Author: Royce Novak , Department of History, Kenyon College

Abstract: »Vietnam has long eluded the geography of comfort women studies, yet its status as the first Southeast Asian territory and the first European colony occupied by Japan makes it a vital missing link in understanding how the comfort women system was adapted to Southeast Asian contexts. Drawing on French and Dutch colonial archival materials, this article presents the first documentary evidence of the comfort women system in Vietnam, using an empirical approach to construct a chronology of the establishment and development of the system there. Providing a detailed chronology outlining how the system developed in Vietnam offers a point of comparison for understanding how the system developed in other territories occupied by the Japanese Empire. Furthermore, this article employs the analytical frames of race and gender, unpacking how the Japanese Empire's racial ideology and gender norms shaped, and were shaped by, the development of the comfort women system in a Southeast Asian context. This investigation of the comfort women system in Vietnam thus provides a framework for better understanding its subsequent implementation and development in Japanese-occupied Southeast Asia while calling attention to wartime atrocities in Vietnam that have gone largely unnoticed in historical scholarship and public memory.« (Source: Journal of Asian Studies)

Contents:

	Abstract (p. 619)
	Japanese Communities in Prewar French Indochina (p. 622)
	Historical Overview of the Comfort Women System (p. 624)
	Japanese Forces in Indochina (p. 624)
	Japanese Military Sexual Violence in Vietnam (p. 626)
	The Contours of the Comfort Women System in Vietnam (p. 627)
		Phase 1: Japanese Soldiers and the Private Sex Industry (September–December 1940) (p. 627)
		Phase 2: Military Involvement in the Private Sex Industry (January–August 1941) (p. 628)
		Phase 3: Full Implementation of the Comfort Women System (August–December 1941) (p. 631)
		Phase 4: Trafficking Vietnamese Comfort Women to Foreign Shores (January 1942–August 1945) (p. 634)
	The Japanese Empire’s Ethnic Hierarchy and Gender in Southeast Asia (p. 635)
	Conclusion: New Directions in Comfort Women Studies (p. 637)
	Acknowledgments (p. 639)
	Notes (p. 639)
	Works Cited (p. 643)
		Archival Sources (p. 643)
		Secondary Sources (p. 644)

Lecture: Novak, Royce. »In Search of Vietnam's "Comfort Women": Archival Methodologies and Preliminary Analysis on Uncharted Territory in Japan's System of Military Sexual Slavery.« Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies. Virtual 2021. - Bibliographic Entry: Info

Wikipedia: History of Asia: History of Japan / Shōwa era | History of Asia: History of Vietnam / French Indochina | Prostitution: Forced prostitution / Comfort women | Sex and the law: Wartime sexual violence / Wartime sexual violence in World War II | War: Pacific War / Japanese war crimes