It is undoubtedly one of the best (if not the best) book about women who are called “comfort women” in English. Soh outlines the historical context of Japan’s fifteen years’ war and critically analyzes available sources in the context of personal experiences. But most of all – with each chapter it makes us realize that this is not a topic limited only to Japanese imperialism. She writes about Korean collaborators and the modernizing Korean society, explains how to understand it all in the broader context of colonialism and capitalism.
For what am I most grateful to Soh, except that she did a monumental research work and described it in an accessible (albeit for people accustomed to the academic writing style) way? For her critical approach to the subject. In her book, she writes about memory and how politicized it is: by Koreans who use the theme of “comfort women” to create a martyrological nationalist narrative, by neo-nationalism in the Japanese edition, who denies that anything like that happened, by the global feminist discourse that brings often the whole complicated procedure to the catchy name “sex slaves”.
And with all this, Soh writes with empathy about the institutionalized system that made women a “war commodity”, clashes Japanese and Korean patriarchal views of the world, outlines a whole range of gray colonial experiences. And she repeatedly reminds that the sexual exploitation of women during wartime took place in various areas conquered by Japan: in the Philippines, Indonesia, Taiwan, Singapore. And most importantly – it was sanctioned by the Japanese government also after the war, as well as by the American invaders, in Japan and Korea, and later in Vietnam.
Soh’s book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand not only one of the most controversial threads in contemporary Japanese and Korean history, but also for those who are interested in feminism and want to understand the mechanisms of structural violence against women in general.
