The concept for the museum originated in 2004, driven by the Taipei Women's Rescue Foundation. It took twelve years of fundraising, supported by donations from the public in Taiwan and abroad, before the museum became reality. The plaque was unveiled on March 8, 2016, International Women's Day, in a ceremony attended by President Ma Ying-jeou and a former comfort woman. The full opening followed nine months later, on December 10, attended by Culture Minister Cheng Li-chun and advocates from Japan, South Korea, and the United States. The TWRF chair stated that the museum would serve not only as a memorial but as a platform to promote gender equality and highlight the lasting damage caused by sexual violence. The original museum was housed in a renovated 90-year-old two-story building in Taipei's Datong District, with a total floor area of 495 square meters, displaying photographs, documents, and video testimony related to Taiwanese comfort women.

During the Japanese colonial period, which lasted from 1895 to 1945, women across occupied Asia were coerced or forcibly recruited into military brothels euphemistically called "comfort stations." The true number of victims across the empire is disputed, but estimates range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. In Taiwan, the women who survived carried their experiences largely in silence for decades, their suffering compounded by social stigma and official indifference. The Taipei Women's Rescue Foundation began advocacy on their behalf in the early 1990s. By the time the museum opened, most of the Taiwanese survivors had already died. The museum's mission was to preserve their testimony before it disappeared entirely, ensuring that the history of what was done to them remained part of Taiwan's collective memory rather than fading into a footnote.

The museum operated at a financial loss from the day it opened. The TWRF sold its own offices in 2019 to keep the doors open, but the COVID-19 pandemic delivered the final blow to an already precarious budget. In July 2020, the foundation announced the museum would close in November. The response was a public fundraising campaign that demonstrated the museum mattered more to Taiwanese society than its balance sheet suggested. In October 2020, the TWRF confirmed the original location would close on November 10 but revealed plans to relocate. On November 7, the foundation announced that the exhibits would move to an office building near Minquan West Road metro station. The new location, on the fifth floor of a building on Chengde Road in Datong District, reopened in April 2021 with plans for rotating exhibitions alongside the permanent collection.

Museums dedicated to comfort women exist in South Korea and elsewhere, but the Ama Museum holds a particular significance as Taiwan's only institution devoted to this history. Its survival, despite chronic underfunding and a pandemic, speaks to a deeper commitment within Taiwanese civil society to confront the uncomfortable legacies of Japanese colonial rule. The museum does not exist in a political vacuum. Relations between Taiwan and Japan are complex, shaped by trade, security concerns, and the memory of occupation. The decision to preserve this history, in a dedicated public institution rather than a single gallery in a larger museum, represents a deliberate choice to keep these women visible. Ama means grandmother. The museum insists that these grandmothers be remembered not as abstractions or statistics but as individuals who endured, survived, and in the final years of their lives, spoke.