【Report】The Representation of "Comfort Women" on Weibo

The speaker’s bio: Dr. Xiaoyang Hao is a researcher at Kyushu University. Specializing in modern Japanese and Chinese history, she is particularly interested in women’s history, sexual violence, war crimes trials, collective memory, and issues related to reparations and reconciliation. Her dissertation examines the way wartime sex crimes were adjudicated in a series of trials, and she is currently working on the commemoration of “comfort women.” Dr. Hao's works have appeared in peer-reviewed journals including The China Quarterly and The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus.

Lecture summary: The speaker started by explaining her initial interest in the comfort women issue and how she combined historical methods and those of communication studies in her current co-authored study. She also explained the rationale behind their choice to focus on Weibo, Chinese equivalent of Twitter, “alternative public sphere”. The question guiding this study was to understand what extent popular perceptions reflected on Weibo are shaped by this official discourse. She introduced some background facts about the topic and moved to her methodology, systematic sampling of Weibo posts. She showed the graph of the number of posts with two peaks in 2014 and 2017. The first peak corresponded to the Sino-Japanese territorial dispute about Senkaku islands and PM Abe’s attempts to revise the pacifist Constitution of Japan, while the second was a response to the release of the film “Twenty-two” (the title reflects the number of survivors). The speaker emphasized that the film showed other social roles of former comfort women, desexualizing them and showing them instead as mothers, grandmothers, neighbors, which made them feel as a part of “us”, imaginary family instead of abstract symbols or historical controversy. Being shown with warmth and humanity was also their preference, and the message they shared at the end of the film was that of peace, not revenge.

At the same time, a number of Weibo posts reacted to Hashimoto Toru’s comment on the necessity of comfort women, while other posts could be seen as marketisation and commercialization of comfort women’s suffering. Among Weibo posts, there were also pornographic depictions and comments on the “gender advantage” (e.g., men died and they survived at least).

Attached are the lecture slides.

Attendance: The event was held in a hybrid mode, in Koshinkan building (KS301) and online on Zoom. Five participants attended it in the classroom (two postdoc researchers, one PhD student and two master’s students) and two more on Zoom (one PhD student and one master’s student). Attached are the event photos.

Q&A: The lecture was followed by a lively discussion. The questions from the audience included: 1) studying historical issues with contemporary methods, 2) differences between the documentaries “Thirty-two” and “Twenty-two” (“32” was better quality with more in-depth analysis, it was a short documentary, while “22” was a feature length film and achieved a tremendous commercial success).

The attendees also wanted to know if it was difficult to do this kind of research in Japan and whether she experienced any kind of pushback. She answered that she experienced stereotyping and had to learn to answer with caution.

Other questions related to the comparative situation of comfort women in different countries and as to why Korean comfort women tend to have most visibility in the mainstream media. She explained that the reason why a former comfort woman from Korea Kim Hak-soon came out first in 1991, building on the feminist movement in Korea which helped shift perceptions of sex crimes from victims’ shame to the crime of perpetrators. Korean civil society was very active during that time and traveled to the US to learn most effective practices of raising global awareness from the Holocaust movement. Nationalistic political actors utilized the comfort woman issue to achieve their own agenda. She also explained differences in representations of comfort women in South Korea and China by different degrees of academic freedom in both countries. She believes that in a patriarchal society with gender inequalities such as China, victim blaming is still dominant.

Yet other students wanted to know whether there is a push to incorporate comfort women issue in textbooks. She answered that since sex is taboo in China, the topic is considered inappropriate for school students. In addition, civic activism that might put pressure to revise textbooks is also seen as something to be put under control and activists risk to be arrested.