This study examines the Chinese “Comfort Women” History Museum in Shanghai, focusing on the historical conditions of Shanghai as a modern gateway city and the formation and operation of the Japanese military “comfort women” system, as well as the background and objectives of the museum’s establishment. Beyond the explicitly presented exhibition content, the study analyzes the ways in which narratives and nationalist discourses are implicitly constructed through the selection and arrangement of exhibition materials, spatial organization, and educational programs. In doing so, it discusses how the museum functions as a site of memory that simultaneously reconstructs nationalist narratives and place memory. Methodologically, the study combines analysis of exhibition materials and on-site observation, including observations of visitor experiences, with a cross-examination of “comfort station”(慰安所) records used in the Shanghai Municipal Archives and relevant prior scholarship.
The findings indicate that archival records provide crucial evidence of the administrative and organizational operation of the comfort station system, yet remain limited in conveying victims’ lived experiences. By contrast, the museum supplements these limitations by reconstructing and transmitting victims’ memories through exhibitions and educational practices, thereby facilitating a transformation of collective and place-based memory through visitor engagement.
In a context where the comfort women issue is often framed through diplomatic and national-interest discourses, the museum partially assumes roles of apology and remembrance that states have failed to fulfill, serving as an educational and memorial space that transmits values of peace and human rights to future generations. Moreover, by commemorating victims’ voices in Shanghai—a site where comfort stations were first established and densely concentrated—the museum evokes universal norms beyond nationalist boundaries and demonstrates the potential for transnational memory linked to broader human rights discourse and debates on wartime responsibility in East Asia.
Nonetheless, the study also identifies limitations in the exhibition’s relatively flat focus on women victims from colonized or occupied regions and its insufficient attention to Japanese women in Shanghai who occupied the position of victims despite being nationals of the perpetrator state. Future research should incorporate a wider range of comfort women–related museums and more extensive visitor-experience data in order to further explore the interaction between place memory and nationalist narratives.