WS colloquium March 13 (F) Legal Responses to World War II Sexual Violence: The Japanese Experience

Legal Responses to World War II Sexual Violence: The Japanese Experience

Yuma Totani

Department of History, UHM

--Co-sponsored with Center for Japanese Studies--

March 13 (Friday) 12:30pm-1:30pm, Saunders 541

Abstract

Since the establishment of international tribunals in the 1990s, there have been debates concerning the extent to which justice systems can help victims and perpetrators of mass atrocity begin the process of confronting the past and restoring the fabric of torn communities. This paper explores how rape, sexual slavery, and other forms of sexual violence that accompanied the Japanese conduct of war were documented at WWII war crimes trials on the one hand and the present-day civil lawsuits on the other. By comparing the two types of legal proceedings, Totani considers the possibilities and limitations of the judiciary in achieving justice, establishing accountability, and restoring the dignity of the victims of atrocity.

Yuma Totani obtained her Ph.D. in History at the University of California at Berkeley, in 2005. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University, in 2005-2006. She is currently an assistant professor of History at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her representative publication is The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008). The Japanese edition, Tōkyō saiban: dai 2-ji taisen go no hō to seigi no tsuikyū (Tokyo: Misuzu shobō, 2008), is translated and revised by the author.