Japan

Citation:

Chinkin, Christine M. 2001. “Women’s International Tribunal on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery.” The American Journal of International Law 95 (2): 335-41. doi:10.2307/2661399.

Author: Christine M. Chinkin

Topics: Gender, Women, Justice, International Tribunals & Special Courts, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militaries, Sexual Violence, Sexual Slavery Regions: Asia, East Asia Countries: Japan

Year: 2001

Citation:

Terazawa, Yuki. 2006. “The Transnational Campaign for Redress for Wartime Rape by the Japanese Military: Cases for Survivors in Shanxi Province.” NWSA Journal 18 (3): 133–45.

Author: Yuki Terazawa

Abstract:

This article discusses cases of sexual violence committed by the Japanese Army in China during the Asia-Pacific War and the redress movement for Chinese rape survivors started in the 1990s. I focus particularly on campaigns launched by women in rural Shanxi province in the People's Republic of China. Unlike survivors of wartime rape and sexual slavery by the Japanese Army in other Asian and European nations, Shanxi women had to develop their movement without strong government and grassroots support in their home country. The ambivalent attitude of the Chinese government regarding individual Chinese citizens' demand for redress from the Japanese government and corporations responsible for the wartime atrocities led women in Shanxi and their supporters in the People's Republic of China and Japan to form a remarkable transnational alliance.

Topics: Gender, Women, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militaries, Post-Conflict, Post-Conflict Reconstruction, Sexual Violence, Rape, Sexual Slavery Regions: Asia, East Asia Countries: China, Japan

Year: 2006

Citation:

Park, You-Me. 2000. “Comforting The Nation: ‘Comfort Women,’ the Politics of Apology and the Workings of Gender.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 2 (2): 199–211. doi:10.1080/136980100427315.

Author: You-Me Park

Abstract:

International politics always operates and is imagined in a gendered manner, especially in matters related to symbolic gestures and spectacles such as the declaration of war, the ritual of surrender, the signing of treaties, or the offer and acceptance of apologies. Therefore, our reading of these events has to be performed with a sustained and rigorous interest in gender: we need to ask how a masculine national image is constructed and guarded in these rituals; how the conflicts among various forms of masculinity are negotiated; how the 'common sense' derived from these gendered rituals affects the real lives of real people on a daily basis. In this essay, [Park] examine[s] the issues of masculine national identity and gendered violence in the context of the controversy around the apologies offered (or not offered) to former 'comfort women,' women who were forced to serve as sex slaves for the Japanese Imperial Army during the Pacific War. By investigating the 'common sense' and underlying assumptions that shape the language around the issues of apologies and compensation for former comfort women, [Park] explore[s] how 'male sexual needs' are imagined; who is rendered deserving of the state protection and who is not; who is dispensable and who is not. [Park] argue[s] that, unless we rigorously examine the language representing and interpreting this particular part of history, we end up reinscribing violent patriarchal assumptions, which made possible the practice of comfort women in the first place. In those instances, the apology can be the biggest insult to those women who silently bore the burden of their sexuality and their female bodies, which are by definition guilty according to Confucian thoughts, for half a century.

Keywords: comfort women, apology, Japanese imperialism, international politics, Asian women's fund, violence, expendability

Topics: Armed Conflict, Gender, Women, Masculinity/ies, Gender-Based Violence, Gendered Power Relations, Nationalism, Post-Conflict, Sexual Violence, Sexuality Regions: Asia, East Asia Countries: Japan

Year: 2000

Citation:

Ahmed, Afreen R. 2004. “The Shame of Hwang v. Japan: How the International Community Has Failed Asia's 'Comfort Women.'” Texas Journal of Women & the Law 14 (1): 1-121.

Author: Afreen R. Ahmed

Abstract:

In 1897, the Japanese intellectual Uchimura Kanzo wrote in an essay entitled "National Repentance," but it was not until 1937 that Japan began greatly expanding its officially sanctioned and closely regulated "comfort system" for the sexual gratification of the Japanese soldiers as they waged war throughout East Asia and the Pacific. The states parties to the treaty included some whose nationals had been enslaved as "comfort women" - Indonesia, the Netherlands, and the Philippines - but the treaty contained no mention of the victims of rape, forced prostitution, or sexual slavery. Japan has argued that during the war, neither slavery nor wartime rape was proscribed by conventional or customary international law. The sexual enslavement of the "comfort women" during World War II was, without a doubt, a violation of the customary international law regarding slavery and slavery-like practices. Documents subsequent to Hague IV confirm that rape and forced prostitution were considered violations of the customary international law of war. On the one hand, both Japanese and Allied military cultures regarded rape as an acceptable side effect of war; on the other hand, the post-war Asian cultures regarded the rape victim as socially unacceptable, partly to blame for her victimization, and nothing more than a source of shame.

Topics: Armed Conflict, Gender, Women, International Law, Livelihoods, Sexual Livelihoods, Sexual Violence, Rape, Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, Sexual Slavery, SV against Women Regions: Asia, East Asia Countries: Japan

Year: 2004

Citation:

Argibay, Carmen M. 2003. “Sexual Slavery and the ‘Comfort Women’ of World War II.” Berkeley Journal of International Law 21 (2): 375–89.

Author: Carmen M. Argibay

Topics: Armed Conflict, Gender, Women, Gender-Based Violence, International Law, International Criminal Law, Justice, International Tribunals & Special Courts, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militaries, Rights, Human Rights, Sexual Violence, Sexual Slavery, Sexuality Regions: Asia, East Asia Countries: Japan, North Korea, South Korea

Year: 2003

Citation:

Metzler, Mark. 2004. “Woman’s Place in Japan’s Great Depression: Reflections on the Moral Economy of Deflation.” The Journal of Japanese Studies 30 (2): 315–52.

Author: Mark Metzler

Abstract:

There is a characteristic moral economy of delflation, and it can be traced with clarity in teh case of Japan's long deflation of the 1920s. Deflation emerged as an issue in 1919 and reached an extreme in 1929 - 31, when the Hamaguchi Osachi cabinet adopted the depression-inducing policy of restoring the yen to gold convertability at its old prewar value. To support its deflation policy, the cabinet launched an extraordinary campaign to induce households to reduce their consumption. Consumption was a specifically gendered conception, and women's place as subjects and as objects of consumption became the symbolic center of a historic confrontation between orthodox "monetarist" and novel "Keysian" ideas.

Keywords: gender, women, economic development

Topics: Economies, Gender, Women, Governance Regions: Asia, East Asia Countries: Japan

Year: 2004

Citation:

Eto, Mikiko. 2008. “Vitalizing Democracy at the Grassroots: A Contribution of Post-War Women’s Movements in Japan.” East Asia Journal 25: 115–43.

Author: Mikiko Eto

Abstract:

The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the socio-political significance of women’s collective activities in Japan. I attempt to demonstrate that the Japanese women’s movements act as a role of democratic agency through their commitment to social reform and to changes in the political status quo. In the first three sections, I give an overview of Japanese women’s movements from the early post-war period to the present day, categorizing them into three types: the elite-initiated, second-wave feminist, and non-feminist participatory. Subsequently, I discuss the confrontation and reconciliation between feminists and non-feminists. In the final section, I examine what role the women’s movements play in socio-political reforms in terms of civil society discourse, and I conclude that the diversity of Japanese women’s movements has contributed to strengthening democracy at the grassroots.

Topics: Feminisms, Gender, Women, Political Participation Regions: Asia, East Asia Countries: Japan

Year: 2008

Citation:

Karlin, Jason G. 2002. “The Gender of Nationalism: Competing Masculinities in Meiji Japan.” Journal of Japanese Studies 28 (1): 41-77.,/span>

Author: Jason G. Karlin

Abstract:

This essay examines gender symbolism in competing representations of nationalism in Meiji Japan. Through an analysis of contesting images of masculinity, it reveals how questions of national identity were articulated in the idiom of gender. In response to the perceived threat of the feminization of culture represented by the intensification of consumption, fashion, and artifice, a vigorous masculinity asserted itself that rejected Western materialism and instead extolled notions of primitivism, national spirit, and imperialism. These two opposing representations of masculinity, a "masculinized" and "feminized" masculinity, each constituted differing responses to the problem of modernity.

Topics: Gender, Women, Men, Masculinity/ies, Femininity/ies, Nationalism Regions: Asia, East Asia Countries: Japan

Year: 2002

Citation:

Sancho, Neila, and Ronit Lentin. 1997. “The ‘Comfort Women’ System during World War II: Asian Women as Targets of Mass Rape and Sexual Slavery by Japan.” In Gender and Catastrophe, edited by Ronit Lentin, 144–54. London: Zed Books.

Authors: Neila Sancho, Ronit Lentin

Topics: Armed Conflict, Gender, Women, Gender-Based Violence, Security, Sexual Violence, Rape Regions: Asia, East Asia Countries: Japan

Year: 1997

Citation:

Hicks, George L. 1997. The Comfort Women: Japan’s Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Author: George L. Hicks

Abstract:

Over 100,000 women across Asia were victims of enforced prostitution by the Japanese Imperial Forces during World War II. Until as recently as 1993 the Japanese government continued to deny this shameful aspect of its wartime history. George Hicks's book is the only history in English regarding this terrible enslavement of women.

Topics: Armed Conflict, Gender, Women, Gender-Based Violence, Sexual Violence, Rape, Trafficking, Sex Trafficking Regions: Asia, East Asia Countries: Japan

Year: 1997