This lecture is part of AREA Ruhr’s lecture and discussion series Eighty years on: The End of the Second Word War in East Asia – Looking Back and Ahead which deals with various topics related to the 80th anniversary of the end of WWII.
Dr. Dorothea Mladenova (Leipzig University)
Remembering the Military “Comfort Women”: Memory Activism and the Legacies of World War II
Date: 9 December 2025
Time: 16.15–17.45
Place: online via Zoom
This talk explores the contested memory of the military “comfort women” — tens of thousands of girls and women from East and Southeast Asia who were forced into sexual servitude for the Japanese military during the Asia-Pacific War. Taking as its starting point a “comfort women” memorial exhibited in Cologne in spring 2025 as part of The Third World in the Second World War exhibition, the talk discusses the role of memory activism and practices of remembrance in addressing the legacies of the Second World War. Although a few monuments to the “comfort women” exist within Japan, they are not part of the country’s official collective memory, and a desire to “draw a line” under the past largely prevails. Yet in other countries, such as Germany, the transnational feminist activism surrounding the “comfort women” has repeatedly brought the issue of sexual violence in wartime into public and scholarly debate.
Speaker bio:
Dr. Dorothea Mladenova is a Research Associate for Japanese Studies at the East Asian Institute at Leipzig University. Taking the perspective of Cultural Studies, Governmentality Studies, and discourse theory, her research focuses on everyday culture, identity formation and power structures in and related to Japan. She has worked on culinary nationalism and glocalization, the 2011 Fukushima triple disaster, the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and the culture of death and dying in Japan. In her current research, she explores the post-migrant shift of memory culture in Berlin concerning the memory of sexual violence in wartime.
Please register in advance to join the Zoom meeting:
https://uni-due.zoom-x.de/meeting/register/9CEPpVbMTO-9HEwle9KtoA
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