Chunghee Sarah Soh
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| Alma mater | Sogang University University of Hawaiʻi |
| Occupation | Sociocultural anthropologist |
| Employer | San Francisco State University |
| Korean name | |
| Hangul | 소정희[1] |
| Hanja | 蘇貞姫[2] |
| Revised Romanization | So Jeonghui |
| McCune–Reischauer | So Chŏnghŭi |
Chunghee Sarah SohorSarah Soh is an American professor of AnthropologyatSan Francisco State University. She is a sociocultural anthropologist who specializes in issues of women, gender, sexuality.
Her book The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan delivers new insight into the nature of the comfort women issue.
She graduated from Sogang UniversityinSeoul and earned master's degree and then Ph.D from the University of Hawaii in 1987. She taught cultural anthropology at universities in Hawaii in 1990, Arizona from 1990-1991 and Texas from 1991–94. She joined San Francisco State University in 1994.[3][4]
Soh has said "there can be no denial of the tragic victimization of forcibly recruited women who suffered slavery-like conditions."[5] According to Soh, "it was Japan's colonialism that undoubtedly facilitated the large-scale victimization of tens of thousands of Korean women".[6]
She wrote a book titled The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan. In the book, she provocatively disputes the simplistic view that comfort women were victims of a war crime were solely the fault of Imperial Japan.[7][8] Instead, she argues that both the Japanese military and the Korean patriarchy are at fault. She asserts that because of the patriarchy that dominated Korea at the time, homes were unstable and thus young girls were more likely to leave, a situation which allowed comfort station owners to recruit them into brothels. Additionally, she argues South Korean nationalist politics and the international women's human rights movement have contributed to the incomplete view of the tragedy that still dominates today.[9]
These women have usually been labeled victims of a war crime, a simplistic view that makes it easy to pin blame on the policies of imperial Japan and therefore easier to consign the episode to a war-torn past.
Soh illustrates how the prevailing, simplistic view of the phenomenon overlooks the diversity of the women's experiences, the influence of historical factors and the role that Koreans played in facilitating the Japanese comfort system.
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