Applying the Cultural Anthropological Approaches in Conflict Resolution: The Case of “Comfort Women”

With the recent Russian invasion, China’s rise, and North Korean missile launches, there is an increased importance for the United States to strengthen its East Asian allies, South Korea and Japan. These two countries, however, have a long history of disputes that resulted from the legacy of the Second World War. One of them is the comfort women issue. More than 200,000 teenage Korean girls were taken by Japanese soldiers as sex slaves during the 1930s and 1940s. They are called comfort women. In December 2015, the South Korean and Japanese governments reached an agreement to resolve the issue of comfort women, getting an apology from the Japanese government. However, the surviving comfort women showed resentment toward this agreement and condemned the Korean government for reaching the agreement with the Japanese government. Why do the comfort women and many South Koreans reject this agreement? Also, two different understandings of the identically written accord have brought social conflict in South Korea. Where do these discrepancies in understanding the same accord come from? Applying the three conceptual frameworks—emic and etic approaches in cultural anthropology, the inclusive and restricted models of conflict resolution, and different levels of reconciliation—this paper analyzes the discrepancies in how people analyze and approach conflict resolution and highlights the importance of the cultural anthropological approaches in conflict resolution and reconciliation.