Guest Editor's Introduction: On Korean "Comfort Women"

THROUGH FORCE AND FRAUD, somewhere between 60,000 and 200,000 girls and women were conscripted into service as "comfort women" during the years of Japan's consolidation of its empire in the Pacific region. Of this number, whose range is so vast because of the continuing unavailability of specific data, some 80-90 percent is said to have been taken from Korea. Other Japan-occupied countries, including Taiwan, China, the Philippines, and Indonesia, served as sources for the remaining percentage. ¹ In the past decade, information regarding these "comfort women," or "military sex slaves," as they have also been called, has begun to circulate widely in both popular and academic U.S. arenas. This issue of JAAS responds to that phenomenon.

More specifically, the essays published here interrogate U.S. popularization of this information, including Asian Americanist interest in it. From Laura Hyun Yi Kang's questioning of the language(s) and rhetoric(s) employed to transform information into cultural knowledge and capital, to Lisa Yoneyama's investigation of the significance of Japanese war crimes to U.S. national identity formation, and to my own examination of the ways and means of literary representations of "comfort women," these essays call critical attention to the signifying and material work of various representations of "comfort women" in multiple discursive fields—the academic, the cultural, the literary, the judicial, and always, the political. By focusing critical attention on U.S. and/or Asian Americanist interest in "comfort women," this issue as a whole argues for understanding that interest as driven by and deeply rooted in the non-equivalent and sometimes competing politics of modernity, empire, class and capitalism, and race, gender, and sexuality, particularly as they articulate to law and governmental politics, and to academic discourse.

This volume is of course not exhaustive in its exploration of the uses to which images and stories of "comfort women" are being put in various discourses. Indeed, that the title of this special issue specifies its focus on "Korean 'comfort women'" indicates the awareness of its contributors of the exclusive effect that the ready identification of "comfort women" with "Korea" has in contending with the institution of military sex slavery as operating in other countries under Japanese rule. Nor does this issue engage thoroughly with the multiplicity of images and narratives that undoubtedly circulate globally, the study of which would inevitably reshape the arguments offered here. Rather than seeking comprehensive coverage, the contributors here have focused instead on illuminating certain critical concerns as to the politics and ethics of representing and producing knowledge "about" "comfort women." The identification of such concerns offered in these essays will, perhaps, help to advance the practice of a self-reflexive Asian American studies.

At the same time that these essays are anchored by a focus on Korean "comfort women," they also engage the ongoing interest in Asian American studies in utilizing transnational paradigms of knowledge for understanding such matters as national identity and subject formation. They do so partly by working from recognition of the deeply transnational and complicated histories that underwrite the institution of military sex slavery. The emergence of Japanese modernity in the mid-nineteenth century, which might be understood as in part a response to the aggressive interest in Asia expressed by European and U.S. imperial powers through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, participates in those histories, as do Korean moves toward modernization at the end of the nineteenth century. ² The United States thus is a part of the early picture that encapsulates the conditions giving rise to "comfort women," and it continues to stay in the frame through its neo-colonial presence in Korea subsequent to World War II. Japan's "opening" of Korea with the Kangwha Treaty of 1876 set the stage for the formal occupation that would follow; in the meantime, the process by which Koreans were collectivizing themselves against the then dominant feudalism into...