ABSTRACT:In 2013, Glendale, California, installed \"Peace Monument,\" a bronze statue representing \"comfort women\"—girls and women coerced to work in brothels serving Japanese soldiers during World War II. Japanese groups deny such women were coerced and sued to remove the statue. The conflict over the monument attests to California's deepening ties across a Pacific region haunted by conflicting nationalist memories of World War II. But the monument speaks to other themes as well, including the increasing cultural impact of Korean-American groups on the Southern California landscape, and the recent diversification of subjects honored in monuments both locally and nationally. The paper outlines these three stories about the statue for their interest to West Coast geographers. The larger point is that, as California continues to broaden and deepen its relationships with other Pacific peoples, the state's landscapes will become increasingly multi-layered with stories about these relationships within California's own unfolding modernity.

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Three Stories about a Statue

In this thought-provoking book, Sarah Soh takes on a difficult task of re-reading the history of ‘‘comfort women’’ against the ‘‘paradigmatic narrative’’ of Korean female victimization and Japanese masculine violence. Tracing the comfort women debates in the past two decades, she identifies the two strands of discourses—‘‘feminist humanitarianism’’ and ‘‘Korean ethnic nationalism’’—that have driven much of the domestic and international redress movements and defined the contour and content of the debates among historians, politicians, and feminist and nationalist activists in Korea and Japan. The paradigmatic narrative tells stories of poor young women who were forcibly abducted and violently thrust into sexual enslavement to Japanese soldiers. As powerful as the paradigmatic narrative of sexual slavery has been, Soh argues, Korean women’s experiences and memories of Japanese colonial rule are far more complex and diverse and thus require nuanced and multifaceted analysis with careful attention to heterogeneous voices and perspectives among the women. Culling information from her own interviews with former comfort women as well as Japanese and Korean publications since the 1970s, Soh presents diverse tales of comfort women and their memories. The picture

Mire Koikari

Papers

The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan (review)