The forgotten victims: An analysis of Taiwanese comfort women from feminist transitional justice perspectives

The year 2025 marks the eightieth anniversary to the conclusion of World War II, serving as a poignant reminder of unresolved issues of transitional justice, including the systematic gender-based violence suffered by Taiwanese women forced into comfort women under Japanese colonial rule. Existing literature has focused on survivour-centred narratives of trauma, agency, and interpersonal relations in the postwar era. However, this epistemological literature of how the state has structured transitional justice on the issue of comfort women and gender-based sexual violence remains limited. This paper examines the role of the state, as a patriarchal agency in shaping narratives of comfort women across Taiwan’s political trajectory, from Kuomintang’s (KMT) dominance to the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) governance. Drawing on feminist transitional justice theory, we ask two questions: how did the KMT and DPP politicise the issue of comfort women in the postwar era and how have state-led narratives shaped collective memory and public discourse of these women’s experiences? We analyse government documents from the Taiwanese National Archives, Academia Historica, and partisan newspapers, including the China Times, Taiwan Shin Sheng Daily News, and Liberty Times between 1990 and 2025. We argue that prevailing state approaches marginalise colonial-era gendered harms, neglecting temporal and normative critiques raised by feminist scholars. This paper highlights the enduring legacies of colonial sexual violence and underscores the need for a more comprehensive transitional justice agenda. The passing of the last comfort woman survivor signifies not closure, but the heightened risk of erasure from both public memory and justice discourse.