Teaching "comfort women" issues in women's studies courses.

Over the past ten years, Asian and Western feminists and human rights activists have created transnational coalitions to support the demands for redress by survivors of the Japanese military's "comfort system" of WWII. For nearly fifty years, the stories of these survivors--Asian women who were forced or coerced into brothels and sexually assaulted by thirty to forty soldiers a day over a period of months or years--were omitted from the history of the War; now the details of this systematic sexual abuse are being published everywhere, if not always in textbooks in Japan. But the survivors are no closer today to receiving official apologies or compensation from the government of Japan for their wartime sexual exploitation than they were a decade ago. Since the survivors came forward in the early 1990s, small bands of rightwing nationalists in Japan have loudly denied the truth of their accounts. Meanwhile, Japanese and Western judges alike have continued to dismiss their legal claims for reparations for the wa r crimes to which they were subjected. The former "comfort women (or "military sex slaves," as some prefer to be known) are now women in their seventies and eighties, who will probably never live to see justice done. Those who represent them in courts in Asia and the U. S., or who rake their cause to the global political stage--whether to the U. N., to the Hague Tribunals, or to the U. S. Congress, where two different pro-"comfort women" resolutions have been introduced and have languished--are unlikely to experience victory either.

On the other hand, those who have been and still are attempting to "represent" them in other ways--especially by creating, producing, and disseminating scholarly, or literary, or visual texts about their stories--have already been tremendously successful in making known both their past sufferings and their current political struggles. There is now a large body of material available in English, in a variety of media: documentary films, catalogues of multi-media installations and photo exhibitions, novels, nonfiction works combining historical data and analysis, and reproductions of drawings and paintings all focused on what the "comfort women" endured in the 1930s and 1940s and on how the few hundred remaining survivors live now. The oral testimonials and the written memoirs of many former "comfort women" themselves have begun to be translated and published in the U. S. (1) In addition, there are growing numbers of essays and, as in the case of my own 2001 volume, Legacies of the Comfort Women of WWII, co-edit ed with Bonnie B. C. Oh, books that now focus on recording and studying the phenomenon of feminist activism with and around the "comfort women." Such books tell the story of women and also of men building coalitions in the numerous countries throughout Asia--including Korea, the Philippines, Burma, China, Indonesia, Taiwan--from which the "comfort women were seized by the Japanese and joining not only with Australians and Americans of Asian and non-Asian descent, but with the numerous Japanese feminists who endorse the "comfort women's" claims.

I would like to argue for the importance of bringing this interdisciplinary, multi-racial, transnational material into Women's Studies courses, whether those on global feminist movements, women and war, Asian and Western feminisms, women and violence, women in the arts, women and politics, women's history; or in the introduction to Women's Studies as a field. My reasons for making this argument include those you may already expect. Certainly, teaching the story of the "comfort women" and of the organizing efforts that have grown up around them can help to express solidarity with women who deserve support; having a new generation of academics take their experiences of sexual violence seriously is the least that these women deserve as their due. Such teaching can have the side benefit, too, of demonstrating that (contrary to the standard anti-feminist line) feminist concerns are not primarily white, middle-class, or exclusively American.

But even as I suggest that to teach "comfort women issues can be an important service to the survivors themselves, as well as a service to students who need to be educated about the wide range of global feminism and to see how closely scholarship and activism can work together, I want to go further still. I want to assert that the "comfort women issue has a crucial--indeed an indispensable--role to play right now, at this historical moment, in confronting dangerous assumptions that have become prevalent on all U. S. campuses, even in Women's Studies classrooms. Ultimately, Women's Studies may have more to gain from the lessons of the "comfort women" than the "comfort women" movement has to gain from our interest in it.

"Militarization," as Cynthia Enloe has explained not only in her classic Bananas, Beaches, and Bases (1990), but more recently in her 2000 study, Maneuvers, occurs through a series of decisions and choices. Enloe brilliantly unpacks those decisions and choices, encouraging feminists to ask, "What maneuverings does it take to position certain women in any society to support their governments... when those governments rank public priorities so that they bestow superior value on the military as an institution and on soldiering as a public activity?" (2) Both the process of militarization and its finished results are damaging to women s lives around the globe, leading, as Enloe reminds us, to "militarized violence" and often to sexual violence in particular. (3) College campuses have been militarized--in some cases, re-militarized--under our noses.

But we have now come much farther along that path toward re-militarization, and very quickly, in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001. If, during the Gulf War, journalists were part of that earlier process of enlisting women viewers and readers by focusing on women enlistees, they are currently serving as mouthpieces for militarism in a different way. This time around, they have made themselves the bearers of self-fulfilling prophecies, by assuring readers that pro-military attitudes are not merely on the rise, but are becoming the norm and are associated, moreover, with the virtue of "newness so appealing to the young. I would point to an article such as one that appeared in the New York Times of 26 November 2001, titled "On College Campuses, Students See Military With New Set of Eyes" and subtitled "Even at the Most Liberal Colleges, a New Respect for Armed Forces." (6) By no coincidence, the end of the article focuses entirely upon the voices of women. As it is women who, historically, have been associate d with the most skeptical, or at least ambivalent, views of war and of war machinery, it is necessary here for the reporter, David W. Chen, to affirm his observation of a "new" spirit by having women articulate changed attitudes:

And our Women's Studies classes are proving no exception. Twenty years ago, I began teaching Women's Studies at the University of Virginia through British women's lite rature courses. In 1982, when female and male students read and discussed Rebecca West's 1918 novel, The Return of the Soldier, I counted on them to share the female narrator's horror, as the male protagonist returned shell-shocked and amnesiac from the frontlines and then, once "cured," was sent back again to face death. When I assigned Virginia Woolf's 1938 polemic, Three Guineas, I heard women students in particular actively express their agreement with what Patricia Laurence characterizes as Woolf's "dialectical argument against war" (4) and what Nancy Topping Bazin and Jane Hamovit Lauter describe as Woolf's larger struggle against the "philosophy of domination" underpinning all patriarchal institutions, from domestic to governmental to military ones. (5) In the post-Vietnam War climate of the 1980s, it was possible, even at a state university where there was ROTC and where some students were in uniform, to speak openly and critically of the role that military systems both around the world and in the U. S. had played as forces of oppression. The Gulf War of 1991 was one factor that served to create a shift in the classroom climate. Glamorous publicity images of women as heroic pilots and soldiers, along with the carefully gender-inclusive language of politicians and journalists who talked about "our brave sons and daughters," played an important role in selling militarism back to students, even to young feminists. Long after that war was over, however, this progress toward re-militarization continued, fueled not so much by public events as by media events. In recent years, while teaching interdisciplinary Women's Studies at Georgetown University, I have seen numerous students-- whether in courses such as "Women's Representations of War," "Cultural Representations of Women," or "Introduction to Women's Studies"--eager to write, and to do so uncritically, about Hollywood films such as Courage Under Fire and G. L Jane or, to be more precise, about how Meg Ryan and Demi Moore serve as positive role models for th em in those pro-military propaganda pieces.

Alison Weisgall, a [sic] English and classics major from Bethesda, Md., said that before Sept. 11, she could never understand why anyone would join the military, partly because her father, who attended Columbia in the 60's opposed the Vietnam war.

Before, I might ask, 'Why are you throwing away your life?"' she said. "But now it makes more sense. You think, maybe everyone should be trained, or at least have a notion of what it means."

Some students acknowledge that they feel somewhat removed from the military, because they have the luxury of cocooning themselves in academia. Even so, most say that they no longer view the military as something alien and distant from their lives, and they expect that the military will be a looming presence for some time to come.

"Before, the military was like the little place in Times Square where you could sign up, and I never knew anyone who did it," said Jennifer Lynn Stermer, a junior who is an English major from Manhattan. "Now, I feel--I don't know if respect is the tight word--but I'm thankful that there are people willing to do that." (7)

Meanwhile, the Washington Post produced an equivalent story on 23 November 2001, titled "Trust, and Interest, In Government Soar on College Campuses," which included the results of "A nationwide survey released...by Harvard University's Institute of Politics [which] found that...75 percent of 1,200 undergraduates surveyed said they trust the military to do the right thing." (8) Even more worrisome, this article, by Michael A. Fletcher, bore the subtitle "Patriotism Thrives Where It Once Was Anathema," explicitly conflating patriotism with an uncritical embrace of the military establishment. Where, then, do the histories of the Asian "comfort women of WWII fir into such an environment? And what kinds of interventions might the teaching of those stories perform? Certainly, it is not possible to study either the survivors' personal testimonials or the political background to the systematic and institutionalized sexual violation of these women without posing a challenge to the idea that one can "trust the militar y to do the right thing." As Bonnie B. C. Oh notes, in examining Japan's pursuit of a war of aggression and the simultaneous rise of the "comfort system" to facilitate the Japanese army's invasion and occupation of the rest of Asia,

By the mid-1930s, imperial Japan, led by extreme militarists and with the divine emperor as leader, was positioned to 'guide' all its Asian neighbors. It was convinced of the superiority of its race and the absolute moral correctness of its mission in the military conquest of other parts of Asia. For many Japanese, including most of the general population, World War II in Asia was indeed a holy war for imperial Japan to redeem Asia from the Western imperialists. (9)

Reading such an analysis now must give us pause. Even as we are hearing our political leaders couch foreign policy in the language of a "crusade" against "evildoers," they are also positioning the military in absolute moral terms, as on the side of "the good." Surely no institution should be vested with that sort of totalizing moral authority, but especially not one that has had such a long record, in so many eras and nations, of exploiting the labor and especially the forced sexual labor of women. To bring into the classroom, in 2003, this example of the sexual abuse of Asian women by the Japanese army, as well as information about the continuing refusal of the Japanese government to accept responsibility for the war crimes which it allowed and encouraged the military to commit, is to risk making our Women's Studies students uncomfortable. It might even risk malting them hostile toward us, their professors, who seem to be countering what the New York Times has called that "New Respect." In a recent essay in the Women's Review of Books, the Japanese-born feminist scholar, Michiko Hase, has written about the kinds of student anger and resistance she has encountered at American universities when daring, in courses such as "Global Gender Issues," to discuss "US citizens' complicity in and accountability for their government's and businesses' policies and actions." (10) Ironically, she has found that students "become more appreciative of the course and me," however, if she teaches "comfort women" topics, for "when I presented the 'comfort women' issue in a way that was very critical of Japan, the students knew that I had not been 'bashing' the United Stares but had been applying my critical analysis to all countries and issues." (11) Yet, if their suspicions and hostility were allayed by hearing a Japanese woman lambaste Japanese militarism, then they clearly were not seeing the larger picture--one in which they ought to have recognized the challenge to all versions of militarism, including the kinds closer to home.

Indeed, nor only does the history of the "comfort women" invite students to make the leap from a distant sphere to a nearer one, and to recognize the danger of giving uncritical support and a free hand to any military system, anywhere in the world, but it also forces them to look afresh--and perhaps askance -- at the American army's record of abuse of women during the postwar years in Japan. In his new book, Japan's Comfort Women, Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II and the US Occupation, Yuki Tanaka, a historian who taught for many years in Australia and who now is based again in his native Japan, uncovers and details the role of the U.S. occupying forces, both in refusing to punish the Japanese perpetrators of the "comfort system" and in encouraging, if not requiring, postwar Japanese officials to establish similar military brothels for their own troops. The justification for these postwar brothels, which were filled with coerced and exploited women, was the same one used by the founders of the "comfort system"--i. e., supposedly to prevent the widespread and indiscriminate rape by soldiers of the civilian population. While giving the U. S. occupation forces their due as bringing "various progressive policies to Japan," Tanaka documents clearly how and why they maintained very different intentions where women's bodies and sexuality were concerned and "actively participated in their subjugation." (12)

The pictures that Yuki Tanaka paints of Japanese and the U.S. military conduct in regard to women are similar and similarly ugly. But his aim is neither to bash Japan nor the U.S.; his target is militarism itself, especially the "androcentric ideology" and readiness to use women sexually which "has been, and still is, deeply rooted inmost military forces and the societies that support them." (13) It would, however, be both misleading and in a way counterproductive to introduce into the syllabus analyses of the sexual abuse of women by the U. S. military, but confine these only to examples from the past (and we must consider that for most undergraduates, the 1940s represents an unimaginably distant past from which they can too easily dissociate themselves). Asian American feminists, in particular, have continued to document the links between the Japanese treatment of "comfort women" as sexual chattel and the long, ongoing history of sexual exploitation of Korean women in and around U. S. military bases in Korea. Such links need to be explored, not ignored, in classrooms on American campuses, especially at a time when the journalistic drumbeating on behalf of unfettered militarism is so loud.

In her academic study, Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U. S.-Korea Relations, Women's Studies scholar Katharine H. S. Moon has investigated the U. S. and Korean governments' use of women's bodies to further "cooperation between nations through the creation of the camptowns that systematically organize and make sexual services available to American troops stationed abroad. (14) Similarly, the classroom screening of documentary films about this issue -- especially Diana Lee's Camp Arirang and Hye Jung Park and J. T. Takagi's The Women Outside--can serve as powerful, immediate counterweights to the glamorous images of soldiering that pervade the media. Drawing upon interviews and testimonies, these two films emphasize that many of the women who "serve" the U. S. military today as so-called voluntary sex workers were in fact recruited in the same brutal ways as were their earlier counterparts in Japan's "comfort system"--that is, through coercion, trickery, and even force--because both Korean and American governmental interests have viewed men's access to female bodies for "R & R" as so crucial to military morale.

When assigning books and films that present perspectives so different from the pro-military discourses currently circulating on college campuses, classroom instructors must be prepared for a range of initial student responses, from shock and disbelief to active hostililty toward the content. They must anticipate such reactions, building time and opportunities for lengthy conversation and student feedback into the syllabus; otherwise, undergraduates may feel that professors wish to "indoctrinate" them, and they may use this as an excuse for refusing to engage with the material at all.

But instructors must also recognize in advance and ready themselves to handle the potentially traumatic psychological effects on students of bringing the subject of military sexual exploitation into their courses. Some students will be the children of American soldiers who have served in Asia and frequented the camptown brothels; some may also be the children of women who were at one point in these Korean camptowns (a number of whom, as Park and Takagi's film The Women Outside shows, have married American enlisted men and emigrated to the U. S.). To learn that this buried story of militarism's role in sexual exploitation is also ones immediate family history can be devastating, particularly for eighteen-year-olds.

Instructors will need, therefore, to exercise the same kinds of caution that all Women's Studies faculty must observe, who choose to teach the subjects of sexual abuse or sexual violence in their courses. As Elana Newman points out in "Ethical Issues in Teaching About Violence Against Women," these topics "can upset students' emotional, psychological, political, and spiritual constructions of the world." In addition, "many of the students themselves are survivors of violence. . . and may be suffering from trauma-related psychological symptoms or personal issues." (15) Therefore, it is often wise for faculty to educate themselves about campus counseling services, in order to be ready with recommendations for students who might benefit from these. Instructors who rely on student participation should also consider ahead of time that class discussions may be especially fraught, as Women's Studies professor Margaret Gentry notes, in "a small college community, such as the one where I teach, [because] anything they may self-disclose will find its way around campus very quickly." (16)

Nevertheless, Elana Newman argues persuasively that, despite these pitfalls and difficulties, the study of sexual violence belongs in the classroom, for undergraduates "should be educated about violence from a multidisciplinary perspective so that they can make informed decisions about activism and policity in their communities." Right now, it is doubly important for them, as citizens of voting age, to be able to "make informed decisions" about the current and future role of militarism in the world. To do so, they must be able to draw upon a full knowledge of how military systems have functioned in the past, especially in relation to sexuality. Women's Studies faculty owe their students that information, which includes both the story of Japan's "comfort women system and the story of subsequent American military exploitation of Asian women throughout recent decades. In suggesting that the teaching of "comfort women issues might be able to bring about a much-needed change of mind in Women's Studies students and an increase of doubt about the desirability of militarism, I am, of course, being utopian. Yet everywhere I go, the media assures me that instantaneous change is possible, for supposedly "everything changed" on September 11th, 2001. So, if journalists are to be believed, then everything could just as quickly change again. I would like to think this is so, and that the history of the "comfort women can give students a different version of what New York Times reporter David W Chen called a "New Set of Eyes," a set of eyes that are fully open. Perhaps, if we are lucky it might even teach them another kind of "New Respect"--not for the military, but for women's lives.

1. Among the many sources now available for classroom use on military sexual slavery during World War II are scholarly studies, such as George Hicks's The Comfort Women: Japan's Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War (NY: W. W. Norton, 1994), Yuki Tanaka's Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II (Boulder, CO: Westview 1996), and Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (NY BasicBooks, 1997); personal memoirs and collections of survivors' testimonies, such as Maria Rosa Henson's Comfort Woman: A Filipina's Story of Prostitution and Slavery under the Japanese Military (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), Keith Howard's edited collection, True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women (NY & London: Cassell, 1995), and Dai Sil Kim-Gibson's Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women (Parkersburg, IA Mid-Prairie Books, 1999); and also works of historical fiction, such as Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman (NY: Viking, 1997), Therese Park's A Gift of the Em peror (Duluth, MN: Spinsters Ink, 1997), and Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life (NY: Penguin, 1999).

2.Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 294.

3. Enloe, p. 295.

4. Patricia Laurence, "The Facts and Fugue of War: From Three Guineas to Between the Acts," in Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth, ed. Mark Hussey (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991), p. 238.

5. Nancy Topping Bazin and Jane Hamovit Thuter, "Virginia Woolf's Keen Sensitivity to War: Its Roots and Its Impact on Her Novels," in Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality and Myth, ed. Mark Hussey (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991), p. 24.

6. David W. Chen, "On College Campuses, Students See Military With New Set of Eyes," New York Times, 26 Nov. 2001, YNE, sec. A, p. 15.

7. Ibid.

8. Michael A. Fletcher, "Trust, and Interest, In Government Soar On College Campuses," Washington Post, 23 Nov. 2001, sec. A, p. 3.

9. Bonnie B. C. Oh, "The Japanese Imperial System and the Korean 'Comfort Women' of World War II," in Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War II, eds. Margaret Stetz and Bonnie B. C. Oh (Armonk, NY & London: M.E. Sharpe, 2001), p.7.

10. Michiko Hase, "Class Conflict: Student Resistance and Nationalism in the Classroom," Women's Review of Books 19, no. 5 (February 2002), p. 9.

11. Ibid.

12. Yuki Tanaka, Japan's Comfort Women, Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II and the US Occupation (London and NY: Routledge, 2002), p. 165.

13. Tanaka, p. 87.

14. See Katharine H. S. Moon, Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U S.-Korea Relations (NY: Columbia University Press, 1997).

15. Elana Newman, "Ethical Issues in Teaching About Violence Against Women," Women's Studies Quarterly 27, nos. 1 &2 (Spring/Summer 1999), p. 197.

16. Margaret Gentry, "Forum: How do you teach controversy?" Transformations 12, no. 2 (2001), p. 77.

MARGARET B. STETZ, who is Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Delaware, was the co-organizer of the first major conference in the U. S. on "comfort women" issues, held at Georgetown University in September 1996. With Bonnie B. C. Oh, she is co-editor of Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War II (M. E. Sharpe, 2001). Her many publications over the past twenty years include books such as British Women's Comic Fiction, 18901990 (Ashgate, 2001); essays in volumes such as Nineteenth-Century Lives (Cambridge U P, 1989), Transforming Genres (St. Martin's, 1994), and Literature and Racial Ambiguity (Rodopi, 2002); and articles in academic journals ranging from South Atlantic Quarterly, Victorian Studies, and Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, to Feminist Teacher, Transformations, and The Peace Review.