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Paper short abstract

This paper analyzes how former Japanese "comfort women" internalized frameworks of self-blame and moral culpability. Drawing on testimonies, I examine how survivors reproduce victim-blaming narratives that absolve male perpetrators while holding women accountable for their own sexual exploitation.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the narratives of former Japanese "comfort women" to explore how systems of gendered exploitation produce deeply internalized frameworks of self-blame and moral hierarchy. Drawing on memoirs and interview testimonies, I analyze how these women articulate their traumatic experiences through a lens that simultaneously acknowledges suffering while reinforcing their own perceived culpability—a paradox rooted in their inability to conform to the idealized "good wife, wise mother" (ryōsai kenbo) model of femininity.

Before their coerced mobilization into military sexual slavery, many of these women had already been marginalized within Japan's domestic civilian prostitution system, positioned outside the boundaries of respectable womanhood. This prior stigmatization created conditions in which they came to internalize narratives of doom and expendability, viewing their exploitation as inevitable/unavoidable and even as a patriotic duty—the only contribution they were conditioned to believe themselves capable of making to the nation. These internalized narratives reveal how gendered violence operates not only through physical coercion but through the ideological conditioning of victims' self-perception.

Focusing particularly on the testimony of Suzumoto Aya, I examine moments where victim-blaming narratives are reproduced even within survivors' own accounts. Suzumoto describes witnessing a soldier's brutal assault on another woman at their "comfort station"—an attack so violent it resulted in the soldier's repatriation for psychiatric treatment in Japan, while the victim received no support. Strikingly, the collective response—including Suzumoto's own interpretation—framed the perpetrator as "too naive" (junsui sugita) and faulted the woman for allegedly giving him romantic illusions.

This case exemplifies how patriarchal logic inverts moral responsibility: the male perpetrator is absolved through narratives of innocence and mental fragility, while the female victim is held accountable for her own violation. By analyzing such testimonies, this paper illuminates how survivors of sexual violence and sexual slavery can become unwitting reproducers of the very ideologies that dehumanized them, demonstrating the profound reach of structural misogyny in shaping not only victimization but also the narratives through which victims make sense of their experiences.