Sarah Soh's book The Comfort Women is a brave and ambitious undertaking that addresses the emotionally and politically charged issue of the comfort women—generally understood as women in different parts of Asia who were coerced into prostitution for the Japanese military in the 1930s and 1940s until the end of World War II. Most of the comfort women were recruited from Korea, a colony of Japan between 1910 and 1945. With the rise of the international redress movement in the 1990s, and recent global calls for the Japanese government to apologize to the comfort women (with resolutions adopted by the U.S. Congress and the European Parliament), the drive for historical accountability and compensation have further solidified a paradigmatic story of “sexual slavery.” Suggesting a more complex understanding of women's experiences that does not align with this story is like running headfirst into a minefield.
The Comfort Women seeks to do just this. The book sets out to analyze the historical and cultural contexts (what Soh calls “structural violence”) in both Japan and Korea that made the comfort system possible. It examines the divergent contexts in which women entered the comfort system, using their personal narratives. Furthermore, unlike most of the existing activist and academic work on comfort women, which takes women's testimonials as “truth” beyond examination, Soh critically looks at these “testimonial narratives” as they travel across national and global forums, as well as the campaigns that deploy these narratives.
The author draws on a broad spectrum of interview, archival, published, and ethnographic data from Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and the Netherlands to show convincingly that no singular definition of the comfort system could capture the diversity of conditions and experiences of the women. Rather than a homogenous system of slavery, Soh shows that there were different types of comfort stations and that slavery was not the only mode of control. The most coercive cases were mostly found during the final years of the war. Her findings also show that many of the comfort women initially left home both because of mistreatment of daughters, and the opportunities for “new women” in the modernizing drive of the colonized nation. The fact that most of them were lower-class women in Korea illuminates the convergence of colonial and military institutions with patriarchal cultures that disproportionately rendered poor women vulnerable to sexual exploitation. Soh labors to show, on the one hand, the misery and trauma that the women suffered both within the comfort system and from societal stigma after the war, and on the other, the women's agency in resisting gendered oppression, and, possibly most surprising to many, the human bond that some Korean women developed with some Japanese soldiers.
A unique contribution of The Comfort Women is tracing the genealogy of the controversy over comfort women within the political and social contexts of both Korea and Japan. Soh's review of the political symbolism of names variously used to refer to comfort women (“imperial gifts,” “cunts,” “sex slaves,” “grandmothers”) gives readers a good general understanding of the politics of the field. In showing how knowledge about comfort women had been circulating in both Japanese and Korean societies since the 1960s in the forms of memoirs, novellas, “adult movies,” and history textbooks, Soh both dispels the myth that no knowledge about comfort women existed before the 1990s, and shows how the redress movement took shape within particular national and global contexts (especially the global women's human rights movement) in the late 1980s. In particular, a careful analysis of the increasingly ubiquitous conflation of Voluntary Labor Corps (chŏngshindae) with comfort women (wianbu) in Korean activist discourses throws light on the feminist and ethnonationalist preoccupations of the redress movement in Korea.
It is unclear, however, whether Soh's analysis is helped by her borrowing of the term “public sex” (a term long used in gay studies) to refer to how poor women “customarily” have to answer male desires for “nonprocreative, recreational sex outside the matrimonial bed” (p. xii). It seems that for her purposes, “public-sex work” (p. 201) may better reflect her analysis of state-regulated prostitution, which she argues is not limited to the comfort system but also found with U.S. military and Japanese tourists in Korea. However, if Soh's critique here is of state regulation of sexuality, the focus on “public-sex work” may overshadow the extensive state control of women's sexuality in reproduction and marriage. If Soh's point is that sex should ideally be “private,” procreative, and marital, then she is reproducing the “feminine morality rooted in sexual purity and maternity” in nationalist discourse (p. 225). As her own critique suggests, it is for this feminine morality that comfort women and other “defiled women” are marginalized and silenced in Korean society.
Overall, this book is a valuable resource for anyone who is interested in the comfort women issue, Japanese and Korean societies, colonialism in Asia, as well as the transnational women's human rights movement. The appendix is particularly interesting for those who conduct research on controversial subjects as a native/expatriate ethnographer. Ultimately, readers will feel the challenge of going beyond a facile understanding of sexual violence, and the importance of examining the layers of state actions, nationalism, patriarchy, class, activist discourses, as well as human agency.
