scholarly journals ‘Comfort women must fall’? Japanese governmental responses to ‘comfort women’ statues around the world

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (6) ◽  
pp. 1255-1271
Author(s):  
Rin Ushiyama
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
Comfort Women ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
World War ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Japanese Colonialism ◽  
Japanese Military ◽  
The World

This article examines Japanese governmental responses to memorial statues dedicated to ‘comfort women’ – women across the Asia-Pacific whom the Japanese military forced into conditions now recognised as sexual slavery before and during World War Two. This article discusses four cases around the world in which Japanese government officials have demanded the removal of comfort women statues: 1) Glendale, California; 2) San Francisco; 3) Manila; and 4) Berlin. The global expansion of comfort women memorialisation is significant to contemporary statue politics and crises of memory in three ways. Firstly, East Asian diasporas have become important actors in the remembrance of Japanese colonialism and the Asia-Pacific War outside East Asia. Secondly, these statues constitute attempts by diasporas to recover and reclaim a traumatic past through material culture. Thirdly, despite the global geographical reach of comfort women memory activism, neither nationalism nor the power of the nation-state have declined in today’s transnational world.

scholarly journals ‘Comfort Women’ and the politics of responsibility

2012 ◽  
pp. 89-93
Author(s):  
Gyunghee Park
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Exploitation ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
Sex Industry ◽  
Korean Women ◽  
Comfort Women ◽  
World War ◽  
Japanese Military ◽  
Second World ◽  
Sense Of Shame

Japan’s brutal military occupation of Korea from 1910 until the end of the Second World War is generally remembered as a period of grave injustice which has defined a large part of what it means to be Korean. Though the list of crimes is vast, today it seems that one of the most barbaric offences committed at the time was the formation of ‘comfort stations’ – a euphemistic term used to describe the sexual exploitation of mostly Korean women by the Japanese military and government. After a decisive end to Japan’s military conquest of control over the Asia Pacific with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, former ‘comfort women’ were silenced for over half a century by a deeply systemic sense of shame. Korean patriarchy pressed many survivors to hide their plight or even back into different sectors of the sex industry. However, South Korea’s democratization in the late-1980s ...

China and the United States: Business, Technology, and Networks, 1914–1941

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-141
Author(s):  
Wu Lin-chun
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Scientific Management ◽  
Business Organizations ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The World ◽  
Business Technology

This paper studies the activities of American enterprises, technology, and related business organizations and engineering groups in China from the outbreak of World War i to the Pacific War and explains how these activities helped establish connections between China and the world. It borrows the concept of “networks” from Professor Sherman Cochran’s extraordinary book titled Encountering Chinese Networks, but broadens the scope of the term to include activity at the level of management and competition, as well as placing Sino-American relations in transnational perspective. Using a multi-archival approach to examine China’s major attempts at internationalization, this article focuses on the cases of the American Asiatic Association, the American Chamber of Commerce of China, and the Association of Chinese and American Engineers to show how these networks played important roles in the development of Chinese-American relations. It also discusses the issues of standardization, “scientific management,” and professionalism of entrepreneurs and engineers in influencing network making.

Making Icons

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Coates
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
World War ◽  
Peak Period ◽  
Japanese Cinema ◽  
The Media ◽  
Rigorous Study ◽  
Post War

A distinctive feature of post-war Japanese cinema is the frequent recurrence of imagistic and narrative tropes and formulaic characterizations in female representations. These repetitions are important, Jennifer Coates asserts, because sentiments and behaviours forbidden during the war and post-war social and political changes were often articulated by or through the female image. Moving across major character types, from mothers to daughters, and schoolteachers to streetwalkers, Making Icons studies the role of the media in shaping the attitudes of the general public. Japanese cinema after defeat in the Asia Pacific War and World War II is shown to be an important ground where social experiences were explored, reworked, and eventually accepted or rejected by audiences emotionally invested in these repetitive materials. An examination of 600 films produced and distributed between 1945 and 1964, as well as numerous Japanese-language sources, forms the basis of this rigorous study. Making Icons draws on an art-historical iconographic analysis to explain how viewers derive meanings from images during this peak period of film production and attendance in Japan.

Historical Memories and China”s Changing Views of East Asia

2002 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 41-57
Author(s):  
Guoqi Xu
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Third World ◽  
Military Intervention ◽  
World Country ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
Third World Country ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Historical Memories

AbstractThe use (or misuse) of history for political purposes is not a Chinese specialty. Almost every country in the world does it.1 Even Americans, who are not known for their historical memories, will on occasions use historical arguments. Whenever they contemplate military intervention in a Third World country, an obsession leads them into debate whether it will become another Vietnam.2 The Japanese also use history for their political purposes, as discussed below. The list can go on. But nowhere is the use of history—both remembering and forgetting—more apparent than in current Chinese discussion about the Asia Pacific War with Japan and the status of Taiwan in the world today.

Aviation and Asian Modernity 1900–1950

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Baumler
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Air Force ◽  
Asian Country ◽  
Aviation Industry ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
World War ◽  
The World ◽  
Mapping Techniques ◽  
The Military

Between 1903 and 1950, aviation technology was spread around the world and became a key concern of governments and a cultural marker of modernity. After 1903, Asia had to be explored again. Almost as soon as heavier than air flight became possible, French and British fliers began pioneering new routes to Asian cities and developing new maps and new airports along the way. With these new forms of knowledge, the colonial powers quickly moved to tie together their empires. New mapping techniques allowed for new forms of control, including what the British called “air policing,” the idea that judicious use of aircraft, and in some cases bombs and poison gas, could cheaply pacify far-flung colonial populations. Aviation was one field, however, where the Europeans did not have a long lead on Asians. Just as Europeans were using aviation to express their dominance, Asians were using it to express their modernity. Feng Ru was making and flying his own planes in San Francisco by 1912, and Siam had an air force by 1913. Asian social and political elites, who had once traveled by rail and steamship, now preferred to fly instead. “Air-mindedness” became a marker of global citizenship. Japan was the first Asian country to have an aviation industry. They proved their technological prowess to the rest of the world when they entered World War II. Their pilots bombed cities and fleets across Asia between 1937and 1945. The experience of being bombed as well as the drills and community organizations that grew out of experience ushered in a societal awareness of the military power of airplanes. The war culminated with two atomic air raids and was followed by a scramble to occupy and connect the newly liberated and independent parts of Asia. The post–World War II period led to an intensified effort to tie Asia together with faster transportation

The Demand to Listen to Korean “Comfort Women” and to Two Biblical Women

2020 ◽  
pp. 96-111
Author(s):  
Yani Yoo
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Comfort Women ◽  
World War ◽  
Korean History ◽  
Japanese Military ◽  
Biblical Women ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
Korean Comfort Women

Correlated to the experiences of Korean comfort women, the story of Solomon’s judgment (1 Kgs. 3:16–28) becomes a resistance narrative to hegemonic powers. The interpretation discusses the literary strategies of the women’s identities and naming, the emerging reversal of power, the issues of mimicry, mockery, ambiguity, and the conspiracy of readers. The Japanese military comfort women of World War II serve as the geopolitical context with which the interpretation justifies its focus on the two biblical women. It becomes apparent that colonizing and patriarchal powers ignore victim-survivors of sexual violence and abuse whether in the biblical text or in recent Korean history. Biblical texts and recent wartime events illuminate each other.

Local Ecosystems and Social Conditions of Innovative Enterprise

2020 ◽  
pp. 76-97
Author(s):  
Antonio Andreoni ◽  
William Lazonick
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
World War ◽  
Conceptual Approach ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Innovative Enterprise

This chapter integrates the theory and history of localized economic development by summarizing the experiences of three iconic industrial districts: a) the Lancashire cotton textile district which in the last half of the nineteenth century enabled Britain to become the ‘workshop of the world’; b) the globally competitive towns and cities specializing in a variety of light industries, especially in the Emilia Romagna regional district, that, as the ‘Third Italy’, brought economic modernity to that nation in the decades after World War II; and 3) the area in California south of San Francisco, centred on Stanford University, that, as ‘Silicon Valley’, made the United States the world leader in the microelectronics and Internet revolutions of the last decades of the twentieth century. Using the ‘social conditions of innovative enterprise’ as a common conceptual approach, the chapter highlights key lessons from history of the nexus between firms and their local ecosystems.

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