In Search of Innocence

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Kim Puja, ‘Global Civil Society Remakes History: “The Women's International War Crimes Tribunal 2000”’, positions: east asia cultures critique, vol. 9, no. 3, 2001, p. 611, Hideko Mutsui (trans.). Kim was one of the organisers who had worked for two-and-a-half years to make the Tribunal happen, and is also a historian of colonial Korea. The judges were Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, Carmen Maria Argibay, Christine Chinkin and Willy Mutunga. Kim, ‘Global Civil Society Remakes History’, p. 618. For reports on the Tribunal, a summary of the verdict, and other related documents, see , accessed 7 February 2005. There is no satisfactory terminology for the systematic state-directed sexual violence which was the subject of the Tribunal. I avoid the use of the offensive euphemism ‘comfort women’ except where it appears in quoted material. I share Laura Hein's unease with the pornographic associations of such terms as ‘sex slave’ and ‘sexual slavery’ in the English language, although the equivalent terms in the Japanese language are preferred by many commentators. By referring to the ‘military prostitution system’ I am focusing on the systematic and institutional aspects of the system. In using this term I do not want to suggest any voluntarism on the part of the women involved, and I thus refer to the women as ‘survivors’ rather than ‘prostitutes’ or ‘comfort women’. On the problems of terminology, see Laura Hein, ‘Savage Irony: the Imaginative Power of the “Military Comfort Women” in the 1990s’, Gender and History, vol. 11, no. 2, 1999, p. 343; Vera Mackie, ‘Sexual Violence, Silence, and Human Rights Discourse: the Emergence of the Military Prostitution Issue’ in Anne Marie Hilsdon et al. (eds), Human Rights and Gender Politics: Asia-Pacific Perspectives (Routledge) London, 2000. Vera Mackie, ‘Shifting the Axis: Feminism and the Transnational Imaginary’ in Brenda Yeoh et al. (eds), State/Nation/Transnation (Routledge) London, 2004. Joan Wallach Scott, ‘Gender: a Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, reprinted in Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (Columbia University Press) New York, 1988. Laura Hein and Mark Selden (eds), Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany and the United States (M.E. Sharpe) Armonk, 2000; Stuart Macintyre, The History Wars, 2nd edition (Melbourne University Press) Melbourne, 2004. Senda Kakô, Jûgun Ianfu (Futabasha) Tokyo, 1973; Kim, Il-Myon, Tennô no Guntai to Chôsenjin Ianfu (San'ichi Shobô) Tokyo, 1976; Suzuki Yûko, Joseishi o Hiraku 3: Onna to Sengo 50nen (Miraisha) Tokyo, 1996; Suzuki Yûko, Joseishi o Hiraku 4: ‘Ianfu’ Mondai to Sensô Sekinin (Miraisha) Tokyo, 1996. Eleanor Kerkham, ‘Pleading for the Body’ in Marlene Mayo et al. (eds), War, Occupation and Creativity: Japan and East Asia, 1920–1960 (University of Hawaii Press) Honolulu, 2001; Kanô Mikiyo, ‘The Problem with the “Comfort Women Problem”’, AMPO Japan–Asia Quarterly Review, vol. 24, no. 2, 1993, p. 42. Mackie, ‘Sexual Violence, Silence, and Human Rights Discourse’, passim. Jan Ruff O'Herne, Fifty Years of Silence (Editions Tom Thompson) Sydney, 1994; Maria Rosa Henson, Comfort Woman: Slave of Destiny (Philippine Centre for Investigative Journalism) Manila, 1996; Keith Howard (ed.), True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women (Cassell) London, 1995; Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women (Mid-Prairie Books) Parkersburg, IA, 1999; Sangmie Choi Schellstede (ed.), Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military (Holmes & Meier) New York and London, 2000. Yoshimi Yoshiaki (ed.), Jûgun Ianfu Shiryôshû (Ôtsuki Shoten) Tokyo, 1992; Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Jûgun Ianfu (Iwanami Shoten) Tokyo, 1995; Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military during World War II, Suzanne O'Brien (trans.) (Columbia University Press) New York, 2000; Yuki Tanaka, Japan's Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during World War II and the US Occupation (Routledge) London, 2002. See the Coomaraswamy Report and the McDougall Report, excerpted in Schellstede, Comfort Women Speak, and also available at , accessed 7 February 2005. Jordan Sand, ‘Historians and Public Memory in Japan: the “Comfort Women” Controversy’, History and Memory, vol. 11, no. 2, 1999. Norma Field, ‘The Stakes of Apology’, Japan Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 4, 1995. On differential speaking positions, see Ulrike Wöhr, ‘A Touchstone for Transnational Feminism: Discourses on the Comfort Women in 1990s Japan’, Japanstudien, 2004. On the transnational dimensions of feminist debates, see Andrea Germer, ‘Feminist History in Japan: National and International Perspectives’, Intersections, no. 9, August 2003, , accessed 28 November 2004. Field, ‘The Stakes of Apology’. Curtis Anderson Gayle, ‘Marxist Approaches and Women's History in Early Post-war Japan’, Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies, no. 19, November 2004. Tanaka Kazuko, ‘The New Feminist Movement in Japan, 1970–1990’ in Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow and Atsuko Kameda (eds), Japanese Women: New Feminist Perspectives on the Past, Present and Future (The Feminist Press) New York, 1995, pp. 343–52. Jûgoshi Nôto, nos 1–10, 1977–1985; Jûgoshi Nôto Sengo Hen, nos 1–8, 1986–1996; Ajia to Josei Kaihô, nos 1–, 1977–; Vera Mackie, ‘Women Questioning the Present: the Jûgoshi Nôto Collective’ in Janice Brown and Sonja Arntzen (eds), Across Time and Genre: Women's Writing in Japan (University of Alberta) Edmonton, 2002. Cf. Cynthia Enloe, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire (University of California Press) Berkeley, 2004, p. 104. Rikki Kersten, ‘Revisionism, Reaction and the “Symbol Emperor” in Post-war Japan’, Japan Forum, vol. 15, no. 1, 2003, p. 24. Compare with feminists in Australia (and to some extent Britain) who engaged with social democratic governments, leading to the coining of the term ‘femocrat’ (feminist bureaucrat) and extended debates on the gendering of state institutions. Anna Yeatman, Bureaucrats, Technocrats, Femocrats: Essays on the Contemporary Australian State (Allen & Unwin) Sydney, 1992. Ueno Chizuko, ‘The Politics of Memory: Nation, Individual and Self’, History and Memory, vol. 11, no. 2, 1999, Jordan Sand (trans.); Ueno, Nationalism and Gender, passim. Ueno Chizuko, Nashonarizumu to Jendâ (Seidosha) Tokyo, 1998; Ueno Chizuko, Nationalism and Gender, Beverley Yamamoto (trans.) (Transpacific Press) Melbourne, 2004. Takahashi Tetsuya, Rekishi/Shûseishugi (Iwanami) Tokyo, 2001, pp. 1–32. Tessa Morris–Suzuki, ‘Unquiet Graves: Katô Norihiro and the Politics of Mourning’, Japanese Studies, vol. 18, no. 1, 1998, p. 26. See also Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton University Press) Princeton, 2000, pp. 205–9. Yukiko Koshiro, Transpacific Racisms and the US Occupation of Japan (Columbia University Press) New York, 1999, pp. 89–122. Morris–Suzuki, ‘Unquiet Graves’, p. 30. On Australia, see Ann Curthoys, ‘An Uneasy Conversation: the Multicultural and the Indigenous’ in John Docker and Gerhard Fischer (eds), Race, Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand (University of New South Wales Press) Sydney, 2000, pp. 21–36. See Cynthia Enloe's discussion of the sneaker, in The Curious Feminist, pp. 43–56. Curthoys, ‘An Uneasy Conversation’. Vera Mackie, ‘The Language of Transnationality, Globalisation and Feminism’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, vol. 3, no. 2, 2001; Vera Mackie, ‘“Asia” in Everyday Life: Dealing with Difference in Contemporary Japan’ in Brenda Yeoh et al. (eds), Gender and Politics in the Asia Pacific: Agencies and Activisms (Routledge) London, 2002; Vera Mackie, ‘Shifting the Axis: Feminism and the Transnational Imaginary’ in Brenda Yeoh et al., State/Nation/Transnation. Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, Australian Feminist Studies, no. 1, 1986; Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism’ in Chandra Talpade Mohanty et al. (eds), Third World Women and the Politics of Difference (Indiana University Press) Bloomington, 1991; Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West (Routledge) London, 2001, pp. 17, 89, 178–201. Field, ‘The Stakes of Apology’. Field, ‘The Stakes of Apology’. Melissa Wender, ‘Military Comfort Women: Doing Justice to the Past’, Critical Asian Studies, vol. 35, no. 1, 2003, p. 139. On the ethics of history writing, see Stuart Macintyre (ed.), The Historian's Conscience: Australian Historians on the Ethics of History (Melbourne University Press) 2004

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