I am excited to be giving an invited talk at Stanford University on April 24, 2025 on one aspect of my research I am conducting for my current book on World War II.

• Date: Thu April 24th 2025, 4:30 - 6:00pm
• Event Sponsor: Center for East Asian Studies, History Department
• Location: Lathrop Library, Room 224, 518 Memorial Way, Stanford, CA 94305

Geisha girl nurse: Women of the Japanese empire on the front lines during World War II

Traditional understanding of Japanese women’s roles during WWII
places them on the homefront. This talk introduces my current research
which challenges this narrative by looking at women who as subjects of
the Japanese empire, fought and died in the Asia-Pacific War. They
fought with weapons like guns, grenades and explosive devices. They died
not as “casualties of war” but by being shot by Allied troops or struck
by enemy artillery in battle. That they fought and died was not
supposed to have happened. That they did and that fact seems surprising
shows us the limitations of postwar Japanese historiography.

This talk will discuss how and why certain kinds of women (civilians,
nurses, and comfort women) of the Japanese empire came to be on the
frontlines during the Second World War and the evidence that points to
some of them fighting in battle. However, their presence does not seem
so unlikely when we look at the opposing forces, which included female
guerilla resistance fighters in China and the Philippines who fought
against the Japanese. It will explore why it is so hard to imagine women
in the Asia-Pacific theater as combatants today. It previews just one
part of a larger book project funded by a NEH grant that focuses on the
role of colonial people in the Japanese military as well as how
Indigenous people living on the islands where war came in the Pacific
theater also got coerced into fighting, laboring, and dying for the
Japanese –part of a larger transimperial phenomenon– that the Allied
forces were involved in as well as the Japanese.



This talk is free and open to the public. Please RSVP here.