Nationalism and Gender

One of Japan’s foremost feminist theorists here employs her typically lucid, hard-hitting style to confront head on the various actors in the debate surrounding the issue of ‘comfort women’. While skillfully dismantling the neo-nationalist argument of the ‘historical revisionists,’ Ueno is no less biting in her treatment of her traditional political and intellectual allies - left-wing historians and feminist supporters of the ‘comfort women’ - a fact that has made the book highly controversial in Japan.