Sex Slave x Guerilla: The Fighting "Comfort-Women" of the Asia Pacific War

The issue of comfort women – women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese imperial military across the Asia Pacific region during World War Two– has been typically viewed through a contemporary and geo-political lens where issues over recognition, compensation, and apology, are the source of contention between the various countries in East Asia today. Individual comfort women and their actual experiences during the war have been less often the subject of historical examination nor are they often included in military histories of the war. This talk will detail some women who prior to and/or after their enforced sexual slavery were involved in guerilla warfare against the Japanese military. This talk will also introduce evidence that some comfort women were also fighting on the frontlines with the Japanese military- but whether they were coerced or did so of their own volition- is often hard to decipher. This talk questions why it has been so difficult for historians and scholars to imagine women at war in the Asia-Pacific region as three dimensional subjects–whose experiences were not contained within neat categories of victim or nurturer of men– but could also include frontline experience of war as combatants.