why I want to study the social and cultural history of modern Japan right now?

I like Japan. I like my Japanese friends, Japanese teacher, Japanese entertainment products and so on. I’m attracted to this nation, so I want to know it more. Social, cultural and economic history are all my types. In this class, I’m interested in the comfort women issue.

In the summer of 2017, I watched a special documentary named Twenty-Two in a cinema. This is the first comfort-women documentary which got publicly released in China. Twenty-two former comfort women who survived from the invade of Japanese army or people who had been took care of them talked about those women’s past. Also, the documentary showed me their recent lives. Most of the women were native Chinese but few of them born in the South Korea and the North Korea. China is not the only nation that got harmed, but we do not talk about the other nations also have the comfort women issue two in our high school history textbook.

The documentary is clam. It provides me a perspective to explore what are the comfort women’s later lives. It does not try to trigger extreme emotions. If the elders preferred to stay silent, it would not force them to talk. This documentary records the history, traumatized women and their brave. Sadly, those brave women are near the end of their lives. Some of them died before or after the release of the documentary. If we do not remember them, the history is just bunches of descriptions and numbers. Getting connected to the past is crucial to figure out who we are.

The issue of comfort women is complex in our nation. Those women were victims of Japanese army. However, after the end of the war, it became so hard of them to back to their normal lives. People despised them because they were insulted by Japanese army. A little care came to their traumatized experience. Additionally, their children, whose fathers are anonymous Japanese soldiers, have very hard lives and discriminations are everywhere.

I want to know more about why Japan chose to invade our country in the past and how Japanese people consider the comfort women at that time.