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The Deafening Silence of the Korean “Comfort Women”: A Response Based on Lyotard and Irigaray
Abstract
This article reflects upon the continuing historical denialism concerning the Korean “comfort women” forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II. We argue that the refusal of the Japanese government and others to squarely confront this wrong is made possible through the exploitation of a
différend
in Jean-François Lyotard’s sense of the term. The
différend
arises from a complex set of social, cultural, and legal sources, including patriarchal, colonial, and nationalistic constructions of the wrong and its victims. We seek to tentatively expose the nature of the
différend
by identifying these factors. We then sketch the beginnings of a possible response, drawing on Luce Irigaray’s strategy of emphasizing sexual difference and separation to pave the way for reciprocality between the sexes. The testimonies of the “comfort women” must be allowed to speak for themselves before a response can emerge based in other discourses.
... Comfort women activists occupy an incommensurable, outlaw position by virtue of their unwillingness to accept the legitimacy of international arbitration that denies the primacy of their experience as the basis for determining trauma and seeks to symbolically contain the significance of reparations through their privatization (Izumi, 2001;Kim, 2006). Lee (2015) suggest this incommensurability has produced a "différend" as conceptualized by Jean-François Lyotard. A différend is a dispute whose articulations in social discourse are incommensurable, disallowing dispute resolution. ...
... Jonathan Crowe and Constance Lee (2015) suggest that the comfort women issue represents a "différend," a dispute whose articulations in social discourses are incommensurable, disallowing dispute resolution. Crowe and Lee argue that the comfort women différend is an outcome of patriarchal, colonial, and nationalistic representations of injuries and victims. ...
... Crowe, J., & Lee, C. (2015). The deafening silence of the "comfort women": A response based on Lyotard and Irigaray. ...
Japan conscripted a disputed number of “comfort women” to sexually service their soldiers in occupied territories during World War II. In the aftermath of war, this apparatus was ignored by international diplomacy, and few survivors related their experiences as sex slaves. However, during the early 1990s, sexual crimes against women achieved international attention, emboldened by and emboldening silence breakers whose personal experiences were both affirmed and negated by competing global stakeholders. Activists seeking recognition of and reparations for crimes against survivors of Japan’s comfort women system have since deployed memorials to contest Japan’s position that comfort women were sex workers. These memorials materially instantiate the conflicted interpretations of the scope and severity of Japan’s war crimes, whose undecidability signifies ruptures in the contemporary symbolic order of the United States, Japan, and South Korea alliance. This project examines how online audiences construct the meanings of the highly contested 2017 San Francisco memorial.
... The term "comfort women" is used to refer to females trafficked to the military brothels (known as "comfort stations") operated by the Imperial Japanese polity during World War II (WWII) (Hicks, 1997;Hsu, 1993;Kimura, 2016;Lee & Crowe, 2015;Min, 2021;Min et al., 2020;Min & Lee, 2018;Nishino et al., 2018;Pilzer, 2014;Yoshimi, 2000). Hundreds of thousands of minors from countries including Korea, China, the Philippines, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, the Netherlands, and Australia were abducted across Asia-Pacific regions under Japanese occupation. ...
This study examines the effects of social networks on the disclosure of stigmatizing and traumatic sexual assault experiences. We analyzed publicly archived oral histories of Korean “comfort women” from World War II, employing an innovative method combining word embedding analysis, word frequency comparison, and grounded theory. By extracting their significant social relationships from narrated survivor stories, we parsed two distinctive disclosure patterns according to timing of disclosure: early disclosers and late disclosers. The latter were more socially embedded than the former, indicating the constraining aspect of social networks, in which the size of social networks was positively associated with delayed disclosure. Qualitative findings further elaborated that social networks have double-edged effects. Survivors’ familial networks functioned as both social constraints and social support for public disclosure. Yet, the late disclosers tend to exploit it more as constraints for the fear of transgenerational transmission of social scorn and stigma. The findings contribute to enhancing a culturally relevant understanding of trauma and the repercussions of human trafficking.
This article examines the relevance to judicial interpretation of contextual meaning: the meaning legal texts hold when considered in full light of their social and moral context. I argue first that, as a descriptive matter, contextual meaning is necessarily prior to any more restricted form of textual interpretation; that is, the contextual meaning of a legal text is its ordinary meaning. I then contend that, as a normative matter, judges should presumptively apply ordinary or contextual meaning when construing legal materials. The remainder of the article explores the nature and limitations of the contextualist model of judicial practice. The possibility of conflicts between contextual factors at different levels of abstraction makes it necessary to distinguish narrow and wide versions of the contextualist methodology. I argue that wide contextualism offers the best overall account of judicial interpretation. I conclude by examining the practical and normative limitations of this model.
This article examines the relevance to judicial interpretation of contextual meaning: the meaning legal texts hold when considered in full light of their social and moral context. I argue first that, as a descriptive matter, contextual meaning is necessarily prior to any more restricted form of textual interpretation; that is, the contextual meaning of a legal text is its ordinary meaning. I then contend that, as a normative matter, judges should presumptively apply ordinary or contextual meaning when construing legal materials. The remainder of the article explores the nature and limitations of the contextualist model of judicial practice. The possibility of conflicts between contextual factors at different levels of abstraction makes it necessary to distinguish narrow and wide versions of the contextualist methodology. I argue that wide contextualism offers the best overall account of judicial interpretation. I conclude by examining the practical and normative limitations of this model.
The Korean women’s movement, which is seen in both Western and non-Western countries as being exemplary in terms of women’s activism, experienced a dramatic change in its direction and strategy in the early 1990s. At the heart of the new approach was an increasing focus on sexual violence, which has had a huge impact on bringing women’s issues onto the public agenda in Korea. This book examines feminist practice in Korea by analyzing the experiences of the country’s first sexual assault center, the Korea Sexual Violence Relief Center. Based on extensive original research, including interviews with activists and extensive participant observation, it explores why feminist activists in South Korea chose to organize around the issue of sexual violence, the strategies it used to do so, what impact the movement has made and what challenges it still faces to achieve its objectives.
International criminal prosecutions for serious violations of human rights are not only connected to a collective consciousness about the past; they also shape contemporary memory contestation. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE or Tokyo Tribunal) was established in 1946 to try Japanese defendants for war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against peace. Part of the legacy of the Tokyo Trial is the debate that has ensued over the collective memory of injustice, including critiques of “victor’s justice”, as well as the failure of the Tribunal to adequately prosecute crimes such as the vivisection of prisoners, biological warfare and the systematic sexual enslavement of the so-called “comfort women”.
In this article, I argue that the proceedings and judgment of the Tokyo Trial have been frequently deployed to both confirm and deny the plight of the comfort women, particularly among revisionists and victim advocates The article illustrates not only the power of law to dictate how and what past events will be remembered, but also the transformative power of law as a site of memory contestation. As such, I argue that the “selective memory” of historical war crimes trials can be both an injustice and a collective memory of the past. Such legal memory is not stable and settled, but shifts and changes shape over the passage of time.
After the issue of Japan's responsibility for the "comfort women" exploded in 1992, Tokyo took a series of measured steps to deal with the demands of NGOs in Japan, South Korea, and elsewhere to reveal the truth and offer state compensation to victim-survivors of the Japanese wartime military comfort system. The United Nations has come to define that system as "military sexual slavery." This paper explores the transnational politics of redress for former comfort women from a critical comparative perspective: 1) by analyzing the responses of the Japanese government and civil society to the pressure of the international community, with a focus on the controversial National/Asian Women's Fund created by Tokyo to take moral responsibility and express Japan's national atonement to non-Japanese victim-survivors; and 2) by examining divergent responses of governments and NGOs in afflicted countries to the Fund's atonement projects. Although dismissed by militant activists as a "private fund," the Fund may be conceptualized as a national public organization or an "NPO" with a unique hybrid organizational structure, an inherent dilemma of representation, and internal tension. While it continues to incur severe criticisms from legal compensation advocates in unrelenting pursuit of their political goal, the Fund's implementation of its imperfect, limited, and yet substantive projects has served as a "constructive compromise" measure for 364 aged victim-survivors-improving their living conditions and helping them to heal their long-silenced inner wounds-in the face of the continuing stalemate of the international redress politics.
During the Asian and Pacific War (1937-45), the Japanese government mobilized approximately 200,000 Asian women to military brothels to sexually serve Japanese soldiers. The majority of these victims were unmarried young women from Korea, Japan’s colony at that time. In the early 1990s, Korean feminist leaders helped more than 200 Korean survivors of Japanese military sexual slavery to come forward to tell the truth, which has further accelerated the redress movement for the women. One major issue in the redress movement and research relating to the so-called “comfort women” issue is whether Japan’s colonization of Korea or gender hierarchy was a more fundamental cause of the Korean women’s suffering. Using an intersectional perspective, this article analyzes how colonial power, gender hierarchy, and class were inseparably tied together to make the victims’ lives miserable. By doing so, it shows that a one-sided emphasis on colonization or gender hierarchy will misrepresent the feminist political issue and misinterpret the “comfort women’s” experiences.
This article examines how the nationalist discourse crystallising around the ‘comfort women’ issue (women abducted to function as sexual slaves for the Japanese Imperial Army during the Pacific War) in South Korea has eventually rendered individual victims' needs and preferences irrelevant to a larger narrative of an unforgivable offence to national sovereignty. The narrative, constructed socially with the active participation of the Korean government(s), has also linked together past grievances felt towards both Japan and the USA (their people as well as their governments) – albeit the latter appears only covertly, and on a more symbolic level its presence is indicative of the general public mood. What have been lost in the discourse are the very victims of military sexual slavery, whose fate and wellbeing has no longer been the subject of any social interest.
The aim of this article is to understand who the Ianfu are via a social-historical and socio-cultural study. I set out to contextualise the reality of the women's lives as Ianfu and as surviving Ianfu through the inclusion of recollections of former Korean Ianfu and official histories. Who are the Ianfu, what did they do, where did they go, why were they created, and what happened to them? These are the questions that I sought to answer in order to frame the Ianfu experience through a retelling of their past. Furthermore, there are several reasons why Korean women came to comprise the majority of Ianfu which I endeavour to explain in this article.
The matter of Korean "comfort women" poses multiple problems — of nomination, of identification, of representation, and of knowledge-production. This essay considers the possible implications of the various efforts by Korean/Americans to recall and represent Korean "comfort women" in literature, film/video, visual arts, and scholarship. Rather than attributing a shared ethnic and/or gender identity as the secure origin or compelling cause of their representational impulse, it argues that these efforts dispel the wishful trajectory in which a more intimate identification with the Korean "comfort women" leads to better representations of the "comfort women," which in turn secures greater justice for these women.
History & Memory 11.2 (1999) 129-152
The Japanese political world has splintered to pieces in the aftermath of the cold war. The same splintering has occurred among intellectuals as well, as one distorted claim invites another, until one hasn't a clue who is conservative and who is progressive. The present focus of the confusion is the so-called comfort women problem. Holocaust revisionism has created scandals in the past in Japan as elsewhere, but this time the fire has ignited on our own doorstep. With the emergence of a Japanese version of historical revisionism, the comfort women issue has become a litmus test of attitudes about war responsibility and the construction of public memory.
Fujioka Nobukatsu, of the so-called Liberalist History Research Group, stands at the eye of the typhoon. This "liberalism" has nothing to do with any traditional liberalism. The liberation they claim to advocate is from the "biased historical perspectives of both left and right"; what they call the "Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal perspective" of the left and the "affirmation of the Greater East Asian War" on the right. Actually, this sort of critique belongs entirely to common sense—one hardly needs to hear it from Professor Fujioka. Everyone knows that the Tokyo Trials were victor's justice. As for "affirmation of the Greater East Asian War," that issue was declared bankrupt years ago. To come along now and pose these two as extremes, and then make it appear that you possess "the truth" merely by standing somewhere in between, is the stock formula of the so-called "debate method" in which Fujioka purports to specialize. [...]
Along with "Tokyo Trials History," Fujioka's group makes a scapegoat of what he calls "Comintern History," asserting that in the East-West division of the cold war years, Japan was forced by both camps to accept a "masochistic history." Blatant nationalism and superpower consciousness underlie this thinking. The logic has three stages: (1) The Western powers are guilty of the same evils but they are not apologizing; (2) Japan was an empire standing shoulder to shoulder with the Western powers; (3) therefore, what's wrong with Japan's behaving in the same manner as the Western powers?
Since Fujioka and the revisionists have directed their attacks at former comfort women and their defenders, let us begin by filling in some of the historical context surrounding this system of exploitation. "Comfort stations" were established after the Nanking massacre in 1937 and soon became widespread, first throughout China and then over the whole battlefront in Asia. What first excited the concern of the Japanese military was the frequent rapes committed by soldiers, which enraged the Chinese and accordingly made the occupation more difficult. Rape was illegal even under military code, and in theory rapists were punishable. The combination of the patriarchal assumption that male sexuality is uncontrollable and concern about military hygiene prompted officials to establish comfort stations under military control and forbid soldiers to visit local brothels. Apart from the reduction in overt cases of rape, and greater control over the spread of venereal disease, the comfort stations also reduced fraternization with enemy nationals, which might compromise military security.
Korean women were the favorite recruits for this sexual service, as they best met the military's requirements: they were "imperial subjects," since Korea had been made part of the Japanese empire in 1910, and they were young women without experience in brothels, therefore "hygienic"—military slang even dubbed them "sanitary public toilets." Estimates of the number of women taken vary from 80,000 to 200,000. Japanese women were also recruited, but these women came mostly from brothels, so that for "hygienic" reasons, Korean women were preferred. Still, a racial hierarchy remained between them; Japanese comfort women served officers, Korean women were assigned to lower-ranked soldiers. The fees charged varied on similar lines. As Japan's military advanced south, sexual slavery was introduced in Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, including Dutch women living in Indonesia under Japanese occupation.
In the...
First published in 1967, Writing and Difference, a collection of Jacques Derrida's essays written between 1959 and 1966, has become a landmark of contemporary French thought. In it we find Derrida at work on his systematic deconstruction of Western metaphysics. The book's first half, which includes the celebrated essay on Descartes and Foucault, shows the development of Derrida's method of deconstruction. In these essays, Derrida demonstrates the traditional nature of some purportedly nontraditional currents of modern thoughtâone of his main targets being the way in which "structuralism" unwittingly repeats metaphysical concepts in its use of linguistic models. The second half of the book contains some of Derrida's most compelling analyses of why and how metaphysical thinking must exclude writing from its conception of language, finally showing metaphysics to be constituted by this exclusion. These essays on Artaud, Freud, Bataille, Hegel, and Lévi-Strauss have served as introductions to Derrida's notions of writing and différenceâthe untranslatable formulation of a nonmetaphysical "concept" that does not exclude writingâfor almost a generation of students of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Writing and Difference reveals the unacknowledged program that makes thought itself possible. In analyzing the contradictions inherent in this program, Derrida foes on to develop new ways of thinking, reading, and writing,ânew ways based on the most complete and rigorous understanding of the old ways. Scholars and students from all disciplines will find Writing and Difference an excellent introduction to perhaps the most challenging of contemporary French thinkersâchallenging because Derrida questions thought as we know it.
In an era marked by atrocities perpetrated on a grand scale, the tragedy of the so-called comfort womenâmostly Korean women forced into prostitution by the Japanese armyâendures as one of the darkest events of World War II. These women have usually been labeled victims of a war crime, a simplistic view that makes it easy to pin blame on the policies of imperial Japan and therefore easier to consign the episode to a war-torn past. In this revelatory study, C. Sarah Soh provocatively disputes this master narrative. Soh reveals that the forces of Japanese colonialism and Korean patriarchy together shaped the fate of Korean comfort womenâa double bind made strikingly apparent in the cases of women cast into sexual slavery after fleeing abuse at home. Other victims were press-ganged into prostitution, sometimes with the help of Korean procurers. Drawing on historical research and interviews with survivors, Soh tells the stories of these women from girlhood through their subjugation and beyond to their efforts to overcome the traumas of their past. Finally, Soh examines the array of factorsâ from South Korean nationalist politics to the aims of the international womenâs human rights movementâthat have contributed to the incomplete view of the tragedy that still dominates today.
The principle of government neutrality, as commonly understood, enshrines the idea that government bodies ought to treat all citizens equally. I argue that the traditional interpretation of this principle in liberal constitutionalism has involved a prohibition against legal actors distinguishing between subjects on the basis of their personal characteristics. This approach is unsatisfactory, as it constrains the law's ability to respond to evolved social practices of discrimination. To illustrate this point, I draw on the writings of Jean-François Lyotard and recent judicial decisions on the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
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