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Yasuko Hassall Kobayashi, Ritsumeikan University
There were two world wars in human history, which created enormous mobility of people. World War I created various forms of mobility in Europe, while World War II or the Pacific War functioned similarly and created various forms of mobilities in the Asia and Pacific region. Those war mobilities and their residues in the Asia and Pacific continue to cause diplomatic issues to this date. This presentation focuses on one such kind of war mobility in the Asia and Pacific, so-called “comfort women”. One of the key contentions is whether they were forced to move or not. While oral historians and documentary filmmakers have gathered interviews to prove that they were forced to move to serve as comfort women, others argue that the credibility of such oral interviews can be questioned since the memories of the people who are interviewed could have changed over time. This presentation takes a different approach to understanding comfort women. First, this presentation considers their mobilities as war labour mobility. The geographic scope of this particular kind of mobility was not just between Japan and Korea but was transnational across the Asia Pacific. In fact, an Australian Captain was fascinated to see some of those comfort women arrive at Rabaul in Papua New Guinea before 1943 (Nelson, 2008). Their mobility during wartime across the Pacific Ocean could not possibly have been a result of individual free will and choice alone. Therefore, this presentation will analyse the system that enabled transnational mobility of comfort women as wartime labour within the larger war system, the total war system. In so doing, this presentation argues that the system for mobility of comfort women reveals inscribed ethnicity, gender, and class, whereas the ideology of the total war system of the Japanese empire advocated equal membership of all Japanese subjects.
No extended abstract or paper available
Presented in Session 21. Framed by larger trends: Residential migration patterns