The politics of Gendered Memory of Japanese "Comfort Women"

This thesis explores the role of gender in the nexus between memory construction and national identity formation in Japan, with a focus on the war memory of so-called “comfort women,” or the sex slaves for the Imperial Japanese Army. Despite the fact that Japanese women became the initial victims of the military system of sexual slavery, they have been excluded not only from scholarly research, but also from feminist transnational justice activism for victims. This research, therefore, analyzes the silenced narratives of ten Japanese “comfort women” survivors who testified mainly in the 1950s and 1960s. This study innovates in political science through combining the popular memory approach based on the oral history method, with both the radical feminist approach informed by Carole Pateman’s theory of the sexual contract and the feminist activist approach, premised on the pursuit of social justice. In particular, work focalises trauma and healing at the center of our struggles for emancipation, as proposed by Sara C. Motta and Aurora Levins Morales. This innovative and interdisciplinary study foregrounds memory, history and trauma in the analysis of contemporary politics.

Accordingly, gender and trauma are the two core concepts around which my analysis is weaved. Trauma is political because it reveals gendered unequal relations between the perpetrators and the victims as a central axis in the (re)production in the modern state and nation. The Japanese survivors’ voices of trauma challenge the gendered hierarchy in remembering the past war, which illustrates the hegemonic masculinity of the Imperial Japanese Military and state. The hegemonic masculinity of Japanese soldiers is integral to better understand the hegemonic femininity of “comfort women.” The Japanese survivors challenge this patriarchal militarist state by exercising their political agency through the creation of a counter-memory of victims of the military’s sexual slavery system. This thesis concludes that gender plays a pivotal role in the (re)construction of both war memory and national identity, because for a modern patriarchal state, the control of the former is central to the control of the latter. In this aim, the state control and manipulation of female and male sexuality for mobilisation of the nation is the key to state formation.

By exploring the memories of the Japanese victims as well as war veterans, this thesis contributes to broader discussion about the complexities of masculinised citizenship, feminised subjectivities and (political) personhood in a modern democratic society. I strongly hope that this thesis will contribute to recognizing all “comfort women,” regardless of nationalities, as the victims of sexual slavery, by revealing the fierce battle of the Japanese survivors with their trauma in order to transcend the patriarchal binary of so-called “good” women and “bad” women, and to re-humanise modern Japan.