Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

This paper frames the Japanese military comfort women system as a colonial boundary space, showing how coerced mobility, legal ambiguity, and gendered violence structured imperial governance and persist in postwar politics of memory and responsibility.

Paper long abstract

This paper conceptualizes the Japanese military comfort women system as a boundary space within the colonial empire—neither fully inside nor outside the legal, territorial, or moral order of imperial governance. Rather than treating the system solely as an instance of wartime sexual violence, the paper situates it within the broader spatial and administrative logics of Japanese colonialism, in which borders functioned as zones of exception, mobility, and disposability.

Drawing on colonial records, survivor testimonies, and postwar legal discourse, the paper argues that comfort stations operated as transimperial frontiers where women from colonized and occupied territories were rendered legally ambiguous subjects: incorporated into military labor regimes while excluded from rights-bearing citizenship. Their movement across colonial boundaries—between metropole and colony, battlefield and rear area—produced a form of coerced mobility that both relied upon and destabilized imperial distinctions between civilian and military, legal and illegal, domestic and foreign.

The paper further traces how this boundary-making persisted after 1945, as the unresolved legal status of the comfort women was reproduced through Cold War geopolitics, state apologies without legal responsibility, and ongoing transnational struggles over memory and justice. By framing the comfort women system as a colonial boundary space, this paper demonstrates how gendered violence functioned not at the margins of empire but at its structural core, revealing the enduring colonial logics that continue to shape debates over responsibility, redress, and historical recognition.