FACING THE “COMFORT WOMEN”: REPRESENTATIONS AND RECKONINGS OF JAPANESE MILITARY SEXUAL SLAVERY IN SELECT ASIAN AMERICAN NARRATIVES

Abstract

The issue of “comfort women” and their tragically grievous story is, evidently, one of the most understudied subjects in relation to the literary universe of the second world war. Until the mid 1990s, the historical injustices and ineffable sufferings inflicted upon these women had been sadly absent, or mentioned merely as a passing reference in many of the critical books written around the themes of rape and sexual violence during conflicts. In fact, Hashimoto Toru, the Mayor of Osaka and one of the co-presidents of Nationalist Japan Restoration Party in 2013 at a press conference insensitively remarked that the ‘Comfort System’ during WWII was ‘necessary’ for various reasons which include a) to protect the “respectable” women from getting raped, b) to boost the morale of the soldiers, and c) to reduce the risk of venereal diseases among the troops. Although, this comment invited a lot of criticism from both national and international feminist communities, however, this incident additionally highlights the common rhetorical, idealogical, and cultural reception of the World War II atrocities in Japan. These ideologies, particularly regarding the history of “comfort women,” directly align with the hypernationalist and revisionist leaders and historians of Japan who have not only publicly attempted to drown out the dissenting voices against Japanese wartime crimes but have also consistently characterized these women as ‘prostitutes’ voluntarily working at the war fronts on regular wages. These outlooks further exacerbated when Abe Shinzo held the Prime Minister’s office in Japan for the second time in 2012 and revoked the Kono Statement that unequivocally acknowledged the Japanese guilt and participation in procuring and organizing the ‘comfort system’ during WWII. Since the subject of “comfort women” gained worldwide traction in the 1990s, it has, invariably, surfaced a pervasive gamut of issues and brought up an onslought of scholarly inquiries. These include the gendered and ethnic dimension of war and militarism, the significance of women’s testimonies against the revisionist claims in documenting history, the grave violation of human rights, the relevance of literature and cultural practices to establish the victim/survivors’ identity as political agents, the political implications of war reparations and compensations, and the reconstruction of the political and social memories of war and authoritarian regime in a nation (Kimura 2016). The existence of the ‘comfort stations’ and “comfort women” system for the sexual services to Japanese soldiers during the second world war were not entirely unknown in Japan after the war. There have been evidences of some independent research works and the guilt-ridden biographical diaries of Japanese soldiers stationed in various former Japanese colonies which revealed the true nature of this heinous system and the gross human-rights violation inflicted upon hundreds and thousands of such women in the early 70s and 80s. For instance, in 1973, a former journalist in Japan named Senda Kako published a full-fledged book called The Comfort Women that was widely read by Japanese public and went on to become the best-seller. Furthermore, a South-Korean Professor of Ewha Women’s University, Yun Chung-ok, also conducted an in-depth research about the history of Japanese military sexual violence in 1980s and demanded for political acknowledgement and monetary reparations for the victim/survivors. Additionally, an independent journalist, Kawada Fumiko, upon hearing the story of a former “comfort women” named Bae Bong-gi, produced a biography based on her life in 1987 (Kimura 2016). Despite such early references and revelations, the issue of “comfort women” attained the momentum on international stages only when a former sexually enslaved victim/survivor, Kim Hak-Sun, came forward in August 1991 to tell her sobering story to the world. The term “comfort women” is a euphemism that refers to hundreds of thousands of women from various former Japanese colonies such as Burma, Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Philippines who were involuntarily abducted, duped and exploited for the sexual enslavement for Japanese military army before and during the second world war. Throughout this thesis, this term has been used within quotations marks to underscore the unjust irony and to contest its euphemistic usage by the Japanese soldiers. This system of sexual slavery ran throughout the fifteen-year period of Imperial Japan's aggressive warfare, which began with the Manchurian invasion in 1931 and persisted until Japan's unconditional surrender in 1945. The age of these women ranged from as young as 12 to 20 years old. It is also not easy to estimate the number of women forced into this sexual slavery system as the substantial military documents which entailed the information of the “comfort women” were destroyed and burned by the authorities (Chung 251). However, based on the meagre amount of data available and the testimonies provided by remaining ‘comfort women’ survivors, it is estimated that about 80,000 to 200, 000 women were forced into such military sexual slavery out of which, Korea contributed 80-90 percent of the total (Yang 57). The inhumane sufferings and abject dehumanization of these women only became widely-recognized when many of them shared their ordeals at the rape camps and filed lawsuits against the Japanese government in the early 1990s.