In an era marked by atrocities perpetrated on a grand scale, the tragedy of the so-called comfort women--mostly Korean women forced into prostitution by the Japanese army--endures as one of the darkest events of World War II. These women have usually been labeled victims of a war crime, a simplistic view that makes it easy to pin blame on the policies of imperial Japan and therefore easier to consign the episode to a war-torn past. In this revelatory study, C. Sarah Soh provocatively disputes this master narrative.
Soh reveals that the forces of Japanese colonialism and Korean...