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A Dialogue Between Law and HistoryWhy Can’t Oral Testimonies be Historical Facts? The Study of “Comfort Women” and Its Challenge to Modern Historiography

A Dialogue Between Law and History: Why Can’t Oral Testimonies be Historical Facts? The Study of... [Recent advances in memory studies and women’s history have challenged both historians and legal scholars to reconsider the definition and understanding of “facts”. The study of “comfort women” in Japan is a case in point, which bridges over the field of history and other neighboring disciplines; examining this case also helps transcend the West-China binary in scholarship. Following the development of modern European historiography, per the Rankean model, Japanese historians have prioritized written records, and government documents in particular, over oral sources. This tradition has caused them to devalue the worth of “comfort women’s testimonies as factual evidence, revealing the divergent trends of development in legal and historical studies from the late nineteenth century. But recent criticisms of this “written-source fetishism”, led by the feminist scholar Ueno Chizuko, have helped us to reconsider the notion of “facts” in historical research and also the need to renew the tie between historiography and jurisprudence, its former ally in epistemology and methodology.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

A Dialogue Between Law and HistoryWhy Can’t Oral Testimonies be Historical Facts? The Study of “Comfort Women” and Its Challenge to Modern Historiography

Editors: Zhang, Baosheng; Man, Thomas Yunlong; Lin, Jing

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References (24)

Publisher
Springer Singapore
Copyright
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021
ISBN
978-981-15-9684-1
Pages
99 –116
DOI
10.1007/978-981-15-9685-8_6
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[Recent advances in memory studies and women’s history have challenged both historians and legal scholars to reconsider the definition and understanding of “facts”. The study of “comfort women” in Japan is a case in point, which bridges over the field of history and other neighboring disciplines; examining this case also helps transcend the West-China binary in scholarship. Following the development of modern European historiography, per the Rankean model, Japanese historians have prioritized written records, and government documents in particular, over oral sources. This tradition has caused them to devalue the worth of “comfort women’s testimonies as factual evidence, revealing the divergent trends of development in legal and historical studies from the late nineteenth century. But recent criticisms of this “written-source fetishism”, led by the feminist scholar Ueno Chizuko, have helped us to reconsider the notion of “facts” in historical research and also the need to renew the tie between historiography and jurisprudence, its former ally in epistemology and methodology.]

Published: Dec 15, 2020

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