Emotions in the making: sexual violence in the Japanese empire, 1937–1945

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article applies the history of emotions lens to study the emotions experienced by the ‘comfort women’ in the Japanese Empire. Emotions have been a long-neglected aspect in the study of military sexual violence. The article examines how a mélange of positive and negative emotions enabled those women to exercise some limited agency in a confined and tightly regulated space and, in some rare cases, a rather fair degree of autonomy outside of the confined space. By unravelling the varied textures of interactions between sexual violence and emotions, I argue that affective attachment and intimate relations developed in the confined sites of sexual exploitation formed a kind of strategic intimacy that enables those individuals to exercise limited forms, and a finite amount, of agency. Further, the article utilises sources produced from the perspectives of the victimised women and imperial regulators. Those angles investigate emotions expressed through, and embedded in, dynamic power relationships. The dual perspectives bring out gendered experiences of emotions and also reveal a disparate set of nuanced emotions due to positionality. The article therefore offers a critical analysis of the interrelationships among sexual violence, state power, and a particular set of emotions as a form of power and resistance.