Abstract
As ‘comfort women’ are omitted from history textbooks, the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace in Tokyo remains the only permanent educational venue about the ‘comfort system’ in Japan. Meanwhile, the influential Yasukuni Shrine with its adjacent Yūshūkan War Memorial Museum, also in Tokyo, continues to deny ‘comfort system’ history. While ‘comfort women’ discourse organises these two museums as competitors over history, this chapter scrutinises the claims that are made in each museum and concludes by suggesting that ‘comfort system’ history can co-exist with official mourning in one history if mourning is disentangled from bereavement, since bereavement, but not mourning, enables the ideological appropriation of the war-dead that forms the core of the militarism advocacy that denies ‘comfort system’ history.
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Notes
- 1.
In this chapter, I write ‘comfort women’ discourse when I refer to the polarised organisation of this discourse and ‘comfort system’ history to denote the history of neglection of the set-up, recruitment and maintenance of so-called ‘comfort stations’. I refer to it as a system to highlight its systematic character and continuities after the war’s official ending (for these latter aspects, see Ueno 1999 and Sakamoto 2010).
- 2.
In general, I refer to the Yasukuni and the Yūshūkan as parts of one narrative and only sometimes highlight specificities of each throughout the chapter.
- 3.
- 4.
I use the terms ‘establish’ and ‘write’ history interchangeably throughout the text.
- 5.
I have kept these authors’ names in the order of surname, first name as they are organised in the book (Nishino et al. 2018).
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- 7.
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Eriksson, AK. (2021). Challenging ‘Comfort Women’ Discourse: Rethinking Intersections of Historical Justice and History Education. In: Keynes, M., Åström Elmersjö, H., Lindmark, D., Norlin, B. (eds) Historical Justice and History Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70412-4_9
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