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  • Comfort Women Activism: Critical Voices from the Perpetrator State by Eika Tai
  • Kan Kimura (bio)
Eika Tai. Comfort Women Activism: Critical Voices from the Perpetrator State. By Hong Kong University Press, 2020. x, 196 pages. $62.00, cloth; $31.00, E-book.

The topic of comfort women has two faces. The first concerns facts about the Empire of Japan prior to 1945. As is well known, the empire established the system in the 1930s to mobilize women to "comfort" soldiers because serious sexual assaults in occupied Chinese territories became a fatal obstacle to order. As a result, numerous women were collected from the empire as comfort women. Even today, the details of this system are not clear, such as how the mobilization was conducted, how many women from each part of the Japanese empire were sent to the battlefields, and how they were treated. Scholars around the world are still striving to reveal new details.

However, we need to consider not just the history of the comfort women but also the history of dispute and argument relating to them. This second history, which concerns comfort women after World War II, is one of the most important facts we have overlooked on this topic for a long time. In Comfort Women Activism: Critical Voices from the Perpetrator State, Eika Tai explores the efforts of feminist activists in Japan and their work to "rediscover" the comfort women victims and their experiences.

As many studies have revealed, it was not until the beginning of the 1990s that people began to discuss comfort women seriously. This means this topic and its victims were ignored for more than 40 years. Of course, this was not because people did not know of the existence of comfort women before the 1990s. Comfort women were mobilized from all over the Japanese empire, and people witnessed their removal from their countries. In the field and in occupied territories, regular citizens had opportunities to see the women being mobilized, just as they saw soldiers and civilian employees mobilized by the empire.

It cannot be said that the comfort women were forgotten as soon as the war ended. The women defined their existence in many novels, nonfiction volumes, journal articles, and even movies that opened in Japan and South Korea after the war. Their existence was a matter of course for people at that time. But this does not mean that the existence of comfort women was regarded as a serious matter. It was acknowledged, but as an episode under colonial rule and total war. In other words, comfort women were just part of a story whose main characters were typically male soldiers or the civilian staff who witnessed the comfort women system. [End Page 154]

And it was not only males who did not take the topic and victims seriously. In Japan, the first book analyzing the comfort women system was written in 1973 by Senda Kakō, a nonfiction writer and novelist. Following the publisher's sensational and even sexually suggestive campaign, this book was a smash hit and was made into a movie the next year. However, the book did not attract the attention of the period's major feminist activists, despite its publication in the middle of the women's liberation movement that had begun in the late 1960s.

It is not my intention to discuss why the comfort women were not seriously considered even by feminist activists.1 The important point here is that comfort women were not discussed for a long time, so activists had to make efforts to "rediscover" the facts relating to them in the early 1990s.

In part 1 of her book, Eika Tai offers a well-summarized history of comfort women activism after explaining the book's framework and methodologies. This summary functions as an appropriate guide for any reader seeking to understand the basic comfort women topic in Japan after the 1990s. The main part of the book is part 2, in which we hear the "real voices" of activists who actually participated in the process of "rediscovery." The author wrote this part on the basis of interviews with many activists, providing a vivid reflection of what they thought...

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