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reach London, where "members of the mission, except
those who would be returning soon to Japan, had their
hair cut short in the western manner" (p. 108). The
future president of the Bank of Japan managed to
outfit himself for study in the United States when he
was thirteen by "put[ting] together an inelegant collection of odds and ends, including a pair of women's
shoes" (p. 137).
Readers will savor the frank assessments of early
Meiji leaders by English officials who met them in
London in the early 1870s. Describing some of the men
who had helped topple the Tokugawa regime, British
charge Francis Adams called Ito Hirobumi (whose
English was apparently fluent) "a clever useful fellow,
but easily got hold of by foreigners not always of the
best class" and Kido Koin (who did not understand
English) a man of "the most fearless courage." Adams
reserved his highest praise for Iwakura Tomomi, noting that "the Mikado's most trusted counsellor" not
only "treats questions broadly, without that tendency
to wander from the point which is a characteristic of so
many Japanese" but also had "a conservative turn of
mind," which served as "a wholesome check upon the
almost republican tendencies of some of the ultraprogressive members of the government" (p. 161).
Unfortunately, Beasley gives only passing mention
to the five girls who joined the Iwakura mission and
stayed in the United States to study. The youngest,
seven-year old Tsuda Umeko, spent eleven years
abroad and eventually opened the first private college
for girls in Japan. Tsuda College remains a leader in
women's education. Another young woman on the
mission later helped introduce Western musical education into Japan. As Dorothy Robins-Mowry has
noted, the Meiji emperor even issued a special rescript
in 1871 that "directed his aristocracy, when traveling
abroad, to take with them their wives, daughters, and
sisters, so that they might learn how women receive
education and bring up children in other countries
(The Hidden Sun: Women of Modern Japan [1983], p.
43).
More information on such female travelers would
have added an important dimension to Beasley's description of overseas study missions and their significance for modern Japanese history. Still, students and
scholars alike will appreciate the book's many other
virtues, including the clear writing style, the thorough
notes, and the thoughtfully prepared annotated bibliography.
GAIL LEE BERNSTEIN
University of Arizona
PETER Duus. The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese
Penetration of Korea, 1895-1910. (A Philip E. Lilienthal Book; Twentieth-Century Japan: The Emergence of a World Power, number 4.) Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press. 1995. Pp. xiv,
480. $45.00.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
Peter Duus returns to familiar ground with new primary source material to examine the motivations
behind the Japanese penetration of Korea in the late
nineteenth century. Duus first probes the motives of
the imperialist coalition of metropolitan Meiji leaders,
then surveys the composition and occupation of the
Japanese business community in Korea, and concludes
with images of the colonized and a new morphology of
late nineteenth-century imperialism. A careful chronology and cogent analysis of motives among politicians and military leaders at home in the earlier
section give way to broader profiles of investment on
the peninsula and migration in the latter section. The
former may bring closure to some controversies over
Japanese motivation and planning regarding Korea,
while the latter establish benchmarks to define early
Japanese business policy and practice on the peninsula.
Among the rich lode of debates and policies in the
initial section, three motifs lend credence to the theme
of industrialization as a necessary but not sufficient
condition of Japan's advance. Duus carefully documents the close linkage between Japanese promotion
of institutional reform on the peninsula and Japan's
own economic and political goals. A progression from
the ambiguity of early Meiji policy to the clarity of
Aritomo Yamagata's "cordon of interest" by 1890,
culminating in the detailed plans for the Protectorate
by May of 1904, suggests a growing consensus balancing strategic geo-political and market priorities. Yet a
third motif highlighting policy conflicts such as that
between General Hasegawa's "coerced change" and
Ito Hirobumi's "guided change" through 1909 offers
further evidence against the clear dominance of economic interests.
If politics and personalities dominate the first section, migration policies, marketing procedures and
profiles, and a variety of enterprises and entrepreneurs
take center stage in the second section. Countering the
emphasis on Japanese state support for economic
penetration by larger firms, Duus cites statistical evidence to argue that "trade developed not through a
few large investments in an enclave but rather through
the collective efforts of a large number of small
entrepreneurs." More attention to issues of an enclave
versus integrated economy would strengthen the argument, as would analysis of the interplay of large-scale
infrastructural investment in transportation and finance supporting the entrepreneurial efforts of the
expatriate community. Portraits of entrepreneurs and
of community institutions embed the economic overview in excellent drama and detail and suggest tensions
between economic motives of the immigrants and
political priorities of the metropole.
The opening narrative about Meiji leaders provides
abundant evidence for Duus's claims of a mixture of
motives in the home islands, but the expansive rather
than intensive narrative of the abacus does not sustain
arguments for tension between state priorities and the
material interests of an emerging expatriate society.
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The suggestion that "if the economic objectives of the
abacus and the sword often matched, that did not
mean that their political interests always meshed as
well" (p. 363) indeed deserves further study, but it
does not establish the thesis of a mixture of motives.
Similarly, claims for "the synergistic nature of imperialist penetration where efforts of one set of Japanese
with one set of motives reinforced the efforts of
another set of Japanese with another set of motives"
(p. 288) appear more a hypothesis than a conclusion. It
is this remarkable synergy between sword and abacus
on the peninsula that will prompt some to question
Duus's initial emphasis on controversies and inconsistencies in Japan's Korea policy. Further study of
mechanisms promoting a synergy or matching of strategic, political, and mercantile interests may bring to
light the effective or dominant motives of Japanese
imperialist expansion.
Scholars of comparative colonialism, imperial expansion, and Japanese and Korean history will find
here a very ambitious monograph that both offers
conclusions and generates new hypotheses regarding
Japanese imperial expansion. Duus achieves his goal of
disaggregating the imperialist coalition and reconstructing a mental world of imperial ambitions, nationalist ideals, and material interest. Subsequent scholarship on the institutions, associations, and personalities
of a material world riven by military conquest and
material gain may complete the picture of expansion
so admirably documented and cogently argued here.
DENNIS L. McNAMARA
Georgetown University
GEORGE HICKS. The Comfort Women: Japan's Brutal
Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World
War. New York: W. W. Norton. 1995. Pp. 303. $25.00.
Scholars have produced a mountain of paper on
imperial Japan, but they have neglected the story of
enforced prostitution by the military. This absorbing
and important book by George Hicks is, therefore, an
especially welcome addition to the literature on Japan's invasion of China and the Pacific War.
The first "comfort stations" under direct control of
the Japanese Army were established in Shanghai in
1932; prostitutes were imported from Japan to staff
the new facilities. Over the following years, the number of stations grew as the military overran East and
Southeast Asia. As the system expanded, however, the
military, for the most part, turned the management of
the stations over to private operators. "These civilian
operators were given paramilitary status and rank,
while the Armed Forces retained overall supervision
and provided support in transport and health services
as required" (p. 47).
By the end of World War II, between 100,000 and
200,000 young women had passed through the Japanese military's sex system. Although most recruits
during the early years were volunteers, as the number
of volunteers proved inadequate those who supplied
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
women for the stations turned to abduction and coercion. "Slave raids" into Korea, which netted women for
comfort stations and men for factories and mines, were
not uncommon. Indeed, the majority of comfort
women were Koreans. Hicks documents the terrible
ordeal faced by these women: sexually transmitted
diseases, malnutrition, tuberculosis, and brutality by
drunken troops. One former comfort woman, who was
kidnapped, recalls that she "was forced to have sex
with ten to twenty men a day. As a result I was
continuously raw. Red raw. Sex was excruciating. Oh,
you have no idea how painful it was!" (p. 13).
The most interesting chapters deal with Japan's
collective amnesia on this subject. Although a book
was published in Japanese in 1973 and more followed
in the 1980s, authorities studiously ignored them. In
1991, however, a legal action taken by three former
Korean comfort women brought the issue of enforced
prostitution to worldwide attention. Documents uncovered in the Self Defence Agency Library, which
proved the link between comfort stations and the
military, were published in 1992. Faced with this proof,
the government admitted the military's involvement
but refused demands for compensation by former
comfort women. Meanwhile, supporters of these
women were urging the Commission on Human Rights
of the United Nations to investigate the matter. After
Hicks completed his manuscript, a United Nations
report (1996) recommended that Japan pay compensation to surviving comfort women, and the Japanese
government encouraged the creation of a private fund
for that purpose.
Hicks deserves praise for presenting this topic to a
wide readership and for drawing upon sources in
Japanese, Korean, and other languages. Nevertheless,
the author and his editor also deserve criticism for
producing a poorly organized book in need of severe
editing.
RICHARD H. MITCHELL
University of Missouri,
St. Louis
P. Pospos and MUHAMAD RADJAB. Telling Lives, Telling
History: Autobiography and Historical Imagination in
Modern Indonesia; Aku dan Toba and Semasa Kecil di
Kampung. Translated, edited, and foreword by SUSAN
RODGERS. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press. 1995. Pp. xiii, 333. Cloth $55.00,
paper $20.00.
Susan Rodgers has made a substantial contribution to
scholarship on Indonesia with these translations of two
autobiographies of boyhood in Sumatra, one of the
major islands of the postcolonial state of Indonesia.
Although the memoirs describe life in the waning years
of Dutch colonial rule, both books were published in
1950, less than a year after the Indonesians won their
independence after fours years of war and revolution.
The two books are well chosen and make for interesting comparisons: Aku dan Toba (Toba and Me) by P.
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