This study investigates how the memory of ‘comfort women’ has been suppressed within Japan’s post-war memory politics and how this memory has managed to break through, with a special focus on survivors from China and South Korea. Drawing on Alexander’s cultural trauma theory, Smelser’s framework of memory defence mechanisms, and feminist scholarship on wartime sexual violence, the analysis employs critical discourse analysis to examine Japanese official and public discourse from 1945 to the present. The findings reveal that Japan has blocked acknowledgment of the trauma of ‘comfort women’ through four interlocking mechanisms, denial, reversal, displacement, and acting out, which are amplified by pre-existing patriarchal structures of shame and silence surrounding sexual violence against women. With the combined operation of these four memory defence mechanisms, Japan has maintained a ‘negative peace’ that erases survivors from public memory. However, these mechanisms are not monolithic but operate in states of partial failure. Fissures have emerged in the ‘in-between’ space between individual experiences and collective narrative, through which survivors have challenged official containment via legal action, digital testimony preservation, documentary filmmaking, academic research, and transnational advocacy, opening possibilities for ‘positive peace’. This study, therefore, calls for creating a ‘safe space’ for survivors to tell their stories and receive the recognition and dignity they deserve. It also highlights the double bind faced by Chinese survivors, who must navigate both Japan’s official denial and the marginalisation of their voices within dominant South Korea-centred narratives of the ‘comfort women’ issue.