Comfort Women Speak

Comfort Women Speak

Author: Sangmie Choi Schellstede

Publisher: Holmes & Meier Publishers

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13:

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Contributing to the continuing revelations, 19 women tell their stories of being forced into sexual service for Japanese soldiers during World War II. Also included are excerpts of United Nations reports and other recent commentary. The account begins the series Science and Human Rights. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR


The Comfort Women

The Comfort Women

Author: C. Sarah Soh

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-05-15

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 022676804X

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In an era marked by atrocities perpetrated on a grand scale, the tragedy of the so-called comfort women—mostly Korean women forced into prostitution by the Japanese army—endures as one of the darkest events of World War II. These women have usually been labeled victims of a war crime, a simplistic view that makes it easy to pin blame on the policies of imperial Japan and therefore easier to consign the episode to a war-torn past. In this revelatory study, C. Sarah Soh provocatively disputes this master narrative. Soh reveals that the forces of Japanese colonialism and Korean patriarchy together shaped the fate of Korean comfort women—a double bind made strikingly apparent in the cases of women cast into sexual slavery after fleeing abuse at home. Other victims were press-ganged into prostitution, sometimes with the help of Korean procurers. Drawing on historical research and interviews with survivors, Soh tells the stories of these women from girlhood through their subjugation and beyond to their efforts to overcome the traumas of their past. Finally, Soh examines the array of factors— from South Korean nationalist politics to the aims of the international women’s human rights movement—that have contributed to the incomplete view of the tragedy that still dominates today.


Chinese Comfort Women

Chinese Comfort Women

Author: Peipei Qiu

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2014-05-01

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 0199373914

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During the Asia-Pacific War, the Japanese military forced hundreds of thousands of women across Asia into "comfort stations" where they were repeatedly raped and tortured. Japanese imperial forces claimed they recruited women to join these stations in order to prevent the mass rape of local women and the spread of venereal disease among soldiers. In reality, these women were kidnapped and coerced into sexual slavery. Comfort stations institutionalized rape, and these "comfort women" were subjected to atrocities that have only recently become the subject of international debate. Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan's Sex Slaves features the personal narratives of twelve women forced into sexual slavery when the Japanese military occupied their hometowns. Beginning with their prewar lives and continuing through their enslavement to their postwar struggles for justice, these interviews reveal that the prolonged suffering of the comfort station survivors was not contained to wartime atrocities but was rather a lifelong condition resulting from various social, political, and cultural factors. In addition, their stories bring to light several previously hidden aspects of the comfort women system: the ransoms the occupation army forced the victims' families to pay, the various types of improvised comfort stations set up by small military units throughout the battle zones and occupied regions, and the sheer scope of the military sexual slavery-much larger than previously assumed. The personal narratives of these survivors combined with the testimonies of witnesses, investigative reports, and local histories also reveal a correlation between the proliferation of the comfort stations and the progression of Japan's military offensive. The first English-language account of its kind, Chinese Comfort Women exposes the full extent of the injustices suffered by these women and the conditions that caused them.


Stories that Make History

Stories that Make History

Author: The Research Team of the War

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2020-08-24

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 3110670615

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What would it be like if your existence was erased for half a century? This is the reality for the Korean comfort girls-women whose lives had been erased since the time of the expansion of comfort stations by the Japanese military in 1937. This book is an effort to bring these women back to life and to make their voices, experiences and memories available to future generations. The experiences of Korean comfort girls-women are a paradigmatic example of how military sexual violence can obliterate the dignity of women and shame them into nonexistence. This book examines how the turning of their innocence into inadequacy, actively by the Japanese government and passively by the Korean government and its people, and also by the world, compounded their long, miserable suffering for half a century until Kim Hak-sun broke the silence in 1991 with the support of Korean activists. The relentless and courageous efforts of Korean comfort girls-women and activists on the road to healing and justice are shared here. These efforts made it possible for us to hear their horrific stories, which are embedded with numerous and intense traumas, allowing them to unfold and be shared on the road to justice and healing.


Hearts of Pine

Hearts of Pine

Author: Joshua D. Pilzer

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012-02-10

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 019975957X

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In the wake of the wartime experience of sexual slavery for the Japanese military during the Asia-Pacific War (1930-45), Korean survivors lived under great pressure not to speak about what had happened to them. These sexual slaves were known as 'comfort women,' and this book brings us into the lives of three of them.


Whose Comfort?

Whose Comfort?

Author: Yonson Ahn

Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Company

Published: 2019-08-30

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9789811206344

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"This book examines the system of military 'comfort women' in World War II created and maintained to provide sexual servitude to its armed forces by Japan during World War II. The ways in which body, sexuality and identity are deployed in the maintenance of colonial/nationalist power, patriarchal relations and ethnic hierarchies are explored in this work. To achieve this objective requires examining issues of body politics, power, femininity and military masculinity, all of which are entangled in the context of the 'comfort women' system. This volume relies mainly on presonal narratives, including testimonies and life histories of Korean 'comfort women' victims/survivors and Japanese veterans obtained from interviews that the author conducted as well as from previously published testimonies." --


Breaking Through

Breaking Through

Author: Helen Alvare

Publisher: Our Sunday Visitor

Published: 2012-09-20

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 1612782817

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Catholic women are some of the most maligned, most caricatured, and most intriguing people in American society. America is flirting with the idea that being a Catholic female means saying "yes" to the faith as a private source of comfort, but "no" to living out its more countercultural moral and social teachings. Catholic women are facing unprecedented questions about sex, money, marriage, work, children and the church itself -- questions with innumerable personal and societal repercussions. Is it even possible that the teachings of a 2,000 year old religion are still relevant for today's toughest issues? A quick tour of leading cultural indicators seems to say "no." But this is far from the whole story. Many women, courageously facing questions their mothers and grandmothers would never have encountered, are finding intellectually and spiritually satisfying answers within the framework of their Catholic faith. Nine such Catholic women -- varying widely in age, occupation and experience -- share personal stories of how they struggled toward the realization that the demands of their faith actually set them free. Their stories -- full of honesty, but ultimately hope -- shed new light and new clarity on women's continued attraction to the Catholic faith. Topics include: Navigating dating and sexpectations Feminism, freedom and contraception Children versus a "better me" Being Catholic in light of the sexual abuse scandal Faith, psychology and same-sex attraction


A Cruelty Special to Our Species

A Cruelty Special to Our Species

Author: Emily Jungmin Yoon

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2018-09-18

Total Pages: 87

ISBN-13: 0062843699

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A piercing debut collection of poems exploring gender, race, and violence from a sensational new talent In her arresting collection, urgently relevant for our times, poet Emily Jungmin Yoon confronts the histories of sexual violence against women, focusing in particular on Korean so-called “comfort women,” women who were forced into sexual labor in Japanese-occupied territories during World War II. In wrenching language, A Cruelty Special to Our Species unforgettably describes the brutalities of war and the fear and sorrow of those whose lives and bodies were swept up by a colonizing power, bringing powerful voice to an oppressed group of people whose histories have often been erased and overlooked. “What is a body in a stolen country,” Yoon asks. “What is right in war.” Moving readers through time, space, and different cultures, and bringing vivid life to the testimonies and confessions of the victims,Yoon takes possession of a painful and shameful history even while unearthing moments of rare beauty in acts of resistance and resilience, and in the instinct to survive and bear witness.


A Gesture Life

A Gesture Life

Author: Chang-rae Lee

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2000-10-01

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 110166004X

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The second novel from the critically acclaimed New York Times–bestselling author Chang-rae Lee. His remarkable debut novel was called "rapturous" (The New York Times Book Review), "revelatory" (Vogue), and "wholly innovative" (Kirkus Reviews). It was the recipient of six major awards, including the prestigious Hemingway Foundation/PEN award. Now Chang-rae Lee has written a powerful and beautifully crafted second novel that leaves no doubt about the extraordinary depth and range of his talent. A Gesture Life is the story of a proper man, an upstanding citizen who has come to epitomize the decorous values of his New York suburban town. Courteous, honest, hardworking, and impenetrable, Franklin Hata, a Japanese man of Korean birth, is careful never to overstep his boundaries and to make his neighbors comfortable in his presence. Yet as his story unfolds, precipitated by the small events surrounding him, we see his life begin to unravel. Gradually we learn the mystery that has shaped the core of his being: his terrible, forbidden love for a young Korean Comfort Woman when he served as a medic in the Japanese army during World War II. In A Gesture Life, Chang-rae Lee leads us with dazzling control through a taut, suspenseful story about love, family, and community—and the secrets we harbor. As in Native Speaker, he writes of the ways outsiders conform in order to survive and the price they pay for doing so. It is a haunting, breathtaking display of talent by an acclaimed young author.


Cassandra Speaks

Cassandra Speaks

Author: Elizabeth Lesser

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2020-09-15

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0062887203

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What story would Eve have told about picking the apple? Why is Pandora blamed for opening the box? And what about the fate of Cassandra who was blessed with knowing the future but cursed so that no one believed her? What if women had been the storytellers? Elizabeth Lesser believes that if women’s voices had been equally heard and respected throughout history, humankind would have followed different hero myths and guiding stories—stories that value caretaking, champion compassion, and elevate communication over vengeance and violence. Cassandra Speaks is about the stories we tell and how those stories become the culture. It’s about the stories we still blindly cling to, and the ones that cling to us: the origin tales, the guiding myths, the religious parables, the literature and films and fairy tales passed down through the centuries about women and men, power and war, sex and love, and the values we live by. Stories written mostly by men with lessons and laws for all of humanity. We have outgrown so many of them, and still they endure. This book is about what happens when women are the storytellers too—when we speak from our authentic voices, when we flex our values, when we become protagonists in the tales we tell about what it means to be human. Lesser has walked two main paths in her life—the spiritual path and the feminist one—paths that sometimes cross but sometimes feel at cross-purposes. Cassandra Speaks is her extraordinary merging of the two. The bestselling author of Broken Open and Marrow, Lesser is a beloved spiritual writer, as well as a leading feminist thinker. In this book she gives equal voice to the cool water of her meditative self and the fire of her feminist self. With her trademark gifts of both humor and insight, she offers a vision that transcends the either/or ideologies on both sides of the gender debate. Brilliantly structured into three distinct parts, Part One explores how history is carried forward through the stories a culture tells and values, and what we can do to balance the scales. Part Two looks at women and power and expands what it means to be courageous, daring, and strong. And Part Three offers “A Toolbox for Inner Strength.” Lesser argues that change in the culture starts with inner change, and that no one—woman or man—is immune to the corrupting influence of power. She provides inner tools to help us be both strong-willed and kind-hearted. Cassandra Speaks is a beautifully balanced synthesis of storytelling, memoir, and cultural observation. Women, men and all people will find themselves in the pages of this book, and will come away strengthened, opened, and ready to work together to create a better world for all people.