This book offers a critical perspective for reassessing the issues of “comfort women,” the sexual slavery system enforced by the Japanese military during World War II. Despite its immediate focus on this military sex slavery, the book’s project is more ambitious and conceptual as it investigates the broader economic, political, and discursive shifts across national and regional boundaries that led to this Asian case of wartime atrocities being belatedly publicized in the early 1990s and rendered highly visible to the global audience thereafter. The book approaches the comfort women issues as a complex “problematic” that was both enabled and constrained by “certain modes of expertise, contestation, and non-knowing” in a US-centered “power/knowledge architecture” (36).
The book’s narrative is layered and complex. It meticulously reviews and updates numerous documents, events, media reports, and academic studies presented in English on the subject of comfort women. Simultaneously, its core chapters are reserved for...
