Reading the Testimonies

Abstract

As access to written documents concerning ‘comfort women’ has been limited, testimonies, particularly those by ‘comfort women’, have played a crucial role in drawing a clearer picture of the ‘comfort women’ system. The emergence of the testimonies of ‘comfort women’ victims coincided with a growing interest in testimonial narratives and autobiographies in various academic disciplines such as anthropology, history, sociology and literature. In the study of history, testimonies pose a fundamental question of how particular knowledge is legitimized to be remembered and the ways that this knowledge is recorded and documented; this is more than simply adding the experience of women to the mainstream of history. The dynamic nature of testimonies also means that engaging with them is a complex practice as listening to or reading them is not at all a straightforward process. After looking at testimonies of ‘comfort women’ victims, this chapter will address questions raised in engaging with these testimonies. As the difficulties associated with reading or listening to testimonies will be discussed in more detail in later chapters, in this chapter the particular question that testimonies pose regarding historical ‘truth’ and ‘fact’ will be addressed.