Freeing the ‘Slaves of Destiny’

Abstract

The Japanese Imperial Army’s comfort system differs from other forms of wartime sexual violence in that it was a disciplinary institution that used sex not as a weapon of aggression but as a means to discipline soldiers into being more efficient tools for Japan’s imperial project. The Philippine comfort women movement employs discursive strategies that respond directly to the gender and race ideologies underlying imperial Japan’s practice of military sexual slavery during the Pacific War. As it seeks reparations for those wartime atrocities, the movement makes appeals to traditional notions of family and Filipino womanhood, a strategy that has done much to create awareness of and public support for comfort station survivors. However, these discourses carry within them the potential to reinscribe those very same patriarchal ideologies that made institutionalized rape possible.