1 Edward Vickers, “Commemorating ‘Comfort Women’ beyond Korea: The Chinese Case,” in Remembering World War Two Across Asia, ed. Mark Frost, Daniel Schumacher, and Edward Vickers (London: Routledge, 2019), 174-207. As a euphemism, the phrase “comfort women” should be enclosed in quotation marks, but for the sake of convenience, they will be omitted hereafter.

2 Chūgokujin senso higai baishō seikyū jiken bengodan, ed., Sajō no shōheki: Chūgokujin sengo baishō saiban 10-nen no kiseki (Tokyo: Nihon Hyōronsha, 2005), 280.

3 See WAM, Aruhi, Nihongun ga yattekita: Chūgoku senjō de no gōkan to ianjo (Tokyo: Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace, 2008 [2015]), 48.

4 Tsubokawa Hiroko and Ōmori Noriko, Shihō ga nintei shita Nihongun “ianfu”: Higai, kagai jijitsu ha kesenai! (Tokyo: Kamogawa Booklet, 2011).

5 Ikeda Eriko, “Coercion, Sexual Violence, and Rape Centers in Yu County, Shanxi Province,” in Denying the Comfort Women: The Japanese State’s Assault on Historical Truth, ed. Nishino Rumiko, Kim Puja, and Onozawa Akane (London & New York: Routledge, 2018), 64-69.

6 Ann J. Cahill, Rethinking Rape (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 2001), 33-34.

7 Deborah L. Rhode, Justice and Gender: Sex Discrimination and the Law (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: Harvard University Press, 1989), 252-53. For a detailed discussion on the gendered nature of legal institutions, see Cahill, Rethinking Rape.

8 I turned to the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM) for archival research, which only holds the court transcripts of the Shanxi Case and legal briefs of the Second, Shanxi, and Hainan Cases, in part due to the lawyers’ reluctance to share certain records with the WAM and the larger public for the sake of their clients’ privacy.

9 Ōmori Noriko, Rekishi no jijitsu to mukiatte: Chūgokujin “ianfu” higaisha totomoni (Tokyo: Shinnihon Shuppansha, 2008), 38, 99-101, 115.

10 See, for example, Maki Kimura, Unfolding the “Comfort Women” Debates: Modernity, Voices, Women’s Voices (London & New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), 156-61. Another significant factor is that the testimonies were given before the court through the medium of interpreters, who facilitated communication between victims who spoke in the Shanxi dialect of Chinese and the lawyers who spoke in Japanese. While I acknowledge the importance of delving into non-verbal aspects of testimonies and the possibility of certain linguistic elements being omitted in the process of translation, the unavailability of audiovisual records of court proceedings renders it impossible to conduct research on that front.

11 Nicola Henry, “The Impossibility of Bearing Witness: Wartime Rape and the Promise of Justice,” Violence Against Women 16, no. 10 (2010): 1098.

12 Ibid., 1098-1119.

13 Ibid., 1111. Indeed, testimonies can be extremely touching and empowering, as exhibited in literature and mass media. However, without an effective mechanism ensuring victims’ ownership over their own narratives, testimonies tend to be truncated for prosecutorial purposes in court. After all, both sides—defense lawyers and state prosecutors—try to win the cases and tend to employ testimonies as primary sources to bear out their arguments and build their cases.

14 Nikki Godden-Rasul, “Retribution, Redress and the Harms of Rape,” in Rape Justice: Beyond the Criminal Law, ed. Anastasia Powell, Nicola Henry, Asher Flynn (London and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), 112-26.

15 Ibid.

16 Judith Lewis Herman, “Justice from the Victim’s Perspective,” Violence Against Women 11, no. 5 (2005): 581-84.

17 Kang Jian, Suopei: Qinli Zhongguo “weianfu” ji bei qianglu furi laogong susong (Beijing: Beijing ribao chubanshe, 2015).

18 Henry, “The Impossibility of Bearing Witness.”; Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998).

19 Elizabeth W. Son, Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women” Performance, and Transpacific Redress (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 101.

20 Ibid., 70.

21 Shoshana Felman, “Theaters of Justice: Arendt in Jerusalem, the Eichmann Trial, and the Redefinition of Legal Meaning in the Wake of the Holocaust,” Theoretical Inquires in Law 1, no. 2 (2000): 28.

22 Ibid., 1-43.

23 Ibid., 1-43.

24 Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: Harvard University Press, 2002).

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid., 38.

27 Ibid., 153.

28 Ibid., 133.

29 Ibid., 133.

30 See Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241-1299.

31 Sokkiroku (Court Transcript, Wan Aihua; hereafter, Court Transcript of Wan), November 30, 2000, 1-13.

32 Court Transcript of Yin Yulin, February 21, 2001, 4-5.

33 Ishida Yoneko and Uchida Tomoyuki, ed., Kōdo no mura no seibōryoku: Dainyan tachi no sensō wa owaranai (Tokyo: Sōdosha, 2004), 163.

34 Sarah Soh, The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

35 Court Transcript of Zhang Fenxiang, June 2, 2004.

36 Psychiatrist Judith Herman points out that “[t]rauma is contagious.” Concepts such as “traumatic countertransference” and “vicarious traumatization” refer to the phenomenon of psychiatrists experiencing traumatic syndromes as a result of exposure to the traumatic narratives of their patients. The word “contagious” here is employed to explain the profound influence of trauma exerted on both comfort women victims and their close family members. For further explanation on traumatic countertransference, see Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 140-47.

37 Kathleen Daly, “Reconceptualizing Sexual Victimization and Justice,” in Justice for Victims: Perspectives on Rights, Transition and Reconciliation, ed. Inge Vanfraechem, Antony Pemberton, and Felix Mukwiza Ndahinda (London & New York: Routledge, 2014), 378.

38 See Gerry Johnstone and Joel Quirk, “Repairing Historical Wrongs,” Social & Legal Studies 2, no. 2 (2012): 158.

39 The author is inspired by Elizabeth Son’s study of the Wednesday Demonstrations before the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. She argues that younger generations, children in particular, embody the “futurity” of the demonstrations, in defiance to the Japanese government’s indifference to the comfort women issue. She further points out that their participation to a certain degree guarantees the continuation of the demands for redress and awareness-raising in the future as well. Son, Embodied Reckonings, 27-64.

40 Court Transcript of Wan, 8, 9, 12, 15, 17, 21. Very occasionally, she also used “sexual violence (seibōryoku)” though, see Court Transcript of Wan, 10.

41 Henry, “The Impossibility of Bearing Witness,” 1106.

42 Court Transcript of Wan, 37.

43 The author is inspired by Son’s discussion of the Korean victim Park Yong-shim’s physical presence before the Women’s Tribunal, see Son, Embodied Reckonings, 93-94.

44 Felman, The Juridical Unconscious, 163, 166.

45 Ibid., 153.

46 Son, Embodied Reckonings, 92.

47 Ibid.

48 Court Transcript of Wan, 19. Wan later adopted a daughter; by “family,” she was probably referring to the bond she formed with her foster daughter.

49 Court Transcript of Wan, 23.

50 Ibid., 36.

51 Shanee G. Stepakoff et al., “Why Testify? Witnesses’ Motivations for Giving Evidence in a War Crimes Tribunal in Sierra Leone,” The International Journal of Transitional Justice 8 (2014): 431-32.

52 Kawaguchi Kazuko, Chinjutsusho, October 28, 2004, 6.

53 Ibid.

54 Stepakoff et al., “Why Testify?,” 433-34.

55 Court Transcript of Yin Yulin, February 21, 2001; Court Transcript of Zhang Xiantu, February 21, 2001; Court Transcrpit of Wang Gaihe, February 21, 2001; Court Transcript of Gao Yin’e, May 17, 2001; Court Transcript of Zhao Runmei, September 6, 2001.

56 Ōmori, Rekishi no jijitsu to mukiatte, 95-96.

57 Ibid., 96-97.

58 Genkoku saishū junbi shomen (the Second Case), November 2, 2001, 18-19.

59 Ibid.

60 Ibid.

61 Ibid., 24-27.

62 Ibid., 28.

63 Genkokura saishū junbi shomen (the Hainan Case), March 22, 2006, 4.

64 Ibid., 23.

65 Genkokura saishū junbi shomen (the Hainan Case), March 22, 2006, 4-7.

66 Genkoku saishū junbi shomen (the Second Case), November 2, 2001, 7.

67 Ibid., 69.

68 Ibid.

69 Ōmori, Rekishi no jijitsu to mukiatte, 142.

70 Ibid., 49.

71 Ōmori, Rekishi no jijitsu to mukiatte.

72 Carol Gluck, “Operations of Memory: ‘Comfort Women’ and the World,” in Ruptured Memories: War, Memory, and the Post-Cold War in Asia, ed. Sheila Miyoshi Jager and Rana Mitter (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), 49-50.

73 Ibid., 51.

74 Ishida Yoneko, “Nihongun seibōryoku ni kansuru kioku, kiroku, kijutsu: Sanseishō ni okeru senjō seibōryoku no chōsa kara,” in Kōdo no mura no seibōryoku: Dainyan tachi no senso wa owaranai, ed. Ishida Yoenko and Uchida Tomoyuki (Tokyo: Sōdosha, 2004), 228-31.

75 Ibid., 230-31; Song Shaopeng, “Meitizhong de ‘weianfu’ huayu: Fuhaohua de ‘weianfu’ he ‘weianfu’ xushizhong de jiyi/wangque jizhi,” Kaifang shidai (2016): 148.

76 Louise Edwards, “Women Sex-Spies: Chastity, National Dignity, Legitimate Government and Ding Ling’s ‘When I Was in Xia Village’,” The China Quarterly 212 (2012): 1059-78.

77 Louise Edwards, “Drawing Sexual Violence in Wartime China: Ant-Japanese Propaganda Cartoons,” The Journal of Asian Studies 72, no. 3 (2013): 562-586.

78 Ishida, “Nihongun seibōryoku ni kansuru kioku, kiroku, kijutsu,” 229; Song, “Meitizhong de ‘weianfu’ huayu,” 149.

79 For a discussion of the judicial treatment of wartime Japanese sex crimes, see Xiaoyang Hao, “What Is Criminal and What Is Not: Prosecuting Wartime Japanese Sex Crimes in the People’s Republic of China,” The China Quarterly 242 (February 2020): 529-49.

80 Song, “Meitizhong de ‘weianfu’ huayu.”

81 Ibid.

82 Ibid.

83 Vickers, “Commemorating ‘Comfort Women’ beyond Korea.”

84 No verdict ruled in favor of comfort women plaintiffs except for the one rendered by the Yamaguchi District Court. The case, which is known as the Kampu Trial (Kampu saiban), involves a group of former Korean comfort women, and the court held the Japanese government liable for its failure to provide redress to the satisfaction of comfort women victims in a timely manner. However, this ruling was later reversed by the Hiroshima High Court upon the appeal by the Japanese government.

85 Clare McGlynn and Nicole Westmarland, “Kaleidoscopic Justice: Sexual Violence and Victim-Survivors’ Perceptions of Justice,” Social & Legal Studies 28, no. 2 (2019): 188.

86 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London & New York: Verso, 2006), 19-49.

87 Ibid.

88 WAM, Aruhi, Nihongun ga yattekita, 54.

89 The same set of exhibits actually toured Shanxi, Shaanxi, and Guangzhou provinces, and Beijing. I choose to focus on Shaanxi province here primarily because Qu’s detailed account on the Shaanxi experience enables me to analyze the impact of the panel exhibits, and by extension, testimonies and legal recognition.

90 Qu Yajun, “Josei, heiwa, minzoku jisei: Sansei Shihan Daigaku de Nihongun seibōryoku paneru-ten o kaisai shite,” in Gendai Chūgoku no jendā poritikusu: Kakusa, seibaibai, “ianfu,” ed. Kohama Masako and Akiyama Yōko (Tokyo: Bensei Shuppan, 2016), 180-90.

91 Although the Japanese government has implemented several reparation programs, including the Asian Women’s Fund (1994-2007) and the ROC-Japan bilateral pact (2015), it has yet to issue an official apology to comfort women victims.

92 Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness.

93 Ōmori, Rekishi no jijitsu to mukiatte; Chūgokujin sensō higai baishō seikyū jiken bengodan, ed., Sajō no shōheki, 18.

94 James Dawes, Evil Men (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: Harvard University Press, 2013), 30.