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COMFORT WOMEN SPEAK: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military. Edited by Sangmie Choi Schellstede. New York: Holmes and Meier. 2000. x, 154 pp. (B&W photos.) US$27.50, cloth. ISBN 0-8419-1413-3.
In his 1946 work, "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell had this to say about the insult that Britons of his time sometimes inflicted on their mother tongue: 'A man may take a drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." This in fact has increasingly become the fate of many languages around the world, especially at the hands of virulent nationalists eternally on the lookout for creative coinages to protect the presumed "pure essence" and "honour" of their societies from "malicious" outsiders, and project self-serving images of collective innocence, in callous disregard of the unimpeachable historical records that show their compatriots committing unspeakable brutalities in pursuit of the "national interest." Thus, in Japan for a long time, the rightwingers have preferred the benign word "merger" for the Machiavellian annexation of Korea (1910) and the equally mild word "incident" for both the violent takeover of Manchuria (1931) and the savagery-filled invasion of the rest of China (1937). And, of course, "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" was the phrase of choice in Japan before and during World War II in defense of the country's imperialist expansion. The expression "comfort women" (ianfu in Japanese; wianbu in Korean) must take its seat in such a disreputable lexicon.
The word "comfort" evokes experiences of a mother's warm hug to an injured or ill child, a nurse's reassuring words to an anxious patient, the...