Yesterday I had a chance to meet briefly in Toronto with Lisa Yoneyama, who is one of the most prevalent scholars working today on issues of transnational war memory politics and World War II in Asia. We both had good things to say about new work by Barak Kusher (University of Cambridge, head of the War Crimes and Empire project) and Nicola Henry (a scholar at LaTrobe University who has been extremely productive in placing the “comfort women” system within a larger investigative frame of wartime sexual violence). Yoneyama herself is concluding a new project on World War II memory which her page at University of Toronto describes as follows:
Yoneyama is currently working on a third single-authored book project, tentatively titled, Cold War Ruins: Feminism, Colonialism, and the Americanization of Justice, in which she critically explores Cold War management of knowledge and the questions of justice, transnational feminism, anti-colonialism, and the location of Asian America.
My students in Leeds will be reading a couple of Yoneyama’s previous article, but the new project sounds particularly promising. Consequently, I spent some time yesterday getting re-aquainted with some of the present literature on the “comfort women” system generally, a list of recommended readings for which are included below.
Books and Reports
Sarah Soh. The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
Nicola Henry, War and Rape: Law, Memory and Justice (Routledge: 2011).
Margaret Stetz and Bonnie B.C. Oh, Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War II (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2001).
Radhika Coomaraswamy, Report of the Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequent, Ms. Radhika Coomaraswamy; Report on the mission to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Republic of Korea and Japan on the issue of military sexual slavery in wartime, United Nations Economic and Social Council, E/CN.4/1996/53/Add.1, 4 January 1996.
Sarah C. Kovner, Occupying power : sex workers and servicemen in postwar Japan (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012). [Not about the ‘comfort women’ system per se, but a fabulously-thought through and presented book about the postwar.]
Journal Articles
Carmen M. Abigay, ‘Sexual Slavery and the Comfort Women of World War II,’ Berkeley Journal of International Law, Vol. 21, no. 2 (2003), 375-389.
Nicola Henry, ‘Memory of an Injustice: The “Comfort Women” and the Legacy of the Tokyo Trial,’ Asian Studies Review vol. 37 no. 3 (2013), 362-380.
Nicola Henry, ‘The Fixation on Wartime Rape: Feminist Critique and International Criminal Law,’ Social and Legal Studies, vol. 23 no. 1 (2013), 93-111.
Sue R. Lee, ‘Comforting the Comfort Women,’ University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law (2003).
Shellie K. Park, ‘Broken Silence: Redressing the Mass Rape and Sexual Enslavement of Asian Women by the Japanese Government in an Appropriate Forum,’ Asian-Pacific Law and Policy Journal, vol. 3. no 2 (Winter 2002), 23-55.
Joshua D. Pilzer, ‘Music and Dance in the Japanese Military “Comfort Women” System: A Case Study in the Performing Arts, War, and Sexual Violence,’ Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, Vol. 18 (2014), 1-23.
Sarah Soh, ‘In/fertility among Korea’s “comfort women” survivors: A comparative perspective,’ Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 29 (2006), 67-80.
Lisa Yoneyama, ‘Politicizing Justice: Post-Cold War Redress and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,’ Critical Asian Studies 42:4 (2010), 653-671.
Online resources
Erik Ropers, ‘Life on the Front Lines: Testimonies by Two Japanese “Comfort Women”,‘ Writing the War in Asia – A Documentary History (University of Konstanz), accessed 7 March 2015.
Satoko Oka Norimatsu, ‘Reexamining the “Comfort Women” Issue: An Interview With Yoshimi Yoshiaki,’ Asia-Pacific Journal (via Truthout), 11 January 2015.
