Teamster Rank and File: Power, Bureaucracy, and Rebellion at Work and in a Union

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Columbia University Press, 1982 - 302 pages

Available for the first time in English, this is the definitive account of the practice of sexual slavery the Japanese military perpetrated during World War II by the researcher principally responsible for exposing the Japanese government's responsibility for these atrocities. The large scale imprisonment and rape of thousands of women, who were euphemistically called "comfort women" by the Japanese military, first seized public attention in 1991 when three Korean women filed suit in a Toyko District Court stating that they had been forced into sexual servitude and demanding compensation. Since then the comfort stations and their significance have been the subject of ongoing debate and intense activism in Japan, much if it inspired by Yoshimi's investigations. How large a role did the military, and by extension the government, play in setting up and administering these camps? What type of compensation, if any, are the victimized women due? These issues figure prominently in the current Japanese focus on public memory and arguments about the teaching and writing of history and are central to efforts to transform Japanese ways of remembering the war.

Yoshimi Yoshiaki provides a wealth of documentation and testimony to prove the existence of some 2,000 centers where as many as 200,000 Korean, Filipina, Taiwanese, Indonesian, Burmese, Dutch, Australian, and some Japanese women were restrained for months and forced to engage in sexual activity with Japanese military personnel. Many of the women were teenagers, some as young as fourteen. To date, the Japanese government has neither admitted responsibility for creating the comfort station system nor given compensation directly to former comfort women.

This English edition updates the Japanese edition originally published in 1995 and includes introductions by both the author and the translator placing the story in context for American readers.

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About the author (1982)

Tahar Ben Jelloun, winner of the 1994 Prix Maghreb and of the 1987 Goncourt Prize for his novel La Nuit sacrée (The sacred night), has published ten novels, four books of poetry, and three works of nonfiction. His books have been widely translated and include three novels in English: Silent Day in Tangiers, Corruption, and The Sand Child. His recent Racism Explained to My Daughter has been translated into fifteen languages and has sold more than 300,000 copies.Barabara Bray lives in Paris where she is a writer, critic, and translator. She has translated many books, including The Lover by Marguerite Duras, Jacques Lacan by Elisabeth Roudinesco (Columbia, 1997), as well as three of Julia Kristeva's novels: Possessions, The Old Man and the Wolves, and The Samurai (all published by Columbia).

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