From the mid-1990s onward, groups of Chinese survivors of various cases of civilian abuse during Japanese invasion (1931-1945) started to bring civil lawsuits to Japanese law courts, demanding apologies and compensations from the Japanese government. These plaintiffs were represented by Japanese lawyers and funded by Japanese civil organizations throughout their long-standing legal attempts.\u00a0Maiko Morimoto, PhD Candidate in Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, will present her dissertation which examines this series of transnational legal redress movement as a site where globally circulating human rights discourses and various particular concerns of regional, national, and local scales intersected at the turn of the new century.<\/p>\n
Morimoto’s presentation at this workshop, in particular, focuses on the cases filed by victims of sexual slavery in Shanxi Province. The plaintiffs \u2014 elderly village women\u2014 were abducted as teenage girls, confined and repeatedly raped by the men of a Japanese military unit that came to occupy their villages in 1941. Exploring the processes through which these women\u2019s memories were unearthed from half-a-century of silence, she identifies three discourses that were at work: the newly-emerged, popularized legal discourse within the People\u2019s Republic of China on the notion of \u201ccivil compensation\u201d; the trans-Asian and trans-Pacific feminist discourse on the \u201ccomfort women\u201d issue; and the medical-psychological theory of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) applied by Japanese pacifist lawyers to establish the plaintiffs\u2019 claim of continued suffering. Her presentation demonstrates how these discursive forces, intersecting with one another, transformed the perception of the victimhood suffered by these women from an object of shame in their local villages to a legal grounding for rights, and how the transformation was left unfinished after the eventual dismissal of their cases by the Japanese Supreme Court.<\/p>\n
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