Norm Internalization through Transnational Legal Process: The Case ofIndividual Compensation for the Former Wartime Comfort Women

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This research critically assesses the Asian Women’s Fund in the context of Japan’s war responsibility, which issue is yet to be resolved even more than sixty-five years after the end of the Second World War. In particular, this research focused on the Fund’s joint project of the Japanese government and Japanese people for ethical compensation for former comfort women. The main research question was the reason for the limited success of the joint project and the research clarified that both the conservatives’ and the liberals’ rigid ontological security, based on their respective images of Japan, controlled their interpretations of the public-private partnership compensation project and thus hampered the operation of the compensation project.Both the conservatives and the liberals perceived that the Fund’s joint ethical compensation project both by the Japanese government and the Japanese people would threaten their respective ontological security. This led to their irrational andmanipulative interpretations of the compensation projects and then to their opposition to the Asian Women’s Fund’s compensation project. This domestic discursive disturbance reduced the credibility of the project, thus leading to some former comfort women’s rejection to receive compensation from the Fund.This research’s two main contributions are as follows: (1). the research of the relatively new academic subject of the Asian Women’s Fund in the context of Japan’s war responsibility; (2). The sophistication of the constructivist approach in international relations scholarship through the clarification of the mechanism of norm internalization.