NTU DFLL Faculty Colloquium

臺大外文系學術演講

Title: Aging and Restoring Dignity: Confessions of Traumatic Memories Experienced under the Japanese Empire and its Aftermath

Speaker: Dr Hiroyuki Ogawa (University of Tokyo)

Moderator: Dr Chung-Jen Chen (National Taiwan University)

Time: 15:00-17:00 on Wednesday, December 3, 2025

Venue: NTU Humanities Hall, B208

This lecture deals with traumatic experiences in youth and public confessions in old age by (1) karayuki-san, Japanese women who were forced to work as prostitutes at brothels, “cafés,” “coffee shops,” “bars,” or “restaurants” mainly run by Japanese men and women, in many places across the Asia-Pacific region from the late 19th to early 20th centuries; (2) Asian and European (such as Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, Filipino, Indonesian, and Dutch) “comfort women (ianfu),” or even “comfort girls” in their early to mid-teens, during the Asia-Pacific War from 1931 to 1945; and (3) Japanese female repatriates (hikiagesha) from East and Southeast Asia as well as Pacific islands (but mainly from Manchuria and North Korea), many of whom suffered from, or were at least seriously threatened by, sexual violence by Red Army soldiers as the Japanese Empire and its puppet state of Manchukuo collapsed in the summer of 1945 (looking from other Asian and Pacific nations, the demise of the Japanese Empire and Manchukuo meant liberation from Japan’s formal and informal colonial rule or military occupation). Particularly, the lecture examines why most, if not all, public confessions were made only after these women became old, and how much their confessions contributed to restoring their dignity, though rather belatedly.

Hiroyuki Ogawa is Professor in the Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tokyo. He mainly works on decolonization of the British Empire, the Commonwealth, and British politics & diplomacy in the mid-20th century onward as well as history of the Japanese Empire from the late 19th to mid-20th centuries. His publications in English include “Public Health, Agricultural Administration, and Colonial Policy Studies in Pre-war Japan: A Comparison with Imperial and Commonwealth Studies in Britain,” The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs, Volume 112, Issue 1 (2023) and “Small Nations, Empires and the Commonwealth: Canada, Quebec, Newfoundland and Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon in Global Perspective,” in Kiyonobu Date and Jean-François Laniel, eds., A New Approach to Global Studies from the Perspective of Small Nations (Routledge, 2023).