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During the Asia Pacifi c War (1937-1945), the Japanese Imperial Army forced women in Japanese East Asian colonies to work as so-called “comfort women” (sex workers). The justice movement for these women is an international intersectional alliance of feminists from Japanese ex-colonies in East Asia, the former colonial power Japan, and other societies, such as Australia, Germany, and the USA. This long-term feminist justice movement has campaigned for an apology and compensation from the Japanese government, as well as for recognition of “comfort women‘s” suff ering and of sexual violence in war in cultural memory. Through researching this justice movement from a processual intersectionality perspective, this paper shows that it gained power and legitimacy from refl ecting and working on its internal intersectional inequalities. This included refl ecting on the class hierarchies between many former “comfort women”, who had power of defi nition, and intellectual feminist activists, as well as on the postcolonial divide between former Japanese colonies and the former colonial power Japan, leading it to develop horizontal cooperation and practices. Following an overview, the paper outlines the movements in South Korea, Japan, and Germany, and highlights the different postcolonial constellation between East Asia and Germany, the main actors, and their aims. While the Japanese government rejected the justice movement‘s demands and the right wing mobilised against it, has been able to infl uence cultural memory to widely recognize sexual violence in war and the dignity of the “comfort women”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the question of how to understand what has appeared as Japan's ›success‹ in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic through analyzing the contribution of specific social mechanisms in shaping societal responses to governmental policies. A comparison of multiple countries in East Asia and West Europe indicates that Japan has been relatively ›successful‹ in containing the spread of COVID-19, at least when contrasted with Western states rather than other Asian states. This outcome is notable in particular in that it was achieved without reliance either on strict legal restrictions (as in some Western countries) or extensive surveillance of the population using digital tools. In fact, despite many of the government's COVID-19-related measures lacking solid legal underpinnings, they appeared to be endorsed and obediently followed by a significant majority of the Japanese population. Meanwhile, a more differentiated analysis shows that there are certain variations even within this general pattern of »Japanese obedience«, both across time and social segments. While this can on the one hand be associated with differing levels of fear of contracting the virus, this only provides a partial explanation of the specific observable patterns of »non-obedience«. Empirical evidence together with theoretical sociological accounts of social control point toward a more nuanced picture in which social pressure plays a substantial role in encouraging compliance of governmental rules--albeit in a highly uneven way--exerting strong influence over certain parts of the population while leaving others relatively untouched. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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