ABSTRACT
Since the issue of Japanese military “comfort women” publicly emerged in the late 1980s, it has traveled the world, crossing the boundaries of nation, race, class, gender, culture, and language. Vacillating between varied dichotomies, the body of “comfort women” has been recurrently constructed. Japanese and Korean governments, activists, scholars, journalists, and the media, as main commentators, have been engaged in discursively constructing the issues, truths, histories, and even personal narratives of “comfort women.” Meanwhile, important questions have been raised concerning imperialism, colonialism, nationalism, militarism, and patriarchy in relation to war crimes, sexual violence and slavery, an unresolved colonial history, nationalized victimization, and state-regulated prostitution. The dominant discourse, however, with differing emphases, continues to change due to partial understatement and partisan interests. As Laura Hyun-yi Kang (2003) properly pointed out, “the matter of Korean ‘comfort women’ poses multiple problems-of nomination, of identification, of representation, and of knowledge production. Who can know and then, in turn, account adequately for both the historical event and its multiple subjects?” (25). Similarly, Sara Soh (2008) challenges us to take a critical stance in understanding the complicated truth regarding the history of Japanese military “comfort women.”
