B030 - Speaking and Silencing Comfort Women: Lost between Empires, Forgotten across Time-Sponsored by AAS Northeast Asia Council

    Session will be held in person

    Friday, March 15, 2024 Friday, March 15, 2024

    9:00 AM - 10:30 AM 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM 9:00 AM - 10:30 AM PDT 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM UTC

    • Room 213 (Level 2, Convention Center)
The “comfort women system,” a euphemism that fails to capture its cruel realities, is as a multi-national issue with a long history, having affected the lives of many throughout Asia and beyond. The scholarship to date has demonstrated that the issue was sporadically brought up as early as the 1960s before receiving wide-spread international attention in the early 1990s. Building on this literature, the papers that comprise this panel take as a departure point the observation that during the war and in the years following its end, “comfort women” were duly recorded and initially remembered by the Western community even before the conclusion of World War II. State actors, religious leaders, news correspondents, and military service members were aware of their existence and experiences, and in some cases attempted to develop policies to assist these women. Yet, overlapping motivations and empires—broadly defined to include both states and religious organizations—led to a complex postcolonial process of speaking and silencing the difficult past. With a historical lens focused on the 1940s but also touching on present day discussions, this panel explores what these actors knew about the comfort women system, how they spoke about it, and why the issue was left on the margins of public discourses and policy attention.
Presentations
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