An Unforgettable Ordeal: Chinese ‘Comfort Women’ in World War II

Using methods including analyzing firsthand testimonies, images, and secondary sources, this paper explores the multiple factors that resulted in the silence of Chinese comfort women survivors in both wartime and the postwar period: shame culture, patrichy, and lack of political and cultural support for comfort women. Due to both patriarchy and related shame culture and a lack of political, cultural, and international support for survivors, few Chinese women spoke up about their experience within the comfort women system prior to the redress movement beginning in 1991; in the 1990s, societal and government support for comfort women increased, leading many comfort women to not only share their experiences but seek justice in the process. To begin, this paper provides an overview of essential historical context, including Japanese colonialism, the establishment of “comfort women” systems, Chinese comfort womens’ suffering, and the post-war struggles and ongoing plight of victims and survivors. Next, this paper argues that due to shame, culture and patriarchy; the lack of political, cultural, and international support for comfort women; and the mental and physical trauma that they experienced, comfort women survivors refused to speak up or seek justice for decades during and after World War II. Finally, this paper investigates key differences between the Cultural Revolution and redress movement, analyzing why comfort women spoke out during the latter period but largely remained silent during the postwar period from 1945 to 1990.

Remembering forgotten heroes and the idealisation of true love: Veteran memorial activism in contemporary China

Recent research on collective memory and war commemoration highlights the ‘conspicuous silence’ of war veterans in Chinese history. Studies of the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945) typically reflect either a state-centred approach, which emphasises the official history constructed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), or the alternative narratives constructed by intellectual elites in post-socialist China. In response to these top-down narratives, this essay focuses instead on a historical redress movement led by ex-servicemen of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The former PLA members, the participant volunteers of this movement, devote themselves into seeking and supporting a group of forgotten Kuomintang (KMT) veterans who fought against the Japanese invaders in the Second World War but now struggle with impoverished living conditions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from 2013 to 2015, I will show how the daily interactions between these two groups of veterans embody a more private and internalised sense of commemorative yearning for a lost past, highlighting in the process the value of ethnographic research in breaking through the wall of silence constructed by hegemonic histories around veteran communities and their role in making war history.

“Untold Stories of Issei Women: Collective Images and Individual Experiences in Japanese American Oral History”

This article examines the relationship between the Japanese American redress movement and the oral interviews of two Japanese immigrant women, known as Issei women. Focusing on the shared images of Issei women in the Japanese American community and the perspectives and self-representations of the interviewees in the oral interviews, it explores how cultural consensus produced stereotypical, collective images of Issei women as submissive, persevering, and quiet persons. As the redress movement progressed in the 1960s to the 1980s, the Japanese American community conducted oral history projects to preserve memories and legacies of their wartime experiences. There are dissimilarities between the original audio recordings and the published transcripts regarding the perspectives of Issei women. This article shows how the community’s desire to preserve idealized images of Issei men and women reduced the accuracy and nuances in the women’s self-representations and the complexities of family relations. Also, contrary to the collective images, Issei women demonstrated how they were independent, assertive, and open individuals expressing their perspectives, complicated emotions, and importance in the family.