associated frame captures contrast sharply with the usual fanfare surrounding the discovery of new ‘comfort women’ imagery. They align with a recent body of feminist research on ‘comfort women’ that draws attention to underlying and enduring patriarchal structures in Japanese and Korean societies that contributed to the making of a wartime machine that ruthlessly exploited tens of thousands of women as sex slaves. As someone who unthinkingly used NA 111-SC-230147 to support an editorial I wrote in 2017, this essay represents an expression of regret about that choice and a serious grappling with the issue of consent in historical imagery of suffering people, known or unknown, photographed against their will.

All ‘comfort women’ photographs are significant as historical traces because of the Japanese military’s end-of-war destruction of material evidence of its forced prostitution system and the Japanese government’s pattern of denial of the system’s existence.^9, As such, they have become a constituent part of academic and grass roots campaigns to “prove the crime.”^10, They have also served as instruments deployed by Korean governments to foster domestic national pride and patriotism while criticizing Japan.^11, At the level of public history, photographs are an important component of museum-based ‘comfort women’ “trauma memorials” because of their indexicality and power to evoke time, place, and circumstance. Wang Siyi says that surviving objects and “photos that appear to be genuine, neutral, and objective” are valued in museum contexts as touchstones of historical authenticity and truthfulness.¹²

While ‘comfort women’ photographs are widely deployed in academic and public history contexts as evidence of Japan’s wartime conduct, it is noteworthy that all but one of the women who appear in the handful of discovered Second World War ‘comfort women’ photographs are unknown. They are unknown because most did not survive the war and its immediate aftermath; because the disappeared or deceased have not been publicly identified as victims by their kin, most likely to avoid disgracing their families; and because the majority of those who did survive chose to conceal their pasts. On this last point, it is telling that while a large proportion of the estimated 150,000–200,000 ‘comfort women’ were Korean, in South Korea only 240 individuals registered with the government as ‘comfort women’ victims.¹³

Thus, Pak’s ethical concerns come into focus: while the circulation of Second World War photographs that depict victims might serve history, scholarship, and the case against Japan for proper acknowledgment of, and compensation for, its crimes against Korean, Chinese, Filipina, and other women, they risk ‘outing’ victims and their relatives, thereby perpetuating the cycle of harm. Also, it must be asked: what constructive or instructive value is there in circulating imagery of abused and degraded women? Is it possible that the evidentiary status attributed to vintage documentary photographs ‘rescued’ for history, and the generalized stories mapped onto them, will diminish the importance attributed to the more complicated and nuanced oral testimonies of survivors? Lastly, it should be asked, what codes of extreme gender domination and power, of legitimated and systematized rape and murder, incorporated into the imagery, might contribute to perpetuating the ongoing exploitation and mistreatment of vulnerable women by soldiers, military organizations, and social systems.¹⁴

NA 111-SC-230147 exemplifies these ethical concerns. Taken by U.S. Army Signal Corps photographer Charles H. Hatfield on September 3, 1944, it depicts four Korean women as captives at Songshan, China, their faces identifiable and their bodies vulnerable to scrutiny.^15, The purpose was to provide evidence of the complete destruction of the Japanese stronghold at Songshan for propaganda purposes, with the women as captured enemy. The four had no power to resist being photographed, or to determine how the images would be used. More fundamentally, they were vulnerable regarding the treatment of their bodies by their male captors. The original caption reads (inaccurately in relation to the nationality of the women): “Four Jap[anese] girls taken prisoner by troops of Chinese 8th Army at village on Sung Shan Hill on the Burma Road when Jap[anese] soldiers were killed or driven from village. Chinese soldiers guarding girls.”¹⁶

The photo was taken two weeks after Chinese forces detonated massive TNT explosions beneath the Japanese fortress on Mount Songshan. At the onset of the battle three months prior, there were approximately 1,200 Japanese troops entrenched on Songshan. By the time the photograph was taken, only a few dozen people remained, including ten women.^17, The four depicted in Hatfield’s photograph were probably hiding in a cave, the entrance to which falls within the frame. The Japanese had told them that, if captured, they would be tortured.^18, Thus, it may be assumed that NA 111-SC-230147 depicts the female subjects in a state of extreme physical and mental exhaustion and gripped by fear.¹⁹

The photograph did not receive special attention at the time. Subsequently, it lay buried in a U.S. National Archives box in Washington DC until it was discovered by the Japanese military historian Moriyama Kōhei and used, without explanatory contextualization, for the cover of his 1984 book Fuukon unnan no tatakai (Battle of Hukawng Valley and Yunnan). Korean historian Pang Sŏn-ju referred to the photograph in his 1992 article “miguk charyo-e natanan Hanin ‘Chonggunwiŏnbu’-ŭi koch’al (Korean ‘Comfort Women’ in U.S. Documents),”²⁰ but did not reproduce it.

The history of the ‘comfort women,’ which for decades was overlooked and suppressed in both Japan and South Korea, gained international attention in August 1991 following Kim Hak-sun’s groundbreaking public disclosure of her ‘comfort woman’ past. Her testimony turned into a case for restitutive justice in December of that year when she filed a class action suit against the Japanese government. In the ensuing months and years, photographs served as important, if generalized, touchstones of truth in the succession of lawsuits initiated against Japan by former ‘comfort women’.

NA 111-SC-230147 became indexical evidence in December 2000 when, at the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery, North Korean survivor Pak Yŏng-sim identified herself as the pregnant subject in the photograph.²¹ Today, if you Google ‘comfort woman’ in Korean, Japanese, or English using the Images option, the photograph of Pak and the three other captives consistently appears in the top results, often with captions that misrepresent the site, context, and origins of the photograph.

Five of the ten women captured at Songshan were interviewed by American journalist Walter G. Rundle in early September 1944. Rundle reported that they gave him false names to protect their families.²² This desire for anonymity is the starting point for an argument to strategically ‘unfind’ NA 111-SC-230147 and other ‘comfort women’ photographs, to limit ourselves to describing their contents and contextualizing their historical significance, but to allow the photographic likenesses of the women’s faces and bodies to ‘return’ to the darkness of the archive. It is an ethical step towards acknowledging the harm inflicted by the original act of photography and the potential for further harm through its retrieval from archival obscurity and circulation on the Internet.

Let us now consider the women in the photograph who have neither come forward to identify themselves nor been ‘placed’ based on corresponding archival evidence.^23, Three broad possibilities exist for their fates after the photo was taken: they made it back to Korea, found a way to survive in China or elsewhere, or perished due to illness, starvation, or violence. For those who survived, the physical, psychological, and emotional injuries inflicted upon them by Japanese soldiers produced severe trauma that research suggests was never overcome and did not lessen over time. Multiple studies show that survivors suffered very high rates of posttraumatic stress disorder and major depressive disorder, as well as from “somatic symptom disorder, social anxiety disorder, panic disorder, and alcohol use disorder.”^24, In light of this evidence, combined with the fact that the women continue to be “re-traumatized due to the unsettled controversy regarding the ‘comfort women’ issue,”²⁵ the widespread circulation of images of ‘comfort women,’ captured in the time of their most extreme victimhood, can in no way be interpreted as respectful of their right to privacy; it is certainly not kind.

As damaging as the physical, psychological, and emotional injuries sustained by ‘comfort women’ during the war were the social rejection and condemnation they confronted afterward.^26, Upon their return to Korea, some women faced hostile social environments and were rejected by their families.^27, Therefore, it is not surprising that most women concealed their pasts and assumed new identities.^28, Their primary motivation for doing so was to protect their loved ones from stigma and discrimination and, where possible, remain connected to their families.^29, Kim Min Ji’s study of the testimonies of former ‘comfort women’ who disclosed their identities indicates that survivors tended to “devaluate themselves and identify themselves as ‘ruined’.” They regarded the misfortunes experienced by members of their families, particularly their children, as their fault.^30, Moreover, disclosers tended to face repercussions from their families for doing so. These ranged from physical violence and mistreatment to shunning.³¹

This pattern of violence is rooted in Confucian patriarchal structures in Korea that legitimize the private and public sexual coercion, psychological abuse, and control of women’s behaviour.^32, Kim’s research shows that this conditioning prompted survivors to understand and rationalize their pain and tribulations based on “gender and sexual identities that were constructed by traditional patriarchal structures.”^33, Li Lin argues that such mistreatment reflects the deeply entrenched social norm in Confucian societies that female sexual assault victims “are ‘contaminated’ and no longer ‘pure’.”³⁴

Kim Eunjae and Shin Eun Kyong go further, suggesting that a sexist social structure in Korea “censured survivors, accusing them of holding personal responsibility for sex trafficking.”^35, These discriminatory attitudes and the women’s low social status led successive Korean postwar governments to ignore calls for justice and redress.^36, Kim and Shin argue that Korean society as a whole was complicit in enforcing the “shame and ‘invisibility’” of former ‘comfort women,’ “so there would be no adverse effects on the country’s dramatic economic growth.”^37, Thus, social, political, and economic factors combined to create, in Choe Hanwool’s words, a “pretext that justifies the women’s experience in the form of shame and humiliation,” thereby eliminating the means for them “to recount their forced experience and reconstruct their own agency out of such a traumatic past.”³⁸

There is also a class element to the violence of the Japanese military system and the subsequent societal persecution of ‘comfort women’ survivors. Most of the victims were young, uneducated women and girls from “the landless tenant or semitenant class” in the countryside or “jobless migrant groups in cities,” who were either misled or abducted into sexual servitude.^39, That they were deemed inferior and expendable in a colonial environment that instrumentalized human life is reflected in the fact that some were recruited by Korean collaborators of the Japanese.⁴⁰

After 1945, gender and class oppression persisted, though not on the same brutal scale, as poor Korean women were coerced and deceived into serving in postwar equivalents of the Japanese ‘comfort stations.’ Recent research reveals that, with the full knowledge of the Korean government, special ‘comfort women’ units were created for South Korean soldiers and American-led U.N. troops during the Korean War. After the war ended in 1953, many of the women went on to work in ‘kijich’on (camp towns),’ which were built around American military bases. As during the Second World War, the women were routinely subjected to violence, forced medical examinations, detentions, and, in some cases, were murdered.^41, Families sometimes declined to claim the bodies of women involved in such sex work.⁴²

Thus, while as Li states, “the dominant narrative represents Japan as the sole source of oppression for ‘comfort women’ victims,”^43, a deeper and more extensive system of exploitation was, and continues to be, in operation. This aligns with Gayatri Spivak’s theorization of postcolonial subalternity, which frames this system as postcolonial insofar as it is rooted in Korea’s colonial past and the country’s forced incorporation into a global capitalist economy that marginalizes, silences, and disciplines poor women. Because academic and political initiatives to “reveal” such women form part of the dominant cultural framework, these merely extend the othering process and associated “circuit of epistemic violence.”⁴⁴

Korean feminist scholarship highlights Confucian and sexist traditions that position women as inferior and condition them to accept gender-based violence as natural or appropriate.^45, It notes that while South Korea’s rapid economic growth and urbanization increased women’s access to higher education and jobs, progress toward gender equality has not advanced commensurably.^46, Poor women in irregular or precarious jobs are particularly victimized by sexist attitudes and behaviours.⁴⁷

The problem of Korean women’s ongoing social and political inequality is illustrated by the current widespread use by men of hidden digital cameras (mollaekamera or molka) to secretly record women’s bodies in schools, toilets, change rooms, hotel rooms, and other private and public places for distribution on the Internet.^48, Heather Park’s study of the handling of such cases within the South Korean court system reveals a persistent tendency to shame women for perceived “promiscuous/sexual behavior,” regardless of whether the behavior is accurately conveyed in the illicitly obtained footage or how it became known.⁴⁹

Thus, the ongoing practice of circulating found photographs of ‘comfort women’ can be argued to reinforce what T. L. Cowan and Jasmine Rault term the gender and class-based “domination logics” and “cultural codes” embedded in images that reproduce colonial and postcolonial “structures of power.”^50, By contrast, survivor testimonies offer a way to avoid these dangers.^51, Considering the collective significance of dozens of testimonies that detail chillingly similar experiences is arguably the most effective way to restore human dignity and recognize and oppose historical patterns of abuse.⁵²

There is an academic preference for documents situated within official archives compared to oral testimonies given after the fact.^53, The accounts provided by ‘comfort women’ survivors in the 1990s and thereafter have been regarded as requiring validation, even though these testimonies share many commonalities and corroborate one another on crucial details.^54, Photographs are especially prized as objective and incontrovertible witnesses of time.^55, In his Images malgré tout, Georges Didi-Huberman makes this case for the four clandestine ‘Sonderkommando photographs,’ taken at great risk by a group of Jewish inmates, that capture the process of mass exterminations at Auschwitz-Birkenau. They are the only such photographs known to exist. Didi-Huberman designates such imagery as “the eye of history [l’oeil de l’histoire]” and considers it a collective responsibility to not only preserve the photographs, but to “affirm their importance by visually encountering them [les soutenir d’un seul regard].”⁵⁶

The photographs discussed here share important similarities with those analyzed by Didi-Huberman in that they provide rare physical traces of vast and systematic wartime crimes committed in secrecy.^57, However, the identifiable faces of the victims represent a significant difference. Didi-Huberman’s treatment of the Sonderkommando photographs as pure and exalted indexicals has faced sharp criticism, notably from Claude Lanzmann, who argues that fragmentary images cannot fully convey the historical truth of Auschwitz and risk constituting false testimony. According to Lanzmann, elevating such visual evidence can invite Holocaust denial, voyeurism, and fetishization while diminishing the significance of survivor testimony.⁵⁸

This critique is relevant to the ‘comfort women’ photographs. Like the Sonderkommando images, wartime photographs of ‘comfort women’ possess a powerful indexical appeal as rare and unlikely glimpses into gross criminal atrocities. They may hold educational value as reminders of human cruelty, both past and present, and as potential deterrents to future brutality.^59, Yet, these images are also powerful agents of harm.⁶⁰

Returning to the photograph NA 111-SC-230147, we see four women at Songshan, their tattered clothes and anxious expressions speaking to their helplessness before the camera and the soldier who wielded it. Whether living or dead, the women remain caught in a moment of profound vulnerability, their dignity and the anonymity many former ‘comfort women’ sought to preserve threatened anew each time the image resurfaces. Removing photographs like this one from public display in academic publications, journalism, museums, and digital platforms does not erase their historical significance. Individual researchers may still access them in the archive. But the darkness of the archive, where they were unearthed, is the most respectful place for them to remain. By replacing these images with thoughtful verbal descriptions and centering survivor testimonies, we shift the focus from the spectacle of suffering to the voices and lived experiences of the women themselves. In doing so, we honor their humanity, give weight to their silence, and ensure that the violence they endured is recognized, but not reproduced.