Sovereign Offerings: Transnational Urban Geopolitics of the San Francisco “Comfort Women” Public Memorial

• In Event: 4209 - At the Site of Memory: Women of Color Epistemology, Knowledge, and Cultural Production

Abstract

San Francisco became the first major U.S. city to erect a public memorial dedicated to former “Comfort Women” in 2017, following similar moves in the suburbs of New Jersey, Virginia, and Southern California. Fighting head-on against the Japanese government’s intensifying historical denialism, the multiethnic “Comfort Women” Justice Coalition donated a monument featuring Chinese, Filipina, and Korean girls and an elderly Korean woman as a gift to the City of San Francisco. This paper analyzes the historical and geopolitical significance of this public memorial in relation to the spatial politics of race, gender, and class in San Francisco and its former sister city Osaka. Based on ethnographic observations and archival research, I examine how the Coalition members mobilized transnationally to shape the public discourse of solidarity and influence local policymakers. Findings highlight the interplay between what Lisa Yoneyama calls a “transborder redress culture” and the urban geopolitics of cultural diversity. On the one hand, the ongoing process of commemoration has encouraged a radical imaginary of translocal solidarity against gendered state violence. On the other hand, spatial and embodied dynamics of urban redevelopment in San Francisco and Osaka disrupts a simplistic construction of these cities’ shared identities as diverse communities. Unpacking this tension, I turn to the work of a Coalition member, Eclipse Rising, which is an organization of ethnic Koreans from Japan (Zainichi Koreans) residing in the U.S. Having roots and networks in three countries, Eclipse Rising members articulate their indeterminate subjectivities as racialized women and queers from a stateless ethnic minority group to cultivate critical survivorship with Indigenous, Black, and immigrant communities. I argue that their affective contribution to the memorial demands us to rethink sovereignty through an alternative temporality of remembrance, accountability, and healing, which can never be accomplished but can only be offered to the future.

Author

• Haruki Eda, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey