Whose Comfort?: Body, Sexuality And Identity Of Korean 'Comfort Women' And Japanese Soldiers During Wwii

Whose Comfort?: Body, Sexuality And Identity Of Korean 'Comfort Women' And Japanese Soldiers During Wwii
Author: Yonson Ahn
Publisher: World Scientific
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2019-10-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9811206368

In recent years, international attention has been recurrently drawn to violence against civilians including sexual violence during war as a means of furthering military or political goals. The ongoing issue of comfort women has been debated not only among Asian countries including Japan, Korea, China, Indonesia, and the Philippines but also in numerous international forums.This book examines the system of military comfort women in Asia and the Pacific created and maintained by Japan during World War II. It uses the comfort women system as a lens for exploring the ways in which body, sexuality and identity are deployed in the creation of patriarchal relations, ethnic hierarchies, and colonial/nationalist power. This book analyzes the role and nature of the comfort women system as a mechanism of social control by the colonial state. This requires the examining of sexuality and body politics, the social background of the victims, wartime working conditions, and regulation of soldiers' sexuality.This book aims to contribute to both the academic community and the community of civic groups through a work that spans the dimensions of history, theory and activism.

Whose Comfort?

Whose Comfort?
Author: Yonson Ahn
Publisher:
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2019
Genre: Comfort women
ISBN: 9789811206351

In recent years, international attention has been recurrently drawn to violence against civilians including sexual violence during war as a means of furthering military or political goals. The ongoing issue of comfort women has been debated not only among Asian countries including Japan, Korea, China, Indonesia, and the Philippines but also in numerous international forums. This book examines the system of military comfort women in Asia and the Pacific created and maintained by Japan during World War II. It uses the comfort women system as a lens for exploring the ways in which body, sexuality and identity are deployed in the creation of patriarchal relations, ethnic hierarchies, and colonial/nationalist power. This book analyzes the role and nature of the comfort women system as a mechanism of social control by the colonial state. This requires the examining of sexuality and body politics, the social background of the victims, wartime working conditions, and regulation of soldiers' sexuality.

Whose Comfort?

Whose Comfort?
Author: Yonson Ahn
Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Company
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019-08-30
Genre: Comfort women
ISBN: 9789811206344

"This book examines the system of military 'comfort women' in World War II created and maintained to provide sexual servitude to its armed forces by Japan during World War II. The ways in which body, sexuality and identity are deployed in the maintenance of colonial/nationalist power, patriarchal relations and ethnic hierarchies are explored in this work. To achieve this objective requires examining issues of body politics, power, femininity and military masculinity, all of which are entangled in the context of the 'comfort women' system. This volume relies mainly on presonal narratives, including testimonies and life histories of Korean 'comfort women' victims/survivors and Japanese veterans obtained from interviews that the author conducted as well as from previously published testimonies." --

The Comfort Women

The Comfort Women
Author: C. Sarah Soh
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2020-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 022676804X

In an era marked by atrocities perpetrated on a grand scale, the tragedy of the so-called comfort women—mostly Korean women forced into prostitution by the Japanese army—endures as one of the darkest events of World War II. These women have usually been labeled victims of a war crime, a simplistic view that makes it easy to pin blame on the policies of imperial Japan and therefore easier to consign the episode to a war-torn past. In this revelatory study, C. Sarah Soh provocatively disputes this master narrative. Soh reveals that the forces of Japanese colonialism and Korean patriarchy together shaped the fate of Korean comfort women—a double bind made strikingly apparent in the cases of women cast into sexual slavery after fleeing abuse at home. Other victims were press-ganged into prostitution, sometimes with the help of Korean procurers. Drawing on historical research and interviews with survivors, Soh tells the stories of these women from girlhood through their subjugation and beyond to their efforts to overcome the traumas of their past. Finally, Soh examines the array of factors— from South Korean nationalist politics to the aims of the international women’s human rights movement—that have contributed to the incomplete view of the tragedy that still dominates today.

Chinese Comfort Women

Chinese Comfort Women
Author: Peipei Qiu
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2014-05-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199373914

During the Asia-Pacific War, the Japanese military forced hundreds of thousands of women across Asia into "comfort stations" where they were repeatedly raped and tortured. Japanese imperial forces claimed they recruited women to join these stations in order to prevent the mass rape of local women and the spread of venereal disease among soldiers. In reality, these women were kidnapped and coerced into sexual slavery. Comfort stations institutionalized rape, and these "comfort women" were subjected to atrocities that have only recently become the subject of international debate. Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan's Sex Slaves features the personal narratives of twelve women forced into sexual slavery when the Japanese military occupied their hometowns. Beginning with their prewar lives and continuing through their enslavement to their postwar struggles for justice, these interviews reveal that the prolonged suffering of the comfort station survivors was not contained to wartime atrocities but was rather a lifelong condition resulting from various social, political, and cultural factors. In addition, their stories bring to light several previously hidden aspects of the comfort women system: the ransoms the occupation army forced the victims' families to pay, the various types of improvised comfort stations set up by small military units throughout the battle zones and occupied regions, and the sheer scope of the military sexual slavery-much larger than previously assumed. The personal narratives of these survivors combined with the testimonies of witnesses, investigative reports, and local histories also reveal a correlation between the proliferation of the comfort stations and the progression of Japan's military offensive. The first English-language account of its kind, Chinese Comfort Women exposes the full extent of the injustices suffered by these women and the conditions that caused them.

“Comfort Stations” as Remembered by Okinawans during World War II

“Comfort Stations” as Remembered by Okinawans during World War II
Author: Yunshin Hong
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 576
Release: 2020-03-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004419519

Okinawa, the only Japanese prefecture invaded by US forces in 1945, was forced to accommodate 146 “military comfort stations” from 1941–45. How did Okinawans view these intrusive spaces and their impact on regional society? Interviews, survivor testimonies, and archival documents show that the Japanese army manipulated comfort stations to isolate local communities, facilitate “spy hunts,” and foster a fear of rape by Americans that induced many Okinawans to choose death over survival. The politics of sex pursued by the US occupation (1945–72) perpetuated that fear of rape into the postwar era. This study of war, sexual violence, and postcolonial memory sees the comfort stations as discursive spaces of remembrance where differing war experiences can be articulated, exchanged, and mutually reassessed. Winner of the 2017 Best Publication Award of the Year by the Okinawa Times.

The Japanese Comfort Women and Sexual Slavery during the China and Pacific Wars

The Japanese Comfort Women and Sexual Slavery during the China and Pacific Wars
Author: Caroline Norma
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2015-12-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1472511255

The Japanese military was responsible for the sexual enslavement of thousands of women and girls in Asia and the Pacific during the China and Pacific wars under the guise of providing 'comfort' for battle-weary troops. Campaigns for justice and reparations for 'comfort women' since the early 1990s have highlighted the magnitude of the human rights crimes committed against Korean, Chinese and other Asian women by Japanese soldiers after they invaded the Chinese mainland in 1937. These campaigns, however, say little about the origins of the system or its initial victims. The Japanese Comfort Women and Sexual Slavery during the China and Pacific Wars explores the origins of the Japanese military's system of sexual slavery and illustrates how Japanese women were its initial victims.

Voices of the Korean Comfort Women

Voices of the Korean Comfort Women
Author: Chungmoo Choi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2023-01-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 100075006X

An innumerable number of young women were taken from Korea during the Pacific War to provide sexual services to Japanese soldiers. These women, including teenagers, euphemistically referred to in Japanese documents as Comfort Women, were shipped to the vastly expanded battlefronts throughout the Japan-occupied territories covering Northern China to Myanmar and to the South Pacific Islands. Many of these girls died, were killed or abandoned during and after the war, but a small percentage of them returned only to face yet another devastating war at home and lasting social stigma. In Voices of the Korean Comfort Women, nine survivors tell their traumatic life stories as to how they were taken, how they had been treated with atrocities at the Comfort Stations, and how they had survived through not only the Pacific War but also the Korean War and beyond. These often-harrowing personal testimonies are each expanded by the interviewer’s observational notes, thereby providing poignant contextual information. This English translation of vital oral history, underpinned with theoretically informed guides, will be invaluable to students and scholars of Asian history, the Pacific War and wartime sexual violence against women as well as those interested in historical trauma and human rights.

Korea and the Global Society

Korea and the Global Society
Author: Yonson Ahn
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2023-02-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000824276

This book explores multiple fields and disciplines around the theme of South Korea’s engagement and exchanges with global society focusing on development cooperation, migration and the media. The core of this volume is an analysis of South Korea’s engagement and reciprocity in global society that has developed out of the country’s shift from aid recipient and migrant sender to aid provider and migrant host. The contributions approach this through the three main aspects of overseas aid, cross-border contacts, and interplay of identities in the mediascape. These themes represent an interdisciplinary array of research that introduces and analyses interconnected and concurrent instances of reciprocity, convergence, tension, inclusion, or exclusion in navigating South Korea’s interactional relations with global society, spanning regions and countries including Africa, Asia, the USA, and Germany. This book will be valuable reading to students and researchers from a wide range of disciplines including sociology, gender studies, ethnic studies, media studies, IR, and area studies, in particular Korean studies.

Comfort Woman

Comfort Woman
Author: Nora Okja Keller
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 201
Release: 1998-03-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101127678

Possessing a wisdom and maturity rarely found in a first novelist, Korean-American writer Nora Okja Keller tells a heartwrenching and enthralling tale in this, her literary debut. Comfort Woman is the story of Akiko, a Korean refugee of World War II, and Beccah, her daughter by an American missionary. The two women are living on the edge of society—and sanity—in Honolulu, plagued by Akiko's periodic encounters with the spirits of the dead, and by Beccah's struggles to reclaim her mother from her past. Slowly and painfully Akiko reveals her tragic story and the horrifying years she was forced to serve as a "comfort woman" to Japanese soldiers. As Beccah uncovers these truths, she discovers her own strength and the secret of the powers she herself possessed—the precious gifts her mother has given her. A San Francisco Chronicle bestseller In 1995, Nora Okja Keller received the Pushcart Prize for "Mother Tongue", a piece that is part of Comfort Woman.