From imperial gifts to sex slaves: theorizing symbolic representations of the 'comfort women'

Abstract

Since 1992, owing largely to the activism of Korean and Japanese women leaders, ex-comfort women and legal experts, a precedent-setting international debate has raged at the United Nations with regard to defining the 'comfort women' issue as a war crime and gross violation of women's human rights.The UN debate has radically shifted the paradigm for representing the comfort women, from prostitutes to sex slaves.This paper examines the multiple, competing symbolic representations of comfort women by theorizing the ideologies of three principal parties implicated in the debate as'patriarchal fascism','masculinist sexism' and 'feminist humanitarianism'. As a historical reality, the comfort women issue is complex, interpenetrating the dimensions of gender, social class, ethnicity and state powerThis paper argues that the categorical representations of comfort women as either prostitutes or sex slaves are only partial truths deriving from narrative frames that not only reveal the ideological stances of the opposing camps but also serve their partisan interests in the global post-Cold War politics of women's rights as human rights. The androcentric euphemism 'comfort women' (ianfu), an official coinage of imperial Japan, was used to refer categorically to young females of various ethnic and national backgrounds and social circumstances who became sexual laborers for the Japanese troops before and during the Second World War. In contrast, the soldiers came to refer to these women as the 'pi' (pronounced 'pea'), a Chinese term meaning goods or articles, which, as a slang term, stood for female genitals (Nishino 1992: 46). The issue of the comfort women used in wartime by the military of imperial Japan leaped to the attention of the world community nearly half a century after the end of the War, with a series of hearings by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR), beginning in 1992. Since then, several formal hearings have been held by the UNCHR Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery, as well as the UNCHR Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities (see Soh 1996). In addition, official investigations have been conducted by 'special rapporteurs' appointed by the UN. A 1996 report submitted by the special rapporteur Radhika Coomaraswamy defined the comfort system as a practice of 'military sexual slavery'.' The