Essai

The Place of "Comfort Women" in the Japanese Historical Revisionism

Chizuko Ueno

The Japanese sociologist Chizuko Ueno (Tokyo University) analyses the Japanese historiography on the subject of forced prostitution during the Second World War. She tries to demonstrate how the present revisionist discourse tend to make the abuses against women – said to be "comfort women" – look common-place and more or less normal. The article underlines how difficult it is to bring about à mentality shift on this subject, in a country where women's submission is firmly rooted in the traditions....