Speaker: Jae-jung Suh, Politics, 国際基督教大学 (International Christian University)

Abstract: »This paper develops a genealogy of “comfort women” discourses in Northeast Asia to highlight a contradictory transnational nature of the history problem. When Kim Hak-Sun, a former “comfort woman,” spoke about her experiences in public in 1991, she helped break the inter-state silence over colonialism maintained since the end of the Asia Pacific War. Her “coming out,” a culmination of indirect dialogues among scholars and activists across national borders, set off two opposite and competitive transnational processes in Northeast Asia and the world. On the one hand, transnational interdependence of regionalist forces has grown that endeavor to increase the legitimacy of each other and promote overlapping frameworks of meaning anchored to individual rights and regional peace. On the other hand, antagonistic transnational interdependence of nationalist forces has evolved whereby nationalist forces in each nation prey upon the existence of their counterparts in the other to legitimize their presence and to promote antagonistic frameworks of meanings centered on national honor. Drawing on primary sources in Korean and Japanese, the paper focuses on the rise of the opposite transnational discourses in Japan and South Korea since the 1990s to analyze the mechanism that shapes their relationship caught between strengthening a regional public sphere and fracturing it into contentious nationalist spheres.« (Source: Online Program)

Wikipedia: History of Asia: History of Japan / Shōwa era | History of Asia: History of Korea / Korea under Japanese rule | 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