Diplomatic, economic and security ties between Japan and South Korea have reached their lowest point in years, a rupture that can be traced to the long-raging dispute over what Japan still owes for abuses committed during its colonial occupation of the Korean Peninsula, including its treatment of the comfort women.

The conservatives have generally avoided the kind of reckoning that Germany has undergone in atoning for the Holocaust, as they argue that the actions of Japan during the war were no worse than those of other nations, and should not damage national pride.

Many of the most vocal right-wing critics of the mainstream view of comfort women are older Japanese, but a younger cadre of social-media-savvy activists regularly pounce on those who describe the women as sex slaves.

“It is an issue that people get wild-eyed over,” said Jennifer Lind, an associate professor of government at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and a specialist in Japanese war memory.

She said passions also run strong in South Korea, where activists accept no deviations from the narrative that the women were brutally enslaved. In 2015, a court ordered a South Korean scholar to redact numerous passages from a book that suggested that the relationship between soldiers and the comfort women was more complex.

Mr. Dezaki’s two-hour documentary, “Shusenjo: The Main Battleground of the Comfort Women Issue,” has been shown commercially in Japan and South Korea and will be shown on college campuses in the United States this fall.