Session 101: Militarism, Sex Work/Violence, and the State in the Transnationalized Contexts of Japan, South Korea, and the United States

Organizer: Jin Kyung Lee, University of California, San Diego

Chair: Yuki Terazawa, Hofstra University

Discussant: Sallie Yea, RMIT University

Keywords: militarism, transnational sex work, diaspora.

This panel seeks to further significant contributions recently made on the topic of military and non-military sex labor and military sexual violence in transnational contexts. It examines three such sites: South Korean military camp towns that utilize South Korean, Filipina and Russian female sex workers; the Japanese sex industry that imports Asian and non-Asian women; and the Japanese military’s "deployment" of Chinese women as comfort women/rape victims during WWII. A central issue that concerns all three papers is the relations between sexuality/sex work and ethno-national identity. When sexualized female bodies are appropriated across national boundaries, how do female sexuality and ethnicity re-configure each other in the multi-ethnic environment that transnational sex work creates? How does the specificity of sexual labor/sexual identity alter female sex workers’ sense of (dis-)identification with their "own"/"other" ethnicities? A related question that the panel asks is if nationalist discourses claim transnational sex workers and comfort women/rape victims as embodied national identities, how may these women in the context of diaspora, racialization, and (sub-)imperialization resist such discursive appropriation by constructing localized and hybridized identities for themselves? The panel as a whole also examines the issue of (dis-)continuity between militarized sex work/violence and internationalized non-military sex work, situated between state regulations/promotion and corporatized sex industries. Thus, we explore the systematicity of commodification and management of sexualized feminine bodies whereby patriarchal institutions and capitalist organizations intersect each other in the transnationalized imperial and sub-imperial contexts of Japan, China, South Korea, and the United States from WWII to the present.

The Making of Transnational Knowledge of Wartime Sexual Violence: The Case of Japanese Soldiers’ Sex Crimes in Shanxi Province in China during World War II

Yuki Terazawa, Hofstra University

The rise of the redress movement in the 1990s led to groundbreaking discoveries and formation of new knowledge about wartime atrocities inflicted by the Japanese military. The case of the Japanese military’s sex crimes in Shanxi is one such example. Female victims themselves began to speak out about how they experienced sexual violence and how they were treated by villagers in isolated farming communities after the Japanese army left. Their testimonies established a new segment of historical knowledge combined with archival research by both local Chinese historians and Japanese researchers. Working on this project has demanded researchers to make certain difficult decisions for conceptualizing the nature of atrocities. For example, victims themselves strongly resist the understanding that they were ‘comfort women,’ or that that they worked in a system of ‘prostitution.’ However, to understand the criminality of the sexual violence they endured, it should be remembered that the acts were not random rape, but were part of habitual and organized activities that were implicitly or explicitly allowed by at least the middle-ranking officers of the Japanese military. In addition, the joint project risks further misinterpretations between Chinese intellectuals, activists, and lawyers and their Japanese counterparts due to the differences in language, research methods, and the legal system. This paper explores the collaborative process whereby the strategic choices made by victims, activists, scholars, and lawyers in their research and lawsuits have led to the formation of new knowledge on wartime sexual violence.

Military Sex Work and Re-configuring Ethnic Identity in South Korea and Korean America

Jin Kyung Lee, University of California, San Diego

This paper compares South Korean feminist re-writings of "camp town fiction" and Korean American works that deal with the issue of military prostitution during the WWII and the post-Liberation era, such as A Gesture Life by Chang-Rae Lee, Comfort Woman and Fox Girl by Nora Okja Keller, and Memories of My Ghost Brother by Heinz Insu Fenkl. The majority of South Korean camp town fictions from the 1950s to the 1970s/80s offer us an instance of masculinist nationalist allegory through racialization and re-nationalization of female sex workers who service the U.S. troops stationed in South Korea. Feminist revisions of camp town fiction from the 1980s and 1990s attempt to de-allegorize these women, shifting their attention to the multiple and intersecting exploitations of gender, class and sexual labor. Such re-conceptualization of military sex work transforms South Korean camp towns from the space of figurative masculinist resistance to U.S. neo-colonial domination to a multi-ethnic outpost of the United States global empire where South Korean women, and most recently Filipina and Russian migrant sex workers, re-configure their gendered, sexualized identities in relation to their ethnic(-ized) positions. Then, I examine Korean American literary theorizations of the material linkages between military prostitution in Asian territories and Asian migrants to the United States. The second part of the paper investigates the ways in which the topic of military prostitution may serve as another complex site of re-configuring ethnic identity for Korean/America as an internal and extended post/neo-colonial location.

State Labor Policies on Transnational Migrant Sex Workers in Japan: Protection and/or Discipline?

Eri Fujieda, University of Wisconsin, Superior

As Japan became a major hub of international sex trafficking in recent decades, the Japanese government repeatedly attempted to tighten its control over immigration, prostitution, and organized crime. This paper examines how the Japanese state policies have affected the flow of migrant female sex workers and the mode of their integration into the sex industry. First, I offer a review of the organization of the sex sector and the constitution of the sexual labor market in post-1945 Japan, outlining the historical changes in government policies. What were the merits and problems of state regulations in attempting to control the sex industry? How do we assess the kind of impact state policies had on the lives of sex workers, which were designed to discipline as well as protect them? The second part of the paper focuses on how migrant women from other Asian countries became a significant source of sexual labor. I discuss migration and employment patterns among women from Thailand and the Philippines in detail. What role can the state play in protecting foreign migrant female sex workers from the vagaries of the private sphere, both legal and illegal, such as recruiting agencies and organized crime? What role does the state play in disciplining and further contributing to their exploitation? I also demonstrate the significance of the differences among migrant women of various national origins and the differences between migrant women and Japanese sex workers in terms of their pattern of exploitation due to racial distinctions.