Editorial Reviews
Review
'Comfort women' is a familiar enough concept but you cannot know its true meaning until you read this extraordinary book. This is not just about 'Japan'; it is about Japan and the US and Australia and Italy and the systematic sexual ravaging that is part of how states conduct war. Every university class on the causes, operation, and aftermath of war should make Tanaka's study required reading.
-Mary Katzenstein, Professor of Government, Cornell University
For the first time, Tanaka puts Japan's war crimes against women in comparative perspective, revealing why after the war the U.S. covered up the 'comfort women' system. The Americans were not just rewriting history to make Japan an ideologically acceptable satellite. In occupied Japan, the U.S. military, too, was deeply involved in officially sponsored prostitution.
-Chalmers Johnson, President, Japan Policy Research Institute
Tanaka has given us a pathbreaking, eye-opening book. Japan's Comfort Women reveals not only in precise and fresh detail just how women from around Asia were systematically coerced into military prostitutions. It also shows how the U.S. post-war officials became complicit in the 'comfort women' system, how and why these Americans chose to look the other way when confronted with the evidence. This is a major work with profound political implications for today's world.
-Cynthia Enloe, author of Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives
This is a book which documents in painful, often sickening detail man's inhumanity to woman through the twentieth century. It is impossible to read it without feeling horror and disgust. Tanaka carefully documents Japan's 'Comfort Woman' system, which he describes as the 'largest and most elaborate system of trafficking in women in the history of mankind', but he makes clear that the guilt and the responsibility is not Japan's alone. The governments and societies of East Asia became complicit by turning a blind eye to the crime and to the victims in its midst for nearly fifty years, while in the West governments and armies had detailed knowledge of the Japanese system but saw nothing criminal about it. Armies of all types, including the victorious ones that marched in to occupy Japan after its defeat, took it for granted that their men needed and should be provide with women.
-Gavin McCormack, Australian National University
Yuki Tanaka has taken the critical study of Japan's 'comfort women' in a striking new direction by examining not only the provision of sexual services to the emperor's fighting men abroad, mostly by horrendously exploited Korean and other non-Japanese women, but also the huge network of Japanese prostitutes that arose to cater to U.S. occupation forces after Japan's defeat in 1945. The juxtaposition is stunning and provocative.
-John W. Dower, Elting E. Morison Professor of History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Book Description
Japan's Comfort Women exposes the story of Japanese women who were forced to enter prostitution to serve the Japanese Imperial army, often living in appalling conditions of sexual slavery. Using a wide range of primary sources, Tanaka uncovers new and controversial information about the role of US occupation forces in military controlled prostitution, as well as evidence of a subsequent "cover-up".
Tanaka asks why US occupation forces did little to help the women, and argues that military authorities organized prostitution to prevent the widespread incidence of GI rape among the Japanese women and to control the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. This groundbreaking book reveals new material relating to this highly controversial and contentious issue and is sure to have a deep impact on the ongoing international debate on this highly emotive issue.
Japan's Comfort Women: The Military and Involuntary Prostitution During War and Occupation (Asia's Transformations)
Japan's Comfort Women: The Military and Involuntary Prostitution During War and Occupation (Asia's Transformations),Yuki Tanaka,Routledge,0415194016,Asia,Asia - Japan,Comfort women,Ethnic Studies - General,Japan,Military - Other,Military - World War II,Sexual behavior,Social Science,Sociology,Soldiers,Women,Women's Studies - History,World War, 1939-1945,Asian / Middle Eastern history: from c 1900 -,Europe,European history: Second World War,Social Science / Ethnic Studies,Women's studies
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