“Reframing the ‘Comfort Women Issue: New Representations of an Old War Crime’” by Margaret D. Stetz.

In this chapter, Margaret D. Stetz, a scholar of Women and Gender Studies, problematises the usage of the designation ‘comfort women,’ as most Japanese military sex slaves were underaged girls. She argues that by continually using this term, the euphemism of the perpetrators is perpetuated. Stetz traces the most important artworks that have changed the public representation of, and discourse on, young girls in conflicts and, therefore, the depiction of Comfort Women. 

The chapter starts with an analysis of the representation or censorship of comfort women in Japan and the lack of redress for the Korean, Filipina, Chinese, Taiwanese and Indonesian former sex slaves. Even following the 2016 agreement between the Korean and Japanese governments and a formal apology from Japan, she puts forward, Japan neglected their legal responsibilities. Furthermore, Stetz criticises how most Japanese history books describe these sex slaves as grown women, while most comfort women placed in military brothels were girls “between ‘13 and 16’ years old” (65).

Stets argues that, as a consequence of the public increased attention to girls as war victims in recent conflicts, such as Iraqi girls during the U.S. invasion and occupation, more and more creative works, such as Beyonce’s song “Run the World (Girls)”, the Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and the play Eclipsed by Danai Gurira, draw attention to the role of girls in wartime, either as victims or as combatants. Therefore, Stetz suggests that “[w]ith this background of attention over the past decade to the fates of girls in armed conflict, we can begin to understand why the experiences of girls as girls within the ‘comfort system’ have increasingly come to the fore as a subject for representation.” (69). She stresses the role these portrayals have in “altering how transnational audiences envision and conceive of this particular set of war crimes” (69). 

Stetz then analyses fictional works that draw on the accounts of the comfort women collected, for example, by the “Council for Korean Comfort women’s Issues”, such as the 2012 novel Story of a Comfort Girl by Roger Rudick and the film Spirits Homecoming by director Cho Junglae. As a result of such representations of the comfort women throughout the world by art, there is newfound “[i]nternational outrage, generated by recognizing that the sexual exploitation of underage girls was endemic to the ‘comfort system,’” (75).

This chapter illustrates that when public discourse and official history books fail to acknowledge or adequately represent the comfort women as girls, literature and other forms of art have the potential to bring a more adequate representation into circulation. Additionally, the chapter stresses the emergence of an international discourse on comfort women through art.

Author of this entry: Anne van Buuren

Stetz, Margaret D. “Reframing the ‘Comfort Women Issue: New Representations of an Old War Crime’” Genocide and Mass Violence in Asia: An Introductory Reader, edited by Frank Jacob, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2019, pp. 61-77. doi.org/10.1515/9783110659054-004