Bearing Witness to Unshareable Pain

Abstract

This book does not aim to draw a fuller or more detailed picture of the ‘comfort women’ system with newly acquired ‘information’ through interviews with victim-survivors or archival research. My focus has rather been on various questions and dilemmas that have been raised through the discussion surrounding the ‘comfort women’ system. This is similar to the approach that Rekishi kenkyukai and Nihonshi kenkyukai (2014) recently suggested: the importance of not only examining what the ‘comfort women’ system is, but also exploring the implication that the ‘comfort women’ system and the debates that surround it can have for wider political debates and academic studies. By the late 1990s, the ‘comfort women’ system had become a fairly well-known topic even outside Asia, having been taken up at the UN human-rights bodies and at conferences for more than a few years. However, apart from those experts in human-rights-related issues and Japanese social and cultural history, knowledge about the ‘comfort women’ debates was still fairly limited in the UK and even in academia in general. This was considerably different from the situation in, say, the US, where strong communities of Asian-Americans and scholars in East Asian studies immediately took up the issue and explored and discussed it within various academic and social contexts.