This book offers a critical perspective for reassessing the issues of “comfort women,” the sexual slavery system enforced by the Japanese military during World War II. Despite its immediate focus on this military sex slavery, the book’s project is more ambitious and conceptual as it investigates the broader economic, political, and discursive shifts across national and regional boundaries that led to this Asian case of wartime atrocities being belatedly publicized in the early 1990s and rendered highly visible to the global audience thereafter. The book approaches the comfort women issues as a complex “problematic” that was both enabled and constrained by “certain modes of expertise, contestation, and non-knowing” in a US-centered “power/knowledge architecture” (36).The book’s narrative is layered and complex. It meticulously reviews and updates numerous documents, events, media reports, and academic studies presented in English on the subject of comfort women. Simultaneously, its core chapters are reserved for examining selective discursive categories of US feminist scholarship and of the international projects on women’s rights commissioned by international organizations including the League of Nations, the United Nations, and the World Bank. This approach is valuable and original because even though the problem of forced sex service in the Japanese military was first publicized by Korean and Japanese activists, the subject’s global representations have been framed, modified, and augmented in political and discursive spaces made available by various transnational networks, engagements, and institutions.In analyzing comfort women issues in such global contexts, Laura Hyun Yi Kang proposes taking “Asian women as method” and differentiates an intra-Asian from an inter-Asian approach, thereby denoting the nonunity of Asia and Asian women. The “entextualization of Asian women” is a concept that helps us understand Kang’s practice of taking “Asian women as method” in the book: according to Park and Bucholtz, entextualization is “the process by which circulable texts are produced by extracting discourse from its original context,” and “it is a fundamental process of power and authority.”1Traffic in Asian Women’s subsequent chapters critically examine certain institutionalized discourses and forms of knowledge production and their power and authority that obliterated, approved, or modified diverse agendas and movements of Asian women. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 historicize the key categories of women and women’s rights relevant to understanding comfort women issues in the transnational terrain. Kang calls these categories “traffic in women,” “sexual slavery,” and “violence against women.” Chapters 5, 6, and 7 discuss the subjects of contestation in finding truth, justice in reparations, and remembering the history of comfort women.Chapter 2 traces the origin of the term “traffic in women” in the League of Nations’ projects in the early twentieth century. According to the author, the League of Nations racialized the anti-trafficking campaign, dividing white from nonwhite women (55); its reports Asianized trafficking and criminalized prostitution. The United Nations was influenced by the league’s reports in perceiving and managing traffic in women in the postwar period. Chapter 3 introduces the process through which the United Nations identified traffic in women and prostitution as a form of sexual slavery and how Asian women were featured in this discursive and institutional process. Kang argues that the Egyptian geographer Mohamed Awad’s report in 1966 was crucial in activating a new discourse within the United Nations on slavery and traffic in women as well as informing the key arguments of Kathleen Barry’s Female Sexual Slavery, a seminal feminist text on prostitution, published in 1979. Kang criticizes Barry’s evidentiary grounds in depicting Asian women as sexual slaves and regionalizing the problem of prostitution (84).Chapter 4 investigates a more recent category of “violence against women” that emerged in the 1980s. According to Kang, violence against women registered women not under universal human rights but in terms of “injured corporeality” and sexual violation (119); the prominence of this category thus overshadowed violations of other types of women’s rights. When governments and multinational institutions counted violence against women as an actional problem of international cooperation and an impediment to economic productivity, they made cases of this violence subject to enumeration, comparison, and standardization for global governance. Kang argues that such computations reduced Asian women to certain numbers and made them more incomprehensible.Chapter 5 is particularly interesting to historians because Kang examines US military reports on Japanese comfort stations in Burma that include photos and interviews of comfort women. Questioning the possibility of disclosing the “truth” about these women, Kang’s focus is on the Japanese American soldiers who interrogated the women and the complicated subjective and contextual problems that these soldiers faced in interviewing them and recording the results. Kang highlights the heterogeneous and ambivalent character of such an interrogation report and ultimately calls it a “tangled, fascinating personal essay” of a Japanese American soldier’s “assumptions and impressions as inscribed in compliance with” the US military’s template for questioning prisoners of war (183).Chapters 6 and 7 critically discuss the politics involved both in restitution for comfort women survivors and in remembering them, especially through multiple forms of media. The Asian Women’s Fund is a central focus in these two chapters. Chapter 6 analyzes how the Asian Women’s Fund provoked controversy about the proper terms and conditions of reparation as well as how the AWF’s own arrangements applied varying scales and standards of compensation to the survivors from different nations and also to survivors of other political and economic circumstances. Kang argues that such “hybrid monetization of atonement” registered both the role of Japan’s regional hegemony and the uneven development trajectories of other Asian nations in the US-centered diplomacy and economy in Asia. Chapter 7 addresses physical memorials and the virtualization of both activism and redress across the numerous websites, films, and media that proliferated when comfort women issues came to light. This chapter highlights the texts and exhibitions of the Digital Museum of the Comfort Women Issue launched by the Asian Women’s Fund and claims that contradictions in the museum’s texts and displays are failing rather than fulfilling the promise of open-ended and thorough engagement with the issues of the comfort women.Traffic in Asian Women challenges both scholars and activists who have been engaged with the problematics of the comfort women. With erudition and sharp criticism, Kang persuasively explains how institutionalized discourses of feminism and US interests in global governance have both informed and constrained the movements to bring justice to the women forced to serve in the Japanese military’s sex slavery. In various parts of the book, Kang argues that the construction of Asian women in the US-centered power/knowledge structure undermined complex agendas of “inter-Asian” feminist movements, especially against sex tourism and military prostitution in the 1970s and 80s. Other than this important assertion, the inter-Asian discourses and movements of comfort women remain a backdrop to the book’s overall analysis. How did various inter-Asian groups respond to such global discourses and institutional interventions, change their positions, and advance their agendas? Although answering this question is not the book’s main focus, Traffic in Asian Women offers a critique that is indispensable for revisiting the history of comfort women and the subjects related to them from the perspective of Asia women.