Emotions in the making: sexual violence in the Japanese empire, 1937–1945

ABSTRACT

This article applies the history of emotions lens to study the emotions experienced by the ‘comfort women’ in the Japanese Empire. Emotions have been a long-neglected aspect in the study of military sexual violence. The article examines how a mélange of positive and negative emotions enabled those women to exercise some limited agency in a confined and tightly regulated space and, in some rare cases, a rather fair degree of autonomy outside of the confined space. By unravelling the varied textures of interactions between sexual violence and emotions, I argue that affective attachment and intimate relations developed in the confined sites of sexual exploitation formed a kind of strategic intimacy that enables those individuals to exercise limited forms, and a finite amount, of agency. Further, the article utilises sources produced from the perspectives of the victimised women and imperial regulators. Those angles investigate emotions expressed through, and embedded in, dynamic power relationships. The dual perspectives bring out gendered experiences of emotions and also reveal a disparate set of nuanced emotions due to positionality. The article therefore offers a critical analysis of the interrelationships among sexual violence, state power, and a particular set of emotions as a form of power and resistance.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotions
• positive emotions
• sexual violence
• comfort women
• the Japanese empire

Introduction

This article analyses the history of violence and ‘comfort women’ or women survivors in the Japanese empire through the lens of emotions: a neglected aspect in the study of military sexual violence which transpired in the Japanese-controlled ‘comfort stations’ (military enforced brothels).¹ Emotions, in such a context, were often considered problematic as they, in particular those which were positive, can be seen as incompatible with the brute nature of sexual violence and exploitation. However, emotions are significant to historical reckoning, allowing a fuller picture of the past.² Emotions play a crucial role in understanding the diverse experiences of women survivors, as they were subjected to repeated acts of sexual violence, endured physical pain, and were often threatened with death or punishment if they resisted as the Chinese women survivors recounted.³

This article aims to uncover how emotions in tandem with the case study of individual woman survivor, played a part in mediating different forms of violence whether it be sexual, physical, or mental. In particular, it examines how a mélange of positive and negative emotions—love, affection, attachment, loneliness, anger, tedium, solitude, and fear—enabled those women survivors to exercise some limited agency in a confined and tightly regulated space and, in some rare cases, a rather fair degree of autonomy outside of the confined space. I demonstrate how emotions largely positive ones expressed by women survivors exerted significant impact on events that took place in the military enforced brothels, and how emotions and sexual violence interacted with each other in subtle ways. By unravelling the varied textures of interactions between sexual violence and emotions, I argue that affective attachment and intimate relations developed in the confined sites of sexual exploitation formed a kind of strategic intimacy that enables those individuals to exercise limited forms, and a finite amount, of agency.⁴ Here I employ the term ‘power-saturated sites’ as a way of contextualising the power differentials between women survivors and Japanese personnel, and more broadly, as a means of exploring how the survivors utilised the strategic intimacy to contest, negotiate, and reconfirm their autonomy.⁵ Contest and cultural conjuncture thus are constitutive of these power-saturated sites, equivalent to the places of ‘meeting-up’ as conceived by Doreen Massey.⁶ As the limited forms of agency were mediated through emotions and various forms of performance, they were mobilised as forms of both resistance and receptivity and as the ‘weapons of the weak’, in a broad sense.⁷

Previous study on women survivors focuses predominantly on the aspects of sexual violence, state crime, activism, or victimisation, whereas the emotional experiences of those people are largely neglected.⁸ Comfort system, of course, existed at the pleasure of the Imperial Japanese military and, in a sense, were always a subordinate part to the military. The many layers and dimensions of sexual violence, however, still remain shrouded in the darkness as the violence was inflicted and endured in the context of a military enforced sexual space. By focusing on the emotional world of women survivors and imperial regulator of a Korean comfort station manager, this article disturbs assumptions common to the literature on women survivors by critically investigating how emotions find its voices in historical records of imperial control as well as in women survivors’ own recollections. As a departure from dominant narratives of victimhood as well as a response to Vera Mackie’s call to investigate ‘individuals and experiences’ and Edward Wang et al.’s to examine comfort women’s emotions, this article focuses on the details of individual survivors, the limited agency and their experiences that were sacrificed to the ‘symbols of a larger claim of the infliction of national shame’.⁹ Trying to critically think alongside the works of scholars like Park Yuha, Joshua D. Pilzer and Yonson Ahn on the ‘complex collage of performance’ of dance and music, and the ‘traumatic bonding’ between comfort women and soldiers, I make a crucial intervention in the emotional realm of women survivors and of their management within a state sanctioned structure where egregious acts of violence against women took place.¹⁰

Methodology and sources

From an analytical approach of case studies, the article largely utilises sources produced from the perspective of the victimised Korean women survivors as well as from the viewpoint of an imperial regulator of a military enforced brothel manager, who embodies the very essence of what most women survivors called ‘owner’. The testimonies of Korean women survivors are the first-hand accounts of their experiences of a concrete system of enforced sexual violence servicing the military. By applying the methodology of case studies to these accounts, we are able to see how these women, as protagonists of the military enforced prostitution industry, identified and presented themselves. Undertaking micro-level analysis of specific cases of women survivors’ testimonies, which may not constitute the most representative cases, reveals the lived experiences of some women survivors, letting their historical experiences as protagonists take centre stage in the construction of historical narratives. In this way, the article will avoid a common trap of speaking for the women survivors. It will let the women speak for themselves through their own words, voices and narratives, as further discussed below. Moreover, the military enforced brothel manager’s diary as historical evidence offers a unique avenue to understand women survivors’ lives as individuals and as a cohort from the perspective of imperial regulators. The two genres of sources, broadly speaking, complement one another in terms of examining people on the ground who involved in the industry and thus open up a panorama of feelings, emotions, and power differentials.

Further, those twofold angles of women survivors’ own voices and an imperial manager’s accounts constitute dual perspectives of a top-down and a bottom-up to investigate a broad range of emotions expressed through, and embedded in, dynamic power relationships between the sexually abused women and the imperial manager. The dual perspectives bring out gendered experiences of emotions and reveal a disparate set of nuanced emotions due to positionality. In so doing, the article offers a critical analysis of the interrelationships among sexual violence, state power, and a particular set of emotions as a form of power and as a tactic of resistance during the Second World War.

The sources used here are primarily women survivors’ testimonies and personal Korean diaries written in the 1940s, ranging from both well utilised ones such as autography by Maria Rosa Henson to the most recently published testimonies in 2020 and 2023.¹¹ Admittedly, the fragmentary nature of the source base is both scarce and elusive; nevertheless, it indicates the significance of those rarely available sources from those interlocutors, albeit in small number, who survived the military enforced prostitution system. Apart from the personal diaries, the published testimonies in the process of interviewing, editing and then translating are indeed mediated sources of women survivors’ memories. However, it should be noted that there is no ‘unmediated access to people’s inner experiences’, and the sources provide an opportunity to comprehend ‘how those people articulated their emotions and how they managed them in relation to wider norms and power relationships’.¹²

Recognising the limitations of the sources, I hold them in high regard while critically analysing the various kinds of testimonies and evidence. Memories are indeed ‘fragile, gendered, racialised, ethnicised and nationalised’ as demonstrated by Sharon Crozier-De Rosa and Vera Mackie, but the positionality of those survivors allows them to present an inner world of themselves nobody else would otherwise be able to tell.¹³ It is also what Katharine E. McGregor claims that testimony not only permits ‘a victimized person to provide a version of events from their position’, but also is ‘the most significant form of evidence regarding how an individual experienced and remembers traumatic events’.¹⁴ A close reading of testimonials from multiple sources, however limited they may be, can show how close relationships between women survivors and Japanese personnel produced the form of individual autonomy through strategic intimacy. Like the Native American women’s testimonies of affect, those of wartime survivors of sexual violence in the Japanese empire can also assert themselves ‘as carriers of truth, witnesses to history’.¹⁵ Throughout this article, except my own translation of Korean diary, I retain the original romanisation of foreign words including names, places, and transliteration, etc. in order to stay faithful to the limited sources available. Likewise, without any further conversion, Korean romanisation of names and provinces are quoted as they first appeared in the sources.

Emotion as a lens

Using emotion as a lens to undertake case studies of individual women survivor’s emotions can unpack the dynamic interplay between an emotional world and an individual woman survivor on a deeper level than has been previously achieved. Some case studies based on specific individuals constitute the scale of what I call small history in this text.¹⁶ Small here cannot be regarded as insignificant but rather a small scale of individual experiences based on case studies. Emotions create considerable impact on the lives of individual woman survivor, when their experiences entangled in complex relationships of intimate relations and mutual dependency with some Japanese personnel speak to the wider scholarship on the studies of women survivors and sexual violence. More precisely, thinking through emotions as ‘emotional practices’, as developed by Monique Scheer, is helpful in understanding how emotions are expressed and regulated in a wider context of a military enforced prostitution system through four types of practices—mobilising, naming, communicating, and regulating emotion.¹⁷ Grounded in practice theory, ‘emotion practices’ is informed by Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus, suggesting that the body is not a static entity but is instead socially situated and historically conditioned. In other words, emotions are not just internal states but are also constituted through practice because they are learned, embodied, and performed. Scheer argues that emotions themselves can be viewed as a form of practical engagement with the world, emerging from bodily dispositions within specific social contexts that are culturally and historically distinct.¹⁸

In this way, the concept of ‘emotional practices’ is useful in sharpening analysis of how the asymmetrical power relationships between the two parties and their immediate context of the military enforced prostitution system became entangled with a variety of actions associated with emotions such as performance, management, regulation, communication, and cultivation. It is also useful in untangling the complexities of emotional connections between individual woman survivor and her Japanese counterpart. In this sense, ‘emotional practices’ offers a means to analyse the mobilisation of the emotions to both negotiate and navigate the intimate encounters and transactions with Japanese soldiers. In so doing, emotions as experienced and then articulated by women survivors ‘come to life, to vex, enlighten, guide, encumber, to reveal goal conflicts we have overlooked, to aid us in overlooking others’.¹⁹

Moreover, one of the hallmarks of the case study in my analysis is that the reconstruction of women’s emotional experiences on a small scale prioritises an event or place of a specific individual rather than the average individual as shown in the extant scholarship on women survivors. In reducing the scale of observation, this article features the intensive investigation of a well-defined smaller group of women survivors. The scrutinisation of each outlier individual, who articulated positive emotions and who neither fits the generalisation of average individuals nor follows their lead, becomes the focal point of this article. I do not deny that negative emotions occupied the majority of women survivors’ emotional spectrum but this article, focuses specifically on the relatively positive dimensions of their feelings in order to bring out the lesser-known history of their emotional world. The focus on the small group of women survivors is the search for this ‘normal exception’, described by the Italian social historian Edoardo Grendi—‘the kind of unique documentation that gives us a privileged viewpoint from which to examine aspects of society that are not, in fact, extraordinary but shed light on widespread social practices and cultural belief systems’.²⁰ In this inquiry this normal exception thus penetrates the study of emotions of survivors whose feelings might be manipulated by neo-nationalist or considered perilous and strange, but, in actuality, might hold the key to their inner world and be at the centre of attention in some of women survivors’ daily lives.

In contrast, the big history on women survivors emphasises the larger norms of grand narratives of their experiences whereby the emotional lens alone risks generalising the experiences of women survivors. In a word, these two separate approaches overlook specific experiences on the individual level. For instance, the most recent research by Ahn carefully examines one of the most sensitive dimensions of the women survivors’ history, affectionate relationship, and boldly yet circumspectly traverses the terrain of mutual affection and co-dependency between women survivors and Japanese military personnel.²¹ Scholars such as Park Yuha and C. Sarah Soh evolved examinations of intimate interactions between women survivors and Japanese military personnel.²² In particular, Park claims the intimate relationship between the two parties as ‘comradely relationship’ (tongchichŏkin kwankye 동지적인 관계) and believes some of the women as colonial citizens who internalised varying levels of patriotism, which dramatically deviates from the accepted mainstream narratives of the victimised women survivors’ history.²³ This arguably controversial statement, however, to some extent, becomes the basis of what Ahn’s ‘traumatic bonding’ argument. To put it another way, the relationship characterised by mutual affection and co-dependency, or ‘traumatic bonding’, is an extension of Park’s analysis in which women survivors and Japanese soldiers are not in a mutually exclusive position or necessarily antagonistic towards one another, but united by the imperial oppression and by their internalised self-identities as imperial citizens.

More notably, in late 2020, an article by J. Mark Ramseyer, Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies at Harvard University, claiming that women survivors chose to work in the military enforced prostitution system and were paid prostitutes on indenture contracts, generated widespread outrage in the academic community and caused an emotional uproar among the public too, especially Koreans and their diasporic community.²⁴ Ramseyer’s claims, of course, met with loud applause from the Japanese right-wing nationalists and he will be invited to present a lecture on the topic of women survivors and academic freedom at the headquarters of the Liberal Democratic Party, Japan’s ruling party, at the time of writing this article in August 2023. Nevertheless, that academic consequence—hundreds of concerned scholars condemning his article continues to this day in 2023 with the newest article by another group of concerned scholars represented by Yoshimi Yoshiaki, etc., disputing Ramseyer’s assertions.²⁵ In response, J. Mark Ramseyer and Jason M. Morgan authored another potentially controversial book slated for publication in December 2023, The Comfort Women Hoax, defending their academic freedom and hitting back at the concerned scholars.²⁶

Such a methodological difference focusing either on the grand narratives or on the emotional dimension therefore produces an unwanted debate where scholars and politicians from a spectrum of politics tend to side with their preferred historical narration. For example, Japanese neo-nationalists and some pro-Japanese Koreans reject the history of women survivors as victims being raped inhumanly at the military enforced military brothels, while some scholars represented by Ramseyer regard them as prostitutes on contract.²⁷ And worse still, an approach over-reliant on the dimensions of affectionate relationships between women survivors and the Japanese military personnel, sometimes invite public anger and prosecution as demonstrated by the legal case against Park Yuha, who were prosecuted in 2014 with a criminal defamation lawsuit for allegedly slandering former women survivors due to her work titled The Comfort Women of the Empire (Jeguk ui wianbu) published in 2013.²⁸ Aside from being caught up in a legal quagmire, Park was ordered by the court to republish the book with thirty four areas censored, and she made the redacted version of the book open access available on the internet.²⁹

An academic, or a political, dilemma is created as a result of the lack of a more nuanced methodology to explain the arguably positive emotions of those women survivors, particularly in cases of so-called romance with their supposed adversaries. It thus also creates something of an enigma equivalent to a landmine that no scholars dare to step on with the notable exception of Park Yuha, who had the temerity to make positive arguments about the politically charged issue of women survivors. Centring on individual woman survivor with a particular set of emotions, I adopt the combination of an emotional lens and a case study methodology on specific woman survivors and focus specifically on how individual woman survivor went through their lives. Positive emotions and individual experiences thus operate together. This combination is far more informative than either is alone. Moreover, it testifies some criticism of how social science is impossible or undesirable, but rather that ‘social scientists have made generalizations that do not hold up when tested against the concrete reality of the small-scale life they claim to explain’.³⁰ This criticism frees scholars from focussing predominantly on the big history part of the past and shifts attention to a small-scale research into specifically individual life of woman survivor. To put it briefly, the positive emotions expressed and experienced by individual woman survivor becomes worthy of study in their own right.

Different from the grand narrative, this article is more likely to bring out the intricate, tricky function of individual relationships within the military enforced prostitution system. However, this article neither generalises the experiences of the vast comfort women who suffered immensely in the brutally and sexually exploitative system nor it is necessarily in support of the claim made by scholars such as Park Yuha ‘comfort women, like Japanese soldiers did, patriotically sacrificed their bodies’.³¹ Instead, from a case study perspective, it aims to particularise the specific, concrete experiences of some women survivors who are able to narrate what happened on site. In this way, it opens the possibilities of examining the controversial topics of sexual violence and intimate relations from more angles and liberates scholarly research from focussing unidirectionally on the overwhelmingly dominant narratives of victimhood. It should be noted, however, that this article does not intend to sidestep the questions of sexual abuse and atrocities committed within the framework of the military enforced prostitution system. Rather, examining the women survivor issue through the lens of emotions and the methodology of case studies problematises a typically simplified portrayal of women survivor study and advances a nuanced understanding of the wartime sex industry. In so doing, we are then able to unravel different layers and aspects of the violence inflicted upon comfort women.

Emotions in the making

This section scrutinises the emotions primarily articulated by Korean women survivors as well as perceived by the Korean manager of the military enforced military brothel. In this process of critical investigation, I, as a scholar, do not determine their concrete emotional expressions, instead they ascribed the emotions to what they felt and chose the right emotion word labels for the feelings and experiences they described. In other words, those women who experienced the feelings used the words to describe what they had experienced in the military enforced brothels. In doing so, I do not name the feelings and emotions that those women felt but am thinking through the claims and definitions that they provided themselves to these emotional experiences and thinking about what that means for the historical analysis of survivors’ individual experiences. However, as they narrated experiences as well as their experiences being recorded from the perspective of the third party—the Korean manager—I am cognizant of how their different positions of power shaped how they perceived emotions in others and themselves and then practised emotions themselves.

Despite the distressing experiences in the military enforced brothels, some of the most complex forms of interaction between Korean women survivors and Japanese military personnel took place there. The following women survivors, in their own words, raised the visibility of some positive emotion-laden words—love (even first love), attachment, and affection—as mentioned above these are their own word choices of emotions. Admittedly, these emotions are individualistic, personal feelings evoked within a tightly regulated and highly controlled environment. Love and its associated emotions were an unproblematic category at the time in colonial Korea. However, we cannot take these survivors’ emotions of love, attachment, and affection for granted without fully capturing the complexity of love and emotions in a larger historiographical context. Between the 1920s and the 1930s, affection and companionship began to take a central part in the formation of conjugal relationship, a transformation featuring love that could be found in literary and legal discourses such as popular novels, public media, and legal processes in Korea. It was a phenomenon, what Sungyun Lim terms the ‘affectivisation’ of the female partner, where literary discourses of romantic love not only coincided with, but reinforced, the legal discourses of how love was treated.³² Such a dynamic interaction between the legal system and popular discourses characterised women’s ideal of conjugal love, affection, and emotions in the decades of the 1920s and the 1930s. In addition, women, or commonly known as ‘new women’ (sinyosong) in this period, exhibited autonomy to work out their life strategies to pursue love in the interstices of modern Korea.³³ Love and affection acted as a symbol of autonomy and freedom. Love and affection even functioned as a type of hegemonic language for both new women, men, and ordinary women to actively appeal to the ideal of conjugal love in court.³⁴ Generating such a discussion of historiography of love and emotions in Korea advances our understanding of historical, social, and conceptual issues that underly the centrality of those survivors’ emotions, though those positive emotions may appear, at first glance, implausible or counterintuitive.

It is not unusual to read women survivors describing their sentimental attachment to Japanese soldiers and feeling being loved. Lim Jeong-ja (임정자) (1922–2011), a native of Jinju from Gyeongsangnam Province, was taken to Manchuria (Northeastern China) from near Busan at the age of seventeen in 1938. There was a Japanese Unit located four kilometres away from the place where Lim stayed. At night, Japanese officers came out to visit. Lim recalled she ‘received a lot of love’ from a 24-year-old young Japanese officer, Hatanaka Chūtaichō (a battalion commander), and ‘became attached to him’.³⁵ Lim did not suggest that the soldier raped her or forced her to have sex with him, but each time after visiting would leave some money at the bedside to be handed over afterwards to the owner of the military enforced brothels. Owner or manager, a recurring word in the memories of women survivors, who owned and managed the military enforced brothels, in the main, was in control of everyday operation of comfort stations. The most recent and compelling evidence of a Korean male brothel manager under the pseudonym of Park (박씨) operating under the Japanese authorities in Southeast Asia comes from a personal Diary uncovered in the 2012. The diary contains a first-hand description of women survivors’ lives from the vantage point of a manager from above. In his diary entry on 6 April 1944, Park wrote:

Wednesday, 4 August 1943, Cloudy

Idling away the non-business day at comfort station, the comfort women couldn’t stand the tedium too. Even as an owner, it is a bit of a struggle not being able to go out.³⁶

1943년 8월 4일 수요일. 흐림.

영업을 못하고 노니 위안부들도 심심해서 못 견디고, 주인 측도 외출도 못하니 몸부림이 난다.

It is not hard to decipher what is being communicated here, the dynamic powers of hierarchy and the ascription of emotion—tedium, ennui or boredom (simsimhada 심심하다 in Korean). Firstly, Park, as an imperial manager (or commonly known as the ‘owner’), was a conflicted character who was subordinated himself to the Japanese military authorities, but also gained some power as an imperial manager over the management of women survivors in an imperial hierarchy. Secondly and most interestingly, the ascription of the feeling to comfort women on non-working days from the third party as an owner of the military enforced brothel, means as much for the owner as for the women. There are, of course, many ways to interpret this intention of ascribed emotion, both personally and structurally. However, what the manager ascribed to the women helped him rationalise his role in their subjugation. Personally, those women were not bored by their periods of working at the military enforced brothel. Boredom was akin to the boring, tedious wait to get back to their daily routine of frequent Japanese visits. The flip side of the ascriptive characteristic, from the perspective of the manager, insinuates that working days as a comfort woman were not tedious as they became occupied engaging in the so-called sexual activities. Structurally, this ascription of boredom reflects the perceived experiences of comfort women working and living within the miliary enforced system. As an emotion—tedium, ennui or boredom—describes a state of an individual experience of nothing to do or not being interested in things around them. The form of boredom defined by the imperial manager reflected his own absorption in running the military enforced system as an imperial collaborator. Boredom, in this sense, was not incidental to the experience, or the enterprise, of the empire.³⁷ Further, boredom ascribed, expressed, and tolerated by the imperial manager can be central to the empire, a unifying and common emotion of imperial experiences.³⁸ The ascribed emotion of this ubiquitous imperial feeling to those women in this diary entry is thus the epitome of asymmetric power dynamics of the military enforced prostitution system and of the empire, where boredom was closely linked to expectations.³⁹ In this imperial context, boredom was intimately tied to the expectations of engaging in sexual activities with Japanese soldiers.

However, in this military sanctioned prostitution system, women survivors had painful and hurtful experiences of the Japanese soldiers and officers, though some, perhaps arguably, had positive emotions and intimate encounters like the case of Hatanaka Chūtaichō and Lim Jeong-ja. Hatanaka, according to Lim, was concerned about her health and often sang a lullaby—‘nemuri nasai-o. hai, Sadako. nemuri nasai-o (sleep well, Sadako, sleep well)’—in this way singing her to sleep like a baby.⁴⁰ Such care and cherishment (Lim’s own words of ‘care’ and ‘cherish’) from the officer lasted for about a year and then one day she heard from the Unit that Hatanaka was killed.⁴¹ Lim cried over the news and wanted to go to visit his body for the last time to send him off on his way but could not get inside the Unit. ‘I still remember him, that man.’, said Lim.⁴² The emotional bonds between Lim and Hatanaka formed in a complex, tense environment where Lim craved care and support after ‘being dragged around like a chained criminal’ for about eight years to serve Japanese soldiers and, in the meantime, Lim’s presence intensified Hatanaka’s familial longing for his siblings who resided in the Japanese archipelago.⁴³ Hatanaka always thought about Lim in the shoes of his siblings, sympathised with Lim’s miserable position and ‘would shed tears asking how this had happened to Reiko-san [Lim was also known by Hayashi Sadako, Reiko, or Re-chan]’.⁴⁴ These individual affectionate interactions, however, reveal a convoluted characteristic of emotions experienced in the military enforced brothels and defy a dominating narrative on the history of survivors, as also demonstrated in the following cases.

The emotional life of those women bears a touch of intricate, confusing subjectivities of emotive experiences as how affection evolved into first love. Kim Pok-tong (김복동) (1915–2003), a native of Chongju, North Chungchong Province, was taken to Manchuria as a comfort woman at the age of eighteen in ca. 1933. The women followed the troops whenever and wherever they moved. When she met Yoshimoto, a ‘kind, gentle, very gentle, pure’, and the highest ranking officer in his troop, Kim ‘was a bit affectionate with’ him [Yoshimoto].⁴⁵ In love for about two to three years, Yoshimoto was ‘the one who adored me, came, he gave me bread … mochi [a Japanese dessert made of sweet glutinous rice flour] … that’s how much he loved me’.⁴⁶ Having bread and mochi indeed can be luxurious for women survivors who often spoke of not eating enough food. It is thus understandable Kim equated material gain as love from her point of view without taking into consideration the many layers of inequalities between the two, for example, the power imbalance and freedom disparities. Their relationship was as a result grounded in such premises that power, protection, and emotional support co-existed, as further demonstrated below. Kim was then pregnant and she believed Yoshimoto was the father as ‘the privates wouldn’t dare touch me because their senior officer, Yoshimoto, loved me’.⁴⁷ Unfortunately, Kim had a surgery on her stomach to take out the baby and the baby was removed in together with her entire uterus. Precisely speaking, she had a hysterectomy. After the surgical operation, Yoshimoto, according to Kim, secretly ordered a Japanese interpreter to send her back to Seoul, Choson [Korea] where Kim finally was freed from the military enforced prostitution system. When Kim recalls how she felt, she said:

Now that I think about it, I almost laugh in my sleep, but maybe he was my first love. I still think of him from time to time. I was so very lonely, but he loved me, so I also developed a liking for him.⁴⁸

Through emotion-laden words such as first love, liking, and lonely, Kim narrates her feelings in response to how she was treated and valued by Yoshimoto. Be that as it may, lonely or loneliness was one of the most neglected aspects of women survivors’ emotional world where the feeling was internalised and then enacted through their intimate relations with the perpetrators. Here the loneliness expressed and experienced, explicitly or implicitly, by women survivors in this article represented a bodily as well as an embodied experience.⁴⁹

Different from Kim, Han Ok-son (한옥선) (1919–2009), a native of Chochiwon, South Chungchong Province, was taken to Manchuria and China proper as a comfort woman, but mothered two children, named Haga Akiya and Haka Sunja respectively, with a Japanese medical officer, Haga Shoi. Being assaulted and raped for more than a year, Han came to know Haga Shoi who was working as an army doctor at a field hospital in Heilongjiang Province, China. Han was twenty one years old and Haga 27. Han ‘served [had sex with]’ Haga after being called out for by him one night.⁵⁰ Not long afterwards, Haga arranged a rented room at a restaurant, sheltering Han from other Japanese soldiers and only he frequented her. Han had a relationship with Haga for a few years. In their rented private place, they spent time together drinking alcohol and eating different sorts of food such as fried eggs, grilled squids, and pork ribs, all sumptuous food at the time. Haga would console Han whenever she felt homesick crying and then petted her to sleep in both Korean—chajang chajang (sleep sleep)—and Japanese—yoshi yoshi (there, there).⁵¹ Haga made an effort to familiarise himself with Korean lullaby, Chajang chajang uri aga (자장자장 우리 아가) (the Korean answer to Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star), though a few simple words, evoking a sense of close, emotional bond between the two. Han then gave birth to two children only a year apart from each other and Haga hired a Chinese woman to help Han out. Addressing Haga dearly as yonggamnim (husband, an expression usually used by Korean women of older generations), Han was not able to see him again after he went on to the front lines in the South Pacific Islands. Upon learning that the Unit which Haga worked for had all been completely killed, Han cried, couldn’t calm herself down, and spent her days away like that.⁵² In an affectionate encounter where the woman was regarded as a ‘mistress’, Yonson Ahn terms it a ‘shadow wife’, their intimate space of place ‘pseudo-home’, and the kind of family situation a ‘shadow family’ which was not officially allowed by the military authorities, according to Ahn.⁵³ However, in this case study, the infrastructure which was narrowly defined as the site of rented room bears on how the intimate relations formed, progressed, and operated in the imperial system of sexual violence and exploitation.⁵⁴ In Wilson’s study of the infrastructure of intimacy, infrastructure as a systematic aggregation of procedures, codes, and objects generally constitutes ‘an embedding environment for intimate life’.⁵⁵ Moreover, in this particular case of Han and Haga, the company of Han elicited even envy from Haga’s seniors, a general once said: ‘I envy you, Haga Shoi’.⁵⁶ Obviously, the troops senior officers acquiesced in Haga’s arrangement of a de facto intimate relationship with a Korean woman. The case of Han and Haga pointed to an intimate space where physical sexual encounters were condoned by those from senior positions due to the strategic intimacy wielded by the weak.

As the exquisite kind of emotion directly and explicitly articulated by women survivors, Lim, Han, and Kim seem to be involved in a wide spectrum of love and affection. Affectionate bonding became an individually practised form of longing and connection within a constrained intimate space. The complexity of their emotional life, albeit being constructed around the concepts of the so-called shadow bonding, emanated from the individuals within a shadow family. These women with positive emotions may reluctantly be called deviant individuals but their deviancy may find its way into limited agency. Whether consciously or not, women survivors’ gender and their emotions acted together to shape the power differentials within intimate spaces, providing a fine understanding of emotions’ role of power negotiation for the individual and within the system.⁵⁷

Of particular note, the case studies of Korean women survivors’ positive emotions are in stark contrast to the accounts of Chinese women survivors who rarely recalled any trace of affection or compassion toward any single individual Japanese soldier.⁵⁸ It is not to say that Korean women survivors suffered less than their Chinese counterparts, however. The emotive differences beg scholarly interrogation into the highly evocative of women survivors’ individual experiences as the emotional life of individuals bears an uneasy, special relationship to the power dynamics and hierarchies. Despite the article’s primary focus on the relatively positive emotions, it would be remiss to not at least acknowledge some negative feelings that largely dominate the wide spectrum of women survivors’ emotions. Anger or resentment, for example, is one of them. Women survivors from different backgrounds (Korea, China, and Philippines, etc.) articulated their savage anger toward sexual perpetrators.⁵⁹ The feeling of being angry in the extreme prompted their actions such as Chinese woman survivor Huang Youliang wanting to ‘kill them [Japanese soldiers]’ or Korean survivor Kim Bong-yi (pseudonym)/Choi Seon-soon (real name) wanting to ‘tear them [Japanese soldiers] to pieces to death, I would still be angry’.⁶⁰ Anger, one of the negative emotions in this difficult circumstance, reflects the inability of the weak to change the situation and, in the meantime, its associated imagined actions of ‘kill’ and ‘tear … to pieces to death’ indicate a way of protest from the weak. Anger thus points to a complexity and necessity to historicise its specificity, thereby a wide range of negative emotions being worthy of consideration in conjunction with their individual experiences as well, a work that goes beyond the purview of this article. It remains important to acknowledge that both negative and positive emotions have to be dealt with great sensitivity too.

A detailed comparative analysis of the two broadly contrasting experiences is, of course, beyond the scope of this article, but the focal point of Korean women survivors’ emotions in contrast with Chinese women survivors’ problematises the dominant discourses of women survivors and disturbs the overall experiences of women survivors from different backgrounds and races. And these evocative accounts of Korean women survivors lead to the controversial discussions of agency and power, or ‘agentive possibilities’, a useful phrase once used to unpack a parallel yet different analysis of how Korean women were agentive, ‘making meaning’, and ‘wield[ing] transformative agency’ in the face of Japanese soldiers invading the Korean peninsula in the late sixteenth century.⁶¹ Tapping further into the experiences of Lim, Han, Kim and their fellow women survivors, the following section explores in detail their agency (including failed agency), power, performances, and resistance.

Agentive possibilities

Agentive possibilities, a term used by Susan Broomhall to explore a range of agency formed and exercised by Korean women in Joseon Korea, is however useful and germane to think through the individual agency of women survivors in the modern as well as contemporary history of Korea.⁶² At its core, the term explores the agency of Joseon Korean women who either committed suicide after being raped by Japanese soldiers or resisted the sexual assault by killing themselves. Spatially seemingly very distant to the modern history of women survivors, the key contribution of Broomhall’s research lies in the provision of both theoretical and empirical precursors to how the Joseon Korea treated and remembered those sexually abused Korean women in the long durée of the period. It helps us contemplate a cultural and political connection between the two separate sexual abuse histories and unravel how the vastly different interpretation of the two sexual violence atrocities shaped the grand narratives of women as meaning-making subjects in two different historical periods.

Along this line of enquiry, Broomhall’s research lends intellectual weight to Ueno Chizuko’s critiques of a modern nation-state framework of narratives, or ‘the patriarchal paradigm’, on women survivors who became synonymous with national suffering and the daughters of Korea, a ‘model victim’ (moderu higaisha モデル被害者), pure, innocent, and being coerced into the military enforced prostitution system.⁶³ A patriarchal dimension, most intriguingly, runs through the two historical events—Joseon patriarchal society decided how to think of women to fit its patriarchal system and contemporary Korean society took a dominant framing as symbols of national suffering. This viewpoint of patriarchy dovetails with what role the Joseon sexually abused women played in the rebuilding of the Joseon state in the aftermath of the Japanese invasions of Korea (1592–1598) and the necessity of repositioning a collective culture of Joseon identity and society through the status of those women.⁶⁴ Agentive possibilities thus provides a useful alternative framework to consider the agentive dimensions of sexually assaulted women both in the sixteenth century Joseon Korea and in the twentieth century Korea, and leads us to face a challenging, sensitive question why we privilege one kind of experience and marginalise others.

Moreover, the small history of women survivors facilitates the analysis of personal agency and permits a voice of autonomy in the interstices of the brutal military enforced prostitution system. In ‘Is Small Beautiful?’, Brad S. Gregory points out that ‘the micro-scale preserves the agency of ordinary people’.⁶⁵ Of course, the individual woman survivor cannot be categorised as the ordinary person in a traditional sense due to the nature of the military enforced prostitution system, however, it is the complex interactions between the two parties on a micro-scale level and at their individual capacities that become attractive to this article. Agency, though conditioned by power including the power of the subject’s own, is not fully constrained by it and, according to Judith Butler, ‘agency exceeds the power by which it is enabled’.⁶⁶

As one of the leading scholars studying pan-pan girl (パンパン, a derogatory term referring to those women who served soldiers of the allied occupation forces (1945–1952) after the Second World War), Toshimi Chazono shows that pan-pan girls could exercise their agency and then become in charge of the situation despite being in an overwhelmingly asymmetrically disadvantaged power position.⁶⁷ They could maintain an intimate relationship with the occupied forces whilst exercising agency. In some cases, as a victim being raped by American soldiers, a pan-pan girl would demand money as a form of compensation to alleviate her own financial suffering. In a battle for survival, intimacy and its engendered emotions were arguably the most efficient weapon, or the ‘weapons of the weak’ in this context, within an asymmetrical power structure within the sites of such as the abovementioned rented place. As Ahn’s research shows, under the colonial rule of Japan the Korean women survivors ‘acknowledged and/or benefited from their partners’ embodied power as colonisers and as men’.⁶⁸ For the Korean women survivors, the bond with Japanese soldiers represented a mix of care, devotion, benefit, appreciation, pain, and hardship.⁶⁹

Sexual circles of assaults in some cases became narrower as emotions getting involved in this process. The agentive possibilities excluded others of potential soldiers as they formed relationships of their own. After having a relationship with Yoshimoto, the highest-ranking officer in his troop, Kim Pok-tong, for instance, said (and also quoted above) that ‘the privates wouldn’t dare touch me because their senior officer, Yoshimoto, loved me. Those privates would come by, but leave’.⁷⁰ Similarly, Han Ok-son, who was in a de-facto relationship with the army doctor Haga, said: ‘because, well, because he [Haga] was an army doctor, I really benefited a lot. From that time, I didn’t overwork, I didn’t cry, well, I just didn’t try to make money at all’.⁷¹ The intimate relationship with Haga, obviously, led to strategic betterment of Han’s conditions as demonstrated in both her claimed benefits, well-received treatment, and the agency she exercised in the below situation:

The commander of the Aoke unit sometimes visited me, but ever since my old man (Haga) visited me, I could just take the men I wanted to serve. I didn’t care whatever the owner told me to do. Because of my child’s father (Haga), I could just do whatever I wanted. But ever since I got to know him [Haga], I really just received when I wanted.⁷²

This is another good demonstration of how Han could exercise some degree of agency in defiance of the military enforced brothel owners. As these cases demonstrate, some women survivors and soldiers experienced love and formed affectionate relationships, however contentious. But, to individual woman survivor like Kim and Han, the relationships hit an emotional spot; or they arguably ameliorated a sense of loneliness Kim explicitly articulated in the prior section. From her perspective and contrary to what happened to her, the experiences of Kim’s fellow women survivors somehow touched a nerve:

For those women [other fellow women survivors], they took in more than five or six soldiers a day. Even when he (Yoshimoto) adored me, and the others wouldn’t dare touch me because he was so high up, soldiers still came for me. [As for the other women,] the number of soldiers who came [to them] was endless. They wouldn’t, wouldn’t dare to force me, though.⁷³

Meanwhile, in this case, Kim could exercise a surprising degree of agency compared to her fellow Korean women survivors as she claimed she would not be forced to have sex with whatever soldiers came her way. Comparatively speaking, Kim knowingly exercised her agency in such a context of power imbalances and exemplified how she took advantage of the opportunities available to her. Sometimes, the void of deterrent power from figures like Yoshimoto even burst a bubble once was considered safe by the women survivors like Kim. Kim recalled that ‘I was also raped … when the soldiers I didn’t like came to fuck around with me, I’d cry and fight against them, but they’d still assault me. When Yoshimoto went away on business, one of the privates assaulted me’.⁷⁴ First love and its associated limited power in reduced circumstances like this was subordinated to a larger context of sexual violence again. Emotive significance, in this case, as a legitimising basis therefore lost its ground.

This limited agency derived from women’s strategic intimacy, or a result of their autonomous choices, points to a complexity that encompasses mutual dependency tied by bonds of ambiguous emotions. Moreover, the intimate affections and strategic intimacy of those survivors exemplified the limited acts of agency which resonates with those of women in the context of a ‘contact zone’ where European Russians, promyshlenniki, interacted with indigenous population, Alutiiq women in Alaska.⁷⁵ The agency of indigenous people, in particular in the context of intimate relations, was rarely understood. Coerced or even taken as hostages, Alaskan Indigenous Alutiiq women arguably formed intimate, mutually dependent, relationships with Russian men of fur traders in order to survive in the absence of Alutiiq men.⁷⁶ Alutiiq women mirrored the formation of women survivors’ intimate relationships with Japanese perpetrators who supported their wellbeing in difficult, violent situations. Examples of such are relatable to the brute history women survivors admitted to experiencing and aid rethinking of women’s limited agency and sexual intimacy as well as of emotion and agency in a transnational or even transcontinental contexts of colonialism. The complexity of the issue hence demands a historical inquiry in its own right.

On the other hand, the concept of resistance in the comfort station not only is grounded in the everyday forms of emotional bonding and physical resistance but incorporates the acts of performances such as trading, conducting chores, and singing. The resistance, and by extension, their agency came into existence in ways through such performances. An Yun-hong (안윤홍) (pseudonym) (1920–2010), from Tangjin, Ch’ungch’ongnam-do Province, was taken to China in 1942 as a comfort woman and then sent back to Korea due to her unexpected pregnancy in 1945. An Yun-hong described her inability to make any money for the owner of the military enforced brothel due to her appearance, a self-proclaimed ‘ugly’, ‘old-fashioned’ woman.⁷⁷ Such self-confessed ugliness seemed to have saved her from being frequented by Japanese soldiers and did not stop her wanting to leave the comfort station. Instead of making money out of having sex with Japanese soldiers, An Yun-hong engaged in cleaning, making fire with briquettes, making kimchi (a type of side dish based on fermented cabbages), and cooking meals, ‘dirty’ jobs shunned by other girls who were good at ‘receiv[ing] men [having sex with men] well and bring in good money’.⁷⁸ The battlefront to survive thus was shifting from the pitfalls of intimate encounters to the actual performances of daily chores at the military enforced brothels. Despite her self-deprecating appearance, An Yun-hong was still picked by a Japanese soldier to serve him without wearing a sakku (condom) (see Figure 1) whereas the unexpected pregnancy in the first trimester lifted her out the comfort station.

Figure 1. Attack champion condom (totsugeki ichiban). Australian War Memorial collection, Item No. RELAWM28311.003. (Use with permission and courtesy of Garth O'Connell).

In 1945, An was given money and sent back to Korea at the age of 25.⁷⁹ In another case, Ch’oe Kap-sun (최갑순) (1919–2015), from Kurye, South Cholla Province, was taken to China as a comfort woman in 1933. Ch’oe recalled that: ‘whenever we hear they’re coming to attack some place, we get loaded into the vehicles and sent out, they set up [comfort stations], and now the Japanese soldiers all just [come in]’.⁸⁰ In order to get out of the situation, Ch’oe engaged in trading to accumulate money. She sold tofu, then bought and sold whatever she could get her hands on. In another case, Na Sun-man (나순만) (pseudonym) (1929–2021), from Poun County, North Ch’ungch’ong Province, was transferred to work as a comfort woman near Hiroshima, Japan at the age of fourteen and then was abandoned in 1944. Whenever Na and her fellow women gathered, they cried and sang Korean folk songs like the widely known one Arirang, as a means to alleviate their solicitude for their family.⁸¹ Music, as one of the easiest forms of art to produce, fostered solidarity and developed the resistance art as shown in Shirli Gilbert’s work of Music in the Holocaust: Confronting the Nazi Ghettos and Camps.⁸² Music can be a part of ‘a larger process by which people and societies make sense of the world, create and express themselves, and feel connected to others’.⁸³ Thus, it can be a useful tool for women survivors to bound together in resistance of exploitation. The folk songs such as Arirang were no joyful pieces, but were powerful in evoking a strong sense of unity and solidarity among the women. In particular, Arirang was a wildly popular one based on Na Un-gyu’s anticolonial film Arirang (1926).⁸⁴ The group of women survivors gathered together singing songs to assuage their anxiety and worry formed an ‘emotional community’ to strenuously resist the brutality of the institutionalised violence.⁸⁵ The displays of negative emotions such as anxiety, worry, and crying, or their feelings towards Japanese soldiers, are constructed, regulated, managed, and shaped by the individual woman survivor within this emotional community. Songs, in a way, became ‘talismans of their identity and experience’, lasting until the later stage of their lives.⁸⁶

The cases discussed above demonstrate that on the one hand An, Ch’oe, and Na were in compliance with the owner’s requests, though against their wills, and on the other hand, they also showed resistance trying to walk away from the sexual servitude. The demarcation between compliance and resistance is rather murky, but the indistinct mixture of ‘outward compliance and tentative resistance’ can be constitutive of their limited individual agency.⁸⁷ In particular, in Na’s experiences of singing Korean folk songs, they expressed a form of resistance, what might be called the ‘outright resistance’.⁸⁸ Whereas, in her experiences related to moments of agency, An was able to serve through non-sexual activities, though not without consequences of being raped and getting pregnant. It is in those everyday resistance and performances that we come upon the agency and emotions of Korean women survivors in their clearest and fullest reality.

Emotions, affections, agency, or resistance, at times, fail women survivors too. The experiences of a Filipino comfort woman, Maria Rosa Henson, are a mixture of positive and negative emotions but failed agency and resistance. Henson was forcefully captured whilst passing the sentry where the Japanese troops stationed and subjected to daily rape up to thirty times between April and August 1943.⁸⁹ Afterwards, in August 1943, Henson with other fellow captured women were transferred to another location and the daily routine continued. Being angry does not help at all as Henson said: ‘I was angry all the time. But there was nothing I could do’.⁹⁰ It was in December 1943 that the fifteen years old Henson again encountered the thirty two years old Captain Tanaka who has raped her two years before in Fort McKinley Figure 2.

Figure 2. ‘Please, Tanaka, let me go’.⁹² Author’s redrawing.

Feeling that only Captain Tanaka understood her feelings and never hurt her or treated her cruelly, Hansen pleaded with him to help her escape. The pleading was turned down. ‘I felt very weak’, said Henson.⁹¹ Intense individual emotions, intimate bonds, and resistance, in some cases, paled into insignificance with the overwhelming sexual violence of the military enforced prostitution system.

Conclusion

By critically and principally analysing the positive side of emotions, this article has developed an understanding of intricate, intimate relationships between wartime survivors of sexual violence and Japanese military personnel in a state-sanctioned military system of sexual violence. This structure of sexual violence in military enforced brothels provides an insightful site for developing new perspectives on intimate relations, what I call strategic intimacy, between women survivors and Japanese military personnel. The case studies of women survivors’ emotions and intimate relations point to the importance of attending to the women’s individual experiences and their limited agency. As much as the emotions and relationships were shaped by the interactions, they also transformed them in intimate ways—from the improvement of wellbeing to the finite amount of agency. The article not only reconstructs the women’s experiences through the emotion and its associated intimate relations but foregrounds the embodiment of them in power-saturated sites of military enforced sexual places across the Japanese empire. The dynamic relationships between the two parties prompt new understandings of sexual violence and affection over one of the most political charged issues in the modern history of East Asia and beyond.

The article also restores a set of emotions, long neglected even if little researched, to come to know the profoundly different. This article uses the conceptual framework of ‘emotional practices’ to situate the relationships between the two parties, the women survivors and Japanese military personnel, translates into and foregrounds the dynamic, complex interactions between emotions and asymmetrical power structure in the military enforced prostitution system. This perspective shifts the view of emotions from something purely internal to something that is also external and observable, implying that emotions are both shaped by and shape social realities. As demonstrated throughout, emotions should not be tangential to the study of women survivors; combining emotions with case studies to frame the experiences of women survivors liberating research into sexual violence from a limited way. Using this combination of emotional lens and a small-scale case study, we are starting to understand this most enigmatic of experiences and historical narratives. Understanding how the complex emotions developed and existed in the history of egregious sexual violence against women survivors would be wise to flatten the complexity of how emotions played in this sexually violent system. Hence, this article by no means intends to paper over the fact of sexual violence perpetrated by the Japanese military across Asia. Rather it has profound implications for understanding interactions between sexual exploitation and intimate relationships, and further adds to discussions on the larger issues as why sexually exploited women would form liaisons with perpetrators as discussed above in the case of Alaskan Indigenous women with European Russian men.

Nonetheless, the miss of the emotional contestation and the varied texture of women survivors’ history jeopardises the ability to interpret multiple phenomena of their agentive possibilities. Most noticeably, emotions are an inextricable part of the history of women survivors. Humans crave emotional connection. So did women survivors. Take aforementioned Kim Pok-tong for example, along with more emotive ways of connecting with others, Kim, who directly and candidly expressed loneliness, created a positive connection through her positive emotions with Yoshimoto. This is likely to have a positive effect on the way women survivors relate to others. A limited agency, as a result, came from their experiences of individuality instead of a generalised history of every woman survivor. Their limited agency stemmed from their stoical attitude towards the brutality of comfort stations. In difficult circumstances, the limited agency and the nature of sexual violence and exploitation reduced survivors’ positive emotions to an instrument in the power-saturated sites. What is more, we cannot assume uniformity from some women survivors’ individual experiences, but they are not merely passive participants of the military enforced prostitution system. Women survivors exercised what emotional agency they had within the limited freedom and violent constraints they were part of. The emotions of women survivors thus are worthy of research and should not be trivialised or overshadowed by unidirectional dominant narratives.

As noted in the beginning, this article is based primarily on the sources of individual woman survivor’s oral histories, and it cannot and will not paint a full picture of every woman survivor’s individual experiences and their unique individuality. It is, of course, dangerous to make generalisations about the experiences of women survivors, both inconsiderate and wrong to amplify the individuality of some women survivors. In other words, this article is not intended to generalise the experiences of women survivors but to bring out the emotional dimensions of woman survivor’s individuality and their individual experiences. Therefore, the combination of emotions and case studies to analyse the controversial historical issue makes a piquant counterpoint to extant literature on the studies of women survivors, sexual violence, and state crimes. To conclude, I echo Toshimi Chazono’s voice to reinstate and respect the historical voices of the weak who exercised their agency as a survival strategy in the extremely oppressed circumstances whilst redefining and reinterpreting their life experiences.⁹³ Emotions to the history of women survivors are not of peripheral relevance but should be of added importance. We need to come to terms with the discomfortable fact that colonial violence and personal intimacy do heighten tension between the two, but they also enrich academic discourses by opening up new frontiers. As Chungmoo Choi writes in the Voices of the Korean Comfort Women: History Rewritten from Memories, women survivors are ‘not just victims but also survivors with subjectivity and agency’, a claim this article has well substantiated.⁹⁴

Acknowledgements

I would like to present this article to Professor Susan Broomhall FAHA and Dr Mary Tomsic, without whom my foray into the field of emotions would have been impossible. Moreover, I am enormously grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their intelligent insights and comprehensive comments which have substantially strengthened this article. I do not take them for granted. I would also like to thank the deputy editor, Professor Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, for her professional, generous help and attention to details. A very special thanks to Harriet Steele; I enjoyed talking about Australian politics and history with you over a cup of coffee in South Yarra. My final thanks go to Dr Sarah Bendall who kindly invited me to join her Book Writing Club where I had a chance to present my draft to its members, including but limited to Dr Mary Tomsic, Dr Jesscia O’Leary, Dr Sally Fisher, and Dr Minerva Inwald. I owe them a warm thanks too. In 2023, a draft of this paper was presented at the Lilith Symposium of Gender and Joy in History in Melbourne, Australia. All errors, including English translations of the original text in Korean, are entirely my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ming Gao

Dr Ming Gao is a historian of modern East Asia in the Gender and Women’s History Research Centre, the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic University. He was a Kyujanggak Research Fellow at Seoul National University, Republic of Korea, and an invited visiting Fellow at Kokugakuin University in Tokyo, Japan. His research interests concern emotions, gender, women’s history, the Japanese Empire and its global cooperation against infectious disease control. Currently, he is working on some article-length projects on the politics of modern medicine from a transnational dimension by linking Imperial Japan with its contemporaneous empires. His present book manuscript (under contract) focuses on the nature of Japanese imperialism in Manchukuo and, more broadly, in Northeast Asia through the lenses of law, profitability, health, medicine, and gender.

Notes

1 Throughout this article, I refer to comfort women as ‘survivors’/‘women survivors’ instead of ‘victims’ or ‘sex slaves’, because the former assumes little agency on their part while the latter is dehumanising. Likewise, I prefer ‘military enforced brothels’ or ‘military enforced prostitution system’ to ‘comfort stations’. However, I also use ‘comfort women’ and ‘comfort stations’ to avoid being repetitive in particular when mentioning them in the 1930s and the 1940s.

2 Katie Barclay, Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, and Peter N. Stearns, eds., Sources for the History of Emotions: A Guide (London and New York: Routledge, 2021), 9.

3 Peipei Qiu, Su Zhiliang and Chen Lifei, eds., Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

4 Originally ‘strategic intimacy’ is Damon Salesa’s term used in the context of Samoa, I borrow it to refer to the analogous yet different situation where women survivors took advantage of it as a means to fight against the structural nature of sexual exploitation, see Damon Salesa, ‘Samoa’s Half-Castes and Some Frontiers of Comparison’, in Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire, eds. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 71–93, 72.

5 Tony Ballantyne, and Antoinette Burton, ‘Introduction: The Politics of Intimacy in an Age of Empire’, in Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire, eds. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 1–28, 3.

6 Tony Ballantyne, and Antoinette Burton, ‘Introduction: The Politics of Intimacy in an Age of Empire’, in Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire, eds. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 3; Doreen Massey, For Space, (London: Sage, 2008), 83.

7 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).

8 Elizabeth Son, Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance, and Transpacific Redress (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018); Vera Mackie, ‘Sexual Violence, Silence, and Human Rights Discourse; The Emergence of the Military Prostitution Issue’, in Human Rights and Gender Politics: Asia-Pacific Perspectives, eds. Anne Marie Hilsdon et al. (London: Routledge, 2000), 37–58; C. Sarah Soh, The Comfort Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Maki Kimura, Unfolding the ‘Comfort Women’ Debates: Modernity, Violence, Women’s Voices (London: Palgrave McMillan, 2016); Caroline Norma, The Japanese Comfort Women and Sexual Slavery during the China and Pacific Wars (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Jugun ianfu (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2014); Toshiyuki Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during World War II and the U.S. Occupation (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).

9 Vera Mackie, ‘Gender and Modernity in Japan’s ‘Long Twentieth Century’’, Journal of Women’s Study 25, no. 3 (2013): 62–91, 79; Katherine E. McGregor, Systemic Silencing: Activism, Memory, and Sexual Violence in Indonesia (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2023), 187; Edward Wang and Li Yang, ‘qingganshi yanjiu de kuaxueke shijian – yi riben qingganshi fazhan weili de taolun,’ (情感史研究的跨学科实践-以日本情感史发展为例的讨论) [Interdisciplinary Practice of the History of Emotions: A Discussion Centering on the Development of the History of Emotions in Japan], Xueshu Yuekan 6 (2023): 169–79.

10 Park Yuha, Jeguk ui wianbu: sikminchi chipaewa kiŏkŭi t'uchaeng [Comfort women of the Empire: Colonisation and Memory Battle] (Seoul: Buri wa ipari, 2013); Yonson Ahn, ‘Yearning for Affection: Traumatic Bonding Between Korean ‘Comfort Women’ and Japanese Soldiers During World War II’, European Journal of Women’s Studies 26, no. 4 (2019): 360–74; Joshua D. Pilzer, ‘Music and Dance in the Japanese Military “Comfort Women” System: A Case Study in the Performing Arts, War, and Sexual Violence’, Women and Music 18 (2014): 1–23.

11 Maria Rosa Henson, Comfort Women: A Filipina’s Story of Prostitution and Slavery Under the Japanese Military (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999); Chungmoo Choi and Hyunah Yang, eds. and trans., Voices of the Korean Comfort Women: History Rewritten from Memories (London and New York: Routledge, 2023); The Research Team of the War & Women’s Human Rights Center, The Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (ed.), Stories that Make History: The Experience and Memories of the Japanese Military Comfort Girls-Women, trans. Angella Son (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2019); Peipei Qiu, Su Zhiliang and Chen Lifei, eds., Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Park, Ibongun Wianso Gwanliin-ui Ilgi (일본군 위안소 관리인의 일기), annotated and translated by Ahn Byung-Jik (Seoul: Isup, 2013).

12 Katie Barclay, Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, and Peter N. Stearns, eds., Sources for the History of Emotions: A Guide (London and New York: Routledge, 2021), 10.

13 Sharon Crozier-De Rosa and Vera Mackie, ‘Mobilising Affect and Trauma: The Politics of Gendered Memory and Gendered Silence’, Women’s History Review 31, no. 6 (2022): 903–13, 905, 907.

14 Katherine E. McGregor, Systemic Silencing: Activism, Memory, and Sexual Violence in Indonesia (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2023), 23.

15 Victoria Haskins, ‘Testimonies of Affect: Native American Women’s Histories of Violence on California’s Pacific North Coast’, Women’s History Review 31, no. 6 (2022): 953–74, 965.

16 Regarding small history, see Julia Laite, ‘The Emmet’s Inch: Small History in a Digital Age’, Journal of Social History 53, no. 4 (2020): 963–89.

17 Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and is that what makes them have a history)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory 51/2 (2012): 193–220.

18 Ibid., 193.

19 William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 332.

20 Paula Findlen, ‘The Two Cultures of Scholarship’, Isis 96, no 2 (June 2005): 230–7, 233.

21 Ahn, ‘Yearning for Affection’, 360–74.

22 Park Yuha, Jeguk ui wianbu: sikminchi chipaewa kiŏkŭi t'uchaeng [Comfort women of the Empire: Colonisation and Memory Battle] (Seoul: Buri wa ipari, 2013) and C. Sarah Soh, The Comfort Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

23 Park, Jeguk ui wianbu, 67, 160, 207–8, 265.

24 See the article and responses from concerned scholars, J. Mark Ramseyer, ‘Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War’, International Review of Law and Economics 65, no. 105971 (2021): 1–8; Concerned Scholars, ‘Responses by Concerned Scholars to the Problematic Scholarship of J. Mark Ramseyer’, https://sites.google.com/view/concernedhistorians/home?authuser=0; Jeannie Suk Gersen, ‘Seeking The True Story of the Comfort Women: How a Harvard Professor’s Dubious Scholarship Reignited a History of Mistrust Between South Korean and Japan’, The New Yorker, February 25, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/seeking-the-true-story-of-the-comfort-women-j-mark-ramseyer (accessed August 9, 2023).

25 Yoshimi, Yoshiaki, ‘Response to ‘Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War’ by J. Mark Ramseyer’, (February 8, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4029325 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4029325; Yoshimi Yoshiaki, et al., ‘Response to ‘Contracting for sex in the Pacific war’ by J. Mark Ramseyer’, International Review of Law & Economics (2023), pre-print, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.irle.2023.106158.

26 J. Mark Ramseyer and Jason M. Morgan, The Comfort Women Hoax: A Fake Memoir, North Korean Spies, and Hit Squads in the Academic Swamp (New York: Encounter Book, 2023).

27 Mark Ramseyer, ‘Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War’, International Review of Law and Economics 65, no. 105971 (2021): 1–8.

28 Park, Jeguk ui wianbu.

29 Park, Jeguk ui wianbu 2nd, 2015, i, https://parkyuha.org/download-book (accessed November 11, 2023).

30 Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: from Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), 108.

31 Park, Jeguk ui wianbu, 19.

32 Sungyun Lim, ‘Affection and Assimilation: Concubinage and the Ideal of Conjugal Love in Colonial Korea, 1922-38’, Gender & History 29, no.2 (2016): 461–79.

33 Jung Ji Young, ‘1920–30 Nyondae Sinyosong Kwa Chop/che’i Pu’in: Sigminji Kundae Chayu Yonae Kyolhon Ui Kyolryol Kwa Sin’yosong Ui Haengwisong’, (1920-30년대 신여성과 ‘첩/제이부인’: 식민지근대 자유연애결혼의 결렬과 신여성의 행위성) [Concubine or Second Wife: New Woman and the Rupture of Love Marriage in the Colonial/Modern Korea from the 1920s to the 1930s], Hanguk Yosonghak 22/4 (2006): 47–84, 79–81.

34 Sungyun Lim, ‘Affection and Assimilation: Concubinage and the Ideal of Conjugal Love in Colonial Korea, 1922–38’, Gender & History 29, no.2 (2016): 461–79, 465.

35 The Research Team of the War & Women’s Human Rights Center, The Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (ed.), Stories that Make History: The Experience and Memories of the Japanese Military Comfort Girls-Women, trans. Angella Son (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2019), 164–5.

36 Park, Ibongun Wianso Gwanliin-ui Ilgi (일본군 위안소 관리인의 일기), annotated and translated by Ahn Byung-Jik (Seoul: Isup, 2013), 98. The real name of the Korean male manager was deliberately obscured to protect his identity.

37 Jeffrey A. Auerbach, Imperial Boredom: Monotony and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 3–4.

38 Ibid., 3.

39 Ibid, 6.

40 The Research Team of the War, Stories that Make History, 164.

41 Ibid., 165.

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid., 164.

44 Ibid.

45 Chungmoo Choi and Hyunah Yang, eds. and trans., Voices of the Korean Comfort Women: History Rewritten from Memories (London and New York: Routledge, 2023), 137.

46 Choi and Yang, Voices of the Korean Comfort Women, 137.

47 Ibid., 138.

48 Ibid.

49 Fay Bound Alberti, ‘This ‘Modern Epidemic’: Loneliness as an Emotion Cluster and a Neglected Subject in the History of Emotions’, Emotion Review 10, no. 3 (2018): 1–13.

50 Choi and Yang, Voices of the Korean Comfort Women, 37.

51 Ibid., 41.

52 Ibid., 43.

53 Ahn, ‘Yearning for Affection’, 366–7.

54 Infrastructure and intimacy as two different rubrics are useful in teasing out power dynamics in the study of sexual violence under colonialism and imperialism, see Ara Wilson, ‘The Infrastructure of Intimacy’, Signs: Journal of Women in culture and Society 41, no. 2 (2015): 248–80.

55 Ara Wilson, ‘The Infrastructure of Intimacy’, Signs: Journal of Women in culture and Society 41, no. 2 (2015), 274.

56 Choi and Yang, Voices of the Korean Comfort Women, 42.

57 Katie Barclay and Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, ‘Intersectional Identities’, in Sources for the History of Emotions: A Guide, eds. Katie Barclay, Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, and Peter N. Stearns (London and New York: Routledge, 2021), 185–97, 195.

58 Qiu, Su, and Chen, Chinese Comfort Women.

59 See Choi and Yang, Voices of the Korean Comfort Women; The Research Team of the War, Stories that Make History; Qiu, Su, and Chen, Chinese Comfort Women.

60 Qiu, Su, and Chen, Chinese Comfort Women, 127; The Research Team of the War, Stories that Make History, 235.

61 Susan Broomhall, Encounter, Transformation, and Agency in a Connected World: Narratives of Korean Women, 1550–1700 (London and New York: Routledge, 2023), 2–8.

62 Broomhall, Encounter, Transformation, and Agency in a Connected World.

63 Ueno Chizuko, Nationalism and Gender (Tokyo: Seidosha, 1998); Ueno Chizuko, Nationalism and Gender, trans. Beverley Yamamoto (London and Boston: Trans Pacific Press, 2003), 73; cf. although discussed in another context of Indonesia, two more similar terms proposed by Katharine McGregor, ‘ideal victims’ and ‘worthy victims’, are also useful in thinking through the legitimacy of women survivors’ understandings of the past, see Katherine E. McGregor, Systemic Silencing: Activism, Memory, and Sexual Violence in Indonesia (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2023), 151–5.

64 Broomhall, Encounter, Transformation, and Agency in a Connected World, 3.

65 Brad S. Gregory, Review of Is Small Beautiful? Microhistory and the History of Everyday Life, by Alf Lüdtke, William Templer, and Jacques Revel. History and Theory 38, no. 1 (1999): 100–10.

66 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1997), 15.

67 Toshimi Chazono, ‘Sekkusu toiu kontakuto zoun: nihon senryou no keiken kara’, in Toward a Comparative History of Sexual Violence and War, eds. Chizuko Ueno, Shinzo Araragi, and Kazuko Hirai (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2018), 143–69.

68 Ahn, ‘Yearning for Affection’, 369.

69 Ibid.

70 Choi and Yang, Voices of the Korean Comfort Women, 138.

71 Ibid., 37–8.

72 Choi and Yang, Voices of the Korean Comfort Women, 38; ‘receive’ here in the testimonials mean having intercourse or rape as the comfort women describe their experiences of repeated rape.

73 Choi and Yang, Voices of the Korean Comfort Women, 139.

74 Ibid., 138.

75 Gwenn A. Miller, ‘‘The Perfect Mistress of Russian Economy’: Sighting the Intimate on a Colonial Alaskan Terrain, 1784–1821’, in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 297–322, for the concept of ‘contact zone’, see Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Arts of the Contact Zone’, Profession (1991): 33–40.

76 Gwenn A. Miller, ‘‘The Perfect Mistress of Russian Economy’: Sighting the Intimate on a Colonial Alaskan Terrain, 1784–1821’, in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 314–5.

77 Choi and Yang, Voices of the Korean Comfort Women, 98.

78 Ibid.

79 Ibid., 99.

80 Ibid., 73.

81 Ibid., 114.

82 Shirli Gilbert, Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

83 Joshua D. Pilzer, Hearts of Pine: Songs in the Lives of Three Korean Survivors of the Japanese “Comfort Women” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 7.

84 Pilzer, ‘Music and Dance in the Japanese Military ‘Comfort Women’ System’, 11.

85 Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, The American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (June 2002): 821–45, 842.

86 Joshua D. Pilzer, Hearts of Pine: Songs in the Lives of Three Korean Survivors of the Japanese “Comfort Women” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 10.

87 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 289.

88 Pilzer, ‘Music and Dance in the Japanese Military, 22.

89 Maria Rosa Henson, Comfort Women: A Filipina’s Story of Prostitution and Slavery under the Japanese Military (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999), 35–48.

90 Henson, Comfort Women, 40.

91 Ibid., 44.

92 Henson, Comfort Women, 44.

93 Toshimi, ‘Sekkusu toiu kontakuto zoun: nihon senryou no keiken kara’.

94 Choi and Yang, Voices of the Korean Comfort Women, xiv.