Organizer: Samuel Hideo Yamashita, Pomona College
Gender, Sexuality and Nationalism in Japan's Colonial Encounters: The Case of
Military Drafted Comfort Women
Mayumi Yamamoto, University of California, Los Angeles
During World War II, Chinese, Dutch, Eurasian, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and Philippine women throughout Asia were compelled to engage in sex-work by the Japanese military. The existence of these military comfort women was never unknown to the public, however, since 1992 when historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki found five official military documents demonstrating Japanese military involvement in recruiting comfort women, related issues have been intensively re-exposed and discussed. Unfortunately, the work resulting from this interest has neglected the complexities of the situation. In particular, these works have been partially derived from retrospective understandings of boundaries, neglecting change in the "ever-present" nation-state, and so allowing retrospective boundaries to potentially silence comfort women whose experiences did not fit present representations and recreating a simplified but emotionally powerful picture of the past.
This paper analyzes the system of military comfort women through reconstructing Japanese colonial history, attempting to explain the configuration of Japanese colonial social categorizations in military occupied Indonesia (1942-1945), which was one of the last areas of Japanese expansion, itself an accumulation of multiple layers of colonialism. The power of colonialism was particularly deep in the ambiguity of critical social categorizations, categorizations based on ethnicity, nation, gender, and class which produced senses of affiliation, identification, and alienation. The incongruity between the fluidity of categories and their representations seem to have evoked a marginal space. This space of comfort women in social categorizations and the functions of the comfort women system in Japanese colonialism were thus tied to Japan's search for prestige.
When Japan Became the USSR: Karafuto/Sakhalin Island, 1945-1948: The Transition
Mariya Sevela, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
The attack on Southern Sakhalin, as part of the "Soviet Far Eastern Campaign," began on August 9, 1945 coinciding with the American bombing of Nagasaki. A war that lasted sixteen days left thousands dead on both sides; over 18,000 Japanese were taken prisoner and some 300,000 civilians were kept on the island by the Soviet forces. The days of this forty-year old Japanese settlement known as Karafuto were numbered. The battles over the Kurile islands were finished a week later. It was the end of the war with Japan (September 3), and it was the end of World War II. It was also the beginning of a "confused epoch" on the island of Karafuto/Sakhalin-that of When Japan Became Russia.
The next few years that followed the occupation, or the libération, made for a chaotic period. The Soviets were busy installing their administration and settling their own countrymen, the new colonists, while the fate of the Japanese population (as well as Koreans and the Ainu) remained unclear. In the meantime, the island was to be renamed, reorganized, re-settled. Its past was to be erased, its history rewritten. The so-called Transition and Cohabitation had started: the forced cohabitation of two cultures, two races, the conquerors with the conquered.
Using recently examined archival material, memoirs and testimonies collected during 14 months of field work in Japan and Russia, this paper looks to explore the shifting ground between history and memory fifty years after one of the most trenchant events in Russian-Japanese relations.
Creating Quality: The Japanese QC Movement and the Legend of W. Edwards Deming
William M. Tsutsui, University of Kansas
During the 1980s, the management consultant W. Edwards Deming (1900-1993) gained international fame as a scathing critic of American business and a tireless advocate for the methods of statistical quality control. The source of Deming's renown-and his very credibility as a tutor to American industry-was the widespread belief that he was personally responsible for introducing quality control to Japan in the early 1950s. According to the popular wisdom, Deming took to Japanese industry the powerful concept of quality, a concept which found more fertile soil across the Pacific than at home, which spurred the postwar renaissance of Japanese manufacturing, and led ultimately to the collapse of America's international competitiveness. As "the genius who revitalized Japanese industry," Deming was revered in the United States as the very incarnation of Yankee know-how and a prophet of management acumen.
Yet for someone who (the American media assures us) is a virtual deity to the Japanese, W. Edwards Deming remains a enigmatic character to American specialists in Japanese studies. Despite the public acclaim accorded Deming over the past 15 years, his contributions in Japan have received little scholarly attention. Even today, accounts of Deming's influence on Japanese industry and, more broadly, of the origins of Japan's celebrated quality control (QC) movement, remain largely anecdotal. This paper reexamines Deming's work in early postwar Japan, subjecting the popular orthodoxy to unaccustomed historical scrutiny. As I argue, Deming's significance in Japan was far different from that commonly assumed, and his legacy was far more ambiguous than the flourishing Deming mythology suggests. In Japan's nascent QC campaign, Deming was a facilitator, not a creator, a tool in public relations rather than an intellectual rudder, an ornament more than an oracle. While Deming became something of a patron saint for the Japanese movement, he neither introduced quality control to Japan nor profoundly shaped Japanese methodologies of QC. American popular wisdom and the Deming legendry notwithstanding, the conspicuous successes of Japanese quality control were hardly "Made in the USA."