The First #MeToo Activists: Contemporary Campaigning in Support of the Former Japanese Military “Comfort Women”

Abstract

The First #MeToo Activists: Contemporary Campaigning in Support of the Former Japanese Military “Comfort Women” Caroline Norma Activists today continue to rally around the history of the Japanese military's sexual enslavement of women and girls in the China and Pacific wars of the 1930s and 1940s. Their activism is undertaken mostly to extract state‐level apology and reparation from the Japanese government for these crimes of enforced prostitution or “military sexual slavery.” It is undertaken on behalf of, together with, and in the name of survivors and their descendants. Recently, though, with declining numbers of elderly former “comfort women” able to join campaigning, there have emerged other rationales for continuing with the movement for justice. South Korean activists now mobilize against “sexual violence in war” wherever it occurs in the world, as reflected in an installation of the War and Women's Human Rights Museum in Hongdae that commemorates, in spite of its name, specifically the history of Japanese military sexual slavery and activism by survivors. Walking through the museum, visitors eventually end up on a floor exhibiting crimes of sexual violence in conflicts like that in the Congo. This framing of the contemporary movement aligns with international efforts to spotlight crimes of rape in war, which recently culminated in the awarding of the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize to a doctor and a survivor who have “helped to give greater visibility to war‐time sexual violence.” We might well worry about wartime sexual violence in countries like the Congo, but, in this article, I question this framework for “comfort women” campaigning. It dilutes and diverts political action that might otherwise produce good results in contemporary Northeast Asia for women and children, I argue; in suppressing the region's sex industries, for example. Further, the framework inadvertently replicates overly broad castings of the “comfort women” issue that are favored by defenders of the country's wartime record, like that of Japan's current Prime Minister Abe Shinzou. In a speech addressing the issue in 2007, he waxed lyrical that “[t]he 20th century was a century when human rights were violated in many parts of the world. So we have to make the 21st century a wonderful century in which no human rights are violated.” Reframing the criminality of the Japanese military's prostitution system as a problem of “sexual violence in war” weakens, furthermore, the movement's effectiveness, because campaigners are not usually residing in countries plagued by war, let alone crimes of wartime rape, I suggest. In other words, as Samuel Moyn criticizes of contemporary “human rights” campaigners who rally around crimes of states abroad while overlooking serious problems of inequality in their own societies (2012), framing the problem as one of “rape in war” sloughs the history of Japanese military sexual slavery from the reality of contemporary Northeast Asia and estranges it from large‐scale industries of female sexual exploitation operating in countries like Japan, which, I believe, are relevant and important targets of campaigning if we accurately understand the historical cause of what the “comfort women” endured (Moyn ). The historical cause of what the “comfort women” endured is, in Rikkyo University historian Onozawa Akane's view, Japan's pre‐war civilian sex industry (Onozawa ). In a 2010 monograph, she shows this industry operating cheek by jowl with the military's sexual slavery scheme. In line with this understanding of its origins, I argue that campaigning to suppress prostitution in contemporary times respects, and accurately reflects, the historical experience of survivors of military prostitution in its targeting of the historical cause of their enslavement, which is carried over today in the form of large‐scale pornography and prostitution industries in Japan in particular (see Miyamoto ), as a threat to present‐day women and girls, as they were in the girlhoods of survivors. Onozawa is not the only researcher to see the military prostitution system as historically attributable to Japan's pre‐war civilian sex industry in this way, nor is my call for social movement mobilization in alignment with this understanding original. Later in the article, I describe the work of a number of other Japan‐based historians and political theorists who arrive at the same conclusion...