Comfort Women of the Japanese Empire

Colonial Rule and the Battle over Memory

Park Yuha

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9781032566443
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040103395
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This is an important and controversial work, hitherto available only in Korean, Japanese, and Chinese, a book which has been subject to court cases attempting to have some parts deleted. The author reconsiders the issue of the "comfort women," that is the Korean women who were compelled to provide sexual comfort to Japanese troops during the Asia-Pacific War. She explores the human complexity of the experiences of these women, who despite terrible exploitation, she feels, cannot and should not only be considered as passive victims. She sets the issue in context, revealing how Korean society played a role, with patriarchy and middlemen being significant factors in the procurement of comfort women, and how alongside the comfort women there were volunteer labor corps of Korean young women supporting the Japanese war effort. The author highlights Korea's colonial status, different from the territories Japan invaded and conquered, discusses how relations between colonizers and colonized in an empire are not straightforward, and argues that people should work to understand more fully the mindset of those at the time, and refrain from forcing values from the present to resolve indignities of the past. Aiming to find a way to pursue reconciliation while looking more closely at the history, the book provides substantial consideration of key issues to do with empire, memorialization, and censorship. It is an uncomfortable read for those seeking simplistic interpretations and easy solutions.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Prologue from Volker Stanzel, Former German Ambassador to China and Japan: Researching a painful past
• Author’s preface to the English translation
• Translators’ introduction
• Author’s introduction to the Japanese version
• The background of the “comfort women problem”
• Part I Who were the comfort women? State control of the body, civilian engagement
• Part II Colonial rule and the Korean comfort women
• Part III The conflict of memory: The collapse of the Cold War order and the comfort women issue
• Part IV Beyond the empire and the Cold War
• In place of an afterword: Why we must reconsider the comfort women issue
• Index