The Flowers of Japanese-Korean Unity: The female labor volunteer corps in Korea, 1937-1945
While recent attention to comfort women has Japanese exposed war crimes, it has also reinforced representations of colonial Korean women as powerless people. The fact that activists and academics use the Labor Volunteer Corps, otherwise known as Chongsindae, and comfort women (wianbu; ianfu), erroneously suggest that or teishintai was somehow synonymous with military sexual slavery. Chongsindae translates literally as "offering-up-one's-body corps" but was both officially and commonly interpreted as "volunteer corps." This presentation will concern the Women’s Labor Volunteer Corps, in particular the operatives of the Fujikoshi steel factory in Toyama, Japan, to offer alternative renderings of women in wartime Korea.
