Quick Summary of Nakamura's Lecture

Jessica Nakamura’s lecture, “Becoming Missing Comfort Women: Yoshiko Shimada’s Performances of History in Contemporary”, was about comfort women of the Japanese wartime and the art/political work called “Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Women (2012)”, by Yoshiko Shimada.  The lecture explained how the Japanese government took women from their territories (mainly Korea) and force them to be prostitutes for the soldiers of their army during the time around WW2. And as the women survivors of this time die off, there still has not been proper reparations made by the Japanese government toward this crime. Nakamura then displayed photographs of art works and statues that were made to place pressure on the Japanese government to combat this active attempt to sweep this incident under the rug. Her lecture was mainly focused on bringing the viewer’s attention to this problem but was not focused on fighting this issue.