Editor's Preface

In the fall of 2001, I began teaching an upper-division undergraduate course entitled, "East Asia Since 1800." Confronted with a group of mostly European American history majors and minors, I wanted to help them move beyond simply learning about China, Japan, and Korea (the course's primary focus areas) and engage the cultural dynamics that have affected—and still affect—relations between the region's distinct people groups. To accomplish this objective, I eventually turned to a fascinating anthology, edited by Chungmoo Choi, on the "Comfort Women" forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army during the 1930s and 1940s [The Comfort Women: Colonialism, War, and Sex, a special issue of Positions: East Asian Cultures Critique 5:1 (Spring 1997)]. Few teaching strategies in my career have proved so successful. Each article drew students farther into the challenge of empathizing with—or at least attempting to understand—these women and their families from a non-U.S. perspective. Of course, the result fell a good deal short of perfection, but the impact was both profound and palpable. Students, most of whom are now approaching graduation, still visit my office to discuss that book.

The articles contained in this special issue of JAAS both build upon and deviate from the works in Choi's anthology. Her editorial agenda emphasized primarily the task of exposing a suppressed history and addressing the issue of reparations, while Kandice Chuh, Laura Hyun Yi Kang, and Lisa Yoneyama address the cultural meaning of this poignant story. Their work, therefore, represents an important step in the evolution of scholarship on the "Comfort Women" and, more broadly, on the phenomenon of popularized tragedy in human societies. Thus, I am honored to place issue 6.1 in the able hands of its guest editor, Kandice Chuh, and look forward to sharing in the new body of discussions generated by its publication—with my colleagues as well as my students.