Gender & History ISSN 0953-5233
Sachiyo Tsukamoto, ‘A More Miserable Life than Living in the Jungle: A Japanese ‘Comfort Woman’ Story’ Gender & History, Vol.0 No.0 November 2021, pp. 1–18.
A More Miserable Life than Living in the Jungle: A Japanese ‘Comfort Woman’ Story
Sachiyo Tsukamoto
ABSTRACT
This article analyses the recollection of a Japanese ‘comfort women’ survivor published in 1975. By ap- plying the analytical concept of gender and trauma, this study draws on the ‘politics of integrity’ theorised by Aurora Levins Morales (1998) as well as the theory of ‘coherence of the self’ proposed by Charlotte Linde (1993). The social, political and psychological analysis of her life story reveals the complexity of the politics of integrity in telling a story of trauma. It concludes how strongly her silent voice of trauma required societal acknowledgement of her sense of self to regain human integrity and dignity.
Introduction
On 26 April 1972, a forty-seven-year-old Japanese woman was found dead in her small apartment in Chiba prefecture, near Tokyo. Her death was attributed to self- induced carbon monoxide asphyxiation. She left behind only 870 yen, USD 2.80 at that time, and two suicide notes. Her birth name was Yamauchi Keiko (1924−72), but she was widely known by her geisha name, Kikumaru.1 In order to pay her poor
family’s debts back to her geisha house owner, this previous civilian prostitute spent two years between 1941 and 1943 working as a military prostitute at a Japanese naval ‘comfort station’ in Truk Island. She thus became one of the euphemistically called, ‘comfort woman’, the victims of the Japanese military sexual slavery system during the Asia-Pacific War (1931–45).
Kikumaru was among thirty-three ‘elite’ women on Truk Island who were allo- cated to a single officer per day. In fact, she was reserved for only a few officers during her entire time at the ‘comfort station’. Other women at the base were forced to serve numerous enlisted soldiers per day.2 Kikumaru’s positive memory of her expe- rience as an ‘elite’ ‘comfort woman’ was expressed in her interviews with the female journalist Hirota Kazuko in 1970 and 1971: ‘I had the best time of my life in Truk Island’.3 Yet, what led this ‘elite’ ‘comfort woman’ to her tragic death in misery? Hirota published a book about Kikumaru’s life history after her death. In 2016, I had a personal interview with Hirota about Kikumaru’s testimony. Hirota emphasised that the real hell for Kikumaru was her post-war life. Hirota’s finding lends support to Car- oline Norma’s analysis in her work: ‘Regardless of the pathway that led women into the wartime comfort stations – whether it was manipulation, abduction, or trafficking
© 2021 The Authors. Gender & History published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
out of civilian brothels – their health, welfare and life-course outcomes, irrespective of nationality, were depressingly the same’.4
Kikumaru’s final effort to be publicly recognised as a human being with integrity and dignity through her breaking of the silence was rejected by an inhumane patriar- chal society, hiding behind an externally imposed cloak of ‘national victimhood’. She was initially exploited as a ‘filial’ daughter by her family, then as a civilian prostitute by her society and, finally, as a military prostitute by the state. What post-war Japanese society brought her as a surviving ‘comfort woman’ was an endless and excruciating struggle against poverty and social humiliation, which continuously traumatised her. Kikumaru’s narrative of trauma tells two stories: ‘the story of the unbearable nature of an event; and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival’.5 The oscillating nature of trauma between life and death is signified by Kikumaru’s voice and silence in the struggle to connect with the inhumane society, which permanently silenced her voice. She was cremated on 29 April 1972, on Emperor Hirohito’s birthday.
In this article, I seek to construct Kikumaru’s narrative of trauma, informed by trauma theories. Applying the oral history method theorised by Lynn Abrams, this research analyses Kikumaru’s biography written by Hirota.6 Abrams categorised this type of biography as ‘the interpretation of the interview material’.7 In contrast, Kiku- maru’s personal note about her life on Truk Island and suicide note – both featured in Hirota’s book – are primary sources encapsulating her silenced voice.8 In order to supplement the limited sources of the survivor’s interview, my 2016 personal inter- view with Hirota in Tokyo is treated as ‘data’ for ‘evidence gathering’.9 In analysing Kikumaru’s voice and silence, I draw upon the theory of the self, developed by the anthropologist and linguist, Charlotte Linde.10 This study is also informed by the the- ory of the politics of integrity developed by the feminist poet, historian and activist, Aurora Levins Morales.11 Kikumaru’s narrative of trauma signifies the importance of the entire life history of individual victims of the sexual slavery system, even though some constructive accounts were included. Listening to the diverse experience of ev- ery victim allows us to find their silenced (inner) voices of trauma. This research will thus contribute to revealing the constant sufferings of all survivors of the sexual en- slavement, thereby recognising them as victims, regardless of their nationalities as well as whether they were civilian prostitutes either before or after becoming military prostitutes.
Japan’s post-war states’ revisionism and the conspiracy of silence
Trauma is a threat to the state because it can cause a feeling of ‘betrayal of trust’ against rulers among both individuals and communities, destroying social cohesion based on shared collective memories.12 Given that the normative nature of collec- tive memory is inextricably linked to the construction of social identity, the collective memory of trauma can undermine the legitimacy of hegemonic constructs of state and nation.13 The unbridgeable gap between the (pre)wartime and the post wartime was engraved on the entire Japanese society, where the Asia-Pacific War left collective war trauma. This all-out war resulted in the cataclysmic destruction caused by the drop- ping of two atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively, and witnessed the deaths of over 3.1 million Japanese, including 800,000 civilians.14 This catastrophic defeat was powerful enough to destroy the temporal coherence of the official narrative,
which depicted Japan as a single patriarchal family under the protection of their divine father – Emperor Hirohito.
The Japan–US complicity to erase Hirohito’s war responsibility as the Commander-in-Chief from popular memory emerged on 15 August 1945, when his recorded Imperial Rescript of Surrender (Gyokuon Ho¯so¯) was aired on the radio. The script portrayed Emperor Hirohito ‘as deliverer of peace, and a victim of war’.15 Ac- cordingly, it created the new post-war imperial myth, which allowed General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) to utilise the Em- peror as the engine to consolidate his people into Japan’s process of democratisation and demilitarisation.16 This fabrication of the continuity of the ‘peaceful’ imperial throne filled the gap between the (pre)wartime and the post-war Japanese collective identity, thereby silencing the individual and collective voices of war trauma. This sce- nario further imposed the new national narrative of war victimhood on the Japanese people from above, and thus released them from their sense of guilt about the ag- gressive war. Because Emperor Hirohito was not guilty, why should his loyal subjects consider themselves as responsible for perpetrating his war?17
The distorted history that portrayed Emperor Hirohito as the peace-loving symbol of the nation was consistently inscribed into the Japanese popular consciousness by the SCAP. Besides the Tokyo Trials (May 1946–April 1948) and the purge of Japan’s wartime political elites, the SCAP’s censorship banned discussion with respect to Em- peror Hirohito’s war responsibility, which further contributed to erasing any sense of guilt from Japan’s collective memory.18 When the United States occupation was completed in 1952, Hirohito’s war responsibility was neither a concern for him nor his government.19 Nevertheless, the Japanese government maintained the so-called ‘chrysanthemum taboo’, which implied that any debate regarding Emperor Hirohito’s war responsibility is a taboo issue within Japanese society.
As Judith Herman argues, ‘[s]ecrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line’ of defence to evade responsibility for his crime.20 She describes the perpetrator’s strat- egy:
If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her abso- lutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens. …the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it upon herself; and in any case it is time to forget the past and move on.21
Yael Danieli defines the perpetrator’s strategy of silencing as ‘the conspiracy of silence’ and describes the state’s conspiracy as the ‘[p]olitically dictated or officially sanctioned silence’.22 Danieli further expands the concept of conspiracy of silence to the silence forced on individuals by society, which utilises ‘indifference, avoidance, repression, and denial’ in order to stifle any potential individual voices of trauma.23
From an ethical and moral point of view, Japan’s ‘comfort women’ system is one of the most egregious war crimes in Japanese history along with the ‘Rape of Nanking’ in 1937. Nevertheless, the contentious issue did not emerge as an issue of women’s human rights until 1991, when the Korean silence-breaker Kim Hak-soon testified in public. In Japan, there was no secrecy about the war-time ‘comfort women’. Various memories about ‘comfort women’ were expressed in veterans’ memoires and told in the Japanese veteran’s associations, Senyu¯kai.24 In the mass media, the story of Ko- rean ‘comfort women’ was first told in 1947 by a Japanese veteran, Tamura Taijiro¯,
through his novel, Shunpu¯den [A Prostitute’s Story]. In 1973, a Japanese journalist, Senda Kako¯ published Ju¯gun Ianfu [Military Comfort Women]. In 1976, the Korean writer, Kim Il-myon published Tenno¯ no Guntai to Cho¯senjin Ianfu [The Emperor’s Army and the Korean Comfort Women]. Even Senda’s investigative report could not expand its readership beyond Japanese males, ‘most of whom were veterans’.25 More importantly, the gender-blind perspectives represented by these three male writers val- ued and legitimised the patriarchal nature signified by the system of ‘comfort women’. Thus, the state-societal complicity of silencing was historically woven into the fabric of modern Japan. As soon as Japan was defeated by the Allied Forces, the patriarchal social stigma deeply inscribed into prostituted women was attached to them as if the shame of the ‘father’ emperor had been passed on to his ‘daughters’.
A contested history of Japanese ‘comfort women’
Japan’s modernisation commenced in 1868, when the last Tokugawa Sho¯gun re- turned political power to the Meiji Emperor. Then, the western model of the state- licensed prostitution system was introduced into Japan along with a system of mili- tary conscription.26 The western state-licensed prostitution system was characterised by both the state registration of prostitutes and mandatory inspections of women in order to combat the spread of venereal disease.27 Through enacting a series of new regulations, the Meiji government established a system of licensed prostitution based on a French model and developed from the advice of British medical doctors.28 The Meiji government industrialised the prostitution trade by systemising female traffick- ing, business practices and profits through expanding forms of prostitutes from sho¯gi (brothel prostitutes) and geiko (geisha) to shakufu (bar maids).29 All three variations of such prostitutes were debt-bonded servants who were sold to these enterprises by their poor families. The indenture contract with brothel owners entailed selling not only sexual services to clients, but also conveyed the ownership of female personhood to brothel owners. In short, brothel owners traded women between brokers, traffickers and other brothel owners for the brothel owners’ benefit. On top of the enslavement, more debt was incurred to those females for their training, clothing and feeding, to be paid off over time. The recent literature argues that in order to establish the military brothel system, the state took advantage of the existing infrastructure and the logistics provided by the sex industry for civilians.30 In addition to these state-sanctioned prac- tices, the military preyed upon the vulnerability of these indentured prostitutes like Kikumaru who had no hope of paying off their families’ debts back to their brothel owners.31 Thus, countless state-sanctioned prostitutes were mobilised mostly to ‘com- fort stations’ overseas.
Thus, Japanese women were the first victims of the military sexual slavery system.32 The first military ‘comfort station’ was organised by the Japanese navy in Shanghai during the First Shanghai Incident in 1932, and the Japanese army followed suit, establishing its ‘comfort women’ system based on the navy model.33 Back in Japan, government-registered prostitutes became the main target for recruitment into ‘comfort stations’.34 Some Japanese survivors’ stories were published in the 1960s and 1970s, but none of them drew public attention and sympathy until Korean survivor Kim Hak-soon publicly testified in 1991.35 This lack of interest might be attributed to a socially internalised norm in Japanese society, as I see it, that proclaimed all ‘comfort
women’ were prostitutes who volunteered to work as such, in exchange for money.36 This monolithic representation of ‘comfort women’ as camp followers silenced the voices of all victims. Hak-soon’s breaking of the silence brought about a paradigm change in the representation of ‘comfort women’ from prostitutes to sex slaves; at the same time, her testimony stunned Japanese victims into complete silence.37 The only exception was Tanaka Tami (pseudonym, b.1928–present), who confessed in 1992 to Kawata Fumiko. The female journalist happened to pick up Tanaka’s call on a ‘com- fort women’ hotline.38
The coherent self in the politics of integrity
If the memory of an event is traumatic, recovering memory is difficult because nar- ratives of trauma are unspeakable. Judith Herman argues that ‘[t]he conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central di- alectic of psychological trauma’.39 This oscillating nature of trauma between silence and testimony makes it more complex to discover and identify the voices of trauma victims like Kikumaru. Her positive memory as an ‘elite’ ‘comfort woman’ uncovers the immense complexities of Japanese survivors’ voices. During the 1960s and the 1970s, Kikumaru and several other Japanese ‘comfort women’ survivors came for- ward in order to be recognised as victims. Their struggle to speak of their traumatised experiences manifests their recovery process from trauma, as modelled by Herman.40 Trauma is placed at the site of memory and identity construction, revealing power relations between individuals and collectives and/or the state. Linde, a sociolinguist, develops the theory of self-construction, contending that the goal of creating life-story narratives is ‘the creation of coherence’, that is, the establishment of temporal consis- tency of the self. A narrative about oneself is telling not only what happened in the past, but also ‘who we are and how we got that way’.41 In other words, the construction of narratives about one’s own life history is a self-formation process that deals with one’s past through the prism of the present self. According to Linde’s theory of the coherent self, this present understanding of her life is determined by three elements embedded within the self-formation process: ‘continuity of the self through time’; ‘relation of the self to others’; and ‘reflexivity of the self’.42 This public–personal interaction in Linde’s theory of the self helps to locate not only ‘the moral standing of the self and of the social world’, but also the ethical dilemmas in the interplay between the two.43 In order to acknowledge the coherent self, a trauma victim needs not only ‘to re- member the connections between the body, mind, and spirit and to re-integrate know- ing and feeling’, but also, she must re-establish the unity between the past self and the present self.44 In this vein, strong moral standing against the multi-layered ‘conspiracy of silence’ as theorised by Danieli is essential.45 The ‘politics of integrity’, as theo- rised by Morales, signifies the moral principle to create a coherent self. Here, integrity means the state of ‘being whole’ and the politics of integrity of ‘the full complexity of who we are’.46 Embracing this complex construction of the self is central to person- hood. The politics of integrity illuminates the significance of the integration not only between the body and soul, but also between the past self and the present self. For the traumatised, restoring her integrity is a process in which she recovers her humanness by recognising the fragmentation of the self by oppression and restoring her whole
self as a victim. The external world forces a traumatised victim to internalise the per- petrator’s shame and guilt into her inner self by making her feel mad, shamed and invisible through ‘indifference, avoidance, repression, and denial’, as Danieli notes.47 Consistent with this point, Kikumaru’s and other victims’ fragmented positive memo- ries have been (ab)used by the ‘comfort women’ deniers so as to justify their argument that ‘comfort women’ are prostitutes who made a lot of money.48 The politics of in- tegrity – the construction of the coherent self – is thus a pathway that enables the practice and theorisation of the contestation and transgression of the conspiracy of silence in order to reclaim the humanness of both individuals and collectives. This process is fundamental to restoring the fullness of humanity not only to individuals but also to society.49 Kikumaru’s narrative and attempts to overcome the conspiracy of silence in post-war Japan assist us in grasping how she situated herself within the politics of integrity.
Indentured prostitution
Kikumaru’s tragedy started at the age of ten, when she was sold to a geisha house to pay her family’s debt. Geisha venues exploited loopholes in recruiting girls under eigh- teen which was prohibited under Japan’s licensed prostitution system.50 In the 1930s, selling one’s daughter into prostitution by impoverished families was an accepted so- cial norm. As the first daughter, Kikumaru nurtured a strong sense of responsibility as a ‘filial’ daughter who sacrificed her life for the sake of her family, Oie no tame. Even though the filial daughter became a social stigma after being sold to brothels, the notion of self-sacrifice for family was useful to normalise the social practice of the daughter selling. Of importance here is that it concealed the patriarchal structure in which young females were regarded as the property of their fathers.
Under the state-sanctioned prostitution system, the police issued a prostitution license to a geisha apprentice at the time she began to menstruate, which for Kikumaru was at the age of fourteen.51 For her young body, the physical torment combined with the mental injuries caused by selling sex was unbearable. At the age of sixteen, she fled to the Salvation Army, which promoted the abolition of prostitution in Japan. Kikumaru sought refuge in the organisation. However, the predatory inden- tured contract did not free Kikumaru from her family’s mounting debts until she paid them off. Finally, Kikumaru jumped at what she believed would be a ‘golden’ opportunity in which the Japanese military paid back her family’s debts to her geisha house, under the condition that she worked as a ‘comfort woman’ for the Japanese military.52
When Kikumaru was aged seventeen, she drew upon the war propaganda expres- sion, Okuni no tame, ‘for the country’, to convince her parents that it was a good deci- sion to work at the naval ‘comfort station’ located on Truk Island.53 In wartime Japan, the patriarchal slogan, Oie no tame, ‘for the family’ was replaced by the nationalist term, ‘for the country’, which in fact, meant ‘for the emperor’. This nationalist war- time propaganda was used to recruit military prostitutes.54 However, Hirota did not believe that Kikumaru herself was persuaded by this nationalist appeal, although she used it to convince her parents. For Kikumaru, becoming a ‘comfort woman’ was her only chance to escape indentured prostitution. Hirota therefore concluded that Kiku- maru wanted something to justify her decision.55
Kikumaru was transported as a ‘special nurse’ to the navy ‘comfort station’ on Truk Island by a military ship and spent two years on the peaceful ‘Paradise of the South Seas’ before Japan entered into a total war against the Allied Forces.56 Stepping on the tropical island, Kikumaru felt a spiritual uplift as if she had come to another world’.57 Kikumaru said to Hirota, ‘If she died, her spirit will be enshrined at the Yasukuni Shrine along with the spirits of soldiers because she was a military civilian employee on Truk Island’. According to Hirota, this (mis)perception of Kikumaru’s status was what Kikumaru was proud of.58 Even though Kikumaru was a captive within the sys- tem of military sexual slavery, the military might make her life appear meaningful to the outside world, as a gendered patriotic national subject. However, Hirota found the fact that the military never registered any ‘comfort women’ as their employees. In post-war Japan, none of the ‘comfort women’ were enshrined in the war shrine nor granted a military pension by the government.
Reclaiming post-war life
After the war, when Kikumaru was freed not only from military sexual slavery but also from indentured captivity, she demonstrated her active agency in surviving post- war destitution. By frequently changing jobs, such as a factory worker, a dancer, an owner of a brothel for the Allied Occupation Forces and a dealer in the black market, she strove to reclaim control over her own life. Her survival, therefore, became an act of resistance against patriarchal domination, within the confines of patriarchy. Her active agency to build a life for herself furthered her rise to potential stardom. She passed an audition for a film company and was provided acting classes. However, she was arrested for selling some goods at a black market without knowing that they were stolen. She was placed on three years’ probation but lost her dream job.59
In the depths of despair, Kikumaru went back to her family in Kushiro, Hokkaido, where she worked for a Japanese restaurant as a high-ranking geisha who entertained customers solely by singing and dancing. There, she met a cook of the restaurant. He paid her debt back to her employer and they started to live together, even though they were not officially married. Then, he quit his job and started seeing other women, which prompted her to leave him. For Kikumaru, the cook was the first ‘intimate’ abuser in post-war Japan who financially exploited her.60 After leaving the ‘intimate’ abuser, Kikumaru was trapped by another abuser, who was described in her suicide note as ‘the worthless man’.
Kikumaru left two suicide notes. One note addressed to her close female friend, Konuma Sawako, briefly expressed her gratitude for Konuma’s friendship. Konuma had no clue why Kikumaru would commit suicide because Kikumaru shared none of her traumatised stories with Konuma.61 As Hirota recalled, Kikumaru might have felt unbridgeable gaps between those women who never sold their bodies.62 The other note was addressed to Hiratsuka Masao, a male editor of a publishing house, Tokuma Shoten, who had initially instructed Hirota to interview Kikumaru. This note was fraught with grievance toward her neighbours. There, Hirota found a different Kikumaru, who was far from the cheerful Kikumaru who had entertained her during her interview.63 The following text is Kikumaru’s suicide note as translated by the author:
It is okay for you and Mr Ino¯ to pay women for fun. But please don’t own those women because they feel so miserable that they will curse you for the rest of your life.64
As I live in grinding poverty, people stay away from me. When I come across other residents of my apartment outside, they look at me like a nuisance.
I am despised by my young neighbours. As long as they are alive, I will curse them. They are glib talkers. It might be better if I would be among them. But I am too good-natured, and it would be better than being greedy. It is getting dark today as usual.
The man who deceived me was 59 years old. Dribbling on, he had sex that outshone young people while I was thinking about other things. He hardly takes a bath so that sometimes his grime remains. Who can have a smile and have sex with him? He swallows the dribble from his false teeth. It’s disgusting to think about it. I am sorry to cause trouble to someone. My husband’s address is at Y industry, OO Town, OO Ward, Tokyo.
When I visited him, his toes looked like a crab due to neuralgia. When we slept together for the first time, he was sleeping in socks. His fingers looked like a crab. Good to match his toes. He is a dull man with a big penis. I want to see the wife who has been together with him for 10 years.
I would like to thank the staff of your publisher for everything.
I am very happy with my friend who allowed me to work at her restaurant without asking me any questions.
Goodbye
Until her suicide, Kikumaru had hidden her past out of fear of social stigmatisation for more than twenty-five years by changing her name whenever she switched jobs.65
However, she could no longer endure the deeply traumatic experiences, including the social stigmatisation and exclusion. Her suicide note was her desperate cry as a victim of trauma.
Kikumaru’s disengagement with ‘the worthless man’ during sex illustrates disso- ciation of her consciousness from her body. By ‘thinking about other things’ as she wrote, she repeatedly fragmented herself through the disengagement and the dissoci- ation process for the survival of her real self. Thus, sex with the abuser accelerates the dissociation between the body and soul of the abused.66 Accordingly, this survival strategy in prostitution sex destroys human integrity and dignity by facilitating self- segmentation. In other words, these psychological self-defence strategies destroy the connection ‘between the body, mind and spirit’.67 This disconnection results in ‘the divided self’, a condition in which one loses her unity and is torn apart from the real self.68 This divided self carries the risk of losing the self because losing one’s self for a long time causes alienation from the self and irresponsibility ‘to and for one’s self’.69 In the same vein, Kikumaru stopped her engagement in relating to the external world, as her suicide note states, ‘Since I decided to commit suicide, there have been times when I have felt like I cannot work anymore’. This implies her sense of resignation from her efforts to establish her integrity because of the long separation between her body, mind and spirit caused by the multiple dissociations that she went through until her suicide. Finally, she seemingly gave up on the reconnection with both society and herself because she said to the male editor in her suicide note, ‘Please write my post- war story however you want’. Therefore, based upon Kikumaru’s suicide note, I have further constructed her post-war story of trauma as follows.
The divided self
Kikumaru lost ownership of herself yet again, but there seemed no clear cause as an explanation for this when compared with the pre-war and war time. In her note, she described the brutality of her post-war life to both Mr. Hiratsuka and Mr Ino¯ as being: ‘so miserable that they [and she] will curse you [her owner] for the rest of your life’. This passage illustrates the separation between the past self and the present self which divided her self-identity. That is, Kikumaru was in the condition of the divided self, as represented by the split between her outer manifestations as a ‘nuisance’ in her community, and her inner self as ‘good-natured’, as she expressed in her suicide note.70 Her body was subjected to social humiliation and exclusion by her neighbours, owing to her dire poverty.
In her own eyes, Kikumaru was a better person than her neighbours, describing herself in her note as ‘better than greedy’. This moral standing of her inner self was in conflict with the external moral standards, which posed an unsolvable dilemma for her. As Hirota recognised, unlike her stigmatised body, Kikumaru was a proud human being who valued equal human relationships beyond social status. There were times in Kikumaru’s post-war life when she encountered former military officers whom she served on Truk Island, many of whom were promoted in various fields of the post- war society. However, her pride never allowed asking these former military officers for financial help.71 Her sense of pride was also evidenced by her openness, humour, friendliness and consideration in her efforts to make her interview with Hirota neither sad nor depressed.72
At the same time, as a proud human being, Kikumaru was not comfortable with the idea of concealing her past as a ‘comfort woman’.73 According to Kikumaru’s per- sonal note given to Hirota, she was allowing Hirota to write and publish Kikumaru’s story of her time on Truk Island, even though her former colleagues hid their past as ‘comfort women’ owing to a sense of humiliation.74 Kikumaru also allowed Hirota to publish her photographs in the magazine article, saying ‘it’s OK because I haven’t done anything wrong’.75 She consistently exerted herself to fulfil expectations of the social world that forced her to sacrifice herself for the family and the country. Her in- ner self was thus consistent throughout her life, whereas the external world suddenly changed its attitude toward her after Japan’s defeat. This coherence of her internal self, however, disallowed her to recognise and accept her outer manifestation that was stig- matised and excluded by society. In other words, her sense of pride as a self-sacrificial dutiful daughter and as a loyal national subject rejected the social stigmatisation that characterised her post-war life.
The disunity between her outer self and inner self intertwines with the inconsis- tency between her past self and her present self. On the one hand, she gradually be- came aware that the two years of her life on Truk Island as a military prostitute com- pletely ruined the rest of her life, which continued on for more than twenty years. On the other hand, she refused to admit it to herself because she also thought that her life on Truk Island was the only time during which she could bring meaning to her life for both herself and the social world. This separation between the positively remembered past self and the publicly humiliated present self is likely to have evoked a feeling of nostalgia for the past. Hirota assumed that this might be a reason why she was looking forward to Hirota’s visit. During the interview with Hirota, Kikumaru might have felt as if she had been reliving the best time in her life.76 In addition, she might have felt happy that her life story was listened to and recognised by others. The construction of the inner sense of self is relational and, thus, dependent upon relationships with others. Therefore, we need constant negotiation with the outside world for recogni- tion. This relational nature of self-identity construction causes tension in the moral standards between the inner self and the outer world, as shown by Kikumaru’s case. Her outer manifestation of carrying a social stigma reflected the ethical judgement imposed upon her life and inner self by the social world.
Kikumaru felt a sense of nostalgia for her days on Truk Island because of her privileges attached to her ‘elite’ status embedded within the ‘comfort women’ hier- archy. Kikumaru wrote in her memorandum: ‘all of a sudden I have been elevated into a high position’.77 She was provided with the same meals and treatment as the officers whom she served.78 In reality, the privileges were attached only to the officers, whereas she was still a sex slave. Some human relations created under a particular social structure during wartime also evoked pleasant memories of her life at the ‘com- fort station’.79 The military manipulated the feelings of Kikumaru and some other Japanese ‘comfort women’ who had previously suffered as indentured prostitutes through the war propaganda, Okuni no tame, ‘for the country’. More importantly, the wartime life-and-death situation provided an opportunity to develop human at- tachments that could have otherwise had never been evoked.80 For example, another Japanese survivor, Suzumoto Aya (pseudonym) also cherished the memory of her life on Truk Island exactly the same way Kikumaru did, even though she was allocated
to numerous Japanese privates as opposed to a few officers.81 As Hirota concludes, when a Japanese ‘comfort woman’ sexually served a soldier who was ordered to fight in the front line, she forgot that her body was bought by him.82 Her sympathy with the soldier released her from her long-standing sense of humiliation as a captive within the sexual slavery system and allowed her to share bona fide feelings with him. These human attachments enable the dehumanised victim in peace time to feel that she was treated as a human during wartime. As Kikumaru said, she ‘fell in love with all of the officers’ while sexually serving them one by one.83 She also felt sympathy for the soldiers who were destined to die for the emperor. It marked the first time in her life when she felt as if she were appreciated as an ‘equal’ in human relationships with others.
However, this type of human relation is a fiction since war is not a natural hu- man condition. War creates a particular situation in which people are divided into two sides: the abuser and the abused. This abusive relationship ‘does not make sense in the context of humanity’; therefore, we need an explanation in order to restore ‘our dignity’.84 Japan’s war was started by the state, which manipulated human emotions of the nation, including nationalism, in order to mobilise all women and men into it. This state manipulation of human feelings concealed the victim situation from Kiku- maru’s consciousness and encouraged her to engage in her ‘mission’ for the sake of the country. She said in her personal note, ‘With a surge of patriotism and youthful ebullience, I did my best for Japan and the emperor’.85
For any given state, the control of collective trauma is fundamental to perpetuat- ing its sustained national identity. This is articulated through the cultural processes of interpreting social suffering, which enables the state to manipulate the collective memory of trauma for purposes of statecraft.86 With Japan’s defeat, the state thus re- moved its righteous Okuni no tame calling to support the war from Kikumaru’s past and instead placed a social stigma back upon her body by redefining ‘comfort women’ as prostitutes. This is the usual trick that the perpetrator (state) utilises in order to si- lence the victim. By destroying the victim’s ‘credibility’, the perpetrator silences her voice and/or manipulates people into not listening to her voice.87 The perpetrator’s il- lusion and devaluation of his victim results in her doubting her own self as well as her internalising the sense of shame and guilt that, in reality, the perpetrator deserves. Re- sisting the forced internalisation of the state’s shame and guilt, Kikumaru fragmented herself, oscillating between her opposing inner voices. One was whispering that she was not worthy; the other inner voice was insisting that she was worthy and urged her to fight for survival. She listened to the latter voice and decided to restore her integrity by breaking her silence. It was unfortunate that Kikumaru jumped to the second stage of Herman’s recovery from trauma without establishing her sense of safety in the first stage.88
Kikumaru’s final effort: Breaking her silence
Kikumaru’s final effort to restore her human integrity and dignity that was fractured by social humiliation and political silencing was to break her silence, in the hopes of acquiring the public acknowledgement that she was a patriotic national subject on the same ‘footing’ as soldiers. Her breaking of the silence was thus an act of resistance against the abusive social and political world.
On 12 August 1971, Kikumaru’s testimonial narrative came out in an unsigned ar- ticle in a weekly men’s magazine, Asahi Geino¯.89 The five-page article was edited by a male anka¯man, based upon Hirota’s interview with Kikumaru.90 The article referred to little of Kikumaru’s plight as an indentured prostitute. Instead, most of the story reproduced her happy memory of her life on Truk Island, which portrayed her as a patriotic gendered subject. Further, her post-war predicament was offset in the article by her nostalgia for her life on Truk Island. The lack of critical gender perspectives in the Japanese media was explicitly demonstrated in an incident in the previous year. In October 1970, Japan’s first womens’ liberation movement (Wo¯man Libu in Japan) challenged Japan’s patriarchal power structure by criticising the male exploitation of female sexuality. The flyer entitled ‘Benjo karano kaiho¯’ [Liberation from toilets], written by the organiser, Tanaka Mitsu, denounced Japanese male invasion of female sexuality by mentioning Korean ‘comfort women’. Ko¯shu¯ Benjo, or public toilets, re- ferred to ‘comfort stations’ within the Imperial Japanese Military.91 This movement was the first critique of the ‘comfort women’ system by a Japanese feminist.92 How- ever, the patriarchal media marginalised this new women’s liberation movement by labelling it as ‘female hysteria’.93 Hysteria is a strongly gendered category implicat- ing the feminised form of traumatic neurosis as opposed to the masculinised form of post-traumatic stress disorder, such as shellshock.94 The first women’s collective voice of resistance against the patriarchal imperialist state of Japan was thus banished to si- lence by the male-dominated media conspiracy of silence. Accordingly, Kikuamru’s positive accounts at the ‘comfort station’ in the male magazine contributed to rein- forcing the patriarchal subordination of women to both men and the state. This reveals how this gendered dynamic is used to perpetuate the patriarchal nationalist history since ‘[h]istory is the story we tell ourselves about how the past explains our present, and how the way in which we tell it shaped by contemporary needs’.95 Kikumaru’s life history that appeared in the men’s magazine represented her as a self-sacrificing woman who provided important services for the war effort of the patriarchal mili- tarist state and, thus, perpetuated the ‘hegemonic masculinity’ of the Japanese Imperial Military.96
Soon after the magazine article was published in 1971, Kikumaru’s rent fell into ar- rears. Then, as her suicide note reveals, she encountered an even crueller reality of life as being treated like a ‘nuisance’ by her neighbours. Kikumaru regretted her breaking of the silence. She even blamed herself for coming forward as ‘stupid’ and confess- ing that ‘other [surviving “comfort”] women [in silence] were clever’. Hirota did not recognise Kikumaru’s suffering until she had read Kikumaru’s suicide note because Kikumaru never showed her any sign of psychological trauma except in the follow- ing one instance. It occurred three months before her suicide, when a Japanese former sergeant, Yokoi Sho¯ichi (b.1915–d.1997), was discovered in the jungle of Guam. The army straggler, hiding in the jungle for twenty-eight years, was caught on 24 January 1972 and, on 2 February, repatriated to Japan. On arriving in Japan, Yokoi immediately became a media sensation. Everything he did and said were ‘under public scrutiny’.97 Thus, public interest in the ‘back-to-the-future’ returnee drove the whole nation into the media frenzy in which ‘all kinds of publications’ contributed to Yokoi’s rise to stardom as the overnight national celebrity.98 Kikumaru vented her indignation at this national fever by saying to Hirota:
If Yokoi-san is a victim of war, I should be the same as well. There is no reason that the Health and Welfare Minister should grant money and clothing only to him. The minister said that Yokoi-san did it for the emperor. For the emperor? We went all the way to Truk Island because we were also told ‘for the emperor’. It’s regrettable. I want to go to the Ministry of Health and Welfare and tell them that because of my past as a ‘comfort woman’, I can’t get married, living like this instead. … I will tell them that there is a person who lives a more miserable life than living in the jungle.99
This ‘abusive language’ uttered by Kikumaru, flushed with indignation against the nation state, was shocking to Hirota.100 From Kikumaru’s perspective, the real war victim should have been her and not Yokoi. This was her first and last voice of trauma that Hirota ever heard in person.
In reality, the national enthusiasm to welcome Yokoi was much more complex than Kikumaru’s assumption. The belated return of the imperial soldier recalled the forgot- ten memory of the past war. He came, as a perpetrator, back to the current peaceful and prosperous Japan, where people enjoyed economic success.101 With the full re- construction from the debris and rubble after the defeat in 1945, Japan made its debut into the international community through the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 and Expo ’70 in Osaka. At the height of this public ‘optimism’ for the future, the re-emergence of a ‘living fallen hero’ of the Imperial Japanese Army created a shock wave across the nation.102 The media was required to create explanations to ‘make sense’ of his presence in the flourishing Japan, which meant finding ‘the place of the past in the present’.103 Where the media placed Yokoi was not as a soldier-hero but as a ‘victim of circumstances or of an evil military’, which perfectly fit Japan’s new national narra- tive of war victims.104 This ‘media’s complicity with official discourse’ in the conspir- acy of silence stole the opportunity to reconsider Japan’s post-war national identity of war victimhood.105 This opportunity was stolen equally from both the wartime and the post-war generations. Thus, victim consciousness remained intact.
Kikumaru still could not figure out why post-war Japanese society had excluded the surviving ‘comfort women’ from its new collective identity as the victim of war. She also had not recognised that this imperial revisionism did not ‘democratise’ all Japanese people as war victims equally and instantly.106 Even Japanese hibakusha, or atomic bomb survivors, had undergone multi-layered discrimination, stigmatisation and exclusion until finally their torments were publicly recognised a decade later.107 From 1945 through 1952, the SCAP press censorship that included the ban on the use of the term, ‘atomic bomb’ forced the nation to forget hibakusha, while silencing their sufferings.108 Those silenced victims were kept stigmatised and excluded through la- belling them as people with ‘lazy people’s disease (o¯chaku byo¯)’ and having offspring deformation.109 The Lucky Dragon Incident on 1 March 1954 ‘fired anti-nuclear ac- tivism’ in Japan and around the globe, opening a door for formal adoption of the term, hibakusha in 1957.110
However, Japanese ‘comfort women’ survivors have not been allowed to be part of the victimhood society, even in the present. This is still the case even with opportu- nities to reflect the war of the past, including the TBS (Tokyo Broadcasting System) radio interview with another ‘comfort women’ survivor, Shirota Suzuko, in 1986, Kim Hak-soon’s breaking of silence in 1991 and even a possible opportunity upon the death of Emperor Hirohito in 1989.111 In 1972, this societal hypocrisy devastated Kikumaru and led her to admit to herself not only that her present miserable self was caused by
her past self as a ‘comfort woman’, but also that her real sense of self could never be recognised by the external world.
Conclusion
Kikumaru’s life history attests to the military state’s sexual exploitation of a girl from a poor family. What post-war Japan brought her as a surviving ‘comfort woman’ was an endless and excruciating struggle against poverty and social humiliation, which provided the basis of her traumatised experience. The two years of her life on Truk Island as a military prostitute completely ruined the rest of her life, which lasted more than twenty years. Because of this, it is all the more painful and ironic that she believed her happiest time in life was when she worked as a military sex slave.
As Norma emphasises, whether they were manipulated, abducted or trafficked from civilian brothels, ‘comfort women’ survivors’ ‘health, welfare and life-course outcomes, irrespective of nationality, were depressingly the same’.112 Kikumaru’s life story tells us the significance of considering victims’ lives in their entirety instead of looking at their fragmented stories. Listening to the memories about the diverse expe- riences of Japanese ‘comfort woman’ survivors, whether those experiences were pos- itive or negative will help further our understanding of their sufferings. At the same time, it will lead to uncovering the sufferings of all ‘comfort women’ who have si- lenced their voice particularly because some women, regardless of their nationalities, were civilian prostitutes either prior or subsequent to becoming ‘comfort women’.113
Kikumaru’s oscillation between voice and silence discloses the complexity of the politics of integrity in telling a story of trauma. Recovery from trauma requires a trauma victim to construct a coherent life story which connects the present self to the past self, thereby creating her new identity, such as a victim-survivor. However, this new self-identity needs public recognition through the presence of individual lis- teners to her narrative. This intimate community, composed of both the narrator and the listener, is integral to her reconnection to society, which enables the reconstruction of her coherent self. Kikumaru’s voice reveals how significant it was to have societal acknowledgement of her sense of self for regaining human integrity and dignity. At the same time, her silenced voice raises fundamental questions about Japanese society.
Borrowing from the Japanese feminist philosopher, Midori Igeta, those questions are: ‘Are you a human who acknowledges inhumane acts inflicted upon “comfort women” survivors and then responds to their voices?’ ‘Can I trust this society con- sisting of you, humans?’ This inhumane relationship based on deafness and blind- ness to the abused is deeply connected to the patriarchal militarist state–society relationships.114 Here are profound issues concerning the politics of integrity of Japan as a nation state. The Japanese state and society exploited and dehumanised Kiku- maru throughout her life; however, when she tried to trust the abusive society through her breaking of silence, it rejected listening to her voice. This indicates rejection of individual and collective reflection within the government and society about the rela- tionships between the past war and the present Japan. This serious lack of the sense of integrity in the post-war construction of individual and collective social and politico- historical identities mark a stark contrast to Kikumaru’s efforts to restore her sense of integrity. Her last word to the editor, ‘Please write my post-war story however you want’ raises a fundamental question: Did she abandon reconstructing the coherent
self? Or, did she assert herself in suicide, whereby she protected her sense of integrity? Unlike Kikumaru, many other Japanese have shared victimhood consciousness and ap- preciated the democracy imposed from above whereby they have been assimilated into the self-less collectiveness that has never raised the issue of integrity.
Acknowledgements
I would like to dedicate this article to the memory of Kazuko Hirota. This article is part of my PhD thesis, and I am grateful to my supervisors, Professor Victoria Haskins and Dr Sara C. Motta of the University of Newcastle, Australia, for their continuous support and advice. I also thank my editor, Professor Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, for her mentorship. The research for this article was funded by the University of Newcastle.
Notes
The name order of all Japanese and Korean persons follows their traditional pattern; that is, the surname precedes the given name.
See Yoshiaki Yoshimi, Ju¯gun Ianfu (Tokyo: Iwanami Shinsho, 1995); its English version, Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military during World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
Kazuko Hirota, Sho¯gen Kiroku Ju¯gun Ianfu/Kangofu: Senjo¯ ni Ikita Onna no Do¯koku (Tokyo: Shin Jin- butsu O¯ raisha, 2009), p. 47. This book was originally published in 1975.
Caroline Norma, The Japanese Comfort Women and Sexual Slavery During the China and Pacific Wars
(New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), p. 3.
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narratives, and History (Baltimore: John Hopkins Uni- versity Press, 1996), p. 7.
Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (London: Routledge, 2010).
Abrams, Oral History Theory, p. 9.
Hirota, Sho¯gen Kiroku, pp. 16–18; pp. 35–45.
Abrams, Oral History Theory, p. 15. The interview is translated by the author.
Charlotte Linde, Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Aurora Levins Morales, Medicine Stories: History, Culture and the Politics of Integrity (Cambridge: South End Press, 1998).
Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Dario Páez, Nekane Basabe and Jose Lius Gonzalez, ‘Social Processes and Collective Memory: A Cross- Cultural Approach to Remembering Political Events’, in J. Pennebaker, D. Páez and B. Rimé (eds), Collective Memory of Political Events: Social Psychological Perspectives (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997), pp. 147–75.
Philip Seaton, Japan’s Contested War Memories: The ‘Memory Rifts’ in Historical Consciousness of World War II (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 38.
Rikki Kersten, ‘Revisionism, Reaction and the “Symbol Emperor” in Post-war Japan’, Japan Forum 15 (2003), pp. 15–31, here p. 19.
See Igarashi Yoshikuni, Bodies of Memory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Seaton, Japan’s Contested War Memories; James J. Orr, The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001); Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2000); John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1999).
Bix, Hirohito; Dower, Embracing Defeat.
The Cold War context facilitated what Dower calls the ‘reverse course’, applied by the US government. The US withdrew from their original policy of Japanese demilitarisation and democratisation and returned the once-purged politicians and bureaucrats to governmental positions (Dower, Embracing Defeat). Orr, The Victim as Hero, p. 1931.
Orr, The Victim as Hero, p. 34.
Judith L. Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992), p. 8.
Herman, Trauma and Recovery, p. 8.
Yael Danieli (ed.), International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma (New York: Plenum Press, 1998), p. 680.
Danieli, International Handbook, p. 4.
Kinoshita Naoko, ‘Ianfu’ Mondai no Gensetsu Ku¯kan: Nihonjin ‘Ianfu’ no Fukashika to Genzen (Tokyo:
Bensei Shuppan, 2016), p. 43.
Senda Kako¯, Zoku Ju¯gun Ianfu 2 (Tokyo: Ko¯dansha, 1992), p. 52.
Yuki Fujime, Sei no Rekishigaku: Ko¯sho¯ Seido, Dataizai Taisei kara Baishun Boshiho¯, Yu¯sei Hogo Taisei e (Tokyo: Fuji shipman, 1997), p. 88. Akira Fujiwara, ‘Tenno¯ no Guntai no Tokushoku: Gyakusatsu to Seiboryoku no Genin’, in E. Ikeda and A. O¯ goshi (eds), Kagai no Seishinko¯zo¯ to Sengosekinin (Tokyo: Ryokufu Shuppan, 2000), pp. 20–43, here p. 21.
Fujime, Sei no Rekishigaku, p. 87.
Fujime, Sei no Rekishigaku, pp. 51–6; pp. 89–90.
Norma, The Japanese Comfort Women, p. 64.
Norma, The Japanese Comfort Women, p. 80.
Rumiko Nishino, Akane Onozawa and VAWWRAC (eds.), Nihonjin ‘Ianfu’: Aikokushin to Jinshin Baibai to (Tokyo: Gendai Shokan, 2015), p. 26.
Nishino et al. Nihonjin ‘Ianfu’: Caroline Norma, The Japanese Comfort Women.
Yoshimi, Jugun Ianfu, p. 14; Comfort Women, p. 43.
Nishino et al., Nihonjin ‘Ianfu’. However, there are testimonies and witnesses noting that there were cases in which non-prostitutes were also sent to military brothels. For examples, see Yoshimi, Ju¯gun Ianfu, p. 91, Yoshimi, Comfort Women, p. 103 and Nishino et al., Nihonjin ‘Ianfu’, pp. 22–3; pp. 220–22.
See Yoshimi, Jugun Ianfu and Comfort Women; Chunghee Sarah Soh, The Comfort Women: Sexual Vi- olence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); George Hicks, The Comfort Women: Sex Slaves of the Japanese Imperial Forces (NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1995) and The Comfort Women: Japan’s Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995); David Andrew Schmid, Ianfu – The Comfort Women of The Japanese Imperial Army of The Pacific War: Broken Silence (New York: Lewiston, 2000); Yuki Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during World War II and the US Oc- cupation (New York: Routledge, 2001); Margaret D. Stez and Bonnie B. C. Oh, Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War II (Watertown: Eastgate Publishing, 2001); Chizuko Ueno, Nationalism and Gender (Melbourne: Trams Pacific Press, 2004); and Maki Kimura, Unfolding the ‘Comfort Women’ Debates: Modernity, Violence, Women’s Voices (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Kanko Ianjo (Tokyo: Tosho Shuppansha, 1983) by Kenichi Nagasawa, a military doctor who worked at a Japanese ‘comfort station’ in Hankou, China between 1940 and 1945, claimed that most ‘comfort women’ were converts from civilian prostitutes (p. 65). His book also mentioned that they paid back their debts quickly and further saved JPY 30,000 in a bank (p. 64). According to him, the money was equivalent to JPY 4 million in the1980s.
The 1996 United Nations Report submitted by Special Rapporteur, Ms. Radhika Coomaraswamy, con- cluded that the Japanese military ‘comfort women’ system was sexual slavery. Further, in 1998, the UN Report presented by Gay McDougall, Special Rapporteur to the UN Sub-Commission, pointed out that sexual slavery and violence against women, including rape, are crimes against humanity and must be prosecuted.
Fumiko Kawata, ‘Nihonjin “Ianfu” Tanaka Tami san no Shogen’, Shukan Kinyobi 1019 (2014), pp. 28–
31. Like many other Japanese victims, Tanaka was a civilian prostitute prior to becoming a military prostitute.
Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992), p. 1.
Herman, Trauma and Recovery.
Linde, Life Stories, p. 3.
Linde, Life Stories, p. 100.
Linde, Life Stories, p. 123.
Susan D. Rose, ‘Naming and Claiming: The Integration of Traumatic Experience and the Reconstruction of Self in Survivors’ Stories of Sexual Abuse’, in K. L. Rogers, S. Leydesdorff, and G. Dawson (eds), Trauma and Life Stories: International Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 160–79; here
p. 171.
Danieli, International Handbook.
Morales, Medicine Stories, p. 7.
Danieli, International Handbook, p. 4.
See the recent controversial article, ‘Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War’, written by Harvard Uni- versity’s Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Law Studies, J. Mark Ramseyer, for the International Review
of Law and Economics. His main arguments are first, “prostitutes at the comfort stations earned much higher pay” (2021, p. 6) and second, prostitutes could leave and return home earlier after they paid off their debts (2021, p. 6 and p. 8).
Morales, Medicine Stories.
The International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children (1921) stipulated the “under 21 rule” as follows: “(1) any woman under the age of 21 cannot be solicited to engage in prostitution even if she herself agrees; and (2) any woman aged 21 or older cannot be persuaded to engage in prostitution through deceptive or compulsory means” (Akane Onozawa, ‘The Two Sexual Slavery Systems: “Comfort Women” under the Japanese Military and Licensed Prostitution’, in J. Tomás and
N. Epple (eds), Sexuality, Oppression and Human Rights (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2017), pp. 153–62.
Hirota, Sho¯gen Kiroku, p. 90.
Hirota, Sho¯gen Kiroku, p. 36; pp. 78–94.
Hirota, Sho¯gen Kiroku, p. 25.
Hirota, Sho¯gen Kiroku, p. 59.
Interview: Hirota, 2016.
Hirota, Sho¯gen Kiroku, p. 33.
Hirota, Sho¯gen Kiroku, p. 31.
Hirota, Sho¯gen Kiroku, p. 33.
Hirota, Sho¯gen Kiroku, pp. 124–45.
Hirota, Shogen Kiroku, pp. 149–53.
Hirota, Sho¯gen Kiroku, p. 19.
Hirota, Sho¯gen Kiroku, p. 161.
Hirota, Sho¯gen Kiroku, p. 14.
He was a writer who interviewed Kikumaru (Hirota, Sho¯gen Kiroku, p.17).
Hirota, Sho¯gen Kiroku, p. 19.
Kathleen Barry, The Prostitution of Sexuality (New York: New York University Press, 1995), pp. 317–18.
Rose, ‘Naming and Claiming’, p. 171.
Robert D. Laing, The Divided Self: A Study of Sanity and Madness (London: Tavistock Publications, 1960).
Rose, ‘Naming and Claiming’, p. 170, emphasis in original.
Laing, The Divided Self.
Interview: Hirota, 2016.
Hirota, Sho¯gen Kiroku, pp. 14–15.
Hirota, Sho¯gen Kiroku, p. 160.
Hirota, Sho¯gen Kiroku, p. 36.
Hirota, Sho¯gen Kiroku, p. 14.
Hirota, Sho¯gen Kiroku, p. 160.
Hirota, Sho¯gen Kiroku, p. 38.
Hirota, Sho¯gen Kiroku, pp. 33–4.
Interview: Hirota, 2016.
Interview: Hirota, 2016.
Hirota, Sho¯gen Kiroku, pp. 58–68.
Hirota, Sho¯gen Kiroku, p. 46.
Hirota, Sho¯gen Kiroku, p. 46.
Morales, Medicine Stories, p. 4.
Hirota, Sho¯gen Kiroku, p. 36.
Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Herman, Trauma and Recovery, p. 8.
Herman, Trauma and Recovery.
The tittle of the article was “Senjo no geisha Kikumaru ga 26 nen meni akasu Haran no Jinsei [Her sensational life at a battlefield that geisha Kikumaru revealed 26 years after the end of WWII].
According to Hirota (Interview 2016), the anka¯man refers to the journalist who writes and completes a magazine article based on what reporters collected. Hirota was one such reporter (Interview: Hirota, 2016).
A discourse employing an obscene and degrading metaphor of ‘comfort women’ as public toilets was mentioned by Tetsuo Aso¯, a military medical doctor. The architect of the legal and regulatory framework for the operation of the ‘comfort women’ system made references in his reports to military ‘comfort
stations’ as hygienic public toilets (Nishino Rumiko, Ju¯gun ianfu: Motoheishi no Sho¯gen (Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 1992), p. 43.
Kinoshita, ‘Ianfu’ mondai, p. 119.
Tsukamoto Sachiyo, ‘Beyond the Dichotomy of Prostitutes versus Sex Slaves: Transnational Feminist Activism of “Comfort Women’ in South Korea and Japan’, in C. Pension-Bird and E. Vickers (eds), Gender and the Second World War: Lessons of War (London: Palgrave, 2017), pp. 185–99, here p. 189.
Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis (Ba- sic Books, 2000), p. 128 as cited in Victoria Stewart, Women’s Autobiography: War and Trauma (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 8.
Morales, Medicine Stories, p. 24.
R. W. Connell’s concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ (Connell, 1995) theorises a particular form of mas- culinity that achieves the governing position in the hierarchy of masculinity. Hegemonic masculinity maintains its dominant position by legitimising patriarchal structures and practices such as the exclusion of all that is feminised and all who are feminised from the public/political sphere. See R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995) and R. W. Connell and J. W. Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept’, Gender & Society 19 (2005), pp. 829–59.
Igarashi Yoshikuni, Homecomings: The Belated Return of Japan’s Lost Soldiers (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), p. 12.
Beatrice Trefalt, Japanese Army Stragglers and Memories of the War in Japan, 1950–1975 (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 11–12.
Hirota, Sho¯gen Kiroku, pp. 105–6.
Hirota, Sho¯gen Kiroku, p. 105.
See Igarashi, Homecoming, Chapter 5; Trefalt, Japanese Army Stragglers; and Bruce Suttmeier, ‘Spec- ulation of Murder: Ghostly Dreams, Poisonous Frogs and the Case of Yokoi Sho¯ichi’, in N. Cornyetz and K. J. Vincent (eds), Perversion and Modern Japan: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Culture (New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 22–38.
Igarashi, Homecoming, p. 162.
Treflt, Japanese Army Stragglers, p. 115.
Treflt, Japanese Army Stragglers, p. 118.
Igarashi, Homecoming, p. 8.
Imperial Rescript of Surrender was Hirohito’s direct announcement to his subjects and its purpose was to maintain his status by silencing their criticism of his handling of the war as the commander-in-chief. For this end, he represented himself as the saviour of the nation who made the painful decision to surrender for the sake of his subjects.
As for non-Japanese hibakusha, mainly Koreans who were brought to Japan as forced labourers, see Seaton, Japan’s Contested War Memories, p. 103.
Elizabeth Chappell, ‘Hibakusha Memories: Between the Generations’, Wasafiri 35 (2020), pp. 79–86, here p. 81. https://doi.org/10.1080/02690055.2020.1721143
Chappell, ‘Hibakusha Memories’, p. 81.
Seaton, Japan’s Contested War Memories, p. 46; Chappell, ‘Hibakusha Memories’, p. 82.
Shirota Suzuko, ‘Ishi no Sakebi: Aru Ju¯gun Ianfu no Sakebi’ on TBS Radio in Tokyo on 19 January 1986. Shirota testified the life-or-death battle that she barely survived in Palau.
Norma, The Japanese Comfort Women, p. 3.
Katharine H. S. Moon, ‘South Korean Movements against Militarized Sexual Labor’, Asian Survey 39 (1999), pp. 310–27.
Aiko O¯ goshi and Midori Igeta (eds), Gendai Feminizumu no Eshikkusu (Tokyo: Seikyusha, 2010), p. 82.
Sachiyo Tsukamoto was awarded a PhD in politics from University of Newcastle (Australia) in 2019. Currently, she is an Honorary Associate Lecturer for the univer- sity, specialising in gender, war memory/history/trauma, and sexual violence. Her lat- est publication is co-authored with Sara C. Motta, ‘The Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace: Pedagogies of Possibility of Social and Historical Justice for “Comfort Women”’ in Kathy Sanford et al (eds), Feminist Critique and the Museum: Educating for a Critical Consciousness (Leiden: Brill, 2020).
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