What the World Owes the Comfort Women

Abstract

The women who served in Japan’s military brothels across Asia during the Second World War are a focus of the politics of memory in East Asia as well as a touchstone for international human rights and sexual violence against women. By the 1990s, the “comfort women” had become a “traveling trope,” which like the Holocaust, both recognized and transcended its original time and place. Gluck traces their “coming into memory” through changes in five areas of the evolving postwar “global memory culture”: law, testimony, rights, politics, and notions of responsibility. She shows how the ideas and practices of public memory changed over time, in the course of which the comfort women became “global victims” in a transnational memoryscape.

The potential of transnational history education: Attempts at university teaching practice in East Asia

“…The article examined the example of the CAMPUS Asia ENGAGE Program, which applied active learning methods to the teaching of history to undergraduate students in East Asia. Moving beyond nationalism and have a global turn in thinking history is what is particularly needed in the region where teaching history to ‘post-memory’ students is often surrounded by ‘hate nationalism’ (Gluck, 2021: 102–103). The teaching approach presented in this article suggests that students could be mediators in history teaching (Skårås, 2021: 295), and by giving students an agency in the classroom, history education could create a healing environment and an environment of hope (Corredor et al, 2018: 181).…”

“…The conflict over historical narratives is linked to nationalism and has been fuelled in recent decade in the region. The teaching and learning of modern history in Asia cannot be immune to what Carol Gluck (2021) has called 'hate nationalism ' (pp. 102-103).…”

Specters of comfort women: Biopolitical colonial warfare, questions of humanity, and the haunted future

“…In her recent essay entitled “What the World Owes the Comfort Women,” Carol Gluck traces how patterns of national memory politics have been formulated, especially in the context of East Asia, that have been persistently mired in obstructive attitudes toward the redress movement for comfort women. Gluck reconceives the comfort women issue, locating it in a transnational landscape of memory politics while searching for the norms and practices of what she calls the “global memory culture” (2021). Gluck’s work, which follows paradigm shifts in orientation regarding official apology, acknowledgment, and compensation in the “global memory culture,” makes connections between the Holocaust in Europe and Japanese military sex slavery in Asia as analogous, though diverse, examples of transnational memory (2021: 103).…”

“…Gluck reconceives the comfort women issue, locating it in a transnational landscape of memory politics while searching for the norms and practices of what she calls the “global memory culture” (2021). Gluck’s work, which follows paradigm shifts in orientation regarding official apology, acknowledgment, and compensation in the “global memory culture,” makes connections between the Holocaust in Europe and Japanese military sex slavery in Asia as analogous, though diverse, examples of transnational memory (2021: 103). Gluck’s point is clear and hopeful: the significant role played by the comfort women survivors and their supporters (e.g., survivor testimonies and grassroots transnational activism), if demonstrated beyond nationalistic uses of history, can bring the attention of the world to the continuing violation of the human rights of women.…”

“…Gluck’s point is clear and hopeful: the significant role played by the comfort women survivors and their supporters (e.g., survivor testimonies and grassroots transnational activism), if demonstrated beyond nationalistic uses of history, can bring the attention of the world to the continuing violation of the human rights of women. What the world owes the comfort women, then, according to Gluck, is “a debt both to the past, in the form of a more responsible public memory, and to the future, in the effort to prevent similar injustice in our own time” (2021: 104).…”