Comfort Women Issue Research Articles

A Turbid River of History and Law: The Procurement of Women in Imperial Japan and Colonial Korea

Abstract Japanese military brothels during the Pacific War, known as comfort stations, and the predicaments of women confined there still reverberate in public memory. Of late a growing number of scholars have called for approaching the comfort women issue from a broader historical context, linking it to Japan’s prewar state-regulated prostitution, later transplanted into its colonies, and human trafficking. This article discusses the legal frameworks of indentured contracts and criminal prosecution surrounding the procurement of women in imperial Japan and colonial Korea. Most women entered prostitution impressed by poverty when the law fully recognized their agency as independent contractors. The age-old machinery of advanced loan agreements, signed or guaranteed in many cases by destitute parents, revealed how the ill-guided idea of filial piety muddled the boundaries between the exercise of legal rights and their abuses. The judicial process dealing with prostitution contracts and also the crimes of abduction and kidnapping helps understand how law and state institutions operated in the Japanese colonial empire. The recent historiographical debate on the comfort women raises critical questions about the conditions under which the past is assessed.

‘We resolve our own sorrows’: screening comfort women in Chinese documentary films

This article adds a critical lens to the vicissitudinous public remembrance of the comfort women in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the oscillating representations of comfort women in Chinese documentary films. First, it probes how the violated bodies of comfort women on the screen constantly challenge and disrupt the entrenched gender norms in the interstices of the PRC’s official paradigms of “national humiliation” and “national greatness.” Then, it examines the distinctive film esthetics and documentary ethics of Chinese director Guo Ke’s documentary films Thirty Two (2014) and Twenty Two (2017), given that the latter harvested record-breaking box office sales and incited heated online discussions of the comfort women issue in China. In particular, this article scrutinizes how Guo’s esthetically appealing, politically non-confrontational, and ethically provocative approach helps constitute survivors’ private, gendered memories and encourages the viewers to contemplate his minimalist narratives. In a broader sense, this article contributes to the discussions of gender, nationalism, war remembrance, and documentary filmmaking in contemporary China.

Konstruksi Predominant Leader dalam Kebijakan Moon Jae In terhadap Jepang dalam isu Comfort Women pada Tahun 2017-2022

Comfort Women refers to the practice of forced sexual services on thousands of women by Japanese soldiers during World War II. This issue has been a source of tension in relations between South Korea and Japan for several years. In this research, the concept of "predominant leader" is used as a lens for analyzing the role played by President Moon Jae-in in making various policies related to this issue. The method used is descriptive-qualitative with literature study techniques, and the data used is secondary data originating from books, journals, and official websites. This research includes an analysis of several of Moon Jae In's foreign policies towards Japan, such as efforts to register the history of comfort women at UNESCO, demands for compensation against Japanese companies, withdrawal from GSOMIA, and the dissolution of the Reconciliation and Healing Foundation. The results of this research illustrate the complexity of the comfort women issue, with emphasis on ‘goal-driven’ and ‘situationally responsive’ aspects when it comes to policies issued in his effort to seek justice for the victims

Objectification, Bodily Revenge, and National Identity: Refashioning ‘Comfort Women’ in Chinese Cinema

ABSTRACT Considering comfort women as both a contested object of knowledge and a productive figure, this article examines the representational endeavours undertaken by Chinese filmmakers in the past three decades. Specifically, it analyses three fictional films – How Many Levels are Hells (1992), Zhenzhen (2002), and City of Life and Death (2009) – which were produced in disparate socio-political and historical circumstances. Central to this article is a careful examination of women’s violated bodies on screen that have aroused nationalistic sentiments and concomitantly unsettled the very nationalism produced under the rubric of an ingrained masculinist public culture. The article highlights how these cinematic representations address the thorny problems of commodification and objectification of women’s sexuality, the crisis of survival faced by former comfort women, and the universal suffering of comfort women regardless of their nationalities. In a broader sense, by interrogating the comfort women issue as a purveyor of knowledge, the article contributes to the film studies of female sexuality and the memorialisation of World War II in contemporary China.

Gender Issues in Comfort Woman by Nora Okja Keller

Through an exploration of the comfort women system, this article analyzes how the female gender has been oppressed in history. It follows the story of Akiko, the main character of Comfort Woman (1998) by Asian American author Nora Okja Keller. Keller is one of the first authors to write about comfort women, gaining publicity for this issue. This article provides an examination of terms such as sex, gender, and gender issues. Certain concepts influencing American and Asian cultures and their stance towards gender are also analyzed, after which focus is placed on the portrayal of gender roles as illustrated in the novel. The article briefly mentions the history of the relationship between the United States and Korea. The characteristics of the comfort women system are described as well as the causes leading to its establishment such as patriarchy, Confucian traditions, and the exploitability of lower-class society. Additionally, the article highlights how the comfort women issue helped define feminist theory in the US and identifies the transnational nature of the issues involved.

The space of ‘betwixt and between’: liminality and activism in Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s Grass(2019)

ABSTRACT The concept of liminality is fundamentally borrowed from anthropology to explore its application in literary and cultural studies, which remains largely understudied to this date. Liminality essentially signifies a state of in-betweenness characterised by significant factors, such as uncertainty, ambiguity, anxiety, loss of previous values, identity-crisis, isolation and dilemma. The present paper intends to investigate the tropes of liminality in the graphic novel as well as its application to understand the process of transformation of the protagonist as expressed through grids, gutters and panels by employing Victor Turner’s ‘Theory of Liminality’. Further, the later part is dedicated to explore the silhouettes of activism using Turner’s concept of ‘anti-structure’, through the theme of vegetation visible throughout the novel. The present work not only attempts to trace the liminality of the protagonist in Gendry-Kim’s Grass(2019) but also ventures into establishing the liminal status of the genre of graphic novel itself. The study, thus, presents us an opportunity to explore one of the aggressively silenced and traumatic histories of ‘comfort women issue’ through the lens of Gendry-Kim’s recently published graphic novel Grass(2019).

Curating “Comfort Women”

Using the Liji Alley Museum as a vantage point, this article examines the politics of remembering “comfort women” in contemporary China. I situate the museum within three contexts: Chinese museums on Japanese aggression, the global initiative to create women's museums, and the trans-Asian movement to found museums dealing exclusively with the comfort women issue. On the one hand, I discuss how the Liji Alley Museum has made important interventions by foregrounding the relevance of gender to discussions of civilian wartime experience and by normalizing critical discussion of violence against women. By examining the museum's physical layout, narrative frameworks, and display techniques, I reveal its use of a combination of survivors' testimonies and affective devices to engage visitors. On the other hand, I analyze its limitations vis-à-vis present-day China's gender politics. The museum's reliance on government funding and its incorporation into the state-sponsored system of patriotic education have constricted its potential to offer a more complex critique of the multilayered causes behind comfort women victims' suffering, and to connect the comfort women issue with contemporary discussions of gender-based violence.

Japanese Authorities, the ‘Comfort Project’, and Tacit Contracts under Militaristic Rule during the Pacific War

ABSTRACT The comfort women issue (also known as the Japanese military sexual slavery issue), which occurred during the Pacific War from the late 1930s to 1945, has continued to negatively impact the present and future of East Asia for more than seven decades. Even today this issue is the source of multiple and serious disagreements between governments, scholars, and citizens from across the region. This article seeks to contribute to research on the comfort women issue by shifting the focus from the relationship between the Japanese authorities and comfort women to that between these authorities and the comfort agents. It uses archival records, and in particular documents from the Japanese military and police, to illustrate that the ‘comfort project’ was not driven by the choices of the women who were caught in its midst, but rather by a hierarchical structure of wartime militaristic rule, with the Japanese authorities as the principal and the brothel-owners/recruiters as their agents. Further, the article argues that the relationship between the authorities and brothel-owners/recruiters was a tacit contract of agency: both parties had to carry out their commitments because these commitments were so credible, even in the absence of physical contracts.

Politics of the Visible and the Invisible

Abstract In this article, we analyze and compare photographic images from some of the most widely circulated Japanese and American high school history textbooks regarding their treatment of the Pacific War. We focus on the visual component of war technology, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the visibility or invisibility of women, especially regarding the comfort women issue. We argue that images in the textbooks are articulated by a dialectic relationship between the visible and the invisible as a political question, thinking about the “off-screen space” as the structural principle of what we see. The textbooks’ visual memories about the Pacific War are not only influenced by what is shown but also by what is omitted and virtually depicted in the surrounding media.

Applying the Cultural Anthropological Approaches in Conflict Resolution: The Case of “Comfort Women”

With the recent Russian invasion, China’s rise, and North Korean missile launches, there is an increased importance for the United States to strengthen its East Asian allies, South Korea and Japan. These two countries, however, have a long history of disputes that resulted from the legacy of the Second World War. One of them is the comfort women issue. More than 200,000 teenage Korean girls were taken by Japanese soldiers as sex slaves during the 1930s and 1940s. They are called comfort women. In December 2015, the South Korean and Japanese governments reached an agreement to resolve the issue of comfort women, getting an apology from the Japanese government. However, the surviving comfort women showed resentment toward this agreement and condemned the Korean government for reaching the agreement with the Japanese government. Why do the comfort women and many South Koreans reject this agreement? Also, two different understandings of the identically written accord have brought social conflict in South Korea. Where do these discrepancies in understanding the same accord come from? Applying the three conceptual frameworks—emic and etic approaches in cultural anthropology, the inclusive and restricted models of conflict resolution, and different levels of reconciliation—this paper analyzes the discrepancies in how people analyze and approach conflict resolution and highlights the importance of the cultural anthropological approaches in conflict resolution and reconciliation.

What determines the relative success of different war compensation policies? Comparing three unresolved compensation issues between Japan and South Korea

AbstractThis article examines three Japan–South Korea postwar compensation cases: the comfort women issue, the Sakhalin Island forced labor issue, and Korean atomic bomb survivor issue. These compensation movements produced vastly different results, even though the basic policy directions for compensation provision in all three cases were similar. Japan's approach toward the comfort women problem has been a complete failure, while its treatment of the Sakhalin forced labor issue and the atomic bomb issues has been more successful. This article's explanation of the different outcomes focuses on the character and geographical base of the civic groups leading these compensation movements. In South Korea, women's rights activists spearheaded the comfort women compensation movement and related victim-relief activities. The Korean non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that assisted the comfort women treated this problem not only as a women's rights issue, but also as a nationalist issue. In contrast, the Red Cross, a politically neutral international organization, promoted the Sakhalin forced labor and atomic bomb issues. In short, the different receptions accorded to those championing the comfort women issue and those promoting the Sakhalin forced labor and atomic bomb issues depended on the principal agent of each compensation process. This article aims to provide some implications for successfully implementing postwar compensation policies. It suggests that, if successful postwar compensation policy depends on successful perpetrator–victim reconciliation, establishing solidarity between perpetrator and victim countries’ civic groups is important. This can only be facilitated through the depoliticized and transparent operation of leading NGOs both inside and outside the redressal-seeking nation.

트랜스내셔널한 로컬의 영상예술과 수행적 기억 - ‘잔상의 소리(残傷の音)’ 프로젝트와 금선희(琴仙姫)감독 -

<Still Hear the Wound: Towards an Asia, Politics, Art To Come> is a project on Asia, politics, and art curated by Zainichi feminist and philosopher Jeonghwa Lee in 2007. The project offers new methodologies, including an artistic and aesthetic response to issues surrounding Japan's responsibility for colonial crime. In other words, this project begins by reflecting the colonial history of Okinawa that overlapped with Korea (or Jeju), and contains questions about how the two regions will pursue new modes of political community. Among them, this paper focues on Soni Kum's <Still Hear the Wound>(2009), which deals with mass suicide during Battle of Okinawa, <Vegetation>(2009) which describes art performance on Jeju Masscare and Tari Ito's <I Will Not Forget You>, which overlaps the issue of mass suicide in Okinawa and the comfort women issue. Furthermore, Soni Kum made the documentary, <Leyte Dream>(2010) on forced Laborers and comfort women in Leyte Island, Philippines and Noriko Sekakuchi made <Women of the Battlefield>(1989), which covered the testimonies about Korean comfort women in New Guinea. I will also analyze these works. These works deal with issues of dialogue and communication between local historical events overlapping across national borders between Korea and Japan as important topics. Therefore, I would like to analyze these film arts using the concept of ‘transnational local', a concept focused on the space of local. A Zainichi scholar, Jinseok Choi , points out that the historical conditions of the transnational local between Korea (or Jeju) and Japan (or Okinawa) are ‘scarring of Japanese imperialism’ and ‘legacy of colonialism’ along with the Cold War. Taking this point into consideration, I would like to see how the above works emphasize dialogue and communication between the locals, which are the basis of solidarity and memory against state violence or imperialist violence, rather than being reduced to other nationalism and globalization. Also, the above works shows ‘traversing, translating and violating of body and place’ through performability of film or performance art which indicates ‘subjective expression technique.’ ‘interaction between real material and the performance of producer or performer,’ ‘the coexistence of actors and spectators.’ This is also well connected with the transnational local of transversality and translatability.

Court Decisions in the Republic of Korea on Japan's Accountability for Sexual Slavery of the Comfort Women

Abstract On January and April of 2021, two contradictory decisions on the comfort women issue were ruled by two courts in the Republic of Korea (ROK), stirring much controversy on the various legal issues concerning the comfort women. In the January decision, the court held Japan accountable for the acts committed against the comfort women and denied Japan’s immunity in the courts of the ROK because these atrocities constitute crimes against humanity when Japan illegally occupied Korea. On the other hand, the April decision, which was a case for another group of comfort women victims, dismissed the suit by ruling that Japan was rather immune on this issue in ROK courts because state immunity is considered to be part of customary international law. The court specifically referred to the Jurisdictional Immunities case before the International Court of Justice which found that violations of jus cogens as a substantive norm could not trump over procedural matters such as state immunity. As the April case has been appealed by the victims, this article aims to examine the historical background of the issue of comfort women and the main legal issues of these domestic decisions. The first issue concerns whether Japan is immune in ROK courts for even alleged violations of jus cogens, and the second issue is whether the individual claims of the comfort women are still valid today or whether they have been, as a matter of law, extinguished or waived through the 1965 Claims Agreement and the 2015 Agreement signed by both the ROK and Japan.

‘위안부’ 문제의 세계시민주의적 접근

This study aims to analyze the ‘comfort women’ researches conducted in Korea after the 2015 Korea-Japan ‘Comfort Women’ Agreement, thinking that the Agreement served as important momentum to trigger an increase in ‘comfort women’ research in Korean society. ‘Comfort women’ researches in Korea were classified largely into the three following subject areas: First, the comfort women issue as a Korea-Japan political, diplomatic conflict. Second, the comfort women issue as a reconstruction of historical memory. Third, the comfort women issue as a social practice. Then the challenges and directions for ‘comfort women’ research were presented as follows. First, oral history about the testimony of victims should be studied. Second, ‘comfort women’ discourse, which reproduces confrontation between countries should be overcome. Third, discussion on political responsibility is required in comfort women issue. To get closer to solving ‘comfort women’ issue, further studies on political responsibility of community that tolerated structural injustice and epistemic violence as well as judicial and moral responsibility for direct violence such as war crime, cruel treatment, and violation of women’s rights are also required.

박수남 감독 다큐멘터리 속 오키나와의 강제징용 군속과 위안부 재현 연구: 마이너 트랜스내셔널한 기억과 ‘비커밍 아웃’으로서의 증언

Director Park Soo-nam’s films are highly valuable as an author in that they constantly record minority histories excluded from ”official and public archives”, such as the Japanese bombing victims, Korean survivors of the Battle of Okinawa, and the comfort women issue. The most interesting point in 〈Song of Arirang—Voices from Okinawa〉(1991) and 〈Nuchigafu—Life Is a Treasure, “Gyokusai” Stories in the Battle of Okinawa〉(2012) is that in both films, Okinawans actively testify about the victims of Koreans and show solidarity with Koreans. This phenomenon can be called a minor transnationalism conceptalized by Shu-mei Shih and Françoise Lionnet. This does not mean that the minority always opposes the mainstream in the vertical relationship of assimilation and resistance, but reveals a multi-layered area of (inter)action with the voices of majors and other minors, and multi-layered linguistic utterances (Korean, Japanese, Okinawan language). It is a perspective of (im)possibility in which the expressive domain of minors is formed through comparison across national boundaries. Therefore, firstly, this paper attempts to read Park Soo-nam’s film as the concept of “minor transnationalism,” because they depict the memories of minorities formed by crossing the boundaries between Okinawan men or women and Korean men or women in the framework of the memory of Okinawan residents, in which the violence of the Japanese Empire is embodied as a collective memory. Second, I examine how director Park Soo-nam responds to the task of breaking the silence while avoiding the explanation of objectifying “the unmemorable or the unspeakable,” through the ambivalent strategy of non-representation and representation. Lastly, I would like to analyze the mutually (in)communicable relationship between the witness and the listener, the director(or audience), that is formed through the form of the performative performance of the documentary seen in films, in relation to the concept of “becoming out” that Ichiro Tomiyama calls. Here, “becoming out refers to the process of asking questions about our response after the testimony, rather than “the individual’s coming-out with respect to past events that are the basis for judgment.”

The ethno-nationalist solidarity and (dis)comfort in the Wednesday Demonstration in South Korea

‘Comfort women’ refers to the estimated 80,000 to 200,000 women who were forced to serve the Japanese imperial army sexually, physically, and mentally during WWII in and beyond the Asia-Pacific region. Drawing on ethnographic research that I conducted on the protests for comfort women called ‘the Wednesday Demonstration’ from September 2019 to August 2020, this intervention traces both how sexually violated women and their bodies are represented in ways that comfort Minjok (Korean ethnicity) and how discomfort can function as a starting point of alternative feminist knowledge production and transformative praxis. This intervention interrogates how the comfort women narrative draws on paternal metaphors of colonial history—the ‘raped daughter (comfort woman)’ and ‘weak father (colonized Korea)’—and how it reinforces the savior fantasies of Korean men. It then illustrates how this narrative creates an ethnic comfort zone in which the sense of the ‘we, Koreans’ fueled by ethnic victimhood is strengthened and a unified Korea (victim) is re-imagined in opposition to Japan (perpetrator) as the other. By introducing activist Jung Ah-lim’s case, this paper examines how her feelings of discomfort revealed forms of epistemic injustice in which Korean ethno-nationalist leaders determine forms of knowledge regarding comfort women and control the direction of political acts for their nationalist purposes. In doing so, this intervention shows how discomfort enables Jung Ah-lim to pursue her own knowledge and transformative praxis for the comfort women issue.

Melancholia is (geo)political! Postcolonial geography in the Wednesday Demonstration in Seoul

This article examines how melancholia constitutes a psycho-geopolitical space interweaving Korean subjects’ psychic and political lives with the dynamics of the (post) Cold War alliance between Japan and the US. The Wednesday Demonstration is the weekly protest in Seoul that calls for an official apology and legal compensation from the Japanese government for comfort women who worked in the sexual slavery system under the Japanese Empire during WWII. The fact that the weekly protests have continued for 30 years since 1992 signifies that the comfort women issue has remained an unresolved (geo)political issue between South Korea and Japan for three decades, despite apologies and monetary compensations by the Japanese government. This article offers a psychoanalytic-geopolitical rationale for the endless grief of Korean postcolonial subjects who cannot accept the measures of the Japanese government regarding the comfort women issue. Based on 1-year’s participant observations and in-depth interviews with Korean activists who engaged in the Wednesday Demonstration from September 2019 to August 2020, this article aims to accomplish three goals. Firstly, this article shows how Korean postcolonial subjects were/are haunted by colonial past. Secondly, I examine why Koreans cannot complete mourning for comfort women in the context of ROK-US-Japan geopolitical relations. Lastly, this article interrogates how ethno-nationalists intervene to turn melancholia into a motivation for ethnic solidarity and how their attempt might have failed by exploring a Korean postcolonial subject’s psychic lives. In doing so, I argue that the wounds of Koreans related to the comfort women issue are not simply from colonial history, but they are postcolonial wounds that have not healed ‘appropriately’ under the (US-sponsored) South Korean/Japanese (post-)Cold War security arrangement.

The Comfort Women Issue for a Transnational Paradigm

The Comfort Women Issue for a Transnational Paradigm

The Story "Our Grandmothers" Could Not Tell: Representation of the Comfort Women and the Physical Manifestation of Memory

The Story "Our Grandmothers" Could Not Tell:Representation of the Comfort Women and the Physical Manifestation of Memory1 Heo Yoon Translated by Jamie Chang (bio) 1. Remembering the Japanese comfort women2 On August 14, 2018, the 1st Japanese Military Sexual Slavery Remembrance Day was observed. The date chosen in commemoration of Kim Hak-sun's press conference on August 14, 1991, this occasion marked the moment when the movement supporting Japanese military "comfort women," which refers to women who were sent to battlefields in the course of Japan's invasion of the Asia Pacific region and forced to live as sexual slaves in the Japanese military, became an official part of Korean history. The Moon Jae-in administration specified the Japanese military comfort women issues as one of the hundred tasks to be resolved within Moon's term, established the Research Institute on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery, and carried [End Page 311] out recovery and archiving of data, pledging to resolve the matter on the state level. However, for a long time, the comfort women issue had been a civilian social movement and an expression of transnational solidarity. This was not a problem resolved through diplomacy between Korea and Japan (the final agreement between Korea and Japan had occurred in 2015), but a movement with a history of citizens from Korea, Japan, and all over Asia have fought to build. The comfort woman is a historical phenomenon that has arisen from the intersection of colonialism, nationalism, and sexism and is currently the most active civil movement supported by the Korean people. Although Japan was defeated and the colony was liberated in 1945, the comfort women were not able to return to Korea until Kim Hak-sun's testimony in 1991. In negotiations between the United States and Japan, or in the diplomatic relations between Korea and Japan, the issue of comfort women in the Japanese military was never actively discussed. While the student soldiers who returned from the war testified to the horrors of the Japanese army and returned as "sons of the nation" and achieved a turning point in Korean literature, women drafted to the "chŏngsindae [Women's Labor Corps]" did not have proper re-emergence. A few novels during the liberation period briefly mentioned women in the "labor corps," but it was not enough to achieve visibility for these women. Yun Chŏng-ok, the founder of the Chŏngsindae Problem Countermeasures Council (hereinafter referred to as "Chŏngdaehyŏp," present-day "Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan"), had become aware of the Japanese imperial "virgin delivery" at the end of the colonial period through rumors circulating among adults, and she was a female college student trying to avoid it. She thought someone would track down the "women who were taken away" after the Korean War when society settled down, but when no one was talking about the [End Page 312] "women who disappeared" even after Yun returned to Korea from studying in the United States, she set out to find them.3 As Yun Chŏng-ok testifies, Korean society did not make the "comfort woman issue" public for a long time. An Independence Day special feature in 1960 mourned the deaths of women drafted to "Labor Corps" never to return, and comfort women were mentioned in the context of decrying Japan's war crimes, but no one wondered about the comfort women who returned and where they were now.4 The comfort women system, rather, became an everyday part of Korean society. After liberation, as camp towns were established around the U.S. and U.N. military bases, the image of comfort women in the 1950s shifted to U.S. military comfort women who were considered "voluntary" prostitutes. Called by many derogatory names such as "yanggongju [Western princess]," and "Yuen madam [United Nations' Madam]," these comfort women were depicted as gold-digging carriers of STDs who were sullying the good name of an innocent nation.5 Postcolonial South Korea exchanged the bodies of comfort women for the protection of the U.S. military under an American regime in East Asia. The U.S. military...

An Abridged Version of My Book, Asahi Shimbun no Ianfu Hōdō to Saiban [The Reports of Comfort Women by the Asahi Newspaper and Litigations

The Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun has covered the Comfort Women issue since the 1990s, and because of that, it has been a target of the rightwing attack in Japan until now. Ryūichi Kitano, Senior Staff Writer at Asahi Shimbun, decided to write a tome about the entire proceedings of legal battles with the rightwing groups in Japan over Asahi’s coverage of the comfort women issue. The book was published in August 2020, and this contribution by Mr. Kitano is a summary of the 539 page-long record of historical documents and commentaries regarding the litigations and the comfort women issue. Mr. Kitano believes that this book is the only reliable source from Japan that present and future researchers of the comfort women issue can reliably use.