Nationalism and Gender

This is written by a sociologist and Japan’s most famous feminist, Chizuko Ueno. A discursive battle over how Japan’s history should be remembered constitutes the most recent, and perhaps the most explosive, round in a struggle over the legitimacy of different narrator’s understandings of the past and its focus on the comfort women issue. Feminist theorist Chizuko Ueno confronts head on, in her usual lucid and hard-hitting style, the various actors in the debate. She skillfully cuts through the argument of the neo-nationalist historical revisionists who have attempted to deny or minimize the reality of the former comfort women. Ueno’s equally biting treatment of her natural allies – left-wing historians and feminist supporters of the comfort women – has also made the book highly controversial.