A Touchstone for Transnational Feminism: Discourses on the Comfort Women in 1990s Japan

This article reconstructs feminist discourses that evolved in Japan in the 1990s, with a focus on the differences as well as the overlappings of so-called “minority” and “majority” positions, and within the context of transnational feminist developments in Asia and beyond. The “turn towards Asia” that characterized Japanese politics, media and academia during the 1990s also occurred within feminist movements and among feminist academics in Japan. It was the history of Asian women who were forced to serve as “comfort women” for the Japanese military that sparked the new feminist interest in Japan's past as an aggressive invador and colonial power in Asia, and in the relationship between Japanese women and other Asian women. This article focuses on a controversy about the comfort women that evolved between two feminist academics, one of them belonging to the Japanese majority, the other one being a Korean resident of Japan. This controversy highlighted the tensions existing between majority and minority feminists in Japan, that is, between a concentration on gender, on the one side, and an insistence on ethnicity, on the other. However, the analysis carried out in this article suggests that these seemingly opposite standpoints converge in their basic understanding of the self and of feminist politics, and points to the importance and viability of feminist discourses and coalitions across ethnic boundaries.