Re-Articulation on Japanese ‘Comfort Women' Survivors' Experiences

This presentation examines the process of how Japanese ‘comfort women’ has been excluded discoursively from the whole ‘victims.’ The number of Japanese comfort women is estimated from thousands to tens of thousands. Even such a large number of women seem to have been forced to do so, and the fact that they had been located in the poverty group, there has been a tendency, in the discoursive space of ‘comfort women issue,’ that those women are not recognized as ‘victims.’ Moreover, those women have often been represented that they devoted themselves to the nation by performing comfort women. As a matter of fact, Japanese comfort women survivors’ voices have not been heard enough. Presenter introduces some cases that were known by members of civic movements on this issue as Japanese survivors’ claims but were not treated as the matter for the movement groups to make their victimhood known widely in the early 1990s.

To restore Japanese comfort women survivors’ history, it is indispensable to describe the aspects that on the one hand those women have been included in the members of a perpetrating country, and on the other hand excluded from the compassion among local community. Being related to that, this presentation explores otherness and postcolonial context over victims/survivors in the country of the perpetrators from feminist perspective and nationalism theory. In doing so, it aims to re-articulate their experiences.