Thesis (M.A.)--Eastern Illinois University, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves iii-x).

The purpose of this research is to find out: What led Japanese activists who support “comfort women” to hold their opinions, and what do they think contributes to the polarized public opinion about “comfort women” in Japan? What are their activities and strategies to address the issue? How do those activists evaluate their activism and the resolution process? In-depth qualitative interviews were utilized to collect data. The research findings showed that different interpretations of the Second World War and different understandings about male and female rights and roles influenced people’s opinions about “comfort women.” Japanese activists used international pressure to address the issue. Also, it was found that the rightward political trend in Japan fueled by economic recession was impeding the progress of addressing the problem. Based on the findings, suggestions were made to improve the activism, including consideration of reconciliation as a way of dealing with the problem.

The purpose of this research is to find out: What led Japanese activists who support “comfort women” to hold their opinions, and what do they think contributes to the polarized public opinion about “comfort women” in Japan? What are their activities and strategies to address the issue? How do those activists evaluate their activism and the resolution process? In-depth qualitative interviews were utilized to collect data. The research findings showed that different interpretations of the Second World War and different understandings about male and female rights and roles influenced people’s opinions about “comfort women.” Japanese activists used international pressure to address the issue. Also, it was found that the rightward political trend in Japan fueled by economic recession was impeding the progress of addressing the problem. Based on the findings, suggestions were made to improve the activism, including consideration of reconciliation as a way of dealing with the problem.

This dissertation problematizes the ways in which the experiences of the survivors of the "comfort system," the Japanese military's Asia Pacific War/World War II system of sexual slavery, have been articulated and narrativized, with particular attention to texts by and about the Filipino comfort system survivors, or "Lolas." The juridical contexts in which the former comfort women have so frequently been asked to speak of their experiences have resulted in a paradigmatic comfort women narrative, one that is inherently problematic, despite having proven expedient and politically useful in the short term for generating public interest and support for the cause. This juridical unconscious, whose influence extends to extrajudicial contexts, has reduced the survivors' stories to spectacles of broken, violated bodies, and the survivors themselves to figures of eternal victimhood--representations that ultimately replicate the sexist, racist, and imperialist attitudes that led to the institutionalization of sexual violence during that war. I argue, however, that the comfort women's stories resist total containment; outside the paradigm of redress these narratives are rich sites of knowledge and remembrance whose meanings extend beyond the pursuit of reparations and the promise of closure. This is evident in the texts I examine here, texts by and about Filipinas, whose specific experiences of military sexual enslavement have often been overlooked in international public discourses on the comfort women issue. In the autobiographies Comfort Woman: Slave of Destiny, by Maria Rosa Henson, and The Hidden Battle of Leyte: The Picture Diary of a Girl Taken by the Japanese Military, by Remedios Felias, the survivors/authors flesh out the familial, cultural, and political contexts that inflected their sexual enslavement during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines. Both authors also employ multiple languages, including the visual, as they chip away at the limitations of the paradigmatic narrative, re-membering their traumatic pasts and reconstructing socially legitimate identities. In the aftermath of a different kind of wartime sexual violence, the Lolas of Women of Mapanique: Untold Crimes of War, by Nena Gajudo, Gina Alunan, and Susan Macabuag, adopt and adapt the rhetoric of the comfort women redress movement in order to make their own voices heard. In so doing, they reveal difficult truths about the limits of our ability to comprehend and act upon sexual violence against men during wartime. Finally, I discuss three poems: Ruth Elynia S. Mabanglo's "Balada ni Lola Amonita" ("The Ballad of Lola Amonita"), Joi Barrios' "Inasawa ng Hapon" ("Taken to Wife"), and Bino A. Realuyo's "Pantoum: Comfort Woman." I find that by drawing upon the signs, symbols, and rituals of precolonial indigenous and religious Filipino culture, and by superimposing the metaphorical landscape of memory onto the literal landscape of the archipelago, these poems can offer what the paradigmatic comfort women cannot. The opportunity to break out of our voyeuristic consumption of trauma and share cultural space with the victims and survivors, and the chance to see the Lolas' collective experience as an indelible part the nation's past, present, and future.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2009. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 185-205).

Thesis (M.A.)--Bowling Green State University, 2009. / Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 108 p. Includes bibliographical references.

2015 年年底，⽇本與韓國政府迅速發表有關慰安婦議題的協議。雖然此協 議在國際上獲得讚揚，然⽽卻引起韓國⼈民、慰安婦及⽀持者們的嚴厲批判。 這「最終定案」的協議被視為對犧牲者的背叛，於是幾百位韓國抗議⼈民，包 括慰安婦，⾛上街頭並譴責協議。簡⾔之，慰安婦議題橫亙韓⽇兩國之間且相 當棘⼿。過去幾⼗年，韓國⼈民對於⽇本的道歉感到不滿。因此本論⽂將探究 韓國⼈對於⽇本道歉持續不滿的原因。本研究會依循2015 年協議無效，並進⼀ 步揭露協議真正的⽬的。本論⽂以質量分析研討諸多學術性期刊、報告等資 料。 / At the end of year 2015, Japanese and South Korean governments announced a quick agreement over the long-standing issue of “comfort women.” While the agreement won international praises, it raised sharp criticisms from the South Korean citizens, the former comfort women and their supporters. This “final and irreversible” deal was seen as a betrayal of the victims, leading hundreds of South Korean protesters including former comfort women out on the street to denounce the deal. The comfort women issue remained a stubbornly unsolvable issue between the two countries. For the past decades, South Korean people were never satisfied with Japan’s past apologies. This thesis aims to study the reasons behind South Korean people’s constant dissatisfaction towards Japan’s allegations; to trace the ineffectiveness 2015 agreement; and to reveal the true purpose behind the agreement. This thesis is based on qualitative analysis of various scholarly books, journals and reports relevant to the topic at hand.

This thesis examines how Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life (1999) represents the issues of war crimes. Writing the comfort women issue, Lee handles the bitter history of the Second World War in a postmodernist way. Against the modernist perspective on war history that draws on a simple and moral conclusion, Lee's writing underscores the function of narrative and the influence of trauma in the representation of the war crime. It offers a literary approach to the issue that complicates the role of the perpetrator and the victim, thus distances itself from the common understanding of war crimes. I argue this literary representation of the history of war crimes could be more powerful than historical writings, because it will ultimately challenge the concept of war itself.

This dissertation explores postcolonial fiction that reflects the structural situation of a genocidal number of third-world women who are being trafficked for sexual purposes from postcolonial countries into the global north—invariably, gender, class and race play a crucial role in their exploitation. Above all, these women share a systemic disposability and invisibility, as the business relies on the victim’s illegality and criminality to generate maximum revenues. My research suggests that the presence of these abject women is not only recognized by ideological and repressive state apparatuses on every side of the trafficking scheme (in the form of governments, military establishments, juridical systems, transnational corporations, etc.) but is also understood as necessary for the current neoliberal model to thrive undisturbed by ethical imperatives. Beginning with the turn of the twentieth century, then, I analyze sexual slavery transnationally by looking at James Joyce’s “Eveline,” Therese Park’s A Gift of the Emperor, Mahasweta Devi’s “Douloti the Bountiful,” Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon, Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail, and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, concentrating on the political, economic, and social discourses in which the narratives are immersed through the lens of Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial theory. By interrogating these postcolonial narratives, my project reexamines the sex slave-trafficker-consumer triad in order to determine the effect of each party’s presence or absence from the text and the implications in terms of the discourses their representations may tacitly legitimize. At the same time, this work investigates the type of postcolonial stories the West privileges and the reasons, and the subjective role postcolonial theory plays in overcoming subaltern women’s exploitation within the current neocolonial context. Overall, I interrogate the role postcolonial literature plays as a means of achieving (or not) social change, analyze the purpose of artists in representing exploitative situations, identify the type of engagement readers have with these characters, and seek to understand audiences’ response to such literature. I look at authors who have attempted to discover fruitful avenues of expression for third-world women, who, despite increasingly constituting the bulk of the work force worldwide, continue to be exploited and, in the case of sex trafficking, brutally violated.

This dissertation explores postcolonial fiction that reflects the structural situation of a genocidal number of third-world women who are being trafficked for sexual purposes from postcolonial countries into the global north—invariably, gender, class and race play a crucial role in their exploitation. Above all, these women share a systemic disposability and invisibility, as the business relies on the victim’s illegality and criminality to generate maximum revenues. My research suggests that the presence of these abject women is not only recognized by ideological and repressive state apparatuses on every side of the trafficking scheme (in the form of governments, military establishments, juridical systems, transnational corporations, etc.) but is also understood as necessary for the current neoliberal model to thrive undisturbed by ethical imperatives. Beginning with the turn of the twentieth century, then, I analyze sexual slavery transnationally by looking at James Joyce’s “Eveline,” Therese Park’s A Gift of the Emperor, Mahasweta Devi’s “Douloti the Bountiful,” Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon, Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail, and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, concentrating on the political, economic, and social discourses in which the narratives are immersed through the lens of Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial theory. By interrogating these postcolonial narratives, my project reexamines the sex slave-trafficker-consumer triad in order to determine the effect of each party’s presence or absence from the text and the implications in terms of the discourses their representations may tacitly legitimize. At the same time, this work investigates the type of postcolonial stories the West privileges and the reasons, and the subjective role postcolonial theory plays in overcoming subaltern women’s exploitation within the current neocolonial context. Overall, I interrogate the role postcolonial literature plays as a means of achieving (or not) social change, analyze the purpose of artists in representing exploitative situations, identify the type of engagement readers have with these characters, and seek to understand audiences’ response to such literature. I look at authors who have attempted to discover fruitful avenues of expression for third-world women, who, despite increasingly constituting the bulk of the work force worldwide, continue to be exploited and, in the case of sex trafficking, brutally violated.