Feminism and Antiracism: International Struggles for Justice

8 Feminism, Nationalism, and the JapaneseTextbook Controversy over "Comfort Women"

Chapter 8 Feminism, Nationalism, and the Japanese Textbook Controversy over “Comfort Women” Yoshiko Nozaki In 1993, “women’s human rights” were recognized at the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, resulting in the “Declaration of the Elimination of Violence against Women.” In 1994, the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo recognized the reproductive rights of women, and the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing included the issue of sexual rights of women in its report. At these UN conferences, the wartime rape and abuse of women was viewed as constituting (sexual) war crimes. The participants of these conferences were well aware of what was happening in places such as Bosnia and Rwanda, and it was in that connection that the issue of “comfort women” became a constant focus of discussion.1 The existence of comfort facilities and comfort women during the Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945) has not been a secret. In fact, at the end of the war the Allied Forces, led by the United States, took many comfort women into custody as POWs. However, although the Allied Forces knew that many of the women had been forced to work in the comfort facilities , they did not view the matter as a war crime requiring the prosecution of the Japanese involved. (Except for two cases—one involving Dutch women in Indonesia, and the other Guam female residents, no further investigation was conducted.)2 The issue remained by and large unrecognized in postwar Japan, in spite of a hard-fought struggle over the national memory—in particular, “the official wartime history” as taught to Japanese schoolchildren—for many years.3 Many Japanese writings on war memories referred to comfort women, 170 known as ianfu in Japanese. They were Japanese and non-Japanese women who “comforted” Japanese officers and soldiers on the front as well as in occupied territories during the Asia-Pacific War. Some comfort facilities were privately run (and supervised by the military), others built and directly managed by the military.4 In his memoirs, Japan’s former prime minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, a political ally of Ronald Reagan, mentioned his involvement in building comfort facilities in Borneo when he was a young navy officer. He wrote about it rather proudly: [The troop I commanded was] a big one consisting of three thousand men. Soon [after the occupation of the island it turned out that] there were some who raped the native women and some who indulged in gambling. In some cases I built comfort facilities for these men, with considerable effort.5 In the 1990s the Japanese military comfort women system came to be seen as one of Japan’s major war crimes. The issue became a major site of political as well as educational struggle, as feminists and progressives put the question of Japanese imperialism, particularly as expressed in the military’s sexual slavery, on the national and international agenda. In this chapter I examine how South Korean and Japanese feminists as well as teachers engaged in peace and justice education (who did not necessarily self-identify as feminists) challenged nationalist narratives of the nation.6 The Emergence of a New Meaning of Comfort Women South Korean feminist activism was one of the major forces that helped to place the issue of military comfort women on the international human rights map. In the struggle for democracy that took place in the 1980s in South Korea, the women’s movement gained considerable strength. Having successfully protested against police sexual abuse of women political prisoners, and having developed a network to support the women raped or abused, South Korean feminists gradually moved on to direct their attention to the issue of comfort women. In 1990, Yun Chung-ok, a Professor at Ewha Womans University, published a series of reports in a major South Korean newspaper based on her interviews with surviving former comfort women living in Japan, Thailand, and Papua New Guinea.7 The timing coincided with the issue of women’s human rights, including the wartime violation of those rights then being raised by the international women’s movement.8 Feminism, Nationalism, and the Japanese Textbook Controversy 171 In May 1990, the planned visit of Roh Tae-woo, then President of South Korea, triggered intense South Korean public debate regarding Japan’s accountability for its colonial rule of Korea. Those who had lost their family members in the war voiced their opposition to...