Based on extensive ethnographic work, Comfort Women Activism examines how women activists in Japan, Japanese and Koreans, have come to understand the comfort women issue. The movement in Japan has evolved as part of transnational activism, in which the activists in Japan play a crucial role in lobbying legislators and generating public opinion conducive to the state’s compensation. By presenting the activists’ narratives, the book illuminates the nuanced understandings of the issue they have developed through face-to-face communication with survivors. Their diverse voices shed light on the mul ... More

Based on extensive ethnographic work, Comfort Women Activism examines how women activists in Japan, Japanese and Koreans, have come to understand the comfort women issue. The movement in Japan has evolved as part of transnational activism, in which the activists in Japan play a crucial role in lobbying legislators and generating public opinion conducive to the state’s compensation. By presenting the activists’ narratives, the book illuminates the nuanced understandings of the issue they have developed through face-to-face communication with survivors. Their diverse voices shed light on the multifaceted aspects of the movement. The book also provides an account of the movement’s thirty-year history and an overview of scholarly arguments presented in Japanese. Many of the activists’ thoughts are relevant to scholarly debates on the comfort women issue, exemplifying, substantiating, and commenting on what researchers have said. By measuring the activist narratives against scholarly debates, the book argues that comfort women activism in Japan is a new form of feminism characterized by critical historical consciousness; the intersectionality of gender, ethnicity, and class; mutual transformation; and transnational solidarity. Most importantly, it argues that women activists in Japan, a former colonial empire, have avoided falling into imperialist feminism through the act of listening to survivors wholeheartedly.