Twelfth International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

Since the end of World War II, the Japanese government has neglected to provide an official apology for the 200,000 women who were enslaved as prostitutes for the Japanese Imperial Army, provoking a long campaign from comfort women to preserve this history. This paper contextualizes Taiwan’s memorialization of the comfort women against the backdrop of the global redress movement, focusing on a case study of a comfort women museum erected in Taipei in 2016. I argue that contemporary Taiwan’s unique position of geopolitical vulnerability with regards to mainland China creates a relationship of dependency on her close ally, Japan, which greatly diminishes popular support for the redress movement in Taiwan. I explore how the architectural constitution of the museum itself as a ninety-year-old building from the period when Taiwan was colonized by Japan paradoxically situates the Taiwanese redress movement in a discourse of colonial nostalgia. I juxtapose this against the contemporary, modernist lines of the comfort women museums in South Korea, where public sentiment against Japanese colonial rule is much more embittered. I ask how these museum spaces dialectically structure and reproduce the discourses surrounding the differing forms of colonial violence practiced in South Korea and Taiwan, as well as their divergent legacies in the present day. How do these curatorial memory practices respectively inflect or depart from those of the nation state that they belong to? How do we read these spaces not only as reservoirs of memory but also as collaborators in the ongoing project of memorializing?