Nationalism and Gender in the Comfort Women Issue

Abstract

Almost twenty years have passed since Korean women first began to raise the issue of comfort women before public opinion in the early 1990’s. During this time, the issue has become part of the larger stream of the international women’s movement, and has come to be viewed as part of the sexual violence occurring in areas of military unrest worldwide. Also during this time, women throughout Asia who have survived their ordeals as comfort women have finally begun to speak out about their experiences after maintaining a long silence since the war. Among these survivors, however, Japanese women still maintain their silence. Despite the fact that many of the women forced to serve as comfort women for the Japanese military were in fact of Japanese origin, these women have not been addressed in the effort to identify survivors or in support movements. 1 In fact, Japanese survivors had already begun to speak out as early as the 1980’s, before the support movement for comfort women had come into full swing. Shirota Suzuko (1921 –1993) 2 strove to make her voice heard to convince the government to build a memorial for comfort women. Although her wish was granted and a memorial was built, her story never reached society properly. And in the 1990s, when Korean women began to speak out, the plight of Japanese comfort women continued to be largely ignored both within the support movement and within society. In this report, I wish to address how this opacity with regards to Japanese comfort women had come about. In recent years, encouraged by the resolutions passed in the US Congress and European Parliament, movements have begun in Japan toward the establishment of laws and resolutions in Japanese municipal councils. 3 I believe that in order to position the