PhD candidate Aika Sato awarded a Wenner-Gren Dissertation Grant

Congratulations to PhD candidate Aika Sato, who has been awarded a Wenner-Gren DIssertation Fieldwork grant for her research titled: “Cities Built on Sexual Violence: Afterlives of Japanese Empire in Shanghai and Singapore.”

Eighty years after Japan’s WWII system of sexual slavery, many former ‘comfort stations’—where ‘comfort women’ were raped—have outlived witnesses and been folded into everyday life in Shanghai and Singapore. As both cities pursued post-imperial modernization, these buildings were remade into homes, shops, and clinics. In both, gendered violence was rendered publicly illegible: Shanghai, the first and most densely documented comfort-station city, preserved none of its 182 sites, while Singapore, Asia’s first to heritage-list one, did so only for its colonial architecture, without official signage acknowledging its violent history. Since the 1990s, comfort-women scholars have made this violence visible through region-wide redress, interpreting such absence as forgetting—a moral failure to reckon with the past. Yet the memory paradigm obscures how people inhabited these sites long before, and continue after, reckoning became imaginable. My 24-month ethnography in Shanghai and Singapore asks: How do residents, activists, bureaucrats, and developers build lives, attachments, and claims around material remains of violence in a post-witness era? Through interviews, participant observation, and archival research, I trace everyday negotiations of proximity to violent remains, showing how empire endures not as a past to be remembered or forgotten but as the ground where post-imperial urban life is continually remade.