"De-national" Coalition Against Japan's Gendered Necropolitics: The "Comfort Women" Justice Movement in San Francisco and Geography of Resistance

In order to counter the far-right Japanese Government's historical revisionism ("denialism") and make the Government of Japan (GOJ) officially apologize to survivors of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery System (JMSSS) (1932–1945), it is essential to understand JMSSS in global configuration of racial and gender power. In transpacific colonialism, Japan has been granted impunity from its accountability for JMSSS, and presented itself as victim of white supremacy, being singled out for allegedly universal problems of sexual violence and war-time prostitution. Rather than understanding JMSSS as exception to modernity, a temporary rise of fascism, or war-time hysteria, this paper condemns JMSSS and its denial as gendered necropolitics, politics of death and terror inherent to Japan's modern sovereignty. Japan's gendered necropolitics involves differential gendered racialization, hypersexualization, and ungendering against its colonial others, whose non-being is prerequisite to Japan's sovereignty.

To challenge Japan's abuse of its sovereign power and to counter necropower, we, proponents of the "Comfort Women" justice movement, forged what I call a de-national, decolonial feminist coalition for collective self-determination, to share, beyond national borders, political tools and resources. This paper helps expand the de-national coalition through providing theoretical foundation for connecting decolonial movements and highlighting geography of resistance.