Sara Kang is a historian of gender and sexuality in modern Japan, Korea, and the Asia-Pacific. She holds a Ph.D. in History from Harvard University, and her research investigates histories of sexual exploitation and violence under overlapping Japanese and American imperial formations.
At Princeton, Kang is developing her first book project, “Operation Relax: Empires of Sex in Japan, South Korea, and the Asia-Pacific (1945-1995),” which examines the genealogy of military sex management across the Asia-Pacific during the two American Wars in Korea and Vietnam. The book argues that starting in 1950, the US military program known as Rest and Recuperation (R&R) built on the vast geographies and infrastructure of the exploitative Japanese “comfort” system to provide soldiers with sexual recreation across the Asia-Pacific. Using Japanese, South Korean, and U.S. military and diplomatic records, newspapers, journals, women’s testimonies, and local records relating to R&R in Asia, she hopes to expose the enduring colonial legacies of a global patriarchal system founded on the notion that soldiers require the racialized and gendered labor of “rest” and “comfort” to be healthy. Kang is also working on her second project on the imperial histories of hot spring excavations across the Asia-Pacific, the development of sexual bathing cultures, and their impact on diasporic women’s lives in Asian America. Through both academic and public-facing work, Kang seeks to empower transnational feminist bonds and discover ways history-writing can help reappraise ethnic divisions between women in the postcolonial world.
Kang earned her B.A. in History and Japanese from Williams College and an A.M. in Regional-Studies East Asia from Harvard University. She received language training at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama and the Inter-University Center for Korean Language Studies at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Program during her year affiliated with Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the Reischauer Institute and the Korea Institute at Harvard University. Her work has been published in The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Harper’s Bazaar, and Fukuoka Joseitachi no Sengo (Fukuoka Women’s History). She currently also serves as an organizer for the Modern Japan History Association’s New Books on Japan Series.
