「慰安婦」問題をテーマとした新刊書

The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan (Worlds of Desire: The Chicago Series on Sexuality, Gender, and Culture)

著者の Chunghee Sarah Soh*1 は、文化人類学者で、サンフランシスコ州立大学教授。*2

本書の"Prologue | An Anthropological Analysis" から本文を少し抜粋してみる。

　In short, I attempt to make an objective analysis of a controversial issue, so this study will probably offend everyone who takes side in the sexual and identity politics of the opposing camps. Nevertheless, my study findings oblige me to take a critical stance against the simplified characterizations of Japan's military comfort stations as wither "military brothels" or "rape centers." Defining the nature of Japan's military comfort system simply as commercial sex, sexual slavery, or war crime only serves the ends of the partisan politics being waged by adversarial ethnic nationalists and transnational human rights activists. Despite its important contributions to the international recognition of wartime sexual violence as a war crime, the Korean redress movement has employed "approximate truths" or strategic exaggerations that have effectively impeded deeper understanding of the comfort women issue and any real progress toward its resolution. That Japanese soldiers committed sex crimes during the war―not only the "usual" individual and/or mass rapes on the battlefield but also those that fall under the rubric of comfort stations―is beyond dispute.
　But does this warrant sweeping categorical definitions such as "rape centers" for Japan's military comfort facilities comprising the diverse categories and subtypes of ianjo that evolved during the Fifteen-Year War? Is this a productive approach? Are the Japanese unique in providing systematically for their soldiers' sexual recreation? Is Korean society entirely innocent? I believe that we now need to ask these questions if we are to examine Japan's military comfort women system as a historical institution that was more complex than the competing categorical definitions of licensed prostitution versus war crime.

(page xviii)

とまぁ、かなり刺激的な内容であるが、この後、ちゃんとこう言ってる。

　Finally, I must warn strongly against the rightists and militant nationalist in Japan and elsewhere who might abuse and take any portion of this book out of context to promote their own partisan positions. It is about time that they, as well as their domestic and foreign critics, acknowledged the whole complicated truth of historical facts about Japan's wartime military comfort system instead of continuing to cling their own distorted partisan versions of "partial truths."

(page xviii)

今まで読んだ部分に限っていうと、同意しかねる部分もあるし、事実認識がおかしいと思える部分もあるが（著者にとって客観性とは何だろう？）、その主張自体は↓の本のそれと重なる部分がかなりあるように感じた。

ナショナリズムの狭間から

両書とも、「慰安婦」研究が新しい展開を見せるかもしれないことを予期させるが、そこに日本の「右派ナショナリスト」がコミット可能な余地はどうやらなさそうである。

*1:彼女の論文"Human Dignity and Sexual Culture:A Reflection on the 'Comfort Women' Issues "

*2:出版元であるUniversity of Chicago Press の書籍紹介→ここをクリック