(Re)visiting the testimony exhibition part of Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace in Tokyo, I focus on one testimony in particular. This testimony was given by a survivor of the “comfort women” system, a state-sponsored regime of military sexual exploitation and core institution in the Empire of Japan’s expansion 1932–1945. The testimony was then withheld before the exhibition opened. I approach this “withheld testimony” as an invocation of rupture to the time, space, and positionalities informing the museum narrative. The paper interrogates the interplay of the survivor’s act of withholding her testimony, the curatorial decision to represent the absence that followed on the withholding, and the disruption to the museum narrative that the withholding prompts. By exploring the withheld testimony as a speaking silence, visible emptiness, and present absence, the paper offers a rethinking of model victimhood under the comfort women system.

In this article, I identify a conceptually distinct form of epistemic appropriation: the creation and proliferation of the epistemic fata morgana. An epistemic fata morgana is a hermeneutical resource that is hollowed out, stripped of its meaning and political power, and yet, posited as if it were still accessible. This resource is taken up by dominant knowers in a way that preserves only its perception, but not access to it. This process is illustrated by an examination of the resource “sexual harassment” within the university context. The epistemic fata morgana is an important addition to the field of epistemic injustice for it lends itself to highlighting the frustration that is felt by marginalized people, especially within institutional contexts.