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The Visual Representation of ‘Comfort Women’ and War Experience: in the Case of Iwami Furusawa

기타하라 메구미 1

1일본 오사카대학교

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ABSTRACT

Iwami Furusawa(b.1912-2000) is a Japanese male artist known for his many paintings of female nudes, who engaged in surrealist movement in 1930’s and went to China as a soldier. Furusawa’s art works from 1945 to mid-1950’s are characterized by their visual images of the front in China, comfort women, colonized land, Korean War, atomic bomb, Panpan,and the Japanese occupation by G.H.Q.. Especially I focus on the representation of comfort women in my paper. Furusawa expressed his view of history of human being and tried to recover his own ‘subjectivity’ as both a male and a Japanese on a large oil painting ‘Nagusamemodae’(1949)which is one of his masterpieces and depicts a comfort woman with a various Christian art code. The young voluptuous body of comfort woman on the picture represents his desire to control a female body, that is a colony, by a Japanese hetero-sexual man. On the other hand, how did Furusawa represent male bodies in those days? He described a few works with wounded soldiers or male prostitutes, and something was lacking in body or mentality with these male bodies. I analyzed how his experience of war and defeat in China and Korea were visualized in his art works, in the process of his reconstructing his identity after the war. Although art historians and critics have treated Furusawa as heresy as “an abnormal surrealist”, his visual representation of comfort women and male soldiers shows a common theme with postwar Japanese male intellectuals.

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