Sarah Soh Comfort Women Summary
The issue of the comfort women has been so politically charged in China and South Korea that if someone dares to attribute it to some factors other than the Japanese brutality and imperialism during WWII in public, he is likely to be branded as a traitor and inundated with threatening letters, expletive languages, and disparaging news articles. Such ethnic nationalism has created numerous barriers in academic research of these marginalized women in history. Fortunately, C. Sarah Soh makes an audacious attempt to challenge the dominating public rhetoric and offers an insight into the origin, the development, and the legacy of the “comfort women” system.
Born in post-colonial Korea, but educated and worked in the U.S., Soh successfully distances herself from the intense emotion and nationalism in Korea and takes an objective, comparative approach to study the comfort women from the viewpoints of South Korea, Japan, and third-parties. Adopting a method she coins as “expatriate anthropology”, she has interviewed dozens of people experiencing that part of history---both Korean ex-comfort women and Japanese veterans. At the same time, she delves into a large number of literature,
…show more content…
She introduces four ideologies essential to their history. Each contains a set of language and symbols to describe them. The ethnic nationalist ideology of sexual slavery dominates the historiography (47). Soh pays extra attention to the South Korean nationalism vis-à-vis the Japanese struggle with how to confront the issue of the comfort women. The author stresses that the variety of terms describing these women infers “the significance of both individual and collective social psychology in dealing with the gross social injustice” imposed on the colonized young Korean women, which lay in the intersection between sexual and cultural violence, and the disparity in power between Korea and Japan
Literary Devices In Lost Names
743 Words | 3 PagesThe novel Lost Names by Richard Kim gives a glimpse of Korea during the period in which Japan had colonized it and had been conquering a plethora of other Asian countries. It follows the life of a young boy as he and his family live in the colonized country of Korea and speaks of how their lives were effected. The writing is accomplished in giving testimony to the occupation of the Japanese of Korea and its people and the ways in which they enforced allegiance to Japan. By means of policy, law, and everyday practices the Japanese attempted to create an allegiance to themselves from the Koreans; while the majority of these succeeded at some level they also created a deep set hatred by the people because of the oppressive practices used.
Richard Kim Lost Names Essay
1574 Words | 7 PagesLost Names is a book that has both the realism of remembered experience and the imagination of a series of stories. It puts a human face on the colonial period that can easily be overlooked in more than academic treatments. Richard Kim paints a grim picture of the height of the Japanese occupation from 1932 to 1945 in Korea. Throughout Lost Names, we are shown seven different scenes from a boyhood and early adolescence. What Richard Kim wants us to learn from Lost Names solely depends on the reader, as everyone can take away something different.
Rape Of Nannking Essay
1583 Words | 7 Pages“What I am about to relate is anything but a pleasant story… For it is a story of such crime and horror as to be almost unbelievable… I believe it has no parallel in modern history.” These are words taken from the diary of George Fitch, one of the heroic leaders of the Nanking Safety Zone in Nanking, China. What happened there during the six weeks of Japanese occupation in December 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War is one of the foremost atrocities ever committed in the history of humankind. This is the story of the Rape of Nanking. After suffering the humiliation of being forced to sign treaties with the United States and the compulsory ending of Japan’s economic isolation in 1853, the Japanese people were left with a fierce resentment of foreign powers, which bolstered a wave of nationalistic sentiments and the adoption of the samurai ethic of bushido as the moral
Looking Like The Enemy Analysis
1010 Words | 5 PagesMatsuda’s memoir is based off of her and her family’s experiences in the Japanese-American internment camps. Matsuda reveals what it is like during World War II as a Japanese American, undergoing family life, emotional stress, long term effects of interment, and her patriotism and the sacrifices she had to make being in the internment camps. Everyone living in Western section of the United States; California, Oregon, of Japanese descent were moved to internment camps after the Pearl Harbor bombing including seventeen year old Mary Matsuda Gruenewald and her family. Matsuda and her family had barely any time to pack their bags to stay at the camps. Matsuda and her family faced certain challenges living in the internment camp.
Summary Of Jung Chang's Wild Swans: Three Daughters Of China
1083 Words | 5 PagesIn the book Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang, the author talks about the stories of her grandmother and mother as well as herself during their journeys as women in China. The book discusses how gender roles, political ideology, and economic ideology in China change over time. During the entirety of Chinese history, many changes and continuities transpired and had crucial impacts on China. However, a great amount of change occurred during the time period from the 1900s to present day. These changes and continuities incorporate happenings in areas concerning the treatment of women, political structure, and economic capacity.
Essay On Korean Comfort Women
1851 Words | 8 PagesIntroduction In Alden Speare’s (1986) words, "migration can be involuntary when a person is physically transported from a country and has no opportunity to escape from those transporting him”. Literature on forced migration often focuses on asylum seekers and refugees, but there are other groups of displaced persons. This paper will look at trafficked people, particularly on Korean comfort women during the Imperial Japan times, from the years 1931 to 1945. Comfort women are females who were forced into sexual slavery during the Sino-Japanese War and World War II, to provide sexual services to the Japanese Imperial Army troops so to improve the morale of Japanese soldiers (Lynch, 2009).
Yenomi's Journey To Freedom
293 Words | 2 PagesAt the young age of 13, Yenomi had no concept of the freedom she and her mother were risking their lives for. “I didn’t even know the word. I didn’t know the concept.” says Yenomi, the author of In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom. ”I never heard of that word ‘freedom’. To me, the happiest thing was having food.”
Comfort Women Thesis
948 Words | 4 PagesThe World War 2 carried many un remedied and unacknowledged injustices among the human race. One of the greatest inhuman acts committed was “comfort women “issue. These were women and girls that were either lured or forcefully taken in to the Japanese military camps to serve as sexual objects for the soldiers. Some women were trafficked into sexual slavery with the promise to work in big textile industries. The imperial Japanese military colonialists supported this act of comfort women citing that it aided in reduction of rape crimes that the Japanese army would have been prone to.
Examples Of Rationale Hye
1292 Words | 6 PagesRationale I have chosen to write about a strong, young girl, Hye, who was exposed to an unforgettable trauma, which caused her to resent the country she was born in, North Korea. We will witness her journey from being a brainwashed North Korean citizen into a free American citizen through the diary entries. These diary entries elucidate Hye’s struggles as a North Korean and how that shaped her into the person she is today. The diary entries are informal because Hye, like any other girl, wrote them depending on how she felt, which includes powerful diction that implies how she feels about her aunt's execution in North Korea.
Chinese Women In America
2402 Words | 10 PagesIn the mid-19th century the first batch of Chinese women entering the United States. During that period, Chinese women have been marginalized for a long time. They must not only resist racial discrimination from the white American society, but also resist China’s ancient feudal traditions. Because of the anti-Chinese mentality and legal provisions of the early Americans, the number of Chinese women who entered the United States were really small. Under gender discrimination and racial discrimination, these women had the same tragic fate.
Kim Sa-Ryang's Tenma
1227 Words | 5 Pages“Tenma” tells a story about a young Korean man named Genryu who is profoundly influenced by Japanese assimilation policy during Japanese colonial. In the story, he acts sycophantic to the Japanese while demonstrates disparaging attitude toward the Korean, which reveals his intermediate position between two ethical groups. Genryu desires to emulate Japanese colonizers; however, he can never be equal like Japanese colonizers because Japanese colonizers only consider him as a tool to assimilate other Koreans and promote Japanese culture. Consequently, Genryu is alienated between both Japanese and Korean ethical groups. The author Kim Sa-Ryang writes this story to present how Korean people are intrinsically affected by Japanese assimilation
Rape Of Nanjing Essay
1080 Words | 5 PagesEventually, John Rabe, Mr. Tang, and Ms. Jiang went to talk to Japanese Officer Second Lieutenant Ida Osamu to stop the issue. However, Ida didn’t support them. Instead of stopping his soldiers, Ida threatened the center’s stability. He asked for 100 refugee women to serve as “comfort women,” whose purpose was to ‘revitalize’ the Japanese soldiers. If the safety zone’s committee refused to do so, then troops would be sent to destroy the safety zone.
Neocolonialism In Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters '
981 Words | 4 PagesJessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters exposes lives of numerous characters living in the postcolonial Philippines. Hagedorn vividly paints the picture of a society freed from the foreign oppressor that still clings to the imported values and struggles to recreate itself. The postcolonial confusion and a sense of a lost national identity have allowed for a newly formed nationalism to spread. Yet, the influence of the former U.S rule lingers as society remains infatuated with Hollywood movies, soda drinks, and shopping. The Hagedorn's novel displays “the pressures that neocolonialism places on gender, as well as the pressures the gender places on neocolonialism” (Chang, 637).
Japanese War Brides Analysis
755 Words | 4 PagesIt can thus be surmised that such negative depictions of Japanese ‘war brides’ are rooted in the context of post-war Japan, where the ‘betrayal’ by young Japanese women, seemingly in recognition of the socio-economic superiority of the American occupiers, further underscored the “sense of defeat and impotence shared by the
Reaction Paper About Comfort Women
915 Words | 4 PagesSome other possible sources of enriching the understanding of the ‘comfort women’ case are the transcripts of the trial for both sides in order to not only understand the legal issues involved and the structure embedded in these trials (i.e. the international legal system and the Japanese system of law), and the preserved photos taken of other ‘comfort women’ for further interpretation of the treatments of some other Japanese soldiers towards these
More about Sarah Soh Comfort Women Summary
Literary Devices In Lost Names
743 Words | 3 PagesRichard Kim Lost Names Essay
1574 Words | 7 PagesRape Of Nannking Essay
1583 Words | 7 PagesLooking Like The Enemy Analysis
1010 Words | 5 PagesSummary Of Jung Chang's Wild Swans: Three Daughters Of China
1083 Words | 5 PagesEssay On Korean Comfort Women
1851 Words | 8 PagesYenomi's Journey To Freedom
293 Words | 2 PagesComfort Women Thesis
948 Words | 4 PagesExamples Of Rationale Hye
1292 Words | 6 PagesChinese Women In America
2402 Words | 10 PagesKim Sa-Ryang's Tenma
1227 Words | 5 PagesRape Of Nanjing Essay
1080 Words | 5 PagesNeocolonialism In Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters '
981 Words | 4 PagesJapanese War Brides Analysis
755 Words | 4 PagesReaction Paper About Comfort Women
915 Words | 4 Pages