The Co-Opting of a Movement: Nationalism’s Effect on the Discussion of Comfort Women in Japan and Korea

This thesis examines the transformation of the Korean Comfort Women redress issue to a political issue. It also examines how within South Korea, the progressives and conservatives frame and discuss the comfort women issue differently, and use the issue to reflect their political goals. Through content analysis of the publishing of J. Mark Ramseyer’s controversial article and the 2015 agreement between South Korea and Japan, I analyze how progressive and conservative newspapers report differently on the issue. I found that both progressive and conservative newspapers focus more on the politics between Japan and South Korea than the redress movement itself. This shift in focus has co-opted the comfort women redress movement and has harmed the chances of the surviving comfort women to get reparations