Discourses About Comfort Women in Japan, South Korea, and International Society
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DOI:10.17265/2328-2134/2015.12.002
Kan Kimura
This paper focuses on the discourse about the comfort women until the early 1990s, and analyzes it with the data from mass media articles and books about this issue, most of which have not yet been highlighted as targets for academic analysis. This paper also divides the public sphere around the comfort women into three areas: South Korea, Japan, and the international society, because the public sphere of each nation before the globalization of the 1990s was independent and only slowly did they influence one another. Before the issue was politicized and recognized by the mass media, it was not easy for people in one country to realize how people in another country understood and discussed this topic. As a result of analysis, this study has discovered several facts. First, the origin of the discourse on the comfort women can be found in the 1960s and looks back to World War II. At this time the comfort women were not regarded as an independent and important issue but only remembered in South Korea and Japan as a background to the war. Second, the situation changed with the publication of the book by Senda Kako and the beginning of the first in-depth arguments in Japan. Senda’s book was very influential and fixed the later direction of the discourses in the two countries. We did not find an independent discourse about the issue in South Korea until the beginning of 1990s because the South Korean discourse was heavily dependent on Japanese materials. Third, the discourses of the two countries started to separate after the issue became diplomatically charged. South Korea took a critical stance against the issue and the Japanese gradually became unsure and worried about the repercussions from the 1965 treaty. Finally, the international media took a critical stance against the Japanese because they regarded the issue in the context of human trafficking of Asian women in the sex industry and regarded it as a typical example of “sex enslavement” by the Japanese. This discourse in the international media was originally established independently from the South Korean discourse, but later sustained by South Korea through the petition the victims submitted to the Japanese court. The discourses in the public spheres of South Korea, Japan and international society were formulated by these processes. They were then frozen and we have repeated the same arguments and remained in the same situation and for almost a quarter-century.
comfort women, historical dispute, Japan, South Korea, international society, World War II
Kimura, K. (2015). Discourses about comfort women in Japan, South Korea, and international society. International Relations and Diplomacy, 3(12), 809-817.