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The Geopolitics of Public Memory: The Challenge and Promise of Transnational Comfort Women Activism
Abstract
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 places, boundaries, and landscapes of war histories can represent the desire for peace and the memorialization and critique of war crimes and militarism. The landscape of Okinawa Peace Park, which represents the tragedy and inhumanity of war rather than the sacrifice of the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces in the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, and transnational activists' geopolitical efforts to memorialize the comfort women who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese militarist regime in the Pacific War are examples of how critical geography can lead to memorialization and criticism of militarism and war crimes (Hashimoto and Telfer 2019;Nadesan and Kim 2022). ...
The purpose of this study is to analyze how and why preservice geography teachers’ (PGTs’) geographic reading and reconstruction of war histories can be meaningful for preservice geography teacher education (PGTE). The participating PGTs related their own geography-based war history card news (GWHCN). As a result, all of the participants deepened and broadened their understanding of geography (Types 1 and 2) and some of them refined their consideration of war and peace issues (Type 2). The results of this study suggest the need for discussion about the importance of approaching and learning war histories in geography education and PGTE.
... Since then, the 'comfort women' issue has increasingly been examined within a broader social and cultural framework. This approach underscores how the memory and recognition of comfort women are intertwined with national narratives (Heo 2021), heritage diplomacy (Nadesan and Kim 2022;Shin 2021;Vickers 2019Vickers , 2021, museum interpretation (Kim 2020;Lee and Tamashiro 2023;Sun, Liu, and Yan 2024;Wang 2020) as well as ongoing debates concerning historical accountability (Vickers and Su 2021) and gender-based violence (Myadar and Davidson 2021;Ueno et al. 2018), which highlight the wide-ranging implications of the 'comfort women' issue. ...
This research underscores the critical role of museums in interpreting difficult heritage and fostering public reflection. By examining visitor comment books at the Chinese Comfort Women Historical Museum in Shanghai, this study analyses visitor perceptions and responses to the difficult history associated with war and historical atrocities. While the museum aims to raise public awareness about the ‘comfort women’ issue, it also inadvertently reinforces nationalist narratives among Chinese visitors, whose comments often emphasise anti-Japanese sentiments. In contrast, foreign visitors express empathy and a desire to understand the broader context. This study offers valuable perspectives on the complexities of curating narratives of historical injustices in museums and their impact on societal attitudes and reconciliation efforts.
... By doing so, I examine the development of the girl statue movement into a left-wing nationalist-populist movement in South Korea, with a focus on identification with a girl statue as a key psycho-political catalyst. Scholars from diverse fields have discussed a girl statue as a contested site for the representation of comfort women (Chun, 2020;Cameron, 2017), (transnational) politics of memory surrounding girl statues (Yoon, 2017;Nadesan & Kim, 2022), and intersections between feminism and nationalism (Kwon, 2019;. Despite their scholarly achievements, relatively little is known about the political orientations and goals of those who spearheaded and participated in the girl statue movement. ...
Sonyosang (girl statue in Korean) is a bronze statue symbolizing “comfort women,” the estimated 80,000 to 200,000 women physically, mentally, and sexually exploited by the Japanese Empire during WWII. As a backlash against the 2015 ″comfort women” agreement between the South Korean and Japanese governments, Koreans have installed 384 girl statues across South Korea. Based on ethnographic research that I conducted in South Korea between 2019 and 2021, including in-depth interviews with Korean activists who raised funds for or participated in creating, installing, and managing girl statues in South Korea, this research examines how the girl statue movement in South Korea has developed into a left wing nationalist-populist movement and how affective identification with the statue generates a populist identity. To this end, this research firstly discusses how former President Park Geun-hye’s undemocratic political measures recall the memory of minjungism (Korean populism) that led the pro-democracy movement in the 1980s, enabling Korean nationalist leftists’ demands to form a chain of equivalence in the girl statue movement. Secondly, relying on Melanie Klein’s theory of identification, this article examines how the ‘people’ is constituted through affective forms of identification with the girl statue. By doing so, this article demonstrates that the growth of the girl statue movement into a left-wing nationalist populist movement blurs boundaries between the psychological, the personal, the national, and the (geo)political.
This essay aims to contribute to the development of invitational rhetorical theory, using the tragic and sobering story of “comfort women” as an illustrative case study. By focusing on the relatively recent mediated and special turns in the rhetorical studies, we propose a critical cultural analysis and eventual addendum of mediated texts as well as the rhetoric of materiality as essential means to understand and apply invitational rhetoric. Our project demonstrates how—in a socio-political context of cultural erasure and forgetting—material and visual messages serve as the most invitational modalities. The material and visual rhetoric intervene in the context of strategic amnesia, endurance, and as they center the voices and experiences that historically have been made completely subaltern. Utilizing a selection of artifacts of the rhetoric of materiality and pieces of media rhetoric, we demonstrate how those forms of invitational rhetoric create and encourage safe dialogical spaces for traditionally silenced, marginalized communities. Ultimately, we aim to demonstrate how the new understanding and utilization of invitational rhetoric can become a mechanism for social change and enable a shift in the public consciousness.
This study content analyzed online comments on Fox News and CNN’s YouTube platforms related to news stories on the 2017 special election for the U.S. Senate in Alabama. Republican candidate Roy Moore attracted widespread media attention one month prior to the election – after being accused of sexual misconduct for alleged relationships decades before his run for U.S. Senate. Comment threads were polarized on the two ideologically different forums (CNN and Fox News) as well as within these forums. The latter indicated a crossover effect or the tendency of social media users to leave comments on an ideologically opposing forum. Regardless of being “native” or crossovers, commenters tended to drown out reporters’ messages by introducing new discussion topics. Through the examination of the most popular comments, this study argues for the need for a more nuanced approach to understanding audience gatekeeping in today’s polarized media environment. The article highlights the importance of monitoring online comments to understand the power of the audience to exercise control over the direction of social media commentary.
Drawing from critical trans theory’s methods of systemic analysis, this article examines how #MeToo’s carceral politics have reinforced the exclusion and ongoing abuse of those most vulnerable to gender and state violence. The stories of many people of color, queer, transgender, poor, and/or disabled folks remain inarticulable within a retributive system that requires survivors to narrate themselves as “perfect victims.” Adopting critical trans theory’s emphasis on administrative violence, I connect the transformative visions of penal abolition with discourses on sexual violence. Focusing on the rhetorical strategies of incarcerated survivors and their defense committees, I demonstrate how these rhetors model forms of Rebecca Dingo’s “networked arguments.” In doing so, they offer a promising vision of how organizers and advocates can address the particularities of individual experience while also responding to and working collaboratively against oppressive social and state institutions.
In this essay, I analyze print news coverage concerning the feminicides in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, which some legal advocates-activists position as a crime against humanity. Such a classification underscores the magnitude that one might expect, but fails, to manifest in news coverage. Spanning a 14-year period, I examine 113 print news articles published in the U.S. Combining framing analysis with considerations of loss and grievability, revealed are three frames, their rhetorical dimensions and rhetorical distance effected. One frame, a “city of two faces,” is simultaneously absent and filled with violence that structures understandings of Ciudad Juárez. The oppositional nature of the “faces,” combined with the manifestations of violence, produce “negative valence” that bears on a second frame of “victims, bodies, and murdered women.” Its rhetorical contours provoke discursive violence resulting in double violations against Mexican women and girls of the feminicides. The final frame, “grieving mothers,” is limited in its ability to counteract rhetorical distance fostered by the first two frames. Individually and combined, the frames affect discursive violence, conceived as masking or effacing other forms of violence and/or productive of negative valence, that colludes with other manifestations of violence all the while ignoring U.S. complicity. Recognizing discursive violence for what it is, and the role of media frames, reveals how profoundly audiences could be primed. Media frames can activate audiences so that they view violence as an inevitability in Mexico, view the victims as less than sympathetic, and pity grieving mothers. Therefore, this analysis orients scholars’ attention to the ways that discourse fosters rhetorical distance and advances more concretely the relationship of frames and discursive violence.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15295036.2019.1575516
** Email to request a complimentary copy of my essay. Published online in February 2019; hard copy June 2019
In this article, we present a cross-national comparative analysis of which online news users in practice engage with the participatory potential for sharing and commenting on news afforded by interactive features in news websites and social media technologies across a strategic sample of six different countries. Based on data from the 2016 Reuters Institute Digital News Report, and controlling for a range of factors, we find that (1) people who use social media for news and a high number of different social media platforms are more likely to also engage more actively with news outside social media by commenting on news sites and sharing news via email, (2) political partisans on both sides are more likely to engage in sharing and commenting particularly on news stories in social media, and (3) people with high interest in hard news are more likely to comment on news on both news sites and social media and share stores via social media (and people with high interest in any kind of news [hard or soft] ar
During the World War II, up to 200,000 women, the majority of whom were Korean, were forced to provide sex to Japan’s military forces. The perceived refusal of Japan to fully take responsibility for the mistreatment of these “comfort women” has been a major obstacle to Japanese-Korean relations for a quarter of a century. Although the signing of the December 28, 2015 Agreement between Japan and Korea purported to “finally and irreversibly” solve the comfort women issue that has divided these two East Asian powers, the voices of Korean and Korean-American civil society indicate the contrary. American local, county, and state governments have become key battlegrounds in the conflict. As comfort women memorials across the USA proliferate, these governmental entities have allowed themselves to be caught up in incomplete narratives, whether Japanese or Korean. Against the backdrop of the tense geopolitics of today’s Asia-Pacific, a more responsible, comprehensive inquiry is needed to bring closure to a tragic chapter of human history.
This essay draws on original qualitative research about feminicides in Ciudad Juárez to examine a transcribed and translated testimonio. Delivered by a sister of a victim of the feminicides, this testimonio bears witness by orally narrating instances of individual and collective violence committed against Mexicanas. The sister's testimonio stages violence in order for listeners to identify with (and take up a position against) acts of violence. Achieving such a goal relies on transforming listeners-to-witnesses through an embodied positionality rhetorically crafted prior to and during a feminicidio testimonio. Contextual antecedents prime listeners for a feminicidio testimonio by representing violence and kinship and also functioning as scenes for addressing listeners. Both the form and content of a feminicidio testimonio enable the transformation of listeners-to-witnesses: The form creates structural and latent relational dimensions of a testimonio whereas the content contains violent themes that indicate the types and levels of violence, as well as the actors behind it. Ultimately, a feminicidio testimonio is a means not only to respond to violence but also to produce new witnesses.
Testimonies of wartime sexual violence contribute to the recognition of rape as a serious human rights violation. Although acknowledgement and justice are imperative to ending silence and impunity, this article critiques some commonly held therapeutic assumptions about disclosure through examining the way so-called "unspeakable" events are communicated through legal discourse. In this article, the author explores the inherent limitations of language for bearing witness to wartime rape, specifically focusing on international war crimes tribunals. The author argues that trials contribute to the impossibility of bearing witness through both the appropriation of trauma and the failure of law to accommodate traumatic experiences.
Rape has been used as a weapon in the conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in unprecedented ways. Research into the phenomenon of war-rape is limited, particularly in this context. The aim of this study was to explore perceptions of local leaders in eastern DRC concerning rape and raped women in the war context. Local leaders were chosen for their ability to both reflect and influence their constituencies. Interviews were conducted with 10 local leaders and transcripts subjected to qualitative content analysis. The study suggests that mass raping and the methods of perpetration created a chaos effectively destroying communities and the entire society and that humanitarian aid was often inappropriate. Furthermore, an exclusive focus on raped women missed the extent of traumatisation entire communities suffered. More significantly, the lack of political will, corruption, greed and inappropriate aid creates a tangled web serving to intensify the war. This complexity has implications for humanitarian interventions including public health.
Traditionally, public memory scholarship looks to the monuments and memorials inscribed with cultural narratives of the past. Yet, public memory is also a process of formation and deformation, of comings and goings, much like the tourists entering and exiting a city such as Reno, NV. For this project, the authors of this essay took up Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman's “walking methodologies” to explore the ephemeral experiences of the University of Nevada, Reno campus and its plans for expansion and revitalization in the surrounding area. Through a series of four vignettes (Recollection, Embodiment, Ephemera, and Unformed Objects), we offer themed reflections of our experiences, including our collective senses of contradiction, confusion, and (dis)connections with the city and campus. We contend that as cities and campuses consider revitalization projects, they should recall the experiences and narratives of the city as a part of their histories and public memories. Those narratives should include moments of formation and deformation as leaders and academics seek to preserve the public memory of the city.
This article outlines the history of the “comfort woman” statue from its emergence in Seoul to its incarnations in the United States up to the present moment. Its aim is to explore the debates regarding its installations and to account for shifting discursive fields with its changing localities from South Korea to the United States. Particular attention is paid to the controversies concerning “comfort woman” statues erected in Glendale, California; Southfield, Michigan; Brookhaven, Georgia; and San Francisco, California. In all cases, the cities encountered enormous pressures from the Japanese government, ultra-right-wing politicians and citizen groups. Resistance on the part of the Japanese government suggests ongoing efforts to systematically deny the wartime atrocities performed on women by its imperial predecessor and to silence the victim-survivors. The installations of the ‘comfort woman’ statues in the United States offer an opportunity for Asian diasporic communities with entangled World War II histories to resist such silencing and weave their own interstitial narratives.
The research on online news comments has been dominated by a normative approach and has centered on media engagement. Normativity and media dominance have also featured big in the theoretical discussions on the public sphere. This article presents a case study of online news comments, combining a novel methodological testing of social network hypotheses to examine user–user interactions in online comments with a conceptual discussion of the potential connections between social network research and theories of the public. The social network analysis in this study indicated that users (online commentators) do not constitute highly dense networks, although their relations can be studied as social networks. However, this analysis can only explore limited features of this online phenomenon and requires complementary methods. From a conceptual perspective, this article confirms the role of shared issue for a potential public and also emphasizes the importance of context, actors, and meanings for understanding the public.
Cambridge Core - Human Rights - The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal - by David Cohen
The ultranationalist Action Conservative Movement (ACM), a network of new far right groups that emerged around 2007, has taken an interest in the controversy surrounding Japan's colonial past. Influenced by the historical revisionism promoted by mainstream conservatives, such as Nippon Kaigi and the government under Prime Minister Abe Shinzō, they have engaged in street-level activism against former 'comfort women' and their support groups. Based on extensive fieldwork and interviews, this article discusses how ACM activists established an independent identity by differentiating themselves from other right-wing movements through aggressive and 'active' engagement on the comfort women issue. By looking at the different motivations and strategies taken by ACM activists, I demonstrate that even as the ACM criticizes the conservative establishment for inactivity, it functions to elevate claims by mainstream conservatives. Amplifying the establishment's criticism of the comfort women's claims as mere fabrications, the ACM has changed the perceptions of a wide range of right-wing groups and even the general public. By paying close attention to a number of activists' narratives, I show that despite their critical attitudes and sensational tactics, ACM activists function to complement the revisionist stance of the conservative establishment. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press in conjunction with the University of Tokyo. All rights reserved.
Diaspora politics, coalition building, and the gender rights movement have come together to bring about the unexpected: the public memorialization in the United States of “comfort women,” young women from across Asia forced to provide sexual services to the Japanese Imperial Army during the 1930s and 1940s. In this article, we explore how local politics in the United States became the site of competing narratives over the comfort women, and debates over erecting memorials or statues in honor of these women on public land. Our analysis builds on the existing literature on the role of diaspora in international and local politics but also adds the important dimension of changing gender norms. Through case studies, we explore the dynamics behind the success or failure of the siting of a monument and the important role of activists and local politicians in mobilizing support throughout the process. Using a qualitative approach based on fieldwork and interviews, we highlight the size and trends of the ethnic Korean population, the relative strengths of supporting and opposing coalitions, and the use of the strategy of universalism in determining whether or not the goal of siting a memorial in honor of the comfort women is achieved.
The institutionalized practice of sexual slavery during World War II continues to haunt diplomatic relations between Japan and South Korea. The recent controversy surrounding the possible removal of the “Statue of Peace” in Seoul, South Korea, serves as further evidence that sexual violence continues to deny women representational claims to their bodies and memories. This study examines the statue’s performance as an agentic rhetorical embodiment that witnesses on behalf of the victimized. In turn, the statue-as-witness creates false witnesses of those engaging with its memory while politicizing its obliquely referenced crime. This controversy presents scholars of public memory and gender studies an opportunity to examine how women’s bodies are not only sites of political domination but also memorial appropriation.
We appreciate the opportunity to respond to the many issues raised in Kendall Phillips's (1999a) essay "A Rhetoric of Controversy" and Thomas Goodnight's (1999) essay/response Mssrs. Dinkins, Rangel and Savage in Colloquy on the African Burial Ground: A Companion Reading." Our interest in "controversy" and "the political," among other issues they raise, leads us to respond to their arguments, to draw some connections to our own work where relevant, and, hopefully, to expand the terms of the conversation between Phillips and Goodnight in order to encourage other scholars interested in these subjects to participate in the discussion.
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.
This article draws on Walter Benjamin's insights about collecting to consider how the curatorial approach in the Women's Jail museum figures former inmates as collectors who haunt a scene of memory that productively mediates the gaze. In compelling viewers to see how particular women recollect incarceration, this place of diverse and distinct memories invites a new mode of connection with visitors—kinship—that avoids problems associated with both identification and affect in museum exhibits.
Current paradigms of human rights and reconciliation call for democratization of memories, with former victims interjecting their interpretations of the past, challenging the versions recollected by the powerful. The trajectory of comfort women issues has implications not only for the Japanese democracy, but also for Korea. The shifts in memory are about respect for human rights and the beginning of a reconciliatory journey between former adversaries. Reconciliation involves multiple stages of self-reflexivity, acknowledgement, redistributive justice, corrective mechanisms, and a final movement of forgiving. In order to transcend the counterproductive blame games, memory, human rights, and reconciliation need to be interwoven. The rising global awareness of human rights helps to highlight the accountability of the individual, once largely overshadowed by groups, with political leaders, and nation-states. Memories are no longer confined within national borders. As the comfort women monuments in Korea and the United States suggest, they become increasingly transnational and even global.
Grounding our evidence in Karl Lagerfeld's Paris-Shanghai: A Fantasy, a filmic homage to Coco Chanel, we theorize a “visual rhetoric of containment,” which limits the subjectivity of the racial Other and consolidates whiteness. The visual rhetoric of containment manifests in four ways: the creation and enactment of “the yellowface gaze,” which affirms whiteness through the eyes of the “native” Other, the affirmation of a post-feminist model of exchange, which objectifies the Chinese, the representation of Chanel as a master of place and order, and the conception of time as a constraint that Chanel, but not the Chinese people, can transcend.
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.
This study investigated if user-generated comments on Internet news sites affect readers' inferences about public opinion, and subsequently, their perceptions of media bias, and how ego-involvement moderates such effects. Supporting the notion that hostile media perception (HMP) stems from defensive processing, those who read others' comments discordant (vs. concordant) with their own opinion believed that the public was against their position and perceived the news report to be more hostile and partial in its coverage, but such effects were limited to those with higher ego-involvement. Readers' comments also had a direct effect on HMP among more involved individuals, without altering their perceptions of public opinion, suggesting that people might misattribute the opinions expressed in others' comments to the news article. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
From a feminist standpoint, this study provides an updated analysis to the age-old subject of women and war reporting. A content analysis of 406 stories from Time magazine explores the intersection of U.S. war reporting and gender in the coverage of the U.S. war in Iraq. Relying on feminist theories, this research dissected the normative method of war coverage to emphasize the reality of women's silence. The results demonstrated that women's perspectives—from official sources to private civilians' voices—are still scarce in war reporting. Women also accounted for only a fifth of the bylines and were mostly quoted as private individuals—representing less than a tenth of the subjects cited. The data showed that women, when it comes to war, are still symbolically annihilated through omission. Feminist ethics must be integrated into journalists' work to rectify the masculine perspectives and viewpoints found in war coverage.
On numerous occasions in the past fifteen years, U.N. peacekeepers have been accused of sexually assaulting or abusing the populations they serve. A Comprehensive Review of peacekeeper misconduct completed in 2005 identified significant problems and recommended numerous changes to address them. The U.S. Army and NATO, in a response to the possibility that their deployed troops will be engaged in or facilitate human trafficking, have enacted new policies intended to remove their troops from the demand for women trafficked for sexual services. The Department of Defense and NATO initiatives are similar to those being considered by the United Nations for preventing sexual misconduct by its peacekeepers. Because the United States, NATO, and the United Nations are all addressing the problems of sexual misconduct by deployed troops, their efforts should be mutually reinforcing. The examples of American and NATO armed forces offer hope that the United Nations will also enact strong measures to prevent future misconduct by its peacekeepers.
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 study examines the efforts and effects of human rights nongovernmental organizations' (NGOs) campaigns on "comfort women" issue in East Asia. By focusing on the dynamic process of interactions between the three main actors involved in the issue: comfort women NGOs; Japanese government; and the United Nations, I first argue that the Japanese government is being forced to change its original discourse of official denial and cover-up policy to approach the demands offered by comfort women's NGOs. Second, the human rights movement relies on popular awareness and consciousness toward human rights issues in civil societies.Hence, through campaigns and activities,NGOs can play the key role to promote this issue and further form a transnational activism around the region and the international community. Third, a leading NGO can effectively promote international networking and then can press the target government to change its position. Fourth, we need to conduct a process oriented analysis of a specific case within a research framework to establish the exact influence of NGOs on the human rights issues. Finally,comfort women's NGOs have established a successful model for the transnational advocacy networks in human rights movement and have promoted a new claim for women's rights in East Asia.
Recent scholarship on apology has shifted its critical emphasis from the juridical use of apology as a means of self-defense to the moral value of apology as integral to specific reconciliation processes. This article examines the “comfort women” reparations debate in Japan in the 1990s as symptomatic of this change in how we think about apology and reparations. It illustrates how “comfort women” reparation lawsuits disrupted the symbolic economy of political apology in an inter-Asian political context and, thus, transformed the rhetorical force of apology from a past-oriented to a future-oriented technology of care.
It is strange that there is nobody here in Japan who came out as a user of the Japanese military comfort station. The soldiers were almost of the same age as us. Since we are alive here and now, so should they.
A person writes the words just to play a little modest light on some shadowed corner of life. And then someone waiting in the corner looks into the light and is transformed by it. The power is not in the words. The words are not matches that light the fuse inside the spirit of person who reads them.
In following postcolonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty, I begin with a question: Who speaks for the Korean past?1 In particular, who speaks for the Korean history of the Japanese military sexual slavery system? I raise these questions because certain positions seem to be absent in the writing of Asia's history during the period of colonialism and the Pacific war. The problem is not only that certain categorical positions are absent, such as those of a particular class, gender, nationality, or sexuality, but that attempts are made by others to designate the viewpoints and methods to represent them. In this essay, I address the subject positions of the women survivors of Japanese military sexual slavery through the representation of their testimony. If the category of "comfort women" of Japanese sexual slavery can substantially and metaphorically designate the absent positions in history at both regional and global levels as I claim, creating and deconstructing the methods of representation of testimony—that is, from whose point of view do we listen to the testimony?—will be the very issues that matter. I focus on this methodological question as a site of contestation as well as a source of inspiration in theorizing the writing of history. This essay is about the method, ethics, and, ultimately, epistemology of representing the numerous and nameless subjects that have been called "Japanese military comfort women."
Relatively widely known as the Japanese military comfort women system, the Japanese sexual slavery system operated, for the most part, during the period of the Manchurian and Pacific wars, from 1932 to 1945. The system was planned and implemented for the sexual satiation of Japanese male soldiers through the enslavement of women from (for the most part) Korea, China, Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, the Philippines, and beyond. Enslaved "comfort women" were brought to "comfort stations" throughout the vast region in which the Japanese imperial army fought for the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, which spanned East and South Asia as well as the South Pacific islands.2 In the case of Korean recruitment, enslaved women were mostly teenagers, drafted via force, fraud, and other means of menace; their total numbers are estimated to have been between 100,000 and 200,000, making Koreans the most numerous victims. Once installed in the comfort stations, the women were raped by dozens of Japanese soldiers each day; in some cases, this continued for years.
It was not until the late 1980s that the truth about this unthinkable system and its unpunished crimes began to surface. Although since then even basic information about the comfort system has been contested, at the moment the first survivor spoke out to say and recognize that "I am a former comfort woman," a new epoch opened in writing colonial history and perhaps in attaining justice for these women. When the first self-identified Korean survivor, Kim Hak Soon, said, "I have wanted to speak [about] this experience," it was a deconstructive moment in the functioning of comfort women as a trope of shame and secrecy in Korean history.3 Whose shame and secrecy have enveloped the subjectivity of this woman? How can we understand our unpreparedness for this revelation, the "opaque" in our knowledge?4
If sati designates a metaphor for physical and epistemic violence against women in India, the enslavement of comfort women symbolizes the violence against women in colonial Asia that has been unspoken.5 In a Foucauldian sense, when the other in a system of knowledge—the subject's exterior—begins to...
During WWII, 200,000 girls and young women from across Asia were sexually enslaved by Japan—a tragic history unearthed less than 20 years ago and still inadequately addressed by the Japanese government. This paper examines, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the legacy of this “comfort women” history, problematizing its attendant rituals of apology, “political forgiveness,” and reparation. The author analyzes the meaning of apology and forgiveness, and develops a typology of “reparation,“ concluding that what surviving “comfort women” have articulated is a model of “social reparation,” or a holistic goal of mending the past and restoring an international human community.
This case study traces hegemony in action by revealing aspects of the struggle over sexual assault discourse in the related moments of encoding, text, and decoding. The study suggests that meaningful analysis of audience responses to progressive rape news requires considering which textual themes spark a response, the orientation of the reading to the text (i.e., preferred, negotiated, or oppositional), and the orientation of the text to the dominant culture (i.e., challenge or reassertion).
Since first having an online presence, American newspapers have tried their best to make readers more involved with their stories. Since the first newspapers started appearing on the world wide web circa 1995, these publications have been working on integrating a range of tools to both enhance the reader's experience and to encourage reader participation and involvement – emails to contact staff, for example, or online polls where the public can easily express their opinion. Among the many tools used, newspapers have started allowing readers to post comments on stories online, not only to be more inclusive but to revitalise the concept of ‘citizen journalism’, where readers can actively contribute and help the news coverage. While the concept of interactivity between readers and publications has been extensively analysed in several studies in past decades, this new venue remains virtually untouched, despite its clear importance.To achieve this goal, this study – the first of its kind – conducted a content analysis of a random sample of reader comments posted on the websites of 10 major US newspapers. Results showed that readers have misused these comment boards, turning them into forums for opinions and personal attacks. Yet, while most comments did not contribute to the news coverage, they were still important tools for promoting the newspaper, for encouraging interaction between publication and reader, and for promoting democracy and freedom of speech. The study concludes with suggestions on how to improve comment boards and suggestions for follow-up studies with other publications with an online presence.
The military “comfort women” of the Japanese Imperial Army in World War II offer an extreme case of institutionalized sexual violence against women. Trafficking in women is a form of sexual slavery in which women are transported across national borders and marketed for prostitution. In this way, their bodies are displaced and commodified by other powers. This practice has been expanded in times of peace to “sex workers,” either as entertainers or prostitutes. Japan is now the most notorious country in the world for recruiting such women. Sex tourism to other Asian countries by Japanese men is a contemporary version of comfort women. Unless sexual violence and the commodification of women's bodies are eliminated, there will always be comfort women. War justifies violence against women; to stop war, we have to recognize the fact of this violence and understand the casualties.
Gender justice within the context of armed conflict and its aftermath refers to legal processes that are equitable, not privileged by and for men, and which acknowledge ways in which women uniquely experience harm. Typically, gender justice is neglected in preference for achieving reconciliation, which is driven by patriarchal interests favoring the powerful and disenfranchising the oppressed. This article's purpose is to explicate thematic concepts from writings about justice and reconciliation, to contrast religious and secular perspectives, and to expand current discourses about how gender justice can be created and maintained within post-conflict reconciliation processes. I emphasize the importance of truth-telling within the framework of gender justice and psychosocial healing as essential components of reconciliation processes. I argue that gender justice must occur if reconciliation processes are to succeed and that governments, communities, and individuals must accept responsibility for ensuring gender justice.
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.
We appreciate the opportunity to respond to the many issues raised in Kendall Phillips's (1999a) essay "A Rhetoric of Controversy" and Thomas Goodnight's (1999) essay/response "Mssrs. Dinkins, Rangel and Savage in Colloquy on the African Burial Ground: A Companion Reading." Our interest in "controversy" and "the political," among other issues they raise, leads us to respond to their arguments, to draw some connections to our own work where relevant, and, hopefully, to expand the terms of the conversation between Phillips and Goodnight in order to encourage other scholars interested in these subjects to participate in the discussion. This is an electronic version of an article published in Western Journal of Communication 63.4 (1999): 526-538. Western Journal of Communication is available online at: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/. College of Arts & Science Department of Communications Studies
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