Working memory retains information and makes it available for processing. People often need to hold several chunks of information available while concentrating on only one of them. This process requires selective attention to the contents of working memory. In this article, we summarize evidence for both a broad focus of attention with a capacity of approximately four chunks and a narrow focus of attention that selects a single chunk at a time.

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The story of the 'military comfort women' has, in the past eight years, been seared into international historical memory. This euphemistic term was used by the Japanese during World War II to refer to a huge group of Asian women -possibly 200,000 -who were rounded up by order of the Japanese military and shipped to the front lines to serve as prostitutes for the soldiers. They were recruited in various ways (discussed below) but were treated as slaves once on duty. Some also cooked and cleaned but their primary duty was to provide daily sexual service for the soldiers and sailors. The lives of the military comfort women were extremely hard. At the end of the war, many of them were deliberately killed or abandoned on the battlefield by the retreating Japanese forces. In the decades since the war, most of the survivors have lived in poverty and often alone rather than with kin.In 1990 some former comfort women began raising the issue of apology and reparation from Japan, although none identified herself publicly until 1991. When the Japanese government responded by announcing that its wartime incarnation had no direct involvement with enforced prostitution, other women and even some Japanese veterans were so appalled by that reaction that they spoke up as well. 1 Since then, the issues of acknowledgement, their memories, apology and restitution for enslaving the women have caused major international tensions for the Japanese government. 2 In the same period, the wartime and postwar experience of these mostly poor and uneducated old ladies has sparked enormous scholarly and popular interest in Asia, Europe, Oceania, and North America. 3 Clearly, theirs is a potent history, compelling the imagination of many today -far more than it did fifty or even twenty-five years ago. This essay explores the reasons for that suddenly augmented imaginative power and the variety of meanings their ordeal has for different groups of people, specifically Japanese, other Asian, and Western feminists, proponents of Asian cultural identity in Asia and the United States, and Japanese nationalists. Although there are a few vocal individuals in Japan who refuse to accept the overwhelming evidence of the existence of the comfort women systemnot just the testimony of the women themselves, but also of soldiers and