Speaker: Amy Stanley, Department of History, Northwestern University - Speaker's Personal Website, Wikipedia

Abstract: »Contrary to popular perception, the “comfort woman issue” did not emerge into public consciousness in the early 1990s. Rather, as scholars such as Kimura Kan and Sarah Soh have demonstrated, Japanese journalists, memoirists, novelists, and filmmakers addressed the topic decades before the first survivors came forward to testify. But much less work has been done on English-language popular discourse before the 1990s. What did the British and American public know, and when did they know it? This presentation discusses how and why “comfort girls” were discussed in English-language media during and immediately after World War II. Before the summer of 1944, most English-language references to the ianjo system appeared in Chinese publications and Allied intelligence reports, and they described “prostitutes” and “brothels.” This changed when a Japanese-American intelligence officer and former journalist, Alex Yorichi, composed a famous interrogation report of twenty women and two station masters who were captured in Myitkyina, Burma. After the report, the issue gained much more salience. This presentation discusses the circumstances of the report, which probably contained the first translation of ianfu as “comfort girls,” and examines how the issues it raised were picked up in propaganda and newspaper reports in the last year of the war and in its immediate aftermath.« (Source: Online Program)

Wikipedia: History of Asia: History of Japan / Shōwa era | History of Europe: History of England | History of the Americas: History of the United States / History of the United States (1917–1945) | 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