ABSTRACT
Victim-survivors of Japan’s military sexual slavery, often referred to as ‘comfort women’, are women from Japan, its former colonies and occupied territories, who were sexually exploited by the Japanese military during World War II. The injustice they suffered only gained a delayed recognition when these women started to recount their experience in the 1990s, some 50 years after the end of the war. Supported by feminist activists, historians and other scholars, they have actively sought justice from the Japanese government and helped the international community to acknowledge sexual violence as both a serious war crime and a crime against humanity. However, not only the Japanese government has evaded its legal responsibilities to these victims over the past 30 years, but also more recently has engaged in preventing memorials to ‘comfort women’ from being erected, further perpetuating injustice to these women. As a result, this issue has become a crucial site of the politics of memorialisation. This chapter aims to explore how the material and spatial effects of these memorials and people’s engagement with them, as well as women’s testimonies, could create an emotionally engaged ‘affective’ community and build resistance to this legacy of injustice.
