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This article examines how melancholia constitutes a psycho-geopolitical space interweaving Korean subjects' psychic and political lives with the dynamics of the (post) Cold War alliance between Japan and the US. The Wednesday Demonstration is the weekly protest in Seoul that calls for an official apology and legal compensation from the Japanese government for comfort women who worked in the sexual slavery system under the Japanese Empire during WWII. The fact that the weekly protests have continued for 30 years since 1992 signifies that the comfort women issue has remained an unresolved (geo)political issue between South Korea and Japan for three decades, despite apologies and monetary compensations by the Japanese government. This article offers a psychoanalytic-geopolitical rationale for the endless grief of Korean postcolonial subjects who cannot accept the measures of the Japanese government regarding the comfort women issue. Based on 1-year's participant observations and in-depth interviews with Korean activists who engaged in the Wednesday Demonstration from September 2019 to August 2020, this article aims to accomplish three goals. Firstly, this article shows how Korean postcolonial subjects were/are haunted by colonial past. Secondly, I examine why Koreans cannot complete mourning for comfort women in the context of ROK-US-Japan geopolitical relations. Lastly, this article interrogates how ethno-nationalists intervene to turn melancholia into a motivation for ethnic solidarity and how their attempt might have failed by exploring a Korean postcolonial subject's psychic lives. In doing so, I argue that the wounds of Koreans related to the comfort women issue are not simply from colonial history, but they are postcolonial wounds that have not healed 'appropriately' under the (US-sponsored) South Korean/Japanese (post-)Cold War security arrangement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The US media's coverage of the comfort women issue has primarily focused on three main aspects: human rights, nationalist conflict, and security. First, American newspapers and magazines asked the Japanese government to apologize to the former comfort women by revealing the misery of their lives through a discussion of human rights. However, that discussion not only reflected the East-West power imbalance, but even served to promote voyeurism and sexual fantasies. Second, following the end of the Cold War, as tensions between South Korea and Japan over the issue have escalated, US media have increasingly taken a position as middleman, indifferent to the history of these women. The US media have scolded both South Korea and Japan for their nationalistic conflict. Third, the US media began to employ a security discourse on the comfort women issue as the controversy between South Korea and Japan deteriorated to a level that threatened the interests of the United States in East Asia and disrupted the Obama administration's "Pivot to Asia" strategy. US media have played the role of midwife for the birth of the 2015 South Korea-Japan Comfort Women Agreement by shaping and disseminating a security discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the strategic partnership between the European Union (EU) and Japan in the post-Cold War era by focusing on the bilateral political and security cooperation. To this end, the discussion explores the motivations of both sides for strengthening ties, the constraints on cooperation and the main joint initiatives. The article demonstrates that, on the basis of shared values and common goals, as well as the two partners' focus on soft power, the Euro-Japanese partnership has since the early 1990s become more action-oriented and has acquired a certain strategic dimension. Nevertheless, different foreign policy priorities and structural limitations concerning the role Japan and the EU each can assume as international political and security actors suggest that the bilateral partnership is not likely to move far beyond its current 'paper value', and hence become a more intense and genuinely strategic one, in the years to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]