Geisha girl nurse: Women of the Japanese empire on the front lines during World War II

Traditional understanding of Japanese women’s roles during WWII places them on the homefront. This talk introduces my current research which challenges this narrative by looking at women who as subjects of the Japanese empire, fought and died in the Asia-Pacific War. They fought with weapons like guns, grenades and explosive devices. They died not as “casualties of war” but by being shot by Allied troops or struck by enemy artillery in battle. That they fought and died was not supposed to have happened. That they did and that fact seems surprising shows us the limitations of postwar Japanese historiography.

This talk will discuss how and why certain kinds of women (civilians, nurses, and comfort women) of the Japanese empire came to be on the frontlines during the Second World War and the evidence that points to some of them fighting in battle. However, their presence does not seem so unlikely when we look at the opposing forces, which included female guerilla resistance fighters in China and the Philippines who fought against the Japanese. It will explore why it is so hard to imagine women in the Asia-Pacific theater as combatants today. It previews just one part of a larger book project funded by a NEH grant that focuses on the role of colonial people in the Japanese military as well as how Indigenous people living on the islands where war came in the Pacific theater also got coerced into fighting, laboring, and dying for the Japanese –part of a larger transimperial phenomenon– that the Allied forces were involved in as well as the Japanese.

This talk is free and open to the public. Please RSVP here.

About the speaker: 

Kirsten Ziomek is an associate professor of history and director of Asian Studies at Adelphi University in New York. Her research focuses on the Japanese empire, colonial subjects, Indigenous people, World War II, visual culture and imagery, and comparative imperialisms.

Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies and Critical Asian Studies and her first book, Lost Histories: Recovering the Lives of Japan’s Colonial Peoples was published in 2019 by Harvard University Asia Center. Her current book project reimagines the Asia-Pacific War by focusing on the experiences of colonial and Indigenous people throughout the Pacific region- some who fought for the Japanese military- others who were coerced into providing forced labor, resources or sex.  A fellowship from the National Endowment for Humanities and the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission is supporting her research leave during 2023-2024. 

(See more at www.kziomek.com)