Speaker: Royce Novak, Department of History, Kenyon College - Academia.edu

Abstract: »The history of the “comfort women” system in Vietnam is obscure relative to most other parts of Asia, and historical memory of Vietnamese comfort women is more-or-less non-existent. This paper unpacks political economic factors as to why a collective memory of this traumatic history never developed. This paper explores three factors that have complicated the emergence of survivors’ testimonies since 1945: continuous warfare and revolution in Vietnam through 1975, various and often competing nationalist narratives active during that time period, and Vietnam-Japan trade relations from 1975 to the present. The paper explores each of these points largely through archival documents and datasets relating to foreign trade using a large digital whiteboard to illustrate for the audience the multidirectional and complex relationships among these factors. The presentation concludes by identifying spaces within which a public memory of Vietnamese comfort women may emerge. As Rin Ushiyama (2021) has noted the importance of comfort women memorials for Asian diaspora communities to “recover and reclaim a traumatic past,” this paper highlights the potential of the Vietnamese diaspora, whose political activity is not circumscribed by the Vietnamese government and often intersects with other social justice-oriented Asian diasporic movements, as a space for the production of memory of Vietnamese comfort women. While this approach cannot remove the political economic and geopolitical barriers to the emergence of a public memory of Vietnamese comfort women, identifying such barriers is an important step towards creating new spaces for the production of this critical memory.« (Source: Online Program)

Wikipedia: History of Asia: History of Japan / Shōwa era | History of Asia: History of Vietnam / Japanese invasion of 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