Singapore Studies in Society & History. Singapore: NUS Press, 2022. x, 208 pp. (Tables, maps, B&W photos.) US$25.00, paper. ISBN 9789813251861.
The author of this outstanding new contribution to Singapore studies and to the literature on comfort women in Asia is well known to historians and history educators in Singapore. Kevin Blackburn has taught in the island-city’s National Institute of Education since 1993 and has made substantial contributions to the study of the history of education and the Japanese occupation in Singapore. This book, which recently won the Singapore Book Publishers Association’s Singapore Book Award for Best Non-Fiction Title 2023, is informative and accessible for scholarly and non-scholarly audiences alike. It is based on extensive research in archives and museums in London, Japan, Malaysia, the United States, Korea, and Australia,and on the pioneering research of Japanese historians Hayashi Hirofumi and Yoshimi Yoshiaki.
Blackburn brings the reader on a journey across Singapore and other locations in the Japanese empire in Asia during World War II to investigate two mysteries. Were there local “comfort women”—the grossly inappropriate euphemism for women that the Japanese military enslaved for their soldiers’ sexual gratification (1)—in Singapore then? The reader is left in no doubt that Singapore was a centre of the Japanese military’s pan-Asian sex industry. Local Singapore women and hundreds of other women—from South Korea, Malaysia, and Indonesia in particular—were forcibly recruited or deceived and made to become sex slaves in the comfort stations meant for ordinary soldiers, or prostitutes in the restaurants-brothels for Japanese officers known as ryotei. “Comfort women” were also sent out from Singapore to Peninsular Malaysia, Thailand, and Java. Using a diverse range of sources, from official reports to testimonies and other exceptional materials like the diary of a Korean comfort station manager, chapters 2 through 4 examine the experiences of the sexually enslaved women in the ten known comfort stations in Singapore.
Why did Singapore’s “comfort women” not speak up about their experiences after 1945? In chapters 1 and 5, Blackburn argues convincingly that the fear of social stigma and familial rejection, as well as the lack of political or institutional support, led to the their erasure from historical memory and their self-silencing. These fears and lack of support stemmed from the patriarchal attitudes of unsympathetic male actors. The absence of these war victims’ voices reflects “masculinist hegemony over memories of the comfort women” (13). Chapter 1 establishes the contemporary backdrop for the book. In late 1991, former Korean comfort women sued the Japanese government for their suffering during the war, inspiring other redress movements elsewhere. The response in Singapore, however, was muted (29). Instead, former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew implied that the presence of Korean “comfort women” in the comfort stations had “saved” Singapore women from a similar fate (17). Blackburn argues that these remarks, and similar comments by other male personalities, could have deterred Singapore’s former “comfort women” from breaking their silence. Chapter 5 traces the origins of this silence to the immediate aftermath of the war. Though emancipated, the different groups of “comfort women” in Singapore found it difficult to return to their own societies, afraid of being shunned as “fallen women” who had became willing prostitutes during the occupation (119). In Singapore, the colonial authorities and male community leaders saw local comfort women in similar frames and attempted to remove them from public view. The intervention of the sole female member of the Singapore Advisory Council to the postwar British Military Administration led to more positive and less punitive measures to help the women reintegrate into Singapore society. Their successful reintegration, Blackburn observes, may have further discouraged these women from being open about their wartime trauma. Finally, in chapters 6 and 7, Blackburn explores the efforts of different groups of people—Korean and Japanese researchers, local journalists, theatre groups, and television producers—to discuss or represent the stories of Singapore’s former comfort women. The difficulties they have faced underline the social, cultural, and political barriers that have ensured that Singapore’s former “comfort women” remain enigmatic.
Blackburn’s absorbing book piqued some questions that may be worth addressing. Local South Asian and Eurasian women were missing from the narrative: Were they deliberately excluded from the Japanese military’s sex industries? In what ways was the Japanese military’s sex industry racialized? In addition, the 1962 discovery of mass graves of executed Chinese men in Singapore triggered a public furor among Singapore’s Chinese community, which Lee Kuan Yew had to manage carefully to preserve Singapore’s vital economic relations with Japan. Did any discussion of the suffering of Chinese women surface during the controversy? Relatedly, to what extent has the memorialization of the infamous Sook Ching massacres contributed to the submergence of the suffering of other groups of victims?
In all, the book ought to be included in courses on Southeast Asia and Singapore, and on Japanese imperialism in Asia. The book will also appeal to audiences interested in the value of oral history for historical research. Blackburn relies extensively on oral history collections in Korea and Singapore, including a less-known oral history collection in the National Institute of Education he and his students are developing. Furthermore, Blackburn’s observations call for us to consider how oral history archives can institutionalize the erasure of women by privileging and normalizing the patriarchal, gendered lenses of mostly male interviewees (23, 27). Finally, this empathetic history of comfort women in Singapore, and of their absence from Singapore’s public memory, reminds us to reflect on the ways we become complicit ourselves in discouraging victims from stepping forward, from speaking out, and from seeking the support they deserve.
Edgar Liao
University of Macau, Macau SAR