"Trostfrauen", "Comfort Women"
The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 15 | Issue 21 | Number 3 | Nov 01, 2017
Mit freundlicher Erlaubnis von Japan Focus


Overcoming Double Erasure: Japanese “comfort women”, nationalism and trafficking.

Morita Seiya
translated by Caroline Norma

"Women of Japanese nationality have been erased in relation to the history of the wartime 'comfort women’. For many decades after the war the existence of military ‘comfort women’ as a whole was ignored, and Japanese women, too, were ignored, at least in respect of their status as victims of wartime sexual violence. As we know, this deadlock over the history of the so-called comfort women was broken in the 1990s by survivors publicly testifying about their experiences, specifically those from North and South Korea. These women spoke widely about their experience of violence and abuse at the hands of the Japanese military,