New Ways of Solidarity with Korean Comfort Women: Comfort Women and What Remains (Palgrave Macmillan Studies on Human Rights in Asia) [1st ed. 2023] 981991793X, 9789819917938

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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN STUDIES ON HUMAN RIGHTS IN ASIA SERIES EDITOR: MIKYOUNG KIM

New Ways of Solidarity with Korean Comfort Women Comfort Women and What Remains Edited by Ñusta Carranza Ko

Palgrave Macmillan Studies on Human Rights in Asia

Series Editor Mikyoung Kim, Hiroshima, Japan

This Palgrave Macmillan book series addresses the rising interest in human rights topics in Asia. It focuses on the largely underexplored territory of Asian human rights topics highlighting its empirical manifestations, historical trajectory and theoretical implications. It also goes beyond the problematic dichotomy between “East” and “West” by engaging in rigorous case-specific as well as cross-regional comparisons within South–South context. China’s rise in world politics and its emergence as a massive donor, for example, has significant yet troubling implications. The member countries of ASEAN and Northeast Asia, on the other hand, would have different preoccupations and priorities calling for context-sensitive diagnosis and prognosis to promote human right causes. The series is multidisciplinary in nature and open to submissions focusing on international organization, ethics, criminology, development, freedom of expression, labour rights, environment, human/sex trafficking, democratization, governance studies, disability, reproductive rights, LGBT, post-/colonial as well as post-/authoritarian critiques and social movement, among others. The series publishes full-length monographs, and edited volumes.

Ñusta Carranza Ko Editor

New Ways of Solidarity with Korean Comfort Women Comfort Women and What Remains

Editor Ñusta Carranza Ko University of Baltimore Baltimore, MD, USA

ISSN 2752-4310 ISSN 2752-4329 (electronic) Palgrave Macmillan Studies on Human Rights in Asia ISBN 978-981-99-1793-8 ISBN 978-981-99-1794-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1794-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Bhong-Jin Kim This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Liberation: Painting by Korean artist Numi titled “Liberation,” represents the moment when a comfort woman tells her story and transcends the current space and time. The palms that are joined together express the moment of meditation, oneness of the heart, and liberation.

Acknowledgments

This volume grew out of a series of papers presented under the theme of “A New Outlook to the Atrocities: Comfort Women and What Remains” at the University of Baltimore’s Virtual Conference sponsored by the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2022-C-002) on May 20–21, 2022. It is dedicated to the memory of comfort women, many of whom are no longer with us. This book could not have come into being without the help of a number of people. In particular, I would like to thank the Academy of Korean Studies for their support in funding the conference which became the impetus for this project. At Palgrave, I would like to also express my most sincere appreciation to Mikyoung Kim, series editor, Vishal Daryanomel, the commissioning editor, and Saranya Siva, the project coordinator, whose sound advice and eagerness to assist made my task easier. In addition, I greatly appreciated the dedicated copyediting help from Catherine Znamirowski and research assistants Nafeesat RabiuAdebayo and Adwoa Hanson-Hall. Finally, the numerous challenges associated with steering such a project to publication were rendered manageable due to the assistance of Margarita Cardona and the support from my colleagues at the University of Baltimore. The contributors of this volume deserve deep appreciation for the work they have rendered. In addition, I greatly appreciated the input from our fellow virtual conference participants who provided invaluable insights and suggestions during the conference sessions in which some of these

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

chapters in this book were initially presented as works in progress. I am also thankful to Joshua Pilzer, and the anonymous reviewers whose ideas and arguments provided a good sounding board for the compilation of this book. Last but not least, a special note of thanks to my family (Fernando and Marie, Francisco and Hye Sun, Luiz and Maria-Angelica, Ayra and Eric, and Nathalia) whose encouragement, support, and understanding made this whole thing possible.

Contents

New Ways of Solidarity with Korean Comfort Women Ñusta Carranza Ko

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Victims, Stories, and Transformations The Power of Korean “Comfort Women’s” Testimonies Pyong Gap Min The Comfort Women Redress Movement in the United States: The Korean Diaspora Through the Activities of the Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues and Immigrants’ Dual Identity Boram Yi and Jaehee Kim Multiple Encounters and Reconstructed Identities: Halmoni Activist-Survivors of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery as Postcolonial Subjects Na-Young Lee

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Ways of Memory, Remembrance, and Healing New Genres, New Audiences: Retelling the Story of Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery Margaret D. Stetz

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CONTENTS

Korean “Comfort Women” Films Following the 2015 Korea–Japan Comfort Women Agreement: Historical Perceptions of Military Sexual Slavery Amid Strained Korea–Japan Relations Hyo-won Lee Keeping the Memory of Comfort Women Alive: How Social Media Can Be Used to Preserve the Memory of Comfort Women and Educate Future Generations Lauren Seward Kut as Political Disobedience, Healing, and Resilience Merose Hwang

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Global Actors, Legal Frames, and Contested Memories Memory and Politics: Discovery of North Korean “Comfort Stations” and the Politics of “Places of Memory” Hyesuk Kang On Comfort Women’s Way to the United Nations Jieyeon Kim

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Lessons from International Human Rights Norms and Korea’s Comfort Women-Girls Ñusta Carranza Ko

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Index

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Notes on Contributors

Ñusta Carranza Ko is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Baltimore. She is the author of Truth, Justice, Reparations in Peru, Uruguay, and South Korea: The Clash of Advocacy and Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), co-author of Theories of International Relations and the Game of Thrones (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019), and has also published several articles and chapters in memory and genocide studies. Her research focuses on transitional justice in Latin America and Asia, historical women’s rights violations in Korea, and Indigenous peoples’ rights in Peru. She is of Indigenous (Quechua-speaking peoples from the Northern Andes of Peru) and Korean descent. Merose Hwang is an Associate Professor at Hiram College, teaching in history, film studies, Asian Studies, and gender studies programs. She was a research fellow at the Institute for Korean Studies, Yonsei University and a two-time visiting scholar at the Center for Religion, Sogang University. She is a three-time recipient of the Korea Foundation grants and a threetime recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities grants. Her current interests are in Korean global history and decolonization pedagogy. Hyesuk Kang is the Academic Research Professor at the Korea Institute of Political Science at Seoul National University. She received her doctorate in political science from Seoul National University in 2017 with

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a thesis titled “The Politics of Legitimacy and Resilience: Adaptive State Nationalism in North Korea.” Her main research topics include North Korean politics, inter-Korean relations, nationalism, and gender issues. In particular, she is very interested in the formation process and influence of political ideologies such as socialism and nationalism and the role of the state in it. To date, she has written 14 journal articles and 5 book chapters and a number of research reports. Prior to her work at Seoul National University, she worked for three years as a research professor at Soongsil University’s Department of Political Science and Diplomacy. Currently, she serves as an advisor to major national organizations, including the Ministry of Unification of Korea and the Peaceful Unification Advisory Council of Korea. Jaehee Kim is a lecturer and visiting researcher at the Institute of Global Politics at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (HUFS) in Seoul, South Korea. She earned her doctorate in Political Science at HUFS with the dissertation, “The impact of the nuclear development strategy on the nuclear negotiations: Focusing on Iran and North Korea.” Her research centers on North Korean politics, diplomacy, and society. She co-authored “The study on the nuclear strategies of North Korea and Iran,” published in The Korean Journal of Area Studies. She is currently writing about the healthcare system for women and children in North Korea. Jieyeon Kim is a doctoral candidate in the Political Science Department at Purdue University. Jieyeon’s specific area of study is International Relations, and her primary research interests include United Nations Peacekeeping Operations (UNPKOs), Non-Traditional Security, Human security, and soft power. Currently, she is writing her dissertation on the participation of certain-sized countries in UNPKOs, using the Republic of Korea and Canada as case studies. Prior to studying at Purdue, Jieyeon earned a B.A. in Philosophy, Spanish language and literature, and a M.A. in Political Science and International Relations from Seoul, Korea University. Her Master’s thesis focused on the implementation of humanitarian intervention. Hyo-won Lee is a Seoul-based arts/entertainment journalist and Master’s candidate at the Graduate School of International Studies at Seoul National University. Former Korean bureau chief of Blouin Artinfo and former film and dance critic for The Korea Times, Lee was a

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correspondent for Monocle and Korean film market analyst for The Hollywood Reporter. She has also written for CNN , Billboard, and WWD. A member of the UNESCO International Dance Council, she is co-author of The Colors of Korean Buddhism (Seoul: Korea Buddhism Promotion Foundation, 2010; chapter on Buddhist zen dance). Na-Young Lee is Professor in the Department of Sociology at ChungAng University (Seoul, Korea) and Chair of the Board at the Korean Council for the Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan. After earning her Ph.D. from the Department of Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland, USA, she has dedicated herself to feminist activism and research across national boundaries. Her research interests include postcolonialism, gendered nationalism, sexuality, and trans/national women’s movements. She has published many books and articles in Korean, English, and Japanese, covering the subjects of Japanese military “comfort women,” U.S. military bases, prostitution, gendered space, women’s oral history, and migration. In addition, she has been deeply involved with issues of gender equality, human rights, and resolution of historical injustice in many government institutions and civil organizations. Her international publications include “ Un/forgettable Histories of US Camptown Prostitution in South Korea: Women’s Experiences of Sexual labor and Government Policies” (2017); “Korean Men’s Pornography Use, Their Interest in Extreme Pornography, and Dyadic Sexual Relationships” (co-author) (2015); “The Korean Women’s Movement of Japanese Military ‘Comfort Women’: Navigating between Nationalism and Feminism” (2014); “Negotiating the Boundaries of Nation, Christianity, and Gender: The Korean Women’s Movement against Military Prostitution” (2011); and “The Construction of Military Prostitution in South Korea during the U.S. Military Rule, 1945–1948” (2007). Pyong Gap Min is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He also serves as Director of the Research Center for Korean Community at Queens College. The areas of his research focus are immigration, ethnic identity, ethnic business, immigrants’ religious practices, and family/gender/women, with a special focus on Asian/Korean Americans. He is the single author of seven books. They include Caught in the Middle: Korean Communities in New York and Los Angeles (1996), the winner of two national book awards, and Preserving Ethnicity through

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Religion in America: Korean Protestants and Indian Hindus across Generations (2010), the winner of three national book awards. He published Korean Comfort Women: Military Brothels, Brutality, and the Redress Movement in 2021. His new book, Transnational Cultural Flow from Home: Korean Community in Greater New York, has been just published in October 2022. His 14 edited or co-edited books include Encyclopedia of Racism in the United States, 3 volumes (795 pages), which was selected as one of the 23 best books in the reference category published in 2005 by the Booklist Editors. He received the Distinguished Career Award from the International Migration Section in 2012 and the Contribution to the Field of Study Award from the Section on Asia and Asian America of the American Sociological Association. Lauren Seward currently works in the Cybersecurity field for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). She has worked for the DoD since September 2012, when she started her career as an intern. Ms. Seward studied Humanities at the University of Maryland Global Campus and completed her Master’s degree at the University of Baltimore, studying Global Affairs and Human Security, with a capstone research focus on preserving the memory of comfort women through social media. Margaret D. Stetz is the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of Humanities at the University of Delaware, where she is also associated with its Center for the Study and Prevention of Gender-Based Violence. With Bonnie B. C. Oh, she was co-organizer in 1996 at Georgetown University of the first international academic conference on “comfort women” issues. They subsequently co-edited the first volume of scholarly essays on the topic, Legacies of the Comfort Women of WWII (2001). Since then, she has held a Korea Foundation fellowship, published an additional ten essays on various aspects of military sexual slavery, and lectured on the subject at universities in Japan, Korea, Spain, the United Kingdom, and around the United States. Boram Yi is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Baltimore, a state university in Baltimore. Maryland, USA. She earned her doctorate at the University of Georgia. Her research centers on the U.S.–East Asian relationship and East Asian culture. She is the author of “Prelude to conflict, 1910–1948,” which explains the context of the coming of the Korean War, a chapter in The Ashgate Research Companion

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to the Korean War. She co-authored “‘An alliance forged in blood’: The American occupation of Korea, the Korean war, and the U.S.- South Korean alliance, an examination of the U.S.-Korean relationship prior to the Korean war,” published in the Journal of Strategic Studies. Her forthcoming book, The Korean comfort woman issue and the debate over the “past” in East Asia, examines the implication of the debate over the atrocities and memories of World War II in the tri-party alliance of South Korea, Japan, and the United States. She is currently completing a book manuscript on making the first Status of Forces Agreement between the United States and South Korea.

List of Figures

Multiple Encounters and Reconstructed Identities: Halmoni Activist-Survivors of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery as Postcolonial Subjects Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Yun Chung-ok, Kim Shin-sil, and Kim Hye-won at the investigation trip in Okinawa, Japan (Source Lee Na-Young, provided by Kim Hye-won) The sign-unveiling ceremony of the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan. On the far left is Yun Chung-ok, and the person next to her is Lee Hyo-jae (Source War and Women’s Human Rights Museum)

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Keeping the Memory of Comfort Women Alive: How Social Media Can Be Used to Preserve the Memory of Comfort Women and Educate Future Generations Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Lilia Pilipina Facebook Group Page (Note Lila Pilipina Facebook Group Page [December 6, 2021] [Facebook Post]. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/lilapilip ina1992) TikTok Site for @StellaMoon (Note @Stella Moon. Tsukada.Studios. [August 12, 2020] [TikTok]. Retrieved from https://www.tiktok.com/@tsukada.studios)

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LIST OF FIGURES

Memory and Politics: Discovery of North Korean “Comfort Stations” and the Politics of “Places of Memory” Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Victims’ professions prior to the comfort station (Note Reprinted from “A Study on the Actual Condition and Characteristics of Military Comfort Women in North Korea” [p. 73], by Dang. Kim, 2002, Women and Peace, 1[1]) Comfort station distribution chart (provided by WAM) (Note Retreived from Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace, n.d., https://wam-peace.org/ianjo/area/areakp/)

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List of Tables

The Power of Korean “Comfort Women’s” Testimonies Table 1 Table 2

Ages at which KCW were mobilized to “comfort stations” Methods of KCW’s Mobilization to JMB

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Memory and Politics: Discovery of North Korean “Comfort Stations” and the Politics of “Places of Memory” Table 1

Age of comfort women victims living in North Korea at the time of the arrest

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On Comfort Women’s Way to the United Nations Table 1

The Path of comfort women Issue and the United Nations

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New Ways of Solidarity with Korean Comfort Women Ñusta Carranza Ko

On May 3, 2022, newspapers across South Korea reported on the passing of Kim Yang-Ju, one of the few remaining Korean victims of sexual enslavement comfort women; human trafficking; Korean comfort women; sexual proletarianization; sexual slavery1 and slave-like practices

1 To set the tone for the many chapters to come, this introduction is consciously using the word “enslavement” instead of “slavery” to describe the situation of Korean comfort women. This is purposeful as comfort women were conditioned and forced to perform acts or services against their will under the threat of death and physical harm. Thus, they were conditioned and victimized by the institution of sexual slavery imposed upon them by Japan’s Imperial Army. These ideas more closely align the identity and situation of comfort women with the term of “enslavement.” For more information on the debates surrounding the usage of such terminology, which is often referred to as “reparative semantics,” please see Reinhart (2022).

Ñ. Carranza Ko (B) School of Public and International Affairs, University of Baltimore, Baltimore, Maryland, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 Ñ. Carranza Ko (ed.), New Ways of Solidarity with Korean Comfort Women, Palgrave Macmillan Studies on Human Rights in Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1794-5_1

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committed by the Japanese military during the Asia–Pacific War World War II (1931–1945) (Young, 2022). Kim was born in 1924. During the Japanese occupation period in Korea (1910–1945), she was deceivingly recruited for a job at 17 years old and taken to China, where she was coerced into sexual enslavement. Kim and other women and girls were forced to work in what were labeled as “comfort stations” or “military brothels” located near battlefields, where they were systematically raped by Japanese soldiers. The term “systematization” accurately describes the crimes committed against women working in comfort stations, as they were “duped, abducted or coerced into sexual slavery” (Hicks, 1997, pp. 18–19). The women and girls subjected to sexual enslavement were referred to in Japanese as ianfu or “comfort women.”2 Scholars estimate that 50,000–200,000 women and girls were forcibly mobilized into comfort stations to “comfort” Japanese soldiers. Many of these women died of “physical abuse, malnutrition, illness (including sexually transmitted diseases), bombings or other tragic circumstances” during the war (Min et al., 2020, p. 1). Of those who survived, some women committed suicide. Other Korean women returned home after Korea gained independence from Japan on August 15, 1945. Kim was one of the women who traveled back to her home country. However, some Korean comfort women, such as Bae Bong-Gi, were also deceptively recruited into sexual enslavement by Japan’s Imperial Army and forced to work in a comfort station in Japan. Bae chose not to return to Korea due to the “overwhelming shame” she felt about her experiences (Gil, 2015). For Ha Sang-Sook, a Korean comfort woman stationed in China, this feeling of shame influenced her decision to remain in the country where she had been forcibly relocated rather than return to Korea (Jim, 2016). The shame was linked to these women’s fear of being ostracized from society if they revealed the violence they suffered (Pilzer, 2012, p. 8). These sentiments were shared by many Korean survivors who managed to return to Korea.

2 On the debate about the terminology of “comfort women,” please see Tai’s (2020) book, which uses the term “comfort women” with the understanding that it refers to women and girls who were enslaved by Japan’s Imperial Army during the Asia–Pacific War period. For readability purposes, the quotation marks will be removed from this point forward.

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On June 11, 1993, the South Korean government passed Act 45653 — more commonly referred to as the Comfort Women Victims Act— allowing Korean comfort women to register as having worked in Japanese military-run comfort stations. Originally, there were 240 victims registered by the South Korean government. Registered victims are eligible to receive monthly financial assistance for the “stabilization of livelihood, nursing, and medical expenses” and monetary support for funeral expenses (Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, 2014, 2022). These are coordinated with memory initiatives launched by the government, which include a commemorative date—August 14—that pays respect to comfort women; comfort women-related archives; an institute that oversees the comfort women case; and support for memorials, sites of memory, art pieces of memory, and museums that honor victims and survivors of these crimes (Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, 2014, 2022). With Kim Yang-Ju’s death, only 11 victims of the Japanese comfort station atrocity remain living in Korea.4 This book does not use the term “atrocities” in the same vein of thought as “mass atrocities,” which are associated with genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Mass atrocities involve systematic and widespread violence resulting in the deaths of a significant or substantial population (Berlin, 2016; Waller, 2016, pp. 28–76). The quantitative measure of “mass” associated with comfort women—however defined—is likely to raise objections. Specifically, it can lead to a heated debate about comparative hierarchies of what is considered “mass” suffering and what is not. In anticipation of such a response, this book uses the term “atrocity” with no quantifier to refer to the war crimes committed by Japan’s Imperial Army, namely related to the establishment and operations at comfort stations. The book focuses on the meaning and weight of the word “atrocity.” Such an approach is a more productive way to think about the gravity of the violence victims 3 This law has been amended multiple times. Currently, Law 4565 is listed as an addendum to Law 17440, which further expands the protection and reparations for victims and survivors of Japanese military comfort stations. 4 Many other comfort women of different ethnic origins have been outspoken about

the violations they have suffered. For instance, according to the Research Center for Comfort Women at Shanghai Normal University, there are 14 living comfort women in China. In the case of the Philippines, only a few survivors remain alive, where thousands came forward to speak about their abuses by Japan’s Imperial Army in the early 1990s. For more information, see Cabato (2019) and WARMAP (2022).

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endured, its impact on surviving comfort women, and the significance this crime represents for victims and affected societies. Korean survivors of comfort stations and activists who have formed part of the transnational redress movement continue to demand the Japanese government acknowledge the human rights violations committed against them. They have also urged the South Korean and Japanese governments to include victims in conversations about formal apologies and reparations. Victims have largely maintained this stance in response to the 2015 agreement reached between South Korea and Japan. The agreement includes an official acknowledgment of Japan’s damage to the “honour and dignity of large numbers of women,” an apology, and a “one-time” financial contribution for reparations purposes (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, 2015). In the negotiations leading up to the agreement, both governments failed to consult victim groups and purposefully overlooked the victims’ demands. In the 2015 agreement between the two states, the meaning of “apology” was established as a one-time, nonrecurring matter that contradicted the global practices of states that have previously issued acknowledgments and apologies for their grave human rights crimes. For instance, the Canadian government issued a “wave” of state apologies to Indigenous peoples over the forced removal of children and genocide of Indigenous peoples (Lightfoot, 2015). Similar responses followed from the United States government in 1993 over the “illegal overthrow of Hawaiian sovereignty in 1893” (Lightfoot, 2015, p. 15). Comparatively to these global practices of apologies, the 2015 agreement “fell short of meeting the demands of the survivors” (United Nations News, 2016). As noted by political scientist Jennifer Lind (2010), the “most apologetic remembrance is that which thoroughly addresses both admission and remorse” (p. 16). The admission involves a form of truth-telling where the human rights crime, for instance, is discussed in detail, the facts are laid out, and the agencies that committed the acts are clearly delineated. Remorse is “conveyed through the tone, scale, or symbolism of the gesture” (Lind, 2010, p. 16). From these standards, the 2015 agreement, which quantified an apology as a “one-time” matter, failed to admit past misdeeds from the Japanese government and fell short of recognizing victims’ demands. In other words, it was not a comprehensive form of apology.

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The problematic 2015 agreement, however, came to a legislative halt in South Korea with the government of President Moon Jae-In (2017– 2022). On November 21, 2018, the Korean Ministry of Gender Equality and Family announced that it had initiated the legislative process for the dissolution of the Reconciliation and Healing Foundation, which was established as part of the 2015 agreement between South Korea and Japan. As scholars note, this marked the “end” to the functions of the 2015 agreement (Cho, 2009). Additionally, President Moon, on various occasions, made public declarations against the 2015 agreement, noting the lack of involvement of victims in the conversations that led to the two countries’ decisions (Kim, 2017). Despite these developments, however, no new or alternative bilateral policy that includes victims’ groups in dialogue has been negotiated as of this writing. Korean comfort women, along with their domestic and international advocacy counterparts, have persistently been seeking some form of retributive, reparative, and restorative resolution. The redress movement’s history can be traced back to the work of Professor Yun Jung-Ok, who was the first woman to conduct research on comfort women; publish a story in 1981 about Bae Bong-Gi, a Korean comfort woman who lived in Okinawa, Japan; and bring in the advocacy interests of the Korean Church Women United (KCWU), Korean Women’s Associations United (KWAU), and other Korean women’s rights organizations in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Min, 2021, pp. 52–62). The impetus for the transnational redress movement, thus, began with these early works by Professor Yun, which was then followed by the public testimony of Korean comfort woman Kim Hak-Sun on August 14, 1991. For years, the transnational redress campaign for Korean comfort women has been actively involved in targeting Japan to revise its commitments to respecting human rights norms and resolve the comfort women issue with proper truth-seeking and symbolic (i.e., apologies), medical, and financial reparations. The achievements have, at times, resulted in meaningful symbolic reparations initiatives outside of Korea. For instance, as sociologist Pyong Gap Min (2021) notes, resolutions were passed by state and city legislatures in the United States which then funded the installation of memorials dedicated to comfort women. The building of such memorials, which involves a difficult process of negotiating with local residents and convincing people of the importance and meaning of the historical past, is a form of symbolic reparations for victims and survivors (Min, 2021, pp. 242–243). However, this has not always been

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the case. Transnational advocacy movements that push for the state to respect human rights norms5 have, at times, inadvertently resulted in provoking “regressive changes in normative practices” from the state (Kim, 2022, pp. 1–2). For instance, the Japanese government “came to view the comfort women issue as an international embarrassment” and has gone in “exactly the opposite direction than what redress activists have intended,” regressing in its behavior on policies concerning comfort women (Kim, 2022, pp. 1–2). This is, in part, due to the “countermobilization” against transnational advocacy that occurs precisely when transnational advocacy movements are most successful (Kim, 2022, pp. 2– 3). The regressive changes have also been evident in recent academic scholarship that has mischaracterized the experiences of comfort women. These include arguments based on game theory that rationalize comfort stations as being based on a contract-based system, meaning women and girls were made aware of and agreed to the nature of the “work” in comfort stations and, in many cases, took advantage of the contracts to receive advanced payments (Ramseyer, 2020). Other works question the veracity of Korean comfort women’s stories, noting how solidarity, bond, and sympathy had formed between Korean comfort women and Japanese soldiers (Park, 2013). These works commonly contested the legal responsibility of the Japanese government (Park, 2013; Ramseyer, 2022). While such studies have been largely refuted by mainstream academic scholarship6 and disavowed by transnational advocacy movements on comfort women, their continued manifestation serves as an indicator of the deepening efforts toward the erasure of memory of Korean comfort women.

Objective Against this backdrop of advocacy efforts, policy changes, and norm regressions, New Ways of Solidarity with Korean Comfort Women provides 5 In the case of comfort women, transnational advocacy movements tend to focus on pressuring the government of Japan to recognize historic human rights violations and the violation of the norm of criminal accountability, which holds that any individual who commits atrocity crimes should be prosecuted. 6 For a complete list of mainstream scholarship that rebukes historical revisionism, please see https://apjjf.org/2021/5/ToC.html.

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a space for victims’ testimonies and memories, engages with their experiences, reflects upon the redress movement, and evaluates policies related to Korean comfort women as victims and survivors from the international, domestic, and bilateral realms. The works included in this book are based on a conference supported by the Academy of Korean Studies, which encouraged scholars to examine the case of Korean comfort women from diverse and interdisciplinary angles in an effort to form new ways of envisioning academic solidarity with Korean comfort women. Many of the papers presented at the conference are included here as well as contributions from junior scholars who have been conducting work on this thematic subject area. Collectively, this edited volume aims to further diversify the scholarship on comfort women, contribute to the existing literature on social movements related to comfort women and other related studies, and, in doing so, challenge the politicization of comfort women. With this objective, the book presents scholarship from interdisciplinary fields that revisit the meaning of victims’ testimonies, memories, and remembrance, social movement efforts on comfort women, and the related role of government, governance, and society by reflecting on the truths about the historical past. In so doing, it initiates new conversations among political scientists, sociologists, historians, and cultural and literary scholars. What do victims’ testimonies reveal about new ways of imagining historical memory of Korean comfort women? How are memories of comfort women and their experiences remembered in social movements, literature, and cultural practices? Where is the place of comfort women’s experiences in politics, diplomacy, and global affairs? These are some of the questions that guide the contributions to this edited volume, which seek to establish new ways of solidarity with comfort women. A glimpse into these questions helps answer and understand how and why the issue of Korean comfort women is subject to political, social, and cultural debate, despite existing evidence. The answer provided by sociology, memory studies, literary studies, women and gender studies, history, and political science research suggests that the comfort women issue is a delicate subject matter, one that has been contested due to the symbolism it carries for each participating state. In other words, it is a case that necessitates individuals and societies to reflect upon the ideological issues that are embedded in their states’ histories and how comfort women’s truth and memory are intertwined with trauma about the historical past for the victim and the involved states. Nevertheless, one must not lose sight of two important factors: (1) the individual experiences of

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the women and girls who were victimized in comfort stations should be centralized and (2) the victim must remain central to the remembrance of the past history. This edited volume takes a significant step forward for scholarly conversation and knowledge by revisiting and reconsidering the Korean comfort women case. Notably, it emphasizes the importance of victims’ testimonies and experiences in shaping history, memory, cultural practices, and other related future outlooks of state policies.

Comfort Women Voices In thinking about building new ways of solidarity with comfort women, this book surveys recent publications about advocacy related to comfort women, with an emphasis on Korean comfort women issues. This is purposeful. The edited volume, while recognizing the importance of other comfort women’s experiences, is largely focused on advocacy, memory construction, testimonies, and politics related to Korean comfort women. As such, the book engages more with literature involving a specific type of victimhood that emerged from the Asia–Pacific War period: the Korean comfort women, who made up roughly 80 to 90 percent of all comfort women. Additionally, the edited volume considers the recent academic pushbacks against comfort women (i.e., Park [2013] and Ramseyer [2020]) and the norm regression induced by the 2015 agreement reached between South Korea and Japan that neglected to hear the victims’ demands. Taking this timeline into account, this book examines the latest scholarship on comfort women, focusing its review of books and edited volumes that have been published.7 The individual chapters of this book provide a more thorough review of the literature related to each subject matter within—for instance—the context of memory studies, literature, cultural practices, and international affairs. Most recent English-language scholarship on Korean comfort women has attempted to provide diverse disciplinary perspectives in edited collections examining the issue of comfort women, namely Korean comfort women. Min et al.’s (2020) edited volume focuses on the transnational

7 The discussion about the literature is primarily focused on published books and edited volumes, with the aim to position this edited volume within the scholarship. However, that is not to dismiss the plethora of academic journal articles that have been published on advocacy, redress, and in response to historical revisionism. The individual chapters of this book provide more in-depth subject-specific reviews of the literature.

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redress movement for victims of Japan’s sexual enslavement. Based on an international conference on the redress movement, the book is the first to examine the “responses to the redress movement for the victims of Japanese military sexual slavery systematically” (Min et al., 2020, p. 21). The chapters are grouped thematically and geographically. The first chapters focus on the redress movement, related activism of citizens and nongovernmental organizations, and government responses in South Korea, Japan, and the United States. Sociologists Min et al. (2020) pay special attention to the redress movement for victims of “Japan’s military sexual slavery” involving Japanese peoples. They document how numerous Japanese citizens and organizations have been at odds with the official Japanese government’s policy of refusing to acknowledge and take responsibility for the atrocities. Moreover, Japanese citizens have helped support Korean advocacy organizations in their redress activities. Min et al. (2020) provide the example of Japanese citizens attending weekly protests against Japanese military sexual enslavement, which have taken place every Wednesday since January 8, 1992, in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul. In addition to their participation in protests, ordinary Japanese citizens have frequented the House of Sharing—where several Korean comfort women reside—and financially contributed to memorialization initiatives, such as building a historical museum honoring victims from the comfort system (Min, 2020). Furthermore, as Mina Watanabe (2020), the SecretaryGeneral of Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace, writes, Japanese citizens and scholars have also undertaken “fact-finding research, while lawyers supported victims filing lawsuits against the Japanese government” (p. 95). The efforts did not stop at the domestic level. Min et al. (2020) explain how Japanese citizens and scholars have attempted to make the Japanese government accountable under international human rights law by cooperating with the United Nations (UN) Commission on Human Rights, submitting reports, and providing information. As such, Min et al. (2020) emphasize Japanese citizens’ extensive efforts to contribute to the redress movement on the comfort women issue. Other chapters from Min et al.’s (2020) book document diverse ways of examining the comfort women case with newly discovered archives in China and thinking further about the notion of “legacies of comfort women” (Oh, 2020). On legacies, the edited volume offers unique and important insights into the comfort women case. Bonnie B.C. Oh (2020),

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a Korean studies scholar, explains how comfort women issues have influenced and facilitated the “advancement of emerging and recently rising non-traditional academic fields in American higher education, such as women’s studies, oral history, and interdisciplinary studies” (p. 205). Comfort women themselves are also influenced by feminist scholarship. As Oh (2020) notes, Korean comfort woman Kim Hak-Sun was able to break her silence in 1991 as a result of the support she received from the Korean Church Women United, the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, and—most importantly— Professor Yun Jung-Ok. As a feminist scholar, Professor Yun had begun documenting and recording the narratives of “comfort women experiences in the 1980s” (Oh, 2020, p. 206). With her practices of the feminist method of care, nurture, and sharing, Professor Yun endowed a “value to comfort women who had hitherto been considered without value” (Oh, 2020, p. 207). This role of feminist scholars and women-centered organizations is often overlooked in scholarship. Specifically, the literature has yet to analyze how these feminist scholars and organizations provide a support system for Korean comfort women, allowing them to come forward with their traumatic stories of hardship. Along with Oh’s (2020) study, women’s studies scholar Margaret D. Stetz’s (2020) chapter discusses the importance of acknowledging the experience of girls as victims of the comfort women system. Stetz (2020) explains that the targeting of underage girls was a deliberate strategy that ensured a “greater power differential between the girl captives and the men who, on a daily basis, raped them” (Stetz, 2020, p. 216). Because the victims were children—in this case, girls—they were “less resourceful” and thus “less likely to plan or survive escapes” (Stetz, 2020, p. 217). Discussing various films on the comfort system, Stetz (2020) notes a shift toward “greater inclusion of the words ‘girls and girl children in discussions of the Japanese comfort system’” and encourages greater acknowledgment of this shift when teaching and writing about this war crime (p. 227). Psychologist Angella Son (2020) also emphasizes the victimhood of girls and coins the term “comfort girls-women to replace the widely used term comfort women” (p. 295). The change in terminology is noteworthy, as it recognizes girls as victims of the comfort system. The “girl-children” victim identity, Son (2020) argues, may be what has been influencing Japan’s longstanding denial of the state’s war crimes. In other words, there may be a “deep sense of shame associated

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with such an atrocity” involving girls from the Japanese government (Son, 2020, p. 295). Min et al.’s (2020) collection of chapters presents a panoramic view of the historical and current comfort women issues from diverse disciplinary angles, including the transnational redress movement. Comparatively, Rumiko et al.’s (2018) edited volume explores the dialogues and discussions that have been emerging within Japan about comfort women. It brings in “cutting-edge research” by Japanese and resident zainichi 8 Korean scholars whose views counter the rise of neo-nationalist rhetoric in Japan. These views on historical revisionism are channeled by Japanese government officials, politicians, and opinion leaders alike who have “denied the paramount role of the Japanese military” in the comfort women system (Rumiko et al., 2018, p. 1). Rumiko et al.’s (2018) contributing chapters provide an overview of how the rise of historical revisionism in Japan involved comfort women. Specifically, Rumiko et al. (2018) aim to “identify and analyze the contentious issues surrounding comfort women today” (p. 1) and ponder upon possible settlement frameworks that may be acceptable for victims. Yoshifumi Tawara’s (2018) chapter explores the rise of revisionism and how comfort women histories are displayed in textbooks. The author documents how the inclusion of Japan’s wartime system of “sexual slavery” in textbooks faced a difficult uphill battle in the early 1990s, and, once included, this content faced fierce reaction by conservatives and members of the far right who challenged this historical truth. Publishers were pressured to change the content of junior high history textbooks, specifically the accounts of Japan’s “forced military prostitution” (Tawara, 2018, p. 157). Tawara (2018) notes how future education reforms may determine and influence the textbook content, moving Japan further into a state-controlled textbook system. Such developments, Tawara (2018) concludes, may obstruct access to the truth for children and deny them the “ability to make their own critical judgments about the world” (p. 162). On a related point about the memory and historical truth of comfort women, human rights activist Chinja Yang’s (2018) chapter engages in a

8 Zainichi is a Japanese term that means “residing in Japan” and has been used synonymously to refer to the ethnic Korean population residing in Japan. For more information about zainichi history, see Lie (2009).

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candid discussion about what terms and conditions of settlement victimized women would be willing to consider. Yang (2018) recounts the story of Song Sin-do, a zainichi Korean resident of Japan who filed a court case against the Japanese government in 1993 demanding an “apology and compensation for the appalling treatment she endured” as a comfort woman (p. 181). Yang (2018) worked with Song and assisted her in the lawsuit, which was dismissed by the Tokyo District Court in 1999, then appealed by Song, to only then be rejected by Japan’s Supreme Court in 2000. During this process of securing redress for Song’s violated human rights and personal dignity, Yang (2018) describes how she was able to identify a list of demands that, while not applicable to all comfort women, perhaps could be considered by some victims as an acceptable settlement for the violence they suffered. She labels them as a “realistic proposal” or a “proposal that the survivors can accept” (Yang, 2018, p. 191). It includes the Japanese government’s acknowledgment of the facts; an official apology to each “surviving victim, regardless of nationality or place of birth”; and official compensation in the form of monetary reparations and symbolic reparations to help restore the “honor” and “dignity” of victims (Yang, 2018, p. 192). This victim-centric vision of justice is important to consider, as any form of apology or beginning of reconciliation processes necessitates the involvement of survivors whose lives have been directly impacted by human rights violations. Alongside these edited volumes, other recently published edited collections on comfort women focus more on providing a space for victims to share their testimonies and memories about their past experiences. Psychologist Angella Son’s translation of the Research Team of the War and Women’s Human Rights Center’s (2020) edited volume includes the oral stories of the surviving victims of the Japanese military comfort girls-women. The stories of the victims are not presented in the form of “serious testimonies.” Instead, the “spoken words were brought up to the level of story or narrative to emphasize the subjective experiences they carry” (Research Team of the War and Women’s Human Rights Center, 2020, pp. 1–3). To achieve this, the interviewers carried out their work using the motto “listening rather than questioning” (Park, 2020, p. 293). The primary reason for this approach was to allow victims to express themselves openly and not be confined to a formal discourse or framing that demanded the preciseness of facts. True to these objectives, the edited book includes a total of 12 victims’ stories, each forming a chapter and one chapter that documents failed interviews.

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The chapter on failed interviews explains how the research team went about lending an ear to victims’ memories, paying attention to their gestures, and giving the comfort girl-woman the opportunity to have her moments of silence and reflection respected. It tells the story of one victim, by the name of Choi Yi-Seon, who did not want to provide her testimony, as it was a “horrible experience,” and she did not want to redescribe “how many soldiers came in, how they took off their pants, and how many they had sex” (Park, 2020, p. 293). Choi is described as being nervous, anxious, and worried that, in speaking her truth, she would reveal an experience that deviated from what has been commonly understood as the events that occurred in comfort stations. Other women were more willing to provide their stories to the research team. However, as the chapter describes, they, too, had strong reactions against having their stories publicized. For comfort girl-woman Kim Dduk-Bbal, the comfort station experiences had been secrets she kept for a long time. With the testimony going public, Kim was afraid she would no longer be accepted by her family if the secret of “having been a comfort girlwoman came out into the open” (Park, 2020, p. 300). Kim was also worried about Korean society’s backlash against her story and said she was “embarrassed because she had come in contact with a lot of men” (Park, 2020, p. 300). Respecting the reservations that Kim Dduk-Bbal and Choi Yi-Seon manifested, their stories were ultimately not included in the edited book. Nonetheless, the research team provided a chapter that documents the difficulties they experienced during the interviews and with obtaining testimonies. These details provide important insight into the ongoing trauma of these victims and South Korean society’s inadequate response and inability to provide a safe space for them to come forward. The Commission on Verification and Support for the Victims of Forced Mobilization under Japanese Colonialism in Korea’s (2014) edited volume also presents a collection of oral narratives from victims. This book follows a more standardized interview approach with a set of questions and corresponding answers from victims. The Commission’s (2014) book first discusses how the research team conducted the interviews and obtained participants’ consent. Then, it provides a brief historical background and lists and defines a set of terms that were commonly used by the survivors. Finally, the book shifts to presenting the stories of 12 individual victims whose names and personal information have been anonymized. The oral histories share some similarities to

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those listed in The Research Team of the War and Women’s Human Rights Center’s (2020) book, with women preferring not to tell their family members about their experiences, lamenting about the past, and commenting on how “everything was so pitiful” in those days (The Commission on Verification and Support for the Victims of Forced Mobilization under Japanese Colonialism in Korea, 2014, p. 80). Although the Commission (2014) presents oral narratives that help to create a holistic picture of the state of affairs concerning victims (i.e., explaining the current status of processing victims as Japanese military comfort women), the book does not dedicate much attention to analyzing the content of the stories. It reads more like a report from a government commission. Aside from the edited volumes from Min et al. (2020), Rumiko et al. (2018), The Research Team of the War and Women’s Human Rights Center (2020), and The Commission on Verification and Support for the Victim of Forced Mobilization under Japanese Colonialism in Korea (2014), most scholarship on comfort women-related matters published in the past two decades has been in the form of books and academic journal articles. These include Anthropologist Eika Tai’s (2020) book that presents the narratives of advocacy in Japan. She describes 11 Japanese women activists’ narratives in the book, noting the diversity and multiplicity she encountered in her research. The narratives from Japanese activists are characterized by “critical historical consciousness; the intersectionality of gender, class and ethnicity; transnational solidarity; mutual transformation; and the centrality of survivors” (Tai, 2020, pp. xvi–xxii). The activists are all aware of the history of “Japan’s aggression and colonial control,” in what Tai describes as a form of “kagaisha ishiki (perpetrator consciousness)” (Tai, 2020, p. 56). At the core of their discussion and involvement in redress advocacy is the recognition of the activists themselves as citizens of the perpetrator state. In part, due to this historical consciousness, these activists remain committed to informing the public of the history of comfort women and have been persistent in seeking a legal resolution, despite the threats and attacks they have faced. Tai (2020) unpacks each of these activists’ experiences in detail, noting how, in certain activists’ cases, they have been able to form a transnational historic view of Japan’s historic crimes due to their liberal school education, which helped them understand that Japan cannot be considered in “isolation from the rest of Asia” (Tai, 2020, p. 59). Sachiyo Tsukamoto’s (2022) book also examines the developments within Japan by focusing on the stories of Japanese “comfort women.”

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The author situates the book within the context of the politics of history, noting the contestations between the memory of comfort women as “victims of the Japanese military sexual enslavement” and the “countermemory” that has emerged (Tsukamoto, 2022, p. 1). Pushing back against such debates, Tsukamoto (2022) focuses on the victimhood of Japanese comfort women, the trauma that they have and are enduring, and why the interplay between “trauma and memory” is highly critical to an “understanding of survivor’s testimonies” (Tsukamoto, 2022, p. 8). As the author describes, traumatic events are “not only real, but are also ongoing for the survivors, resulting in interference with and disruption of memory,” which even influence the “identity construction” of the victims (Tsukamoto, 2022, p. 13). The victims’ stories and struggles are juxtaposed with the state’s efforts toward collective memory construction that emerged in the post-war period, which attempted to “internalize the perpetrator’s shame and guilt into the victim’s inner self by shaming her and silencing her voice” (Tsukamoto, 2022, p. 13). This conspiracy of silence is explored further with each comfort woman’s story throughout the book. Turning the focus from Japan to Korea, anthropologist Sarah Soh’s (2008) book casts a “new cultural-historical light on structural violence in patriarchal societies” and examines the case of Korean comfort women as one that embodies “gendered structural violence in the context of patriarchal colonial capitalism” (p. xii). According to Soh (2008), not all comfort women share the same story of how they came to endure sexual enslavement in Japanese military stations. While some Korean survivors were “kidnapped, others revealed that they were ‘sold’ to human traffickers by their indigent parents,” or they “chose to run away from home in order to escape domestic violence and maltreatment” (Soh, 2008, p. 4). These contrasting experiences are noted by Soh (2008), who then explains how the period of Japanese colonization coincided with capitalist development and modernization and influenced the rise of women’s modern aspirations. A major point of concern with Soh’s (2008) book is her intersection of women’s modern development with the memory of comfort women. By engaging in a lengthy discussion about Korean women’s aspirations for new roles in society, legalized prostitution industry, and wage work opportunities in Korea, the book insinuates that perhaps not all comfort women’s stories of being forced into sexual enslavement are true. In fact, Soh (2008) calls the comfort women issue “sensationalized,” with all

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comfort women being portrayed by the media as “sex slaves” and forcibly recruited (Soh, 2008, p. 22). Despite the nuances that Soh (2008) tries to raise (i.e., not all women’s experiences working in comfort stations were the same), it is important to note that the acts carried out in comfort stations from the standpoint of international human rights law constituted a war crime. Given the controversial views that Soh (2008) has raised and Ramseyer’s (2020) references to her book—which he uses to support his controversial mischaracterization of comfort women’s experiences—her work has come under criticism by Korean studies scholars (Stetz, 2010; Qiu et al., 2014; Min et al., 2020; Min, 2021). Sociologist Pyong Gap Min’s (2021) solo-authored book provides the most complete and objective account of Korean comfort women’s experiences and current efforts to seek redress for survivors. Using 103 testimonies from Korean comfort women, Min (2021) focuses on analyzing the extent to which the women experienced sexual enslavement in their “mobilization and treatment at ‘comfort stations’” (p. 6). The book also comprehensively examines the transnational redress movement that has gained traction primarily in South Korea, Japan, and the United States, involved international social movements in the form of people’s court (i.e., the Women’s International War Crime Tribunal on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery in 2000), and utilized intergovernmental organizations’ platforms where Korean comfort women have testified about their experiences. According to Min (2021), his analysis does not rely on presenting a new fact that has emerged about comfort women’s experiences or the redress movement. Instead, the objective of his book is to synthesize existing facts and testimonies, rebuke publications that are misinformed, and paint a controversial picture of the historic case. As such, the chapters of his book focus on providing the facts on the gendered spectrum of society during the Japanese colonial occupation of Korea; the context of the occupation period; the reason comfort stations were established; the profile of the Korean women taken to these stations and the process of them being forcibly mobilized; the nonexistence of payments and unowned debts of comfort women; the situation in comfort stations involving exploitation, violence, and threats; the abandonment of Korean comfort women post-Japan’s surrender; and the reasons the redress movement began in Korea and spread to Japan and the United States. Min’s (2021) book is a critical text that covers the historical, sociological, gender-based, and political facets of the Korean comfort women

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issue. Comparatively, ethnomusicologist Joshua Pilzer’s (2012) book uses an artistic approach to understand the historical situation of Korean comfort women. Pilzer’s (2012) book effectively presents an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the comfort women issue. Through his field research in South Korea with comfort women, Pilzer (2012) builds a rapport with the victims. He describes his positionality as a researcher from the West and acknowledges that human relationships are complicated and unequal at times. Through music, Pilzer (2012) builds a rapport with comfort women, explores how “people use song to make do, getting by in the course of everyday life,” and studies the link between music and processes of trauma and recovery (pp. xi–xvi). The book does not focus on diving into the historical accounts of the women’s traumatic experiences but, instead, focuses on the “present” (Pilzer, 2012, pp. xi– xvi). Pilzer (2012) explains that music and the act of singing for victims “opened up a space in which they could confront taboo subjects… and craft a sense of self and of the world” (p. 8). According to Pilzer (2012), it was an act of survival for the women to “contain and keep memories alive” and “rebuild themselves and their social relationships in the wake of what had happened” (p. 9). For the comfort women, the songs connected them and their peers. As individuals who experienced similar atrocities, it brought them together as a community. The book is filled with lyrics and rhythms from many of the comfort women’s songs, the author’s interactions with the women, and even website links to some sound recordings. It is the first book of its kind to examine the stories of comfort women through the lens of musicology while simultaneously making connections to trauma, atrocities, and human rights. New Ways of Solidarity with Korean Comfort Women is a comprehensive edited volume of the comfort women case, which analyzes the redress movements, makes space for victims’ testimonies, imagines diverse frames of memory, and considers the politics of memory from the perspectives of literary studies, gender studies, memory studies, and political science. Hence, it is a collection of works that, in some respects, mirror Pilzer’s (2012) work by exploring an artistic and cultural element of the victims and their experiences. The book also provides an empirical analysis like that of Min et al.’s (2020) edited volume and Min’s (2021) solo-authored book by examining the historical truths, facts, archives, and legal opinions. Additionally, it also reflects the approach from Tai’s (2020) work that compares narratives on comfort women between the activists and those in the scholarly context. This edited volume explores narratives in cultural

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practices, literature, and new memory mediums and how they relate to politics. As such, it bridges the differences that may exist in a book or edited volume that focuses solely on sociological, historical, or testimonial matters and others that only examine a cultural or artistic approach to the question of Korean comfort women. The unique intersection that this book represents, therefore, makes it a critical work that should be regarded in understanding, studying, and thinking further about Korean comfort women in the past, present, and future.

Plan of the Book There are many interesting components of Korean comfort women’s cases and issues, including the political debates involving different actors in East Asian politics. However, most are beyond the scope of this book, which primarily aims to provide a space for exploring diverse interdisciplinary approaches to reimagining the memory and lives of comfort women and, in doing so, reflect upon new ways of solidarity with Korean comfort women. The book is divided into three thematic sections: (1) Victims, Stories, and Transformations; (2) Ways of Memory, Remembrance, and Healing; and (3) Global Actors, Legal Frames, and Contested Memories. The first section includes chapters centered on the stories of Korean comfort women. Pyong Gap Min’s chapter explores some of the more salient cases of Korean comfort women’s moving testimonies, which have helped promulgate the redress movement. Min’s chapter also aims to show the “value of the eight collections of Korean comfort women’s personal narrative” using a quantitative data set. The quantification of the testimonies has not been previously attempted for studies that examine comfort women issues. Continuing to focus on victims and the redress movement, Boram Yi and Jae Hee Kim examine how the Korean diaspora in the United States has approached the issue of comfort women. They study how Korean American activists have organized the comfort women redress movement in the United States and how ethnicity has played a role in their actions. The chapter also “contextualizes” the Korean American activism in the “critical international and domestic developments of the 1990s, including the wars in Bosnia and Rwanda, the Los Angeles riots, and the passage of the Violence against Women Act.” In short, Yi and Kim present a new

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approach to studying the “evolution of the comfort women movement form a Korean issue to an American one.” Returning to Korea, Na Young Lee’s chapter extends the role of Korean comfort women’s testimonies and the redress movement by emphasizing the agency of survivors-activists. Using oral histories, Lee examines the stories of “two foundational figures in the ongoing justice campaign for the survivors.” The two women are Yun Chung-Ok, who “managed to escape the fate of many other peers” and first spoke about “Japanese military sexual slavery,” and Kim Bok-dong, a “survivor and human rights activist.” Lee presents each of these activists’ stories and explains that they have interpreted their direct and indirect experiences with Japanese military sexual enslavement as “having been formed by imperialism, colonialism, and patriarchy.” Lee unpacks the evolution of these women’s understanding of their experiences, the elements of decolonization of androcentric history, and how women have broken away from “social stigma and became agents…[of] transformation of a postcolonial society” through mutual caring and healing. The second section of the book brings together four different chapters that explore diverse approaches to the past, present, and futures of memory. Margaret Stetz’s chapter considers new ways and genres to retell the story of Japan’s military sexual enslavement. She uses graphic memoirs, dystopian futurist/science fiction, and poetry to demonstrate how the historical truth about comfort women may be disseminated through these mediums. As “time has only compounded the difficulty of resolving the so-called comfort women issues within a political or legal framework,” she argues that it may matter more to consider what happens in the “informal international court of public opinion” through literature. Similarly, Hyo-won Lee’s study on films explores how Korean onscreen portrayals of comfort women influence the public collective memory and society in Korea and Japan. Previous research has mostly been limited to analyses of individual Korean films such as Spirits ’ Homecoming (2016) and Snowy Road (2015) or has focused on the differences between Korean and Japanese cinematic depictions of comfort women. Lee aims to present a more comprehensive examination of the depiction of comfort women in films, particularly in the context of cinematic historiography and changing social discourse on the subject matter. Additionally, she documents and analyzes how individuals, media, and civic groups in both Korea and Japan as well as third-party nations—such as the United States—have reacted to and utilized them for various means and ends.

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Relatedly, from a more futuristic standpoint, Lauren Seward’s study considers the futures of memories and remembrance of comfort women’s historical experiences. She advocates for the study of social media platforms as a space for fostering new historical consciousness. Seward observes the “possibility of using social media as a virtual space for memory and education” to help comfort women escape the oppression they have faced in traditional memorialization initiatives, which may preserve their memories and educate new generations more effectively. The last chapter in the thematic section of Ways of Memory, Remembrance, and Healing explores the ways in which cultural shamanistic ritual practices or kut symbolize “political disobedience, healing, and resilience” for victims of traumatic and unrestrained violence during war. Merose Hwang compares specters of the community ritual for the spirits of Korean “comfort women” to the community “April Third” ritual that honors victims from a politicide of left-leaning Cheju Islanders by the South Korean military and paramilitary. From the comparison, she explains how kut demonstrate a liberatory practice or a “type of epistemological disobedience to modern, militarized states.” The third thematic section presents chapters that focus on comfort women’s memory and politics. Hyesuk Kang’s chapter deals with the question of how the memory of a state is constructed by engaging with the “discovery of North Korean comfort stations and the politics of ‘spaces’ and ‘places of memory.’” Kang examines how the history of North Korea’s comfort women is reproduced through the place of memory and how it has been used or “produced as collective memories” by state authorities. In doing so, she engages in discussions on the North Korean comfort stations discovery, the political discourse accompanying this history, and the political implications of the “comfort stations” selected as a place of memory in the “reclusive country of North Korea.” Moving from a state-level analysis to the global political context that involves intergovernmental organizations and individual states, Jiyeon Kim’s chapter studies the connections between the United Nations (UN) and the issue of comfort women. She reviews how the UN has “dealt with the issue of comfort women” by examining UN archives and the specific reports and resolutions it has issued. Kim notes the unsatisfactory outcomes for the victims who continue to seek justice and reparations for their case. Moreover, she discusses the cacophony between the principles the UN purports to represent and the outcome of the Korean comfort women case.

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Similarly, Carranza Ko’s chapter focuses on the intersection between the identity of comfort women, politics, and the international sphere by bringing in the perspective of international human rights norms that involve children’s rights. Borrowing the language from Angella Son and Margaret Stetz on “comfort girls-women,” the chapter legally reframes the Japanese military’s enforced sexual enslavement as a violation of children’s rights. Exploring the case from a children’s rights matter, Carranza Ko applies normative standards from the International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children, the Geneva Declaration on the Rights of the Child, the International Labor Organization’s Minimum Age Convention, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, to note the gravity of the crimes committed against girls or children. This approach presents a new angle of legal argument that may be of use for advocates, advocacy movements, and victims. Contributions from diverse authors that engage with the historical truth, provide newly imagined spaces for victims’ voices, and reflect upon the present, past, and futures of memory are needed in this juncture of time when comfort women’s memories are being actively challenged by policy and scholarship. Their visions add weight to the redress movement as new forms of solidarity with Korean comfort women. Particularly, the interdisciplinary approach, which emphasizes the victims’ voices and experiences, helps create a comprehensive and holistic picture of the history of comfort women, their struggles for justice, and the preservation of memory. Additionally, this approach allows academics, policy-makers, and the public to reimagine the historical past from new angles of work, such as literature, cultural practices, and social media.

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References Berlin, M. (2016). Criminalizing atrocity: The global spread of criminal laws against international crimes. Oxford University Press. Cabato, R. (2019, May 20). I’ll keep fighting: Philippine women keep alive memory of sex slaver horrors during World War II. Washington Post. https:// www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/ill-keep-fighting-philippinewomen-keep-alive-memory-of-sex-slave-horrors-during-world-war-ii/2019/ 05/27/e3135b98-674a-11e9-a698-2a8f808c9cfb_story.html Cho, J. G. (2009). Moon Jae-In Government’s Korea Japan policy: Focusing on the problem of Japan’s Imperial Army comfort women. 韓日民族問題硏 究 [The Journal of Korean-Japanese National Studies], 36, 165–205. Gil, Y. H. (2015, August 7). 우리가 잊어버린 최초의 위안부 증언자…그 이름, 배 봉기 [The first comfort woman that testified and that we have forgotten…The name, Bae Bong Gi]. Hankyoreh. https://www.hani.co.kr/arti/international/ japan/703614.html Hicks, G. (1997). The comfort women: Japan’s brutal regime of enforced prostitution in the Second World War W.W. Norton. 1997), 18–19. Jin, K. M. (2016, March 21). 중국의 유일한 한국국적 위안부 할머니 사고로 중 상 [The only Korean national comfort woman residing in China is in critical condition due to an accident]. Hankyoreh. https://www.hani.co.kr/arti/soc iety/society_general/736160.html Kim, B. H. (2017). 문 대통령 “12–28합의 중대 흠결…위안부 문제 해결 안 돼” [President Moon “12–28 agreement major problem…comfort women issue cannot be resolved]. Hankyoreh. https://www.hani.co.kr/arti/politics/ politics_general/825394.html Kim, C. J. (2022). Transnational advocacy, norm regress, and foreign compliance constituencies: The case of the “comfort women” redress movement. International Studies Quarterly, 66(3). 1–2. Lie, J. (2009). Zainichi: The Korean diaspora in Japan. Asian intercultural Contacts, 14(2), 16–21. Lightfoot, S. (2015). Settler-state apologies to indigenous peoples: A normative framework and comparative assessment. Native American and Indigenous Studies, 2(1), 15–39. Lind, J. (2010). Sorry states: Apologies in international politics. Cornell University Press. Min, P. G. (2020). Japanese citizens’ and civic organization’s strong support for the redress movement. In P. G. Min, T. Chung, & S. S. Yim (Eds.), Japanese military sexual slavery: The transnational redress movement for the victims (pp. 75–80). De Gruyter Oldenbourg. Min, P. G. (2021). Korean “comfort women” military brothels, brutality, and the redress movement. Rutgers University Press.

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Min, P. G., Chung, T. R., & Yim, S. S. (Eds.). (2020). Japanese military sexual slavery: The transnational redress movement for the victims. De Gruyter Oldenbourg. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan. (2015). Announcement by Foreign Ministers of Japan and the Republic of Korea at the Joint Press Occasion. https:// www.mofa.go.jp/a_o/na/kr/page4e_000364.html Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. (2014, May 21). MOGEF largely expanded 2014 business budget for the victims of the Japanese military sexual slavery. http://www.mogef.go.kr/eng/pr/eng_pr_s101d.do?mid=eng001 Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. (2022). 일본군 위안부 피해자 보호 지원 및 기념사업 [Victims (comfort women) of the Japanese military sexual slavery protection-support and related commemorative matters]. http://www.mogef. go.kr/sp/hrp/sp_hrp_f013.do Oh, B. B. C. (2020). Legacies of “comfort women.” In P. G. Min, T. Chung, & S. S. Yim (Eds.), Japanese military sexual slavery: The transnational redress movement for the victims (pp. 203–214). De Gruyter Oldenbourg. Park, J. (2020). The story of failed interviews: The silence of Choi Yi Seon, the secret of Kim Dduk Bbal. In Research Team of the War and Women’s Human Rights Center (Eds.), Stories that make history: The experience and memories of the Japanese military comfort girls-women (pp. 293–302). De Gruyter Oldenbourg. Park, Y. H. (2013). Jeguk-ui Wianbu: Sigminjijibae-wa Gioeg-ui Tujaeng [Comfort women of the empire: Colonialism and struggles of memory]. Bburi-wa Ipari. Pilzer, J. D. (2012). Hearts of pine: Songs in the lives of three Korean survivors of the Japanese “comfort women.” Oxford University Press. Qiu, P., Zhiliang, S., & Lifei, C. (2014). Chinese comfort women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan’s sex slaves. Oxford University Press. Ramseyer, J. M. (2020). Contracting for sex in the Pacific War. International Review of Law and Economics, 65, 1–8. Ramseyer, J. M. (2022, January). Contracting for sex in the Pacific War: A response to my critics. The Harvard John M. Olin Discussion Paper Series (Discussion Paper No. 1075). http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_c enter/papers/pdf/Ramseyer_1075.pdf Reinhart, N. T. (2022). Reparative semantics: On slavery and the language of history. Commonplace: The journal of early American life. http://common place.online/article/reparative-semantics/ Research Team of the War and Women’s Human Rights Center. (Eds.). (2020). Stories that make history: The experience and memories of the Japanese military comfort girls-women (A. Son, Trans.). De Gruyter Oldenbourg.

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Rumiko, N., Puja, K., & Akane, O. (Eds.). (2018). Denying the comfort women: The Japanese State’s assault on historical truth. Routledge. Soh, C. S. (2008). Sexual violence and postcolonial memory in Korea and Japan. The University of Chicago Press. Son, A. (2020). The Japanese secret: The shame behind Japan’s longstanding denial of its war crime against Korean comfort girls-women. In P. G. Min, T. Chung, & S. S. Yim (Eds.), Japanese military sexual slavery: The transnational redress movement for the victims (pp. 295–324). De Gruyter Oldenbourg. Stetz, M. D. (2010). Reconsidering the ‘comfort women’ and their supporters. Journal of Human Rights Practice, 2(2), 299–305. Stetz, M. D. (2020). Making girl victims visible: A survey of representations that have circulated in the West. In P. G. Min, T. Chung, & S. S. Yim (Eds.), Japanese military sexual slavery: The transnational redress movement for the victims (pp. 215–227). De Gruyter Oldenbourg. Tai, E. (2020). Comfort women activism: Critical voices from the perpetrator state. Hong Kong University Press. Tawara, Y. (2018). Comfort women, textbooks, and the rise of the “New Right.” In N. Rumiko, K. Puja, & O. Akane (Eds.), Denying the comfort women: The Japanese State’s assault on historical truth (pp. 151–165). Routledge. The Commission on Verification and Support for the Victims of Forced Mobilization under Japanese Colonialism in Korea. (2014). Can you hear us? The untold narratives of comfort women: Oral narrations of Japanese military comfort women. The Commission on Verification and Support for the Victims of Forced Mobilization under Japanese Colonialism in Korea. Tsukamoto, S. (2022). The politics of trauma and integrity: Stories of Japanese “comfort women.” Routledge. United Nations News. (2016, March 11). “Voices of survivors must be heard, UN chief says after meeting ‘comfort women’ victim.” https://news.un.org/ en/story/2016/03/524192 Waller, J. (2016). Confronting evil: Engaging our responsibility to prevent genocide. Oxford University Press. 76–78. WARMAP. (2022, May 6). Shanghai Normal University Chinese Comfort Women Museum, Shanghai. http://www.warinasia.com/comfort-womenmuseum-shanghai-normal-university-shanghai Watanabe, M. (2020). Initiatives by citizens of a perpetrator state: Advocating to UN human rights bodies for the rights of survivors. In P.G. Min, T. Chung, & S.S. Yim (Eds.), Japanese military sexual slavery: The transnational redress movement for the victims (pp. 95–116). De Gruyter Oldenbourg. Yang, C. (2018). Listen to survivors’ voices! In N. Rumiko, K. Puja, & O. Akane (Eds.), Denying the comfort women: The Japanese State’s assault on historical truth (pp. 181–196). Routledge.

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Young, H. A. (2022, May 3). 위안부 피해 김양주 할머니 별세…열한분 만 남았습니다 [Comfort women Victim Kim Yang Ju Halmoni passed away…Only eleven remain]. The JoongAng. https://www.joongang.co.kr/art icle/25068242#home

Victims, Stories, and Transformations

The Power of Korean “Comfort Women’s” Testimonies Pyong Gap Min

Introduction The major question in interpreting the “comfort women” system (hereafter, CWS) is whether it was a system of sexual slavery or commercial prostitution. The criminal justice system has accepted victims’ testimonies as a major form of credible evidence. Moreover, personal narratives have been accepted as the most important form of data in oral history. However, Japanese historical revisionists have consistently rejected “comfort women’s” testimonies as credible evidence for determining whether the CWS was sexual slavery or not (Hata, 1990; Ramseyer, 2022). In order to prove that the CWS was indeed sexual slavery, we need to demonstrate that (1) “comfort women” were forcibly mobilized to “comfort stations,” or that (2) they were detained at “comfort stations” for sexual services to Japanese soldiers against their will. But it is difficult to

P. G. Min (B) Queens College and Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 Ñ. Carranza Ko (ed.), New Ways of Solidarity with Korean Comfort Women, Palgrave Macmillan Studies on Human Rights in Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1794-5_2

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find historical data regarding each issue partly because the Japanese military is unlikely to have left enough historical information about the forced mobilization of “comfort women” or the slave-like brutal treatment that they endured, just as civilian criminals do not write down their criminal activities (Yoshimi, 2013). It is also difficult to find historical data partly because the Japanese military and the Japanese civilian governments in the post-war years destroyed as much historical data as possible (Hayashi, 2015, pp. 173–174; Yoshimi, 2000, pp. 12, 34–35, 91). Given the scarcity of historical data, accepting “comfort women” victims’ testimonies as credible evidence for Japanese military sexual slavery is very important. Moreover, I will show that major media outlets, politicians, legal scholars, and the general public—including college students and local residents—accepted Korean “comfort women’s” (hereafter, KCW) testimonies as the key evidence for their forced mobilization to “comfort stations” and brutal treatment at Japanese military brothels (hereafter, JMB). This paper is divided into the following three major sections. The first section will show the two turning points in the redress movement led by leaders of the women’s movement in South Korea. It occurred when the Korean women leaders obtained information in September 1990 about the Japanese military government’s intensive search for a large number of Korean women during the colonial period. Their acquisition of this historical information led them to establish the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (hereafter, the Korean Council) to start the redress movement. The second turning point was the August 1991 public testimony of Kim Hak-sun, among the KCW survivors to break the long silence regarding the CWS. Kim’s testimony was significant because it accelerated the nascent redress movement globally beyond the relationship between Korea and Japan. The second section will show that public testimonies by about 50 KCW in Japan, the United States, some European countries, and at international human rights organizations were enthusiastically accepted, leading various governments and organizations to send strong resolutions to the Japanese government. Finally, the third section will show that 103 KCW’s testimonies included in eight edited volumes comprise the largest sample of testimonies available in Asian countries, large enough to make generalizations of the findings to all KCW. When I cite Asian scholars’ and redress activists’ names, I use their given names first and surnames last, following the Western style (e.g.,

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Puja Kim, Margaret Stetz). But when I cite KCW’s names, I use their surnames first as they do in Korea and other Asian countries (e.g., Kim Hak-sun, Kum-Ju Hwang). When referring to KCW in South Korea, the term halmeoni (grandma) is often added after their names as a gesture of affection and respect; in general, this practice is common when referring to elderly people. I also add halmeoni to their names when I mention them or quote their interviews.

Enough Information on Korean “Comfort Women’s” Forced Mobilization to Japanese Military Brothels in the Post-War Years Koreans learned about the forced mobilization of many young Korean women to JMB through articles published in Korean daily newspapers in the post-war years (Min, 2021, pp. 32–39; Yoshikata, 2015). Many newspaper articles published in the late 1940s and 1970s reported that a large number of Korean girls and young women were forcibly taken to JMB in the name of the chongshindae (Korean term for “voluntary labor corps”). The time gap in public interest surrounding the CWI between the end of World War II (1945) and the 1970s can be partly explained by major geopolitical issues that happened on the Korean peninsula, such as the Korean War (1950–1953), a civilian dictatorship (beginning with Rhee Syngman in 1948), and a military dictatorship (beginning with Park Chung-hee in 1961). Because of these factors, women’s groups in Korea were not able to pay serious attention to the CWI during this time period. However, by the 1970s and 1980s, two urgent issues for the women’s movement in South Korea were the military government’s support of active sex tourism and Korean business owners’ exploitation of women factory workers in the military government’s export-oriented economic policy (Lee, 1992, pp. 263–274). Prof. Chong-ok Yoon, who took a leading role in the redress movement, started her fact-finding fieldwork in Okinawa and Kyushu in Japan in 1980. There were two impetuses for the redress movement for the victims of Japanese military sexual slavery in Korea. One was the Korean women leaders’ acquisition of the Japanese Diet’s minutes in June 1990, which included information about the Japanese military government’s hunting of Korean women to mobilize them to JMB. The other impetus was the press conference of Kim Hak-sun, the first KCW who broke silence, on

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August 1991. The acquisition of the Diet minutes by Korean women’s leaders strengthened their determination to organize the Korean Council for the redress movement. On the other hand, the emergence and public testimony of Kim Hak-sun expanded the scope of the redress movement in Korea to a global redress movement. The battlefield of the redress movement was no longer Korea and Japan, but the United States, Europe, the UN, and other international human rights organization. The power of KCW’s public testimonies in these global battlefields in the next two decades helped to turn the bi-national redress movement into an international redress movement. Going back to the first impetus for the redress movement, on March 31, 1990, Kyoto Press announced that 100 Korean women’s names were found from the list of the 1600 Koreans forcefully mobilized to Okinawa in the Allied Forces historical documents (Lee, 1996, p. 397). Upon hearing the news, Motoka Shoji, a Diet member of the Japan Socialist Party, pointed out in the Diet meeting that “the Japanese government had forcibly drafted more than one million people from Korea for military and labor service during World War II, and that it had hunted young Korean women to serve as sexual slaves” (Korean Council, 2014, p. 45). He recommended that the Japanese government investigate the CWI and make a formal apology and provide compensation for the victims of Japanese military sexual slavery (Lee, 1997, p. 314). However, Director General Shimizu Tsutao of Employment Security Bureau responded that draft procedures had been carried out under the terms of the General National Mobilization Law, and that the CWS had been carried out by private entrepreneurs, and thus the government could not make an investigation (Lee, 1992, p. 397). In June 1990, Korean women leaders accidentally obtained the Diet minutes involving the exchanges of arguments between Motoka Shoji and Shimizu Tsutao. The news ignited the redress movement for the victims of Japanese military sexual slavery in Korea. Yamashita Yeongae, a Korean-Japanese woman studying at Ewha Womans University at the time, found a copy of the Diet minutes and gave it to Chongok Yun, the leader of the redress movement (Lee, 1992, p. 390). In October 1990, Chong-ok Yoon and other leaders of women’s organizations shared the Diet memoirs. The news angered them. They held a special meeting and protested the Japanese government’s actions at a press conference. The leaders of the organizations visited the Embassy of Japan in Seoul to deliver an open letter to Japanese Prime Minister

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Kaifu Toshiki in person. They made six demands to the Japanese government, including its acknowledgment of its forced mobilization of Korean women as “comfort women,” making a formal apology to Korea for the historical event, revealing all the detail of the CWS, building memorials to the victims of Japanese military sexual slavery, making reparations to the surviving victims and their bereaved families, and including information about military sexual slavery in Japanese history textbooks (Lee, 1992, pp. 314–315). The Japanese government did not respond to the six demands. The silence of the Japanese government led the leaders of Korean women’s organizations to establish a coalition organization to deal with the CWI effectively. On November 11, 1990, thirty-seven women’s organizations created Chongshindae Munje Daechaek Hyopuihe (the Association for the Resolution of the Chongshindae Issue) (The Korean Council, 2014, p. 43). To emphasize the criminal aspects of the perpetrators, the leaders of the organization decided that the English-language name of the organization would be The Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan. In June 2019, the English name was changed to the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan. The Korean Council sent another reminder to the Japanese government in March 1991. In April 1991, the Embassy of Japan in Seoul invited representatives of the Korean Council to the embassy to clarify its position. But the Japanese consul general reiterated the Japanese government’s previous position that the Japanese military government never forcibly drafted “comfort women,” and that compensating KCW was impossible because the 1965 Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and Korea absolved the Japanese government of any obligation to compensate Korean victims of the Asian-Pacific War. Young-ae Yoon, one of the attendants at the meeting, recollected the Japanese consul general’s response: He said that the Japanese government could not make an investigation of the “comfort women” issue because there is no evidence that Korean women were forced to serve as “comfort women.” He told us to bring evidence, if any. By “evidence,” we thought he meant any Korean “comfort woman” survivor. They must have believed that no surviving “comfort women” would be able to come forward to tell the truth, the truth that she served dozens of Japanese soldiers every day. They must have

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thought all surviving victims would die soon and that then there would be no evidence as long as the Japanese government did not release the documents. (Author’s interview with Young-ae Yoon, 1995)

Two KCW, both unable to return home to Korea after the end of the war, one in Okinawa (Bae Bong-gi) and the other in Thailand (No Subok), had already been located as the victims of the chongshindae in the early 1980s. This led Korean women leaders to have confidence that more KCW survivors would come forward to tell the truth. The Korean Council put advertisements in Korean daily newspapers, asking KCW survivors to come forward to tell what had happened to them. One night in July 1991, Kim Hak-sun, accompanied by her friend, visited the office of the Korean Council. In a tape-recorded interview, Kim told Young-ae Yoon, the director of the Korean Council, about her history as a “comfort woman.” Yoon later recollected what Kim had said in her tape-recorded interview: “I was forced to serve as a ‘comfort woman’ for Japanese soldiers during World War II. As the Japanese government continued to tell lies about the CWI, I felt that I had no choice but to expose its deceit by telling the truth” (quoted from author interview, 1995). Yoon promised Kim that she would call her after arranging a press conference where she could give her testimony. However, Yoon told me that she initially hesitated to arrange Kim’s testimony because of its possible negative effect on Kim. Yoon described her initial concern about Kim’s testimony: “If Kim halmeoni reveals her story of serving dozens of soldiers every day in front of TV cameras, it would bury her in the Korean patriarchal cultural milieu. I did not want to kill her twice. Therefore, I was hesitant to arrange a press conference for her testimony.” Several days later, Kim called Yoon and asked her why it was taking such a long time. Yoon explained to Kim that she was hesitant because of the damaging effect that publicly testifying could have on her future life. Kim responded “I have a short life to live. Also, I am afraid of nothing because I have neither a husband nor other family members. Would you arrange a press conference as soon as possible” (author interview with Young-ae Yoon, 1995). Thus, Yoon set up a press conference for August 14, 1991, the day before the Korean Independence Day, to dramatize and bring more attention to the testimony. Kim opened with the following statement: “I suffered as a Japanese military ‘comfort woman’ during World War II. I was taken and forced into prostitution by the Japanese

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military. How can the Japanese government deny that its military government took Korean women by force to comfort Japanese soldiers?” (the recording of Kim’s press conference is available at the Historical Museum of “Comfort Women” at the House of Sharing). The emergence of a KCW to society and her first formal testimony in front of the international press sparked the redress movement. First of all, Kim’s testimony encouraged many other “comfort women” survivors in Korea and other Asian countries to come forward and publicly recount their experiences as well. Moreover, her testimony pushed many women in Japan and other Asian countries to establish redress organizations to join the redress movement that Korean women’s leaders had initiated only few years before. Before Kim’s testimony, the redress movement took the form of leaders of the Korean Council pushing the Japanese government to accept their demands. But, after Kim’s testimony, an increasing number of Japanese women’s loosely organized supporting groups were established in different Japanese cities in 1992 and after to engage in the redress movement. These organizations invited Chong-ok Yun, the founder of the Korean Council, and many KCW for lectures and testimonies. The lawsuits against the Japanese government brought by Kim and two other KCW survivors in December 1991 pushed Yoshiaki Yoshimi, an eminent Japanese historian of the CWI, to look for relevant documents in the National Institute for Defense Studies Library (Yoshimi, 2000, p. 35). His search yielded six documents that proved the Japanese military government’s deep involvement in the establishment, operation, and sanitary control of “comfort stations” and even the recruitment of “comfort women” (Yoshimi, 1993). On January 11, 1992, the Asahi Shimbun (a major Japanese newspaper) published an article introducing the six key documents discovered by Yoshimi (Yoshimi, 2000, p. 35). The next day, Chief Cabinet Secretary Kato Koichi publicly acknowledged the Japanese military’s participation in organizing the “comfort women” system (Yoshimi, 2000, p. 35). On January 17, 1992, Prime Minister Miyajawa Kiichi, who was visiting South Korea, officially apologized at a meeting of top Korean and Japanese leaders. In this way, the first public testimony by a KCW accelerated the redress movement.

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Korean “Comfort Women’s” Public Testimonies in Japan, the United States, and at International Human Rights Organizations After the first public testimony by Kim Hak-sun, about thirty KCW took rotations in taking transnational tours, with one or a few women participating in each tour, to many cities in Japan and many colleges and universities in the United States. They also gave a number of testimonies to international human rights organizations, including the Tokyo Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery, and to legislative branches of the United States and other Western countries (the Netherlands, Canada, and European Union). KCW’s testimonies were enthusiastically accepted by participants in these transnational testimonial events. In addition, many Japanese and other international reporters and scholars visited KCW’s apartments and the House of Sharing to interview KCW for the purposes of documentary filmmaking or writing books. The first major KCW’s testimony in Japan was made by Kim Haksun when she and two other KCW visited Japan to file a lawsuit to a district court in Tokyo for compensation on December 5, 1991. Kim gave five testimonies in five different cities in Japan for one week, with each testimony hosted by a local Japanese redress organization. The other two KCW seem to have not given their testimonies as they made a lawsuit anonymously. Hye-won Kim, the executive director of the Korean Council who took Kim Hak-sun to Japan for these testimonies commented on Japanese citizens’ enthusiastic reactions to Kim’s testimonies: Several Japanese right-wingers tried to block our testimonies. But the Japanese media, non-profit organizations, and Korean-Japanese residents in Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, Nara, and Sakai accepted Kim halmeoni’ s testimonies with so much interest and enthusiasm that I was too optimistic about the possibility of resolving the “comfort women” issue soon. A KoreanJapanese resident in Nara asked me about the prospects for resolving the issue. I said: “Thanks to your great interest and fervor, I have the hope that the issue is likely to be resolved sooner or later. My answer was careless …. Whenever each testimony ended, many participants came forward to the halmeoni, gave gifts and made a sincere apology. (Kim, 1999)

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These Japanese civic organizations’ apologies to Korea for their government’s rejection of its predecessor’s crime encouraged Korean redress activists (Kim, 2007, p. 12). In her book, Hye-won Kim introduced a moving event she experienced just after Kim Hak-sun had given a testimony at the YWCA in Kobe which made most participants shed tears. I quote her paragraph: A Japanese woman in her early 40s wearing a sweater came into the room to see Kim halmeoni. She apologized to Kim halmeoni, shedding tears. She then began to talk about her father. She said that she lived only with her widowed father who had served as a Japanese navy officer during the Asian-Pacific War. She confessed that, whenever her father was drunk, he treated her as a woman. She said that she planned to enter a monastery to become a nun. She put a white envelope on a desk before she left the room, and asked me to use the money in legally fighting in the court for Kim halmeoni. There was 500,000 yen ($5,000) inside the envelope. It was a big amount of money at that time. However, I saw a bigger gift than the money inside the envelope. It was her aspiration for a peaceful world with no war and no sexual violence against women. (Kim, 2007, p. 205)

Japanese historians, lawyers, and writers who had serious concerns about the CWI formed an executive committee. The committee held the International Public Hearing on Post-War compensation by Japan in Tokyo in December 1992. “Comfort women” and other Asia-Pacific War victims were invited to the hearing (Soh, 2008, pp. 64–65). The organization also invited international legal experts and “comfort women’ scholars to the event. The results of the hearing led to the establishment of the Center for Research and Documentation on Japan’s War Responsibility (JWRC). The JWRC focused on disclosing historical facts related mainly to the CWI, but also to the Japanese military’s use of chemical weapons in China. The JWRC also worked with the Korean Council in taking the CWI to the Permanent Court of Arbitration in 1994 (Chung, 2016, p. 324). Also, JWRC often published responses to the Japanese government’s denials of its responsibility for sexual slavery. Two key founding members were Yoshiaki Yoshimi and Hirofumi Hayashi, who are still active in research on the CWI. Korean and other Asian “comfort women” groups filed ten civilian lawsuits in Japanese courts against the Japanese government (Kim, 1997, pp. 4–5), but only one lawsuit filed by three KCW at the district court in

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the Shimonoseki Branch of the Yamaguchi Prefecture resulted in a partial winning verdict (Kim, 1998). All the remaining lawsuits received verdicts that supported the Japanese government’s rejection of the CWS as sexual slavery. Despite their failures, the efforts of Asian “comfort women” and their advocacy organizations helped publicize the CWI and gain more supporters for the redress movement in Japan. Song Shin-do, a KCW survivor, came to live in Tokyo after the end of the war because she had been abandoned there by a Japanese soldier who had promised to marry her. She filed a civilian lawsuit to the Tokyo District Court on April 5, 1993. From the beginning of her trial, a Korean-Japanese women’s group for her lawsuit (the Song Shindo Lawsuit Supporting Association) was established, which many other Japanese citizens joined. For all 20 court proceedings, the courtrooms were full of people who came to witness the trials involving her testimonies. The court proceedings attracted approximately 10,000 audience members over the course of six years (Yang, 1999, p. 13). Many Japanese citizens who lived in neighboring prefectures are reported to have traveled to Tokyo to attend her court trials. Due to the exposure of her face and name to the Japanese public and media, she had become well-known in Japan, although she died several years ago. Although Japanese judges did not accept her testimonies made in court as credible evidence, most Japanese participants in the trials seem to have accepted them as the truth. Several KCW began to visit Korean communities in the United States beginning in late 1992. Immediately after their testimonial tours, Korean immigrant redress organizations were established in Washington, DC, Los Angeles, and New York, the three largest Korean communities in the United States. The Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues (WCCWI) is the most important Korean redress organization in the United States that has been active until now. A large Korean Methodist Church in the Washington, DC area organized a “testimony and prayer” night in November 1992, featuring Hwang Geum-ju, a KCW. Dongwoo Lee Hahm attended the event and told me, “As a fifty-nine-year-old Korean woman, I was shocked by Hwang Geum-ju’s yelling of the phrase, Ireo-beorin Naechongchun-eul Dolyeo-dalla” [“Give me back my lost youth”] (author interview 2016). She and other members of the Korean church established the Washington Coalition for Women for the Comfort Women Issue (WCCWI) immediately after the testimonial event. At the age of sixty, Lee Hahm resigned her high-paying job at the World Bank to concentrate on redress activities. She devoted herself to the redress

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movement for ten years until she moved to Florida to recover from her deteriorating health conditions. She even spent her own pension fund ($12,000) to pay for a letter of appeal in The Washington Post to publicize the crime of sexual slavery committed by the Japanese military. I believe the power of Hwang halmeonies ’ first testimony at her church had led her to work tirelessly and selflessly for the redress movement for so many years until she became sick. The KCW who visited the United States traveled to many colleges and universities to give testimonies, helped by local Korean advocacy organizations and Korean student clubs. “Comfort women’s” numerous testimonies at U.S. organizations, especially those at universities, were accepted far more enthusiastically than those given in South Korea. I introduce here the most memorable testimony given at a university. Bonnie Oh, an Endowed Professor of Korean Studies, and Margaret Stetz, an eminent feminist scholar of English literature at Georgetown University, organized a conference called “Comfort Women of World War II: Legacy and Lessons” (Stetz and Oh, 2001). It was held on September 30 through October 3, 1996 at Georgetown University. The WCCWI invited a KCW, Kim Yun-shim, to give a testimony at the conference. Lee Hahm, the director of WCCWI, reported the participants’ reactions to Kim’s testimony in the Korean Councils’ monthly report: When about 200 participants, consisting mostly of scholars and other intellectuals, heard her bitter story of the humiliation and pain an elderly woman suffered at a Japanese military brothel as a 14-year old girl, the conference site turned into a sea of tears. Wearing a Korean traditional women’s white hanbok dress, Kim halmeoni talked about her brutal experiences at a Japanese military brothel, and no one left their seat. I could see only people who moved their handkerchiefs to their eyes. The audience who listened to her experiences at a Japanese military brothel stood up and applauded loudly, expressing their respect for her courage and dignity. (Hahm, 1997, p. 9)

Lee Hahm further reported that the next day, Eli Rosenbaum, the director of the U.S. Justice Department, who heard her testimony, arranged a meeting between members of his staff and Kim. Lee Hahm vividly remembered what Rosenbaum, a Jewish American, told Kim halmeoni, holding her hands tightly: “I have two young daughters. When they grow up, I will certainly tell them about your story, and tell them my

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hope that they will live as adults, especially by fighting for human rights and dignity with as much as half of your courage” (ibid.). A staff member of the Office of Special Investigation in charge of international human rights later asked the WCCWI how he could help with the redress movement. Lee Hahm told him that her organization wanted the Justice Department to take any measure possible that would put pressure on the Japanese government. As a result, the Justice Department banned sixteen Japanese citizens from traveling in the United States, charging that “the men conducted horrible medical experiments or forced thousands of women to serve as sexual slaves for members of the Imperial Army during World War II” (Thomas, 1996). Korean redress organizations in the United States began to install “comfort girl” statues and “comfort women” monuments at the end of the 2000s, when few KCW were healthy enough to visit U.S. cities to give testimonies. They succeeded in getting eleven KCW memorials at public places in the United States, with four installed within Korean enclaves or on private property (Min, 2021, p. 244). It is very difficult to get a KCW statue installed at a public place in the United States because local residents and politicians have to approve its installation through a hearing. Korean redress organizations have had to invite at least one KCW to a hearing to give a testimony. One or more KCW’s testimonies were very effective for persuading local residents to accept the value of installing a “comfort woman” statue for public education in their neighborhood. Thus, the installment of a “comfort woman” memorial usually includes two testimonial events, first at the hearing for residents before the beginning of the installment and a second time at the unveiling ceremony after its installment. Since it costs a great amount of money to invite a KCW from Korea as a witness in a hearing, Korean redress organizations in the United States need a major fund to get a KCW memorial installed. Four historical memorials had been installed in what was called Memorial Island in Hackensack—the administrative center of Bergen County, New Jersey—by 2010: memorials commemorating the Holocaust, the Armenian massacre, the Irish potato famine, and Black slavery in the Americas. Dong-chan Kim, the director of Korean-American Voters’ Council, wanted the first KCW statue in the United States to be installed in Memorial Island. He contacted Kathleen Donovan, the executive of Bergen County, to explore the possibility of getting a “comfort woman” statue installed in Memorial Island before 2010. He found that Donovan was unfamiliar with the CWI and thus, she showed no interest. However,

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after Donovan visited the House of Sharing in Korea and met and talked with KCW, she learned the educational value of the CWI (author interview with Kim in 2018). Thus, she allowed Dong-chan Kim’s organization to install a “comfort woman” statue in Memorial Island. It was installed there in 2012. Again, this story indicates the power of “comfort women” survivors’ storytelling. All eleven KCW statues in the United States, with the exception of one, have been installed in small suburban white or multiethnic neighborhoods with a significant Korean population. It is very difficult to get a KCW statue installed in a large central city partly because the Korean-American population there comprises a small proportion of the city’s population and partly because a large number of city council members have to approve building the memorial. The Asian “comfort women” statue installed in San Francisco in 2017 is the only one installed in a large city. Lillian Sing and Julie Tang, two well-known Chinese American women judges who had been active in the Rape of Nanjing Redress Coalition, strongly advocated for getting a pan-Asian “comfort women” statue in San Francisco. Both women retired as judges to concentrate on the movement to get this “comfort women” memorial installed. There were various difficulties in successfully getting the “comfort women” statue in San Francisco approved. As mentioned earlier, it has been far more challenging to get memorials installed in large metropolitan areas. As of 2018, there were 880,000 residents in San Francisco. In addition, a major Japanese historical revisionist organization called Global Alliance of Historical Truth (GAHT) mobilized many Japanese immigrants and neo-nationalist activists in California in the 2010s to block the proposed San Francisco “comfort women” memorial. In 2015, the Board of Supervisors’ Public Safety and Neighborhoods Committee heard arguments about the resolution to decide whether to send it to a full board or not. Invited to the hearing as the major witness, Lee Yong-su halmeoni, a widely known KCW activist, spoke: “Thank you. I came here as living evidence of history—and as an activist who is trying to resolve the history for the sake of all women’s rights in the world” (Mirkinson, 2020, p. 158). Koichi Mera, the leader of the Japanese denialists, led the opposition. “What the previous speaker [Lee halmeoni] said is not true,” he said, “‘Comfort women’: totally false. 200,000? Not true. Sex slaves? Not true” (Mirkinson, 2020, p. 160). Supervisor Eric Mar then interrupted him and said, “Excuse me, are you calling Grandma Lee a liar?

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Are you?” Mera went on, “These women were just sold by their families. They were just prostitutes.” Lee halmeoni got up and screamed at him: “You are the liar.” Later, Supervisor David Campos made a special comment: “To the gentleman who called Lee halmeoni a liar, I have one thing to say: Shame! Shame on you! And I hope that this isn’t backed by a government hoping to have their way.” Despite strong opposition by Japanese denialists, the coalition organization succeeded in getting the pan-Asian “comfort women” statue approved. Two years later, on September 22, 2017, they had an unveiling ceremony of the most spectacular “comfort women” memorial installed in Saint Mary Square in San Francisco. Approximately 500 people, including Lee Yong-su halmeoni, participated in the unveiling ceremony (Choi, 2017). The statue depicts a trio of Chinese, Korean, and Filipino “comfort women” standing on a pedestal and holding hands, as a fourth “comfort woman,” Kim Hak-soon, looks up at them. Judith Mirkinson, the director of the Comfort Women Justice Coalition and the author of a book chapter in an edited volume on “comfort women” and the redress movement emphasized the power of “comfort women’s” testimonies (Mirkinson, 2020, p. 169): One thing we do know now more than ever is that the power of speaking out can never be underestimated. When the “comfort women” spoke out, they helped start a revolution. They weren’t the first, but their voices about the wartime rape and sexual violence are helping to make what was long acceptable never acceptable. And that voice is getting louder and covering bigger ground all the time.

The Power of 103 Korean “Comfort Women’s” Personal Narratives as Both Qualitative and Quantitative Data Sets Japanese historical revisionists have not accepted “comfort women’s” testimonies as credible evidence for sexual slavery (Hata, 2018; Ramseyer, 2022, pp. 2, 3, 17). But the criminal justice system has considered victims’ testimonies as a central factor to determining criminal judgements. In determining whether the CWS was sexual slavery or commercial prostitution, the following two are key issues: (1) whether they were forcibly mobilized to “comfort stations”; and (2) whether they were forced to sexually serve Japanese soldiers under detention in JMB. As Yoshimi

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(2013, p. 41) aptly pointed out, the Japanese military is unlikely to have left behind documents indicating that it mobilized Asian women by force to JMB, just as criminals who kidnap innocent people do not keep records of their illegal behavior. In fact, the Japanese military made every effort to eliminate historical records about the CWS by communicating orally as much as possible (Hayashi, 2015, p. 51). It also tried to destroy as many historical documents related to the CWS as possible. For these reasons, “comfort women’s” testimonies are very important for determining whether or not the CWS was sexual slavery. Another important reason why Japanese historical revisionists have to accept “comfort women’s” testimonies as credible evidence for Japanese military sexual slavery is that all governments, including the Japanese government, and international human rights organizations have used the victims’ testimonies as the most important pieces of evidence. The Kono Statement, which acknowledged the forced mobilization of “comfort women,” was based on both historical documents and personal interviews with KCW’s testimonies (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, 1993). Unlike Japanese historical revisionist politicians, human rights organizations accepted KCW’s testimonies as evidence and announced it as sexual slavery. Moreover, the Shimonoseki Branch of the Yamaguchi District Court accepted the forced mobilization of KCW plaintiffs based on their testimonies (Kim, 1998). In addition, the two most important resolutions to the Japanese government by major international human rights organizations were made mainly based on their interviews with South Korean, North Korean, and other Asian “comfort women” (Coomaraswamy, 1996; Dolgopal and Pranjape, 1994). These human rights organizations concluded that the CWS was a perfect form of sexual slavery. A very important issue is not whether we can use “comfort women’s” testimonies as credible evidence, but whether the sample size of their testimonies is large enough to generalize the findings to all “comfort women.” Fortunately, the Korean Council and the Korean Research Institute on the Chongshindae (Korean Research Institute) conducted personal interviews with 103 KCW and published them in eight volumes between 1993 and 2004. The two organizations completed the eight volumes, which include 103 personal narratives of KCW. When either organization started a volume of KCW’s personal narratives, it recruited several female volunteer professors, adjunct professors, and doctoral students who were qualified to conduct audio-recorded personal interviews with each KCW. Each interviewer contacted the same KCW four to six times at different

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time periods for the sake of the accuracy and consistency of information. As will be shown later, each personal interview group made an effort not to hide any finding, even inconvenient findings, such as voluntary participation in “comfort stations.” Given these facts, Ramseyer’s unfounded attack on the Korean Council for controlling “who scholars and reporters will see and what the women will say” (Ramseyer, 2022, p. 21) is never justified. Moreover, 103 testimonies given by KCW constitute a sample large enough for statistical analyses, as well as the largest sample among several sets of Asian “comfort women’s” testimonies. Since every social group has a few or several deviant cases, we need to use the rule of the “majority” or the “vast majority” as the important criteria for determining whether KCW were sexual slaves or commercial prostitutes. A large number of KCW’s personal narratives were obtained through many women interviewers’ hard work for a long period of time (12 years). But only one of the eight volumes of the edited collections, covering approximately 2600 pages, was translated into English at the time I started my book project in 1995. Even if all eight volumes had been translated into English, it is unlikely that many people would read all 2600 pages of the eight volumes. Moreover, even if someone actually read all eight volumes in their entirety, it would be difficult to understand the overall picture of KCW’s forced mobilization to “comfort stations” and their brutal treatments without quantitative data based on tables. Few Korean scholars have used the 103 personal narratives as a quantitative data set (the exceptions are Chung, 2016; Min, 2021; Yun, 2015). Feminist scholars had used them only as qualitative data. However, I used the personal narratives both as a qualitative and quantitative data set in this paper. Ramseyer rejected “comfort women’s” testimonies as credible evidence on the ground that “these scholars rely too heavily on the statements from a small group of comfort women who demanded compensation from Japan…” (Ramseyer, 2022, p. 23). I hope he will accept the major findings from my analyses of 103 KCW, a sample of KCW which is large enough, in this article. I would like to indicate that it is Japanese historical revisionists who used a few cases of KCW to deny the CWS as sexual slavery. I would like to introduce a few tables and a few key quotations based on the 103 testimonies given by KCW to show the power of their testimonies. Table 1 shows the age distribution of 103 KCW. They were mobilized to JMB at unbelievably young ages. That’s why they are often called Korean “comfort girls.” Seven KCW were mobilized to JMB at

Table 1 Ages at which KCW were mobilized to “comfort stations”

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Age (years)

N (number)

%

8 29 59 7 103

8 28 57 7 100

11–12 13–15 16–20 21–27 Total

Sources Korean Council (2001, 2004), Korean Council and Korean Research Institute (1993, 1997, 2001), Korean Research Institute (2003), Korean Research Institute and Korean Council (1995, 1999)

age twelve, while one was mobilized at the age of eleven. Twenty-nine of them were mobilized between ages thirteen and fifteen. The majority of them (N = 59) were sent to JMB between sixteen and twenty. The minimum age at which Korean and Japanese women could legally start work as prostitutes at that time, according to Japanese law and international treaties that Japan had signed, was 21. Only 7% of KCW had reached the legal age for prostitution. The mobilization of underage Korean women (93%) by the Japanese military violated three international treaties that the Japanese government had ratified long before: the Japanese government had signed the International Agreement for the Suppression of the White Slave Trade Traffic in 1904, the International Convention for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic in 1910, and the International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children in 1921 (Yoshimi, 2000, p. 156). As minors, 93% of KCW should be considered legally as involuntary participants in JMB, regardless of their mode of mobilization. Moreover, the fact that the vast majority of KCW were minors also easily refutes the argument by Japanese historical revisionists (Hata, 1990; Norma, 2016; Ramseyer, 2022) that most KCW were originated from prostitution houses. In determining the issue of whether the CWS was sexual slavery or not, examining the methods of comfort women’s mobilization to JMB are very important. Japanese historical revisionists claimed that most KCW participated in JMB voluntarily or through sales by their parents. For example, the Society for the Dissemination of Historical Facts, consisting of Japanese right-wing lawmakers, journalists, and scholars, placed a fullpage advertisement titled “The Facts” in the Washington Post on June 14, 2007. The advertisement included five alleged major facts. The

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first was: “No historical document has ever been found by historians or research organizations that positively demonstrates that women were forced against their will into prostitution by the Japanese Army.” The claim that there was no historical data that demonstrate the forcible mobilization of KCW is deadly wrong. Veki Yoshikata (2015) and other Korean scholars (Kang, 1997) found many articles published in Korean dailies in the post-war years that indicated the forcible mobilization of Korean girls and young women to JMB in the name of the chongshinde or choeonyogongchul (devoting an unmarried girl to the Japanese government). But since some KCW were sold by their parents with a small number of them having voluntarily participated, statistical data can effectively determine how the majority of KCW were mobilized to JMB. Table 2 shows different methods of KCW’s mobilization to JMB based on 103 KCW’s personal narratives. The Japanese government and historical denialists claimed that the vast majority of comfort women voluntarily participated or were sold by their parents for advance payments. Statistics in Table 2 refute the claim. 103 KCW included 106 mobilizations as three of them were mobilized twice. Contrary to the Japanese government’s argument, the vast majority of KCW (80%) were mobilized through coercive methods or employment fraud. Only six KCW voluntarily participated in JMB, with 13% (N = 14) sold by their parents and other relatives. Only eight of those sold by family members were sold directly to recruiters, with the others sold to third parties, such as restaurants and drinking places. Japanese historical revisionists seem to consider employment fraud as not forced Table 2

Methods of KCW’s Mobilization to JMB

Method Mobilization by coercion at home, work, or at someone else’s home Abducted or kidnapped outside of home Mobilized by a combination of employment fraud and coercion Employment fraud Sold by their parents and other relatives Voluntary or semi-voluntary participation All

N

%

13 18 16 39 14 6 106

12 17 15 37 13 6 100

Sources Korean Council (2001, 2004), Korean Council and Korean Research Institute (1993, 1997, 2001), Korean Research Institute (2003), Korean Research Institute and Korean Council (1995, 1999)

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mobilizations. But the criminal justice system considers mobilization by employment fraud as forcible mobilization. All international human rights organizations include employment fraud in forced mobilization.

Concluding Remarks Korean and other Asian “comfort women” were forcibly mobilized to JMB and encountered brutal treatments by Japanese soldiers. Repeated sexual and physical violence against them forced many of them to commit suicide, but many others chose not to commit suicide to come back alive to accuse the Japanese military government of the brutal sexual slavery at the end of the war. However, stigma attached to the victims of sexual violence forced them to keep silent for about fifty years. Most of them, unable to have normal marital life, suffered severe poverty and physical/mental health problems in the dark. They had not found any opportunity to accuse the Japanese military government of sexually attacking and abusing them. While Korean women leaders were fighting against the military government’s use of sex tourism of Japanese businessmen as a means to earning dollars and sexual interrogation of women college student activists, they came to start the redress movement for the victims of Japanese military sexual slavery in the late 1980s. When they were anxiously looking for KCW survivors to challenge the Japanese government’s denial of sexual slavery, Kim Hak-sun halmeoni emerged to tell what had happened to her at JMB. Her first public testimony in 1991 attracted global media attention, encouraging many other Korean and other Asian victims to come forward to accuse the Japanese military government of sexual slavery. The Korean Council effectively organized KCW’s public testimonies in Japan, the United States, and international human rights organizations. The very enthusiastic responses to their public testimonies have changed many Korean “comfort women” into human rights activists. They realized that their public testimonies had the power to change the world to make it a safe place for women. Most of them did not complete elementary school education. But many of them had become human rights activists and fought hard using their public testimonies until they died. Only eleven Korean KCW survivors stay alive now, with none of them healthy enough to give a testimony. Japanese politicians and historical revisionists may believe that the redress movement will come to an end when all comfort women survivors die. However, the redress movement

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will continue, as the Japanese government has refused to acknowledge its predecessor’s crime and make a sincere apology. The 103 personal narratives made by KCW included in the eight edited volumes are expected to play a more important role in revealing KCW’s brutal treatments at JMB now and in the future.

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———. 2007. Ddaldeul-ui Arirang: Iyagi-ro Sseun “Wianbu” Undongsa (Daughters’ Arirang [the Korean national folk song]: The History of “Comfort Women” Movement based on Stories). Seoul: Hewon Media. Kono, Yohei. 1993. “Statement by the Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono on the Result of the Study on the Issue of ‘Comfort Women’.” Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, August 4. http://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/women/ fund/state9308.html. Korean Council. (ed.). 2001. Gieak-euro Dasi Sseuneun Yeoksa (The History Rewritten by Memory). Collection of Testimonies, Volume 4. Seoul: Pulbit. ———. 2004. Yeoksa-reul Mandeuneun Iyagi (History-Making Stories). Collection of Testimonies, Volume 6. Seoul: Yeaseong-gwa Ingwon. ———. 2014. Hanguk Chongshindaemunje Daechaek Hyopuihe 20-Nyonsa (A Twenty-year History of the Korean Council). Seoul: Hanul. Korean Council and Korean Research Institute. (eds.). 1993. Gangjero Ggeulryeagan Joseonin Gunwinbudeul (Forcibly Dragged Korean Comfort Women). Collection of Testimonies Volume 1. Seoul: Hanul. ———. 1997. Gangjero Ggeulryeagan Joseonin Gunwinbudeul (Forcibly Dragged Korean Comfort Women). Collection of Testimonies, Volume 2. Seoul: Hanul. ———. 2001. Gangjero Ggeulryeagan Joseonin Gunwinbudeul (Forcibly Dragged Korean Comfort Women). Collection of Testimonies, Volume 5. Seoul: Pulbit. Korean Research Institute. (eds.). 2003. Joongguk-euro Ggeuryogan Gunwinanbudeul (Korean Comfort Women Dragged to China). Collection of Testimonies, Volume 2. Seoul: Hanul. Korean Research Institute and the Korean Council. (eds.). 1995. Joongguk-euro Ggeuryogan Joseonin Gunwinanbudeul (Korean Comfort Women Dragged to China. Collection of Testimonies, Volume 1. Seoul: Hanul. ——— (eds.). 1999. Gangjero Ggeulryeagan Joseonin Gunwinbudeul (Forcibly Dragged Korean Comfort Women). Collection of Testimonies, Volume 3. Seoul: Hanul. Lee, Hyo-chae. 1996. “Hanguk-ui Yeoseongundong: Eoje-wa Oneul” (The Korean Feminist Movement: Yesterday and Today). Seoul: Cheongusa. ———. 1997. “lbongun Wianbu Munje-ui Haegyiol-eul Wihan Unong-ui Jeongae Gawjeong” (The Development of the Movement for the Solution to the Comfort Women Issue). In Ilbongun Wianbu Munje-ui Jingsang (The Real Picture of the Japanese Military Comfort Women), edited by the Korean Council, 311–354. Seoul: Seoul: Yeoksa Bipyongsa. Lee, Hyun-Sook. 1992. Hanguk Gyohe Yeoseong Yeonhaphoe 25 Nyeonsa (A 25year History of Korean Church Women United). Seoul: Korean Church Women United. Min, Pyong Gap. 2021. Korean “Comfort Women: Military Brothels, Brutality, and the Redress Movement. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

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Mirkinson, Judith. 2020. “Building the San Francisco Memorial: Why the Issue of ‘Comfort Women’ Is Still Relevant Today?” In The Transnational Movement for the Victims of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery, edited by Pyong Gap Min, Thomas Chung, and Sejung Yim in pp. 149–200.” Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter Oldenburg. Norma, Carolina. 2016. The Japanese Comfort Women and Sexual Slavery during the China and Pacific War. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Ramseyer, J. Mark. 2022. “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War: A Response to My Critics.” The Harvard John M. Olin Discussion Paper Series. Soh, Chunghee Sarah. 2008. The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and PostColonial Memory in Korea and Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stetz, Margaret D., and Bonnie Oh. (eds.). 2001. Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War II . Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Thomas, Pierre. 1996. “War Crimes List Bars 16 Japanese from the U.S.” Washington Post, December 4. Yang, Jing-Ja. 1999. “Gongjeonhan Jaepan-eul Narisio” (Please Render a Fair Judgment). Korean Research Institute, Nesletter 6, No. 2. Yoshimi, Yoshiaki. 1993. Jaryojip: Jonggun Wianbu (Source Book: Military Comfort Women, translated from Japanese into Korean by Soon-Oh Kim). Seoul: Seomundang. ———. 2000. Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military during World War II . Translated by Suzanne O’Brien. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2013. Ilbongun Wianbu: Geu Yeaksa-wa Jinsil (Japanese Military Comfort Women: Their History and Truth). Seoul: Yeoksa Gonggan. Yun, Myung Suk. 2015. Choseonin Gunwianbu-wa Ilbongun Wiansojedo (Military Comfort Women and the Japanese Comfort Women System), translated from Japanese into Koreans by Min-Sun Choi. Seoul: Ihaksa.

The Comfort Women Redress Movement in the United States: The Korean Diaspora Through the Activities of the Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues and Immigrants’ Dual Identity Boram Yi and Jaehee Kim

Soon after the first public testimony of former comfort woman Haksun Kim of South Korea in 1991, many former comfort women from China, Indonesia, Japan, the Netherlands, the Philippines, and other Asian-Pacific countries came forward to break 50-year-old silence and testify about their harrowing experiences under Imperial Japan’s sexual slavery regime (Hanguk ch˘onsindae munje daech’aek wiw˘ohoe [The

B. Yi (B) History Program, University of Baltimore, Baltimore, MD, USA e-mail: [email protected] J. Kim Department of Political Science and Diplomacy, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul, South Korea

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 Ñ. Carranza Ko (ed.), New Ways of Solidarity with Korean Comfort Women, Palgrave Macmillan Studies on Human Rights in Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1794-5_3

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Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, hereafter the Korean Council], 1997; Henson, 1999; Kim-Gibson, 1999a; Qiu et al., 2014; Ruff-O’Herne, 1996; Schellstede, 2000). Scholars and human rights organizations around the world joined the comfort women to shed light on these long-silenced atrocities of World War II and to seek justice from the Japanese government (Dolgopol & Paranjape, 1994; Henry, 2011; Hicks, 1997; Howard, 1995; Kim, 1997; Kim & Sohn, 2017; Min, 2021; Moon & Song, 1998; Soh, 2009; Stetz & Oh, 2001; Tanaka, 2001; UN Commission on Human Rights, 1996; Yoshimi, 1995). The three-decades-long effort has brought international awareness to the comfort women issue and transformed it from an obscure issue during the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMFFE, or the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal) in the 1940s and, in the words of a South Korean diplomat in 1992, an “insignificant” nuisance between South Korean– Japan relations, to a broad question of women’s human rights in the world (Soh, 1996). The phrase “military sexual slaves” has become a widely accepted definition of the term “comfort women.” Moreover, the use of comfort women by Imperial Japan’s military has become one of the most well-known human rights violations it committed during World War II. For instance, the U.S. Interagency Working Group (IWG), created by the 2000 Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act, selected the comfort women issue as one of the four major topics it would need to locate, declassify, and publish, taking a sharp departure from U.S. military’s initial dismissal of comfort women as traditional “camp followers” in 1944 (Intergovernmental Working Group [IWG], 2006; Allied Translation and Interpreter Section [AITS], 1944). In December 2015, when the governments of Japan and South Korea announced reaching the much-criticized and now defunct “final and irreversible” agreement on the comfort women question, major media around the world reported the news (Choe, 2015; Japan and South Korea reach deal, 2015; Kwok, 2015; McCurry, 2015). As the comfort women issue gained visibility around the world, it also generated diverse conversations over important topics of our time— gender-based violence, war and human rights, colonialism and its legacy, and history and memory. This chapter approaches this important issue from yet another angle: the Korean diaspora and immigrants’ dual identity. More specifically, this chapter examines one of the most prominent non-governmental organizations (NGOs) dedicated to the comfort

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women redress movement in the United States (U.S.): the Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues, Inc. (WCCW). The organization finds its success in the members’ effective utilization of their dual identity as American citizens and residents of Korean heritage. The rise of the movement in the U.S. came at a time when the U.S. started witnessing increased political participation of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI). WCCW and other Korean American organizations’ use of its American identity helps expand the redress movement beyond the Korean American community, thus making it a Pan-Asian American movement.

Korean Americans and the Rise of Comfort Women Issue in the United States Through the Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues, Inc. Scholars of social studies have noted that immigrants often display dual identity, a combination of ethnic and national identities (Alba & Nee, 1997; Berry, 1997; Haritatos & Benet-Martínez, 2002; Kunst et al., 2018; Phinney et al., 2001; Verkuyten & Martinovic, 2012; Wu & So, 2019). Immigrants’ ethnic identity refers to individuals’ sense of belonging to their heritage group, often expressed by their adherence to values systems, participation in cultural practices, and use of common language together with emotional significance attached to that group (Ashmore et al., 2004; Phinney & Ong, 2007; Tajfel & Turner, 1986). Immigrants’ national identity means individuals’ internalized sense of belonging to the nation-state they reside (Huddy & Khatib, 2007; Umaña-Taylor et al., 2020). The relationship between one’s ethnic and national identities has been the focus of immigration and acculturation studies. While earlier research suggested that the two identities have a negative correlation, i.e., assimilation, a form of acculturation, meant the forced decline of one’s ethnic distinction (Alba & Nee, 1997), more recent studies show they are independent and immigrants’ acculturation is a process of adding to, rather than substation for (Berry, 2003; Berry et al., 2006). Dovidio et al.’s (1998) broad psychological study of dual identity further supports this view. They have developed a model that demonstrates that multiple identities can be perceived as equally and simultaneously salient (Dovidio et al., 1998). Utilizing this widely used model in psychology, researchers

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have argued that embracing one identity does not necessarily weaken immigrants’ other identities. In studying immigrants’ identity, scholars have demonstrated that being a member of both an ethnic group and the receiving nation is a key criterion for the positive adaptation of immigrants (Wiley et al., 2019). Some even argue that dual identity is, in fact, desirable because it gives immigrants sufficient identification with a subgroup to experience basic security and sufficient identification with the host society (González & Brown, 2006; Klandermans et al., 2008). Immigrants with dual identities are also seen as being in a position to bridge divides between different groups (Love & Levy, 2019; Wiley et al., 2019). The Korean Americans in the greater Washington, DC, area and their effort to bring American attention to the comfort women redress movement through WCCW exemplify how immigrants utilize dual identity to push an important cause. Their sense of a shared ethnic identity with Korean comfort women motivated the members to organize and support the redress movement for Imperial Japan’s sexual slaves. Their national identity compelled them to pressure the U.S. government to take action against this serious human rights violation committed by one of its closest allies, Japan. WCCW was one of the first organizations dedicated to the comfort women redress movement in the U.S. It has remained the most active redress organization in the country since its foundation in 1992 by Korean Americans in the greater DC area. In fact, the organization’s establishment began with visits by two Korean women. In March 1992, on her way to the United Nations (UN) to submit a petition requesting the UN Human Rights Commission’s investigation of Imperial Japan’s comfort women system, Hyo-jae Yi stopped by New York City, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC (Yi, 1997). At the time, Yi was serving as the co-chairperson of the Korean Council, a combination of 37 women’s organizations in South Korea established to focus on the comfort women redress movement in 1990. With her, Yi brought the first collective testimony of comfort women, published by the Korean Council, to be circulated in Korean communities. When Soon-im Kang, a member of the Korean United Methodist Church of Greater Washington (KUMC) who had been following the comfort women news through Korean newspapers, received the book, she edited and sold it with the permission of the Korean Council and sent the $3,500 proceedings to the Korean Council. When she and her church members learned that Keum-ju Hwang, a

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surviving comfort woman, was to visit the UN later that year, they invited her to Washington, DC, and paid for her visit (S.I. Kang, personal communication, January 29, 2000). In November 1992, Hwang testified in a meeting, “A night for prayer and testimony,” at the KUMC. Her heartbreaking story of being drafted by the colonial authorities at age 18, sent to northern China, and repeatedly raped by Japanese officers and soldiers at gunpoint for four harrowing years brought tears to the audience (Schellstede, 2000). Many felt an intimate emotional connection to the past and present sufferings of Hwang and other comfort women. Some audience members lived through colonial times and had vivid memories of those years she had described. Deeply moved by Hwang’s courage, some participants decided to form an organization dedicated to helping surviving comfort women and supporting their redress movement. They agreed to find a female member of KUMC who was fluent in English, Korean, and possibly Japanese. They believed that a woman would better understand the deep and intense suffering of comfort women. They also believed the ability to effectively communicate in all three languages was critical to the success of their redress movement. They found Dong Woo Lee Hahm and unanimously elected her as the founding president of WCCW, the first comfort women advocacy organization in the U.S. (Constante, 2019; D.L. Hahm, personal communication, January 27, 2000; Lee & Hahm, 2020). Hahm received most of her early education during the last decade of the Japanese colonial era when every Korean child had to learn and use Japanese at school; thus, she was fluent in Japanese. She graduated from Ewha Womans University in South Korea, majoring in English literature and language. After she immigrated to the U.S., she worked for the World Bank for twenty years. In addition, she and her husband were active members of the KUMC (D.L. Hahm, personal communication, January 27, 2000). She met all the preferred qualifications that the initial members sought. Whenever asked what motivated her to lead the comfort women movement, she always responded, “I was only twelve years old when Korea gained independence, but it [being a comfort woman] could have been me if I had been born just a couple years early” (Constante, 2019). She said she was shocked upon hearing the testimony because she had never heard of comfort women in her entire life (D.L. Hahm, personal communication, January 27, 2000; Constante, 2019).

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Like Hahm, many original members of WCCW, both first and second generations of Korean Americans, cited their personal sense of connection with Korean comfort women and the Korean identity as their main inspiration to join the movement (S.I. Kang, personal communication, January 29, 2000; J. Park, personal communication, February 2, 2000; M. Park, personal communication, February 2, 2000). Their sentiment was echoed by Korean American artists and writers who created their works on the subject of comfort women. When Hwang broke her story in the 1992 meeting, author and filmmaker Dai Sil Kim-Gibson was invited to translate Hwang’s testimony into English. She elaborated on that experience in Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women Sources. She wrote that the encounter with Hwang brought her past in colonized Korea, which she had kept buried, to come back to her consciousness “with startling force” (Kim-Gibson, 1999a, p. 2). Living in her adopted country for over a quarter century, she said she had put her past aside, but Hwang’s story drew her into that past again. She began conducting research on comfort women and traveling to interview them in South Korea, China, and Japan. Later, she published a collection of comfort women’s testimonies. Based on that book, she produced a documentary, Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women, which was aired nationally on the Public Broadcasting Company (PBS) in 2000 and received critical acclaim and awards (Kim-Gibson, 1999b). A renowned Korean American photographer, Yunghi Kim, built her portfolio based on Korean comfort women, and Time magazine bought Kim’s work for its special report on comfort women in its Asian edition. When asked why she chose comfort women as her first topic as a freelance photographer, she answered, “[I]f I had been born 50 years ago this [being a comfort woman] could have happened to me” (Souza, 1997). The Korean Americans’ deep sense of a personal connection to the country of their birth and its history motivated them to join the comfort women redress movement in various ways. Their “Korean-ness,” their ethnic identity, thus played a key role in mobilizing the community. Soon, Korean Americans in North America formed organizations to help support WCCW and Korean comfort women. They include New York city-based Korean American Voters Council (later renamed to the Korean American Civic Engagement) and Los Angeles-based the LA Working Group (later renamed to the Korean American Forum of California) (Shin, 1999; Soh & Evans, 2007). Sharing the common cause and ethnic solidarity, WCCW has often worked closely with other Korean American

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organizations in petitioning public officials to push the 2007 Comfort Women Resolution in Congress and staging protest rallies in Washington, DC (Kim, 2020). When strategizing how they could best support comfort women and raise public awareness of the comfort women issue, WCCW utilized their “American-ness,” their national identity. Hahm said that, from the beginning, she believed that the seriousness of the comfort women issue should be spread beyond the Korean community. Later in an interview, she said, What good is it if we [Korean Americans] gather only to moan about the tragic past and to console each other? I think the best way to honor and respect the courage of comfort women would be letting Americans hear their stories and help them achieve their demands. (D.L. Hahm, personal communication, January 27, 2000)

Even before WCCW was officially launched, she was instrumental in having Keum-ju Hwang’s testimony reported with an English translation—on the local TV station, Fox 5 News, to inform fellow Americans about her story. WCCW set out to achieve two objectives: a thorough investigation of the comfort women system and receiving an official apology and compensation from the Japanese government. These are the same goals that the Korean Council had. However, WCCW did not adopt the same strategy that the Korean Council adopted in South Korea. While the Korean Council appealed to Korean nationalism (which included a sense of anti-Japanese sentiment), WCCW presented the comfort woman movement redress as an issue of racial discrimination and human rights violation (Moon, 1999). WCCW was also very intentional about not being seen as an anti-Japanese organization. Korean Americans involved in the movement agreed with the strategy and collaborated with other Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and AAPI civil rights organizations (Kim, 2020; Koyama, 2020; Mirkinson, 2020). Korean American activists’ emphasis on their American identity allows them to reach out and build a strong coalition with other ethnic Americans. In addition, while the Korean Council had appealed to international institutions and cooperated with international women’s human rights organizations, WCCW focused its effort on drawing attention from the American public and the U.S. government. This different strategic choice reflected the social and political dynamics of the country in which they

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were located. The Korean Council was, in a sense, pushed to search for outside legal and moral support because of the initial lukewarm response from the South Korean government (Yi, 1997). However, from the beginning, WCCW, as a voluntary group composed of American citizens and residents, chose to appeal to their government and to reach their fellow Americans by engaging in civic dialogues and political actions. WCCW’s strategic choice is what political scientists Huddy and Khatib (2007) have identified as the expression of a strong national identity, which they explained as a sense of being or feeling American with greater civic and political engagement. WCCW’s events and activities in the U.S. thus display their strong American identity. WCCW has organized multiple events and activities, ranging from an art exhibition to a film screening, provided educational lectures and symposiums, and supported research and publications about comfort women. In 2000, it published a collection of 19 testimonies of former comfort women, Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military. It includes many stories that were recorded for the first time, including those of North Korean comfort women (Schellstede, 2000). In addition, WCCW kept a keen eye on news reported in the U.S. germane to the comfort woman issue. Located near the nation’s capital, they were able to organize protest rallies rather quickly. For example, they picketed in front of the White House when Japanese Emperor Akihito visited it in 1994. Female participants of this rally wore white hanbok, a traditional Korean dress for women, holding signs like “Japan War Crime” in English and Korean (Lee & Hahm, 2020). Both the language they used on the pickets and the white dress women wore displayed the protesters’ dual identity. In Korea, a women’s white dress is a symbol of mourning, as it is worn at a funeral. In the U.S., women’s white dress in a rally, worn by suffragettes, represents solidarity in the women’s rights movement. By choosing to wear a white dress that carried political symbolism within the U.S. context and a cultural symbolism for Korea, they engaged in the American tradition of political protests while claiming their Korean identity. The protesters highlighted their American national identify and Korean ethnic identity simultaneously without making one subordinate to the other, as Dovidio et al. (1998) as well as Wiley et al. (2019) observed. They claimed their dual identity, American citizens of Korean heritage, to push the comfort women redress movement in the U.S. In order to raise awareness of the comfort women issue in the U.S., WCCW often compared the comfort women system to historical events

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more familiar to the American public. In its open letter to visiting Japanese Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa, which was published in the Washington Post in 1993, WCCW stated that comfort women were “forcibly recruited into sexual enslavement by the Japanese military during World War II” (Hahm, 1993). Then, they asked Prime Minister Hosokawa to “disclose all records and data” regarding comfort women and to establish a memorial to commemorate the lives of the victims “similar to the Holocaust Museum” (Hahm, 1993). This open letter was aimed less at the Japanese government than the American public. Using the timely visit of the Japanese political leader, WCCW asked American readers, “Have you ever heard about comfort women?” (Hahm, 1993). By equating comfort women with the victims of the Holocaust, the letter positioned comfort women as victims of crimes against humanity similar to those of the Holocaust. WCCW’s utilization of its dual identity and introduction of the comfort women issue as a universal issue of human rights violation was echoed in the Korean American college students’ petition to President Bill Clinton in 1999. In March 1999, the Korean American Students’ Conference (KASCON) invited Yoon-shim Kim, a surviving comfort woman, to be its keynote speaker. After the students heard Kim’s testimony, her abduction, rape, and sexual slavery when she was close to their age, tears filled the auditorium, and the nine hundred participants adopted a resolution to write and send their petition to President Clinton (Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues, Inc., 1999). In the petition, the students demanded U.S. arbitration in the dispute over the comfort women issues between South Korea and Japan, using their dual identity to appeal to universal values and American interests. They first introduced themselves as American citizens of Korean heritage and active political participants who had a great interest in human rights violations inflicted on former comfort women. Then, they asserted that avoiding any engagement would further deepen the problem between Japan and South Korea, two important allies of the U.S., which could limit effective U.S. security operations in East Asia (Korean American students’ conference XIII, 1999). They were drawn to the comfort women’s story because of their shared ethnicity and universal values of human rights. They demanded the action of their government because they understood that was their fundamental right as American citizens. Just like the members of WCCW, the mostly second-generation college

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students found no issues in asserting their Korean and American identities at the same time, affirming the recent research on immigration and acculturation. As the Korean American students pointed out, WCCW recognized it was critical to get the U.S. government involved in the comfort women redress movement. They found their allies in the U.S. Congress and the Department of Justice (DOJ). The first ally was the bipartisan members of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus (changed to the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in 2008) led by Holocaust survivor and Representative of California Tom Lantos (Dem.). In 1993, 24 members of the caucus wrote an additional open letter to Prime Minister Hosokawa urging the Japanese government to investigate the comfort women case “promptly and impartially.” They concluded the petition with the following remarks: Just as it was important for the U.S. Government to decide in 1988 to extend long-overdue official apologies and to pay compensation to surviving American citizens of Japanese descent who were wrongfully forced into internment camps during World War II, we strongly urge your government to do the same for women survivors of forced service in military brothels. (Lantos et al., 1993)

This unsolicited letter from a group in the House of Representatives assured WCCW that working with the members of the U.S. Congress would be effective in pushing for the Japanese government’s apology and compensation. Working with WCCW, in July 1997, Congressman William O. Lipinsky of Illinois (Dem.), also a member of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, introduced House Resolution 126. In the resolution, he and 69 co-sponsors urged the Japanese government to extend a formal apology for its aggression in World War II and to pay reparations to all the victims of Japan’s war crimes. Comfort women were included as one of the four types of victims specifically identified in the resolution (Lipinski Resolution, 1997). Jason Tai, a spokesperson for the congressman, explained that the purpose of this proposal was to have Japan tell the truth. He stated, “In a parallel to the Holocaust, we believe that in order for this type of war crime to never be allowed to occur again, we must be able to document the truth and tell the story” (Washington

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Coalition for Comfort Women Issues, Inc., 1998). Although this resolution failed to pass, it is significant to note that this was the first time that the members of the U.S. Congress formally requested a Japanese government’s action on behalf of comfort women. On November 8, 1999, Congressman Lane Evans (Dem., Il.), one of the co-sponsors of the 1997 Lipinski Resolution, placed a formal statement on behalf of comfort women in the Congressional Record. He invited Americans to join him in concluding the unfinished battle of the Pacific War. In strong tones, he called out for Japan to apologize for its atrocity before the world (Congressional Record, 1999). Since he cosponsored the Lipinski Resolution in 1997, Evans has been dedicated to furthering the cause of comfort women in Congress. He proudly stated, “This was the first step [for] the people in the Congress [to be] aware of the issue and what the implications are” (L. Evans, personal communication, February 2, 2000). Until his retirement in 2006, Evans kept the comfort discussion relevant in Congress (Soh & Evans, 2007). In 2007, the U.S. House of Representatives anonymously passed Representative Mike Honda (Dem.)’s comfort women resolution, Resolution 121, which was close to Evans’ 2006 resolution. Neither Lipinski nor Evans became interested in the comfort women issue because of the demand from their constituency. Both represented districts where Whites and Blacks consisted of 97 percent of the population. In Evans’ 17th Illinois District, people with ethnic roots in Poland, other East European nations, Italy, and Ireland comprised the most powerful majority. In both districts, Hispanics were the fastest-growing minority (Congressional Quarterly, 1997). Representative Evans cited his passion for human rights as the reason for his interest in the comfort woman issue. He was a member of the bipartisan Human Rights Caucus and was an outspoken critic of human rights violations in East Timor. In an interview, he said he supported WCCW specifically because he wanted “to help a group that has no champion, nobody to speak up for them [sic], and [to] translate that into other colleagues in the Congress” (L. Evans, personal communication, February 2, 2000). Working closely with the members of Congress who dedicated their efforts to human rights causes and directly reaching out to the American public for a decade, WCCW helped pass the historic 2007 comfort women resolution. The current president of WCCW, Jungsil Lee, explains it is the “culmination of WCCW’s 15 years of grassroots ‘comfort women’ movement efforts in the United States” (Lee & Hahm, 2020, p. 128).

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A congressional resolution is a non-binding resolution that has no enforcement mechanism. However, the passage of this 2007 resolution is significant in two ways. First, this was the first time the U.S. Congress officially defined Imperial Japan’s comfort women as sex slaves and victims of human trafficking, thus not subject to the statute of limitations. It also requested the Japanese government to “formally acknowledge, apologize, and accept historical responsibility” for its use of comfort women (H. Res. 121, 2007). Second, once becoming a resolution, it could be added to enforce other bills. For instance, in the 2014 U.S. government spending bill, both the House of Representatives and the Senate attached the 2007 Honda Resolution to the Department of State’s budget. This means the department needs to report back to Congress how it had worked to address the requests presented in the resolution. Congressman Lipinski’s office also worked closely with WCCW in opening a comfort women exhibition, “Comfort Women of World War II: An Indisputable Tragedy,” at the Cannon House Office Building in 1998. Lipinski persuaded the Human Rights Caucus and the Women’s Caucus of the U.S. House of Representatives to sponsor it. In a press conference held during the exhibition, Korean comfort woman Bok-dong Kim and Filipina comfort woman Losita Nacino testified their ordeals as Imperial Japan’s sex slaves (Han, 1998). Using the Congressional building for the comfort women exhibition proved to be an effective strategy to push the Japanese government to respond. The Japanese Ambassador to the U.S. held a press conference protesting the exhibition. He claimed that “[the exhibition] might be disrespectful to” his government (Morrison, 1993). It was the first time that the Japanese Ambassador to the U.S. expressed his government’s concerns over discussing the comfort women issue in the U.S., but it was not the last. Now the debate over the comfort women movement between South Korea and Japan started to spread to the American public space. WCCW also developed close relations with another branch of the U.S. government. In October 1996, WCCW coordinated meetings between former comfort woman Yoon-shim Kim and investigators in the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) of the DOJ and in the Department of State. WCCW arranged for five other comfort women to fly to Washington, DC, and meet the OSI investigators (Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues, Inc., 1997). OSI director of Eli Rosenbaum later recalled how their meeting with courageous comfort women

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inspired them to include comfort woman perpetrators on the DOJ watch list announced a month later (Rosenbaum, 2000). On December 3, 1996, the DOJ announced a ban on the entry of 16 Japanese citizens suspected of involvement in the Japanese Imperial Army’s “inhumane and frequently fatal experiments on humans,” or “operation of so-called ‘comfort stations’” (Pierre, 1996). At the time of the DOJ announcement, the comfort women’s tragedy was less known to the American public than Imperial Japan’s biological experiment on live human bodies conducted mainly by notorious Unit 731 (Harris, 1994). However, WCCW contributed to having the DOJ include the comfort woman perpetrators in the U.S. government’s watch list. In making its first Japanese watch list, the DOJ included not only the members Unit 731 but also those who participated in running the comfort women system. Moreover, in the press release, the DOJ defined the nature of the comfort women crime as “rape,” even before the UN accepted this interpretation (Rosenbaum, 2000). The Japanese watch list was the first public criticism of Imperial Japan in connection with its war crimes made by the U.S. government since the conclusion of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal in 1948. These 16 men were the first Japanese citizens listed on a U.S. watch list since the creation of the OSI in 1979. Prior, the office had already identified more than 60,000 Germans and Europeans linked to Nazi persecution and had prevented a hundred from entering the U.S. Since the banning of the Japanese war crime suspects, the OSI has been a partner of WCCW in pursuit of historical and legal justice for the longforgotten victims of World War II. Its director Rosenbaum frequently appeared at WCCW-sponsored lectures, exhibitions, and symposiums, though he did not hold any official title in the organization. He also became a strategy advisor of the coalition (Rosenbaum, 2000). Within a decade of its foundation, WCCW has established itself as an important Korean American organization for the comfort women cause. It has served as a liaison between Americans and Korean comfort women. The comfort women issue probably would have been neglected in the OSI if WCCW had not coordinated the meetings between the investigators and Korean comfort women. WCCW found surviving comfort women who were well enough to fly to the U.S. to be investigated by American officials. WCCW paid their traveling expenses and provided Sangmie Choi Schellstede, who was a State Department interpreter and

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served then as the vice president of the coalition (Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues, Inc., 1997). If Korean Americans had not shown enthusiasm for the issue when two dozen lawmakers spoke up in support of foreign women who told half a century-old stories, the argument supporting the comfort women would have been less compelling. The rise of the initial comfort women movement in the Washington, DC, area is a story that reveals Korean ethnic identity. Korean Americans in the greater DC area, one of the three hubs of Korean American communities in the U.S., heard the compelling testimony of a former comfort woman and felt a deep emotional connection. Her story of Japan’s colonial exploitation and war touched the Korean identity in the audience because they deeply cared about the country they left, and some lived through the colonial era. They first heard the comfort woman’s testimony in a church, one of the most prominent community centers for Korean Americans, with which approximately 75 percent of Korean Americans were associated (Min, 1992). The members of the church were the first to organize WCCW. The particular ways in which WCCW galvanized the issue, however, demonstrate their deep involvement in the country of their settlement. WCCW demonstrated its commitment to the comfort women cause by appealing directly to their fellow Americans and their government. Working within the U.S., utilizing their government, and thus using their American identity, WCCW helped raise public awareness of the comfort women issue in the U.S. WCCW’s three-decade-long activism demonstrates how Korean Americans have effectively used their dual identity—American citizens of Korean heritage—to support the comfort women redress movement in the country of their residence.

Pan-Asian American Movement In addition to WCCW’s effective use of dual identity and tireless activism, the changes in the American political landscape in the 1990s helped create a conducive context for the success of the comfort women redress movement in the U.S. The rise of the Pan-Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders movement since the 1960s in the U.S., although not without challenges, provided a critical backdrop for the WCCW movement. In 1950, there were only 600,000 people of Asian heritage living in the U.S. However, by the time of the 1990 census, 6.9 million Asian

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Americans (or three percent of the total U.S. population), including 787,849 Koreans, resided in the U.S. Asian Americans remained a small fraction of the entire U.S. population, but the fact that Asian Americans were the fastest-growing legal immigrants added weight to the numerical representation (Barringer et al., 1995). The dramatic increase in the Asian population in the U.S. resulted from the 1965 Hart-Cellar Immigration and Nationality Act. This immigration act finally eliminated the quota system, which discriminated against immigrants from Asian nations. The new law emphasized occupational preferences, especially favoring professionals and skilled laborers and family reunions. This change led to an increase in the number of Asian immigrants with high education levels in the U.S. The post-1965 Asian American immigrants were one of the most highly educated immigrant groups in U.S. history (Barringer et al., 1995; Min & Song, 1998). The earlier board membership of WCCW reflected this trend. Most of the first-generation members of the board received their terminal degrees in the U.S. and found their professions outside of the Korean community. Its 1.5- and second-generation participants were the offspring of post1965 immigrants. Native speakers and most professionals, the younger generation had diverse occupations ranging from filmmakers, researchers, interpreters, and employees of multi-national corporations (Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues, Inc., 1994–1999). The Asian American population growth came at the time when the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 helped many minorities take part in the electoral politics of the U.S. By the 1980s, an increasing number of Asian Americans began to seek political careers, usually at the local level. Examples on the East Coast include Margaret Chin, Democratic state committeewoman of New York’s 61st District, and S. B. Woo, lieutenant governor of Delaware. On the West Coast, Thomas Hsieh, supervisor of San Francisco, Judy Chu, councilwoman and mayor of Monterey Park, Michael Woo, councilman of Los Angeles, and Warren Furutani of the Los Angeles Board of Education, represented Asian public officials (Barringer et al., 1995). By the 1990s, Asian American politicians were winning state-level elections. For example, in 1994, Hawaiians elected the first Asian American governor, Filipino American Ben Cayetano. In 1997, Chinese American Gary Locke of Washington State became the second Asian American governor. The growing number of Asian Americans led U.S. government agencies to start collecting data on Asian Americans and to support research

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projects on contemporary Asian American communities. Periodic publications of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights of the U.S. Bureau of the Census added a study of Asian American population since 1970 (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1973). National political parties also started paying attention to Asian Americans. In the Democratic National Convention of 1976, election handbooks and ballots were printed in Chinese and other languages for the first time (Wei, 1993). In his presidential bid, Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter reached out to the Asian American community through the Asian/Pacific American Unit. It was the first time any presidential candidate had given Asian Americans an opportunity to work in a presidential campaign. The ad-hoc unit eventually became a part of the party’s Minority Affairs section, which included African Americans and Hispanics (Wei, 1993). In 1980, Congress also responded to the demand of the Japanese American Citizens Leagues and established a commission to investigate the legacy of the Japanese internment camp of World War II. In 1988, Congress passed the landmark Civil Liberties Act, through which the U.S. government offered an official apology and compensation to more than 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry who were sent to internment camps during World War II. The 1960s, with the rise of the civil rights movement, was also the time during which the term “Asian Americans” was coined. It was and remains a challenge to create a pan-Asian American identity of 50 different ethnic groups, yet this effort resulted in the establishment of Asian American Studies and Asian Studies in academia. In the late 1960s, Asian American Studies was established as a subfield of Ethnic Studies. The programs were initially set up as undergraduate courses in mostly West Coast colleges and universities with a significant enrollment of students of Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, and Korean backgrounds. By the mid-1970s, however, major universities in the U.S. had courses in Asian history, literature, and community. By the 1980s, on at least 10 campuses, including the University of California, Berkeley and Los Angeles, and the City College of New York, students could earn an undergraduate degree in Asian American Studies (Wang, 1981). This was also a time when Asian American college enrollment rose by 126 percent (Kiang, 1989), and many Asian Americans attended elite colleges and universities. From 1976 to 1986, the percentage of Asian American freshmen at MIT increased from 5.3 to 20.6 percent; from 3.6 to 12.8 percent at Harvard; and from 5.7 to 14.7 percent at Stanford (Harrison, 1987).

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The increasing number of courses in Asian studies and Asian American studies in academia means that the 1.5- and second-generation Korean American college students take classes that would contextualize the history of their parent’s generation. Mike Park, a lawyer and board member of WCCW, was a beneficiary of this expansion of Asian studies programs. An offspring of post-1965 Korean immigrants, he took courses on Asian history, literature, and politics and developed a keen interest in his parent’s homeland. This interest and knowledge eventually led him to join the comfort women redress movement. Another active member of WCCW, Jane Park, became interested in Korean politics through the Asian studies classes in her college. In a way, her involvement in the comfort women movement started during her college years. The search for ethnic heritage undoubtedly motivated WCCW members like Mike Park and Jane Park to join the organization. However, they did not see their activism only through the lens of their ethnic identity. They explained their involvement through the lens of the American political tradition of pursuing racial justice and human rights. Their emphasis on American identity bridges their activism to the Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI)’s political and civil rights movement. The pan-AAPI coalition became critical in the next chapter of the comfort women redress movement in the U.S.—building comfort women memorials throughout the U.S. while facing strong opposition from the Japanese government. Since the historic passage of House Resolution 121 in 2007, WCCW and other comfort women redress organizations in the U.S. have focused on building public commemorations and developing educational materials to continue the movement. In 2010, the Korean American Civic Empowerment (KACE) erected the first comfort women monument in the world in Palisades Park, New Jersey. It was the first public commemoration dedicated to the victims of sexual violence in the U.S. Four years later, WCCW initiated building the Comfort Women Memorial Peace Garden at the Fairfax county government center in Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC. However, the more commemoration sites were built in the U.S., the stronger the challenges from the Japanese government and “Japanese history deniers” had become (Kim, 2020, p. 187). They mounted the fiercest oppositions to stop the construction of comfort women memorials and monuments in two cities in California, Glendale, and San Francisco. In 2013, after the Glendale memorial was unveiled, 300 Japanese legislators sent a petition to the city of Glendale demanding

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its removal. In 2014, a small number of Japanese American residents filed a lawsuit against the city in a federal court, calling for the removal of the memorial (Spitzer, 2014). After the plaintiffs lost in the district and appellate courts, they prepared to bring the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. In support of their filing, the Japanese government submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court, claiming that the removal of the monument would serve Japan’s national core interest (Koichi Mera and GAHT-US Corporation v. City of Glendale, 2017). The Supreme Court declined to review the case and ended the legal battle. Despite political and legal challenges from the Japanese government and the Japanese Americans who closely associated with the right-wing politics in Japan, prominent local Japanese American civil rights organizations, including the Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress, the San Fernando Valley chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League, and the Japanese American Bar Association of California, stood with the comfort women redress activists (Koyama, 2020). With the firm support of multiethnic community organizations, the city kept the monument in its public park to remind its citizens of the seriousness of the violence against women, thus validating women’s voices (Berteaux, 2017). The process of building the largest comfort women memorial in the U.S., “Column of Strength,” in San Francisco demonstrates the power of pan-AAPI collaboration in commemorating crimes against humanity committed in the Asian-Pacific theater of World War II and raising public awareness of violence against women. Spearheaded by two retired judges of the California Supreme Court, Lillian Sing and Julie Tang of Chinse heritage, the multiethnic Comfort Women Justice Coalition (CWJC) led the movement to install the monument in the city’s Chinatown. Sing and Tang were deeply involved in the Rape in Nanjing Redress Coalition since the 1990s and closely worked with Japanese American civil rights activists, including Fred Korematsu, who led a legal fight against the wartime order that sent all people of Japanese heritage to internment camps during World War II. They also collaborated with Roy Hong, Phyllis Kim, and other Korean American community activists. Judith Mirkinson, a longtime women’s rights advocate, was also a core member of CWJC (Kim, 2020; Mirkinson, 2020). By bringing attention to comfort women’s history, Ting said, CWJC hoped to highlight preset issue of violence against women and human trafficking. She also wanted the memorial to remind the public of comfort women’s courage to speak out, thus, helping change the culture that

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blames women for becoming victims of such crimes. Eric Mar, who championed the memorial project during the planning process as the city’s supervisor, noted that the pan-Asian American collation was key to the successful building of the monument on public land (McGrane, 2017). Their views were reflected in the design of the monument. It features three young women, representing Chinese, Korean, and Filipino comfort women, standing in a circle and holding hands, while an elderly woman in Korean dress, resembling Hak-sun Kim, the first comfort woman who broke the silence, looking at them. Once again, the Japanese government and Japanese American supporters of Japan’s right-wing revisionists strongly protested the proposed installation of a comfort women memorial in San Francisco (Taylor, 2017). Despite these oppositions, the city of San Francisco chose to install the memorial and faced the city of Osaka’s unilateral declaration of ending the half-a-century-long friendship (Hauser, 2018). Japanese American civil rights organizations that supported the installation of the Glendale monument also supported the San Francisco memorial. In addition, they helped identify and stop Japanese right-wing revisionist campaign that spread misinformation about the history of comfort women (Koyama, 2020). For diverse supporters of the comfort women redress movement in the U.S., the comfort women issue is no longer exclusively a Korean American or a Japanese American issue but the issue of women’s human rights and racial justice that all Americans could participate in. Seattle-based human rights activist Emi Koyama explained that Japanese American supporters of the comfort women movement viewed it as a broad antiracist social justice struggle (Koyama, 2020). Representative Mike Honda, the lead sponsor of HR 121 and Japanese American, emphasized that the physical representation of the comfort women could not only teach the public about an issue in the past but also help them to think about how to prevent violence against women and end human trafficking today (McGrane, 2017). The increasing participation of AAPI in American politics and civil societies and their shared value of human rights help explain the pan-ethnic support of the comfort women redress movement in the U.S.

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Conclusion The examination of WCCW’s comfort women redress movement shows how immigrants can effectively utilize their ethnic and national identity to successfully advance a political cause in the U.S. Without subordination one identity to the other, WCCW has raised the comfort women redress movement to the American public sphere. Thus, this study challenges the binary approach in acculturation study and argues that to fully understand immigrants’ political mobilization, immigrants’ application of dual identity needs to be examined. WCCW and other comfort women redress activists’ focus on national identity has enabled them to collaborate with other minority and human rights organizations in the U.S. It is significant to note that the largest comfort women monument in the U.S. was built in San Francisco’s Chinatown led and supported by broad AAPI coalition (Mirkinson, 2020). Phyllis Kim, a 1.5 generation Korean American, comfort women redress movement activist, and executive director of Comfort Women Action Redress & Education (CARE) in California, explained her new initiative, the inclusion of comfort women in California public school’s world history curriculum this way: “When we immigrate, we bring our language, culture and history” (Kim, 2016). Here, she claimed the significance of encouraging the recognition of immigrants’ ethnic identity. Then she went on to say, “[t] hat’s the wealth that we bring into this state,” thus advocating her national identity based on multiculturalism (Kim, 2016). Entering into its fourth decade of activism, the comfort women redress movement in the U.S. may become more “Americanized.”

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McGrane, S. (2017, October 21). An important statue for “comfort women” in San Francisco. New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culturedesk/an-important-statue-for-comfort-women-in-san-francisco. Min, P. G. (1992). The structure and social functions of Korean immigrant churches in the United States. The International Migration Review, 26(4), 1370–1394. Min, P. G. (2021). Korean “Comfort women”: Military brothels, brutality, and the redress movement. Rutgers University Press. Min, P. G., & Song, Y. (1998). Demographic characteristics and trends of post1965 Korean immigrant women and men. In Y. I. Song & A. Moon (Eds.), Korean American women: From tradition to modern feminism (pp. 45–64). Praeger Publishers. Mirkinson, J. (2020). Building the San Francisco memorial: Why the issue of the “comfort women” is still relevant today? In P. G. Min, T. R. Chung, & S. S. Yim (Eds.), The transnational redress movement for the victims of Japanese military sexual slavery: The transnational redress movement for the victims (pp. 149–178). De Gruyter Oldenbourg. Moon, A., & Song, Y. I. (1998). Ethnic identities reflected in value orientation of two generations of Korean American women. In Y. I. Song & A. Moon (Eds.), Korean American women: From tradition to modern feminism (pp. 139–148). Praeger Publishers. Moon, K. H. S. (1999, March/April). South Korean movements against militarized sexual labor. Asian Survey, 34(2), 310–327. Morrison, J. (1993, April 23). Japan urges caution. Washington Times, p. 18. Phinney, J. S., & Ong, A. D. (2007). Conceptualization and measurement of ethnic identity: Current status and future directions. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 54(3), 271–281. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0167.54.3.271. Phinney, J. S., Horenczyk, G., Liebkind, K., & Vedder, P. (2001). Ethnic identity, immigration, and well-being: An interactional perspective. Journal of Social Issues, 57 (3), 493–510. https://doi.org/10.1111/0022-4537.00225. Pierre, T. (1996, December 4). War crimes list bars 16 Japanese from U.S. Washington Post, p. A.01. Qiu, P., Zhiliang, S., & Lifei, C. (2014). Chines comfort women: Testimonies from imperial Japan’s sex slaves. Oxford University Press. Rosenbaum, E. (2000, January 29). Speech at the annual meeting of the Washington Coalition of Comfort Women Issues, Inc. Washington, DC, USA. Ruff-O’Herne, J. (1996). 50 years of silence: comfort women of Indonesia. Toppan Company. Schellstede, S. C. (Ed.). (2000). Comfort women speak: Testimony by sex slaves of the Japanese military. Holmes & Meier. Shin, H. S. (1999). Ilbongun “wianbu” munjeeui haegy˘oleul wehan Kukje hwaldoneui s˘ongkwawa kwaje [International activities for military “comfort

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Multiple Encounters and Reconstructed Identities: Halmoni Activist-Survivors of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery as Postcolonial Subjects Na-Young Lee

Harvard Law professor John Mark Ramseyer’s (2021) article “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War” sparked heated controversy.1 Scholars in South Korea, Japan, the United States, and elsewhere authored

1 Two factual claims are as follows: there were contractual agreements between comfort women and brothel keepers who paid women large cash advances, and women in brothels could leave early if they earned out by paying off their loans and debts. Please see Stanley et al. (2021) for details.

This is a reprint from PhiloSOPHIA. N.-Y. Lee (B) Department of Sociology, Chung-Ang University, Seoul, South Korea e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 Ñ. Carranza Ko (ed.), New Ways of Solidarity with Korean Comfort Women, Palgrave Macmillan Studies on Human Rights in Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1794-5_4

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numerous statements challenging his denial of historical truth and his unethical misuse of historical documents.2 Thirty years have passed since the issue of Japanese military sexual slavery has been raised.3 Paradoxically, however, historical revisionism and/or denialism of Japanese military sexual slavery seems to have expanded, choking our throats and snatching our hair while the perpetrators deny responsibility and explore the potential for a different kind of future. More people create convenient realities as they move away from original memories. The past is a heavy burden for them. They feel resentment toward what they have done or suffered through and tend to replace these with some-thing else. The replacement starts with a less painful scene that is constructed and fake but is created with one’s full awareness. As they describe the scene repeatedly, the distinction between truth and fabrication fades away… . As incidents go further back in history, the construction of convenient truth expands and becomes more perfect. (Levi, 2017)

2 Gordon and Eckert (2021), Stanley et al. (2021), and Kim (2021), etc. Simultaneously, other scholars defended his argument under the guise of “academic freedom” (Ezaki et al., 2021; Lee Young-hoon et al., 2021; Yi & Phillips, 2021, etc.). See the website of the Korean Council for detailed information regarding this issue: https://wom enandwar.net/kr/%ec%97%ad%ec%82%ac%eb%b6%80%ec%a0%95%eb%a1%a0-%eb%b0%98% eb%b0%95%ec%9d%84-%ec%9c%84%ed%95%9c-%ec%9e%90%eb%a3%8c-%eb%aa%a8%ec% 9d%8c/. 3 In this essay, I use the terms Japanese military “comfort women” and Japanese military

sexual slavery interchangeably and sometimes use the term Ch˘ongsindae when narrators or older texts use this term to refer to “comfort women.” Japanese military comfort women refer to the victims of the imperial Japanese military’s institutionalized sexual slavery system. The term military sexual slavery began to spread due to increasing awareness that the Japanese military comfort women issue cannot be explained as voluntary sex work based on private contracts. A major contributor to this change was Radhika Coomaraswamy, who defined the issue as “military sexual slavery in wartime” in a report submitted to the Commission on Human Rights in 1996. However, in the very beginning of the redress movement, ch˘ongsindae was also used with the term Japanese military comfort women. Ch˘ongsindae in principle refers to the Women’s Labor Corps, or the Women’s Volunteer Corps, which conscripted women from colonized Korea to labor for Japanese war efforts, such as in munitions factories. During the Japanese colonial period, in fact, there were many people who understood ch˘ongsindae as comfort women, and sometimes a labor mobilization and a mobilization for sexual abuse and exploitation were inseparable in both system and practice, which led to confusions in the memories of victims and perpetrators. For a more detailed explanation, see Chung (2016).

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As Primo Levi, a holocaust survivor, points out, if one “move[s] away from original memories,” the distinction between the very nature of memories of perpetrators and victims fades away, and the past falls into the hands of the next generation of perpetrators. They deploy excuse, denial, exaggeration, and the erasure of memory to manipulate the past and reconstruct historical “truth” in ways that suit them. How can “we” who pursue truth and justice, then, retain the original memories of victims? Last year marks the thirtieth anniversary of Kim Hak-soon’s courageous public testimony. After Kim came forward, many survivors and activists exposed the previously suppressed stories of sexual abuse, exploitation, and violence perpetrated by the Japanese military and imperial Japanese government. They challenged the imperialistic, colonialist, androcentric international order that had been formed, full of prejudice and injustice, and raised voices in order to change laws and systems in this process.4 Most importantly, through various encounters and cooperative activism, victims and supporters/activists have overcome traumatic personal experiences and extended their hands to others who had been suffering. This paper aims to disrupt what Levi terms the “convenient truth” constructed by the perpetrators by shedding light on the intersubject relations that took place between women, both victims and supporters. These relations reconstructed the women’s own identities and resituated subject positions, awakened the masses who had been sleeping in ignorance, formed solidarity in the women’s suffering and resistance, and drove the movement for resolu-tion. Since Japanese military sexual slavery (known as “comfort women”) was publicized in the early 1990s in South Korea, the issue has captured numerous people over the globe as a matter of the human rights of women. How did the movement for resolution of Japanese military sexual slavery start, and how could the practice have continued for more than thirty years? Why have some people taken interest in an issue that others have completely ignored, paid attention to the marginalized, and borne responsibility for historical injustice? To respond to these questions, I will explore the very beginning of both spontaneous and informed encounters and the ongoing relationship between survivors and activists, particularly highlighting the stories of Yun Chung-ok, the leading scholar and activist who first spoke out about 4 For more information regarding the changes in international norms and national laws driven by victims and supporters, see Chung (2016).

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the Japanese military sexual slavery, and Kim Bok-dong, a victim-survivor and human rights activist. I argue that their intertwined experiences and multiple dialogues to lead subject re/formation have been a driving force to continue the redress movement. Based on oral history interviews; feminist ethnography focusing on women’s lives, activities, and experiences5 ; and various documented resources, I will juxtapose the lives of victim-survivors and activists to show the ways in which they confronted the uncategorized Other and formed a community of responsibility to decolonize androcentric history and debunk ethnocentrism. This paper is a product of collaborative work and individual memory. It is built from a large accumulation of stories that have interwoven narratives of activists and survivors whom I have met since 2002, people who have been involved in the activism and given it meaning, and my personal experiences observing and participating in the movement as an insider/outsider. Thus, this paper does not seek to construct a single truth or a complete, one-dimensional version of history. Instead, it aims to participate in a restorative process of partial history that disrupts collective memories through individual ones, weaving their experiences of traversing space and time from the colonial era to now. Therefore, this article details the alterior history of the movement through the memories of activists who testified, as they listened to and spoke up with survivors.6

Colonized Girls Facing War and Gender-Based Violence One day, my village head came to our house accompanied by a Japanese man who was wearing a brown jacket without military insignia. We were wearing light Korean skirts and blouses, so it must have been in either spring or fall. The village head then had more power than the presentday provincial governors. The Japanese man who came spoke Korean very well, and he told my mother: “You have to give us your daughter, so we 5 Buch and Staller (2007, 190) argue that feminist ethnography might be distinguished from other ethnography in three aspects: (1) ethnography focused on women’s lives, activities, and experiences; (2) ethnographic methods or writing styles informed by feminist theories and ethics; and (3) ethnographic analysis that uses a feminist theoretical lens and/or pays particular attention to interplays between gender and other forms of power and difference. 6 See Lee Na-Young (2014, 2016) for details on the movement.

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can send her to the Teishintai (Ch˘ongsindae in Korean). You don’t have any sons, but even daughters need to work for the country. If you refuse to send her, you will be considered a traitor and will not be able to stay in this village.” My mother asked, “What is Teishintai?” They told her, “She will be working in a factory that makes military uniforms. She only has to work for three years. She will be sent home even before the three years are up if you let us know that she is about to get married, so you have nothing to worry about. If she wants to earn more money, however, she can continue to work for longer than the three years.” Although I don’t remember very clearly, they also wanted my mother to sign some kind of form but my mother refused to do it because she remembered how my father went through a horrendous time because he signed something by mistake. So, I could not refuse to go, and that was how I was conscripted. (Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan [hereafter Korean Council] and Korean Research Institute for Military Sexual Slavery, 1997, 84)7

A girl who had been born a daughter of a peasant in Yangsan, South Gyeongsang Province, in 1926 thus became a Japanese military “comfort woman” at the age of fifteen in 1941, and she struggled to return to her homeland after liberation. Her father had passed away due to stress induced by debt collectors after the person he had acted as a guarantor for had failed to pay their debt. After her father’s death, her mother took care of the six children alone by “transporting dung.” She quit school when she was in fourth grade because her mother was worried that they were living in “uncertain times.” While her older sisters had been “married off early to avoid being taken by the Japanese,” she was “helping with house chores as her family deemed her to be too young” for anything to happen (Korean Council and Korean Research Institute for Military Sexual Slavery, 1997, 84). However, no women in colonized Korea were free from the pressure to serve their country, even among families who only had daughters. Believing that she only had to work “three years” in a “factory... mak[ing] military uniforms,” she had no choice but to leave home.

7 Narrator: Kim Bok-dong, interviewer: Chung Chin-sung. The English translation is from Seung-kyung Kim and Na-Young Lee (2017).

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I was on a ship. The ship arrived in Guangdong … In Guangdong, a row of military officers was sitting and there was an examination room in the back. Then, they told us to go in one by one. So I went in, and they started examining my body. I was so small back then, so what would I know? I was trembling in fear. Some older women were being examined, but they told us young girls to stay behind. After the examination, I went to a building, some school or a house, which was prepared for us. It was a big house, there were rooms next to one another covered by plywood and the doors were made of plywood too. I could hear people knocking on other rooms and breathing. They put a nameplate on each room and assigned us the rooms. In the evening, the officer who examined me came into the room I was in. He told me to take off my clothes. I was unsure why he told me to undress after I already did so [for the examination] during the day. I was so scared that I ran outside. But where would I go? I was caught and the officer slapped my face. I couldn’t even tell if my flesh was still there. It was chaotic, and the angry officer did not care for my young body but handled me roughly, so I was bleeding and torn.8

The girl who left home arrived in Guangdong, China, after passing through Busan, South Korea; Shimonoseki, Japan; and Taiwan. She was put on a military truck and sent to a place that resembled a hospital. After being examined for venereal diseases, she was trapped in a “nightmarish” comfort station. She ran away in fear but was soon caught and subsequently suffered horrendous abuse and sexual violence. I think it was in November 1943. I was 17 years old, and a first-year student. Even during high school, teachers urged us to volunteer to become nurses, and we were told to go to Ch˘ongsindae.9 It became worse after I went to college.... One day, all of us first-year students were told to gather together in the basement of the main building. I was feeling uneasy. Two people, one of whom was wearing a uniform, distributed printed forms. We were not given any time to read the content, but we were told to sign the form with our thumbprints. And then they collected the forms and left. I didn’t even know what was there. After that incident, I withdrew from college. (Narrator: Yun Chung-ok; Yoon, 2010, 110)

8 Kim Bok-dong, testimony at the 2000 Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery, Tokyo, December 2000. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Korean are by Kim Woohee, Kim Haesel, and me. 9 Ch˘ongsindae refers to the Women’s Labor Corps, which conscripted women from colonized Korea to labor for Japanese war efforts, such as in munitions factories.

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Another girl, who was born to an affluent liberation-movement activist’s family in Mt. Geumgang (Goseong), Gangwon Province, in 1925 and attended a school in Seoul, “fatefully” avoided conscription by quitting school with the excuse of getting married (narrator: Yun Chung-ok; interviewer: Lee Na-Young). The young Yun Chung-ok, who had been attending Ewha Womans College, dropped out of school because she “was not married,” “could be taken as Ch˘ongsindae,” and was “scared” after signing a document that seemed like a pledge to follow the National Mobilization Law. Her parents, who had made her drop out of school, hurried their daughter’s marriage. It was a time when men who were dragged into forced labor rushed to marry, feeling that “they should at least leave their seeds,” and parents of daughters were marrying them off to any man, whether they were old, wid-owed, or sick. The marriage eventually did not take place because of Yun’s will, and as the war loomed on the horizon, her father led the family back to Mt. Geumgang. Although their socioeconomic class differences would lead them down different life paths, both these girls were structural victims of the colonization of Korea. One was born into a poor peasant’s family and became a victim of the Japanese military’s sexual slavery, while the other avoided the “misfortune” thanks to her affluent and progressive family. However, both women could not avoid the clouds of colonialism and androcentric patriarchy. Yun Chung-ok recalls the anxiety and fear they shared as colonized women: There was fear and I was afraid. Even now, when I remember that time, there is no light, no day; it is all dark night and cold. From the time when I quit school until independence, we lived in Mt. Geumgang to avoid the war, and I felt like I had been forced into a long tunnel where everything is damp with cold wind and rain. I did not know when the war would end, and I felt like I was walking through the tunnel and facing a rainstorm and cold wind from the other side. That is what I felt back then. (Narrator: Yun Chung-ok, interviewer: Lee Na-Young) When I came out of the room the next day, other women were washing their bloody clothes after being assaulted by the soldiers. Hanging out the laundry on the veranda, two other women and I talked about dying together. The three of us saw a Chinese man cleaning the comfort station and gestured with our hands and body, to ask him to get us medicine that could kill us. I gave him 1 won that my mother gave me as an emergency

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fund when I was leaving home. 1 won was quite a lot of money at the time. My mother gave me this money and told me to let her know if I ran out of money. It was unspeakable to think that I was spending the money to get poison to kill myself. After a while, the Chinese gave us a bottle of something, with a large bucket of water. They were meant to be eaten together. My mouth burned as I picked up the bottle. It was not a poison, but Gaoliang liquor. One of us said, “It’s alcohol. I heard that if you drink too much alcohol, you’ll die. Let’s try it.” We shared it, and it felt like my neck was falling off. I drank water to calm it down and drank again. As I kept drinking, I drank a whole bottle because even my neck was paralyzed and I didn’t feel sick. And we knocked out. (Narrator: Kim Bok-dong, interviewer: Chung Chin-sung; Korean Council and Korean Research Institute for Military Sexual Slavery, 1997, 87)

The fear, horror, despair, isolation, and frustration of a young girl waiting for an unknown day of liberation are symbolized by the words “cold,” “night,” “damp,” “cave,” and “rainstorm.” Such symbolism overlaps with the reality of girls at the Japanese military comfort station, who had no way out but death and had to “wash bloody clothes after being assaulted by the soldiers.” With the “unspeakable” fate of buying “deadly poison” with the emergency fund her mother had given her when she was leaving home, a young Kim Bok-dong took the “poison” until she felt paralyzed due to the devastating despair at the realization that this “poison” was in fact alcohol. Kim Bok-dong’s passing out from drinking that day signifies her symbolic death, a girl who would never return. It also gestures to irreversible colonial injustice. As such, the two girls made their way through the dark colonial period in their own spaces, with no end in sight. Who wronged the girls during this period? Women in colonized Korea were easily sacrificed due to layers of structural injustice, including militarism and an unrelenting war with expanding Japanese imperialism, exploitative economic policies that exacerbated poverty, and Japanese misogyny that was implanted in the existing Korean patriarchy. None of those who had deceived and coaxed others with the excuses of colonization, poverty, and family and who had committed forceful abuse and kidnapping would be free from the sins and responsibilities of committing structural injustice. This included Korean (Kim Bok-dong’s case) and Japanese (Hwang Geum-joo’s case) heads of villages who participated in recruiting and mobilizing women under the guise of sending them to military factories, Japanese soldiers who kidnapped girls by truck at night (Kim Hak-soon’s case), Japanese soldiers who kidnapped a girl

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fleeing a factory (Kang Deok-kyung’s case), Japanese soldiers who directly committed rape and violence (most cases), and Koreans who turned away from such acts, maintained their silence, or even blamed victims and excluded them from their communities after they returned (most cases). Above all, the sins and responsibilities of the Japanese military and the Japanese state, which planned and implemented an organized sexual slavery system to boost morale and prevent sexually transmitted diseases among the soldiers, are the greatest. Each of the soldiers as an individual could have been a responsible bread-winner of a family or a submissive soldier obeying his superior’s orders. Like Eichmann in Jerusalem, they could have been ordinary people who might have been “conscience-stricken if they hadn’t done what they were ordered” (Arendt, 2006, 78). These are people who are indifferent to the suffering of others but still obey their superiors’ orders without question. Ordinary people who are only interested in themselves, their status, their careers, and their families, behind their “incompetence to think in other people’s shoes” (106). In particular, colonized Koreans would have agreed to acquiescence and approval out of fear for their own survival. As Arendt points out, they may have unwittingly participated in the secular embodiment of evil as “ordinary people who are ready to do almost anything if only safety and comfort are guaranteed.” However, as a result, numerous women in colonized Korea had to suffer the physical pain of systemic rape, violence, incarceration, abuse, forced medication, and forced abortion. Many were murdered. Those who survived experienced lifelong stigma and trauma. The abhorrent history of femicide and gender violence intertwined with colonization and war was inscribed on these women’s minds and bodies.

Decolonization? Women’s Navigation of Postcolonial Regimes I didn’t even know what “comfort woman” meant. I heard from an uncle who had been forced into the labor corps that many young women did not go into Ch˘ongsindae but instead became comfort women and how miserable their lives were... I must have been around twenty when I first asked about comfort women and began to learn more about the women who had been comfort women. People would say there were comfort women and wouldn’t respond when I ask them what “comfort woman” is.

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I learned from former student soldiers that these women were in comfort stations. I kept asking and started to find out more about comfort women. After I learned about them, my question changed from “What are comfort women?” to “How could anyone do this to another human?” (Narrator: Yun Chung-ok, interviewer: Lee Na-Young)

On August 15, 1945, Japan surrendered, and the colonial rule officially ended. However, the women did not experience peace. Yun Chung-ok, who returned to Seoul after liberation, asked around for news of “her peers who signed with their thumbprints” at the time. She heard unbelievably terrible news from those who returned, which made her feel anger toward the “humans” who had committed such wrongdoings and violated human dignity. One day I was told that the ship arrived and walked half a day. [When I arrived at the port] I was told that the ship had not arrived, so I came back. This happened several times until the ship came. The ship was huge. We boarded a small boat to get to the big ship. At least 300 people could board that ship. It was the last ship to Korea. The ship only boarded Koreans and stopped along the way to board more people. It took months to get to Busan. Even after arriving in Busan, we could not get off the ship for about fifteen days because of cholera. One day, my brother-in-law wrote a letter, tied it to a can, and sent it down to a small boat that was passing by. Since my brother-in-law worked as a sailor in the neighborhood for a long time, the person in the boat recognized and brought his letter to his family. About three days later, my sister and cousin took a boat to see us. We were coming out on the deck and spotted them. As the ship was far away from the boat, we could not hear them. We gestured to each other and cried. The next day, they sent gochujang and kimchi to us aboard the ship on a string. A bigger container came the following day. They had contacted [my family in] Yangsan and my mother was waiting too. A while later, we got off the ship and went into a warehouse-like place after getting disinfections. My brother-in-law’s brother, who had become a policeman after independence, helped us get out faster. After getting out of the warehouse, we went through baggage inspec-tion. We were told to hand in all the money we had. I gave away what I got from soldiers and the hospital. I was not too sorry because I could not use it in Korea anyway. Instead, I received 100 won and a train ticket to Mulgeum. When I got to the gate, my mother made me eat the tofu she had brought. We had changed

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so much that we almost could not recognize each other. Mother and I sobbed. The next day, my mother and I left for Yangsan. My brother-inlaw seemed to be aware that I was a Japanese military “comfort woman,” but he did not tell my mother. He only told her that I was a nurse at a hospital. (Narrator: Kim Bok-dong, interviewer: Chung Chin-sung; Korean Council and Korean Research Institute for Military Sexual Slavery, 1997, 90–91)

Kim Bok-dong, who had been trapped in a long tunnel of suffering as she was transferred between comfort stations in Guangdong, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Sumatra, Indonesia, was sent to an Allied Forces prisonerof-war camp after Japan’s defeat in World War II. Through the help of a relative, she boarded a ship returning to Korea and her hometown. She entered hibernation, having buried the damage and loss she could not even share with her family, but the trauma continually resurfaced and plagued her. Most Japanese military “comfort women” victims were abandoned at the battlefields or even massacred after World War II ended. Those who were able to survive boarded trains by themselves and walked back, while others were detained in Allied Forces’ prisoner-of-war camps, later taking ships back (Seoul National University Human Rights Center Chung Chin-sung Research Team, 2018). I was taken there when I was 15 and suffered through all that. I lived like that until independence, by which time I was 26. I returned home and saw my mom. I couldn’t tell [her what I had gone through]. My mom at the time, (suddenly tearing up) I, I don’t talk about this because I would cry when I do. (Narrator: Choi Gab-soon; Korean Council 2000 Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery Korea Committee Testimony Team, 2011, 169)

Even after returning to their motherlands, many survivors internalized the idea that they were shameful and either did not return to their hometown or remained quiet about their past. With the “unimaginable” and painful experiences that “would not let one survive if she remembers everything” buried in their hearts, they led lives of “self-consolation,”10 as they were neglected by close families, society, and their own country.

10 Narrator: Gil Won-ok, interviewer: Choi Gija; Korean Council (2004).

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I realized after returning home that [pretty much all] parents didn’t know about the places we had been taken to. How would they know? I hid it myself. [People] told me to get married as I was too old [to be unmarried]. They told me I had to get married. . . . I couldn’t get married for the life of me. So I ended up telling my mother and my eldest sister. How could I get married when I’m like this? They said, “How can such things happen? It must be a lie. People can’t live like that.” But I haven’t died after all that I went through. I guess it doesn’t kill, right. How can humans do such things…. My mother passed out…. She cried, “my daughter’s life is ruined after she was sent to Teishintai.” In the end, my mother suffered from heart disease until she passed away because of me. I was an undutiful child…. I got married to a man 8 years older than I was because of my mother’s wish. I was harassed a lot because I couldn’t bear children. He cheated on me and didn’t even come home. I couldn’t stand it, so I came back to my mother’s house. (Narrator: Kim Bok-dong; Lim, 2012; Kwon, 2018, 117–119)

Kim Bok-dong, who had barely recovered, eventually confessed her experiences to her mother, who kept urging her to get married. Shocked by Kim’s story, her mother passed out. Kim Bok-dong took on guilt for what had happened. In time, she followed her mother’s wishes and married an older man, but she returned to her mother’s house after a short while. Afterward, she traveled to Busan and made a living by running a small store there. After the Korean War broke out on June 25, 1950, Yun Chung-ok and her family fled to Siheung, Busan, and then Jeonju. In 1953, while Yun was still staying in Jeonju and the Korean War was nearing its end, Yun took a cargo ship from Busan and went to the United States to study abroad. Her decision was inspired by a wish to “leave the country,” alongside “curiosity” to explore the outer world and her “frustration” with the lack of academic opportunities available for women. It was very unusual for a young woman to go study abroad at a time when feudal patriarchal norms were staunch and the war was ongoing. However, she actualized her dreams with her fearless, strong will and the support of her family. In particular, Yun Chung-ok’s mother, a woman of the colonial era, wholeheartedly supported Yun’s departure, hoping for a different life for her daughter.

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I wanted to get out of the country. I had a curiosity for the world. I couldn’t study medicine because medical schools didn’t exist back then. I also liked history, but there were no history departments. There was a domestic science department, but I didn’t want that … I wanted to study. I thought what I had done wasn’t enough and I should study more. I didn’t mind going to the United States. (Interviewer: Weren’t you afraid?) No—I wasn’t afraid. My mother even sold her ring to pay for my fees. (Narrator: Yun Chung-ok, interviewer: Lee Na-Young)

Having received a scholarship to cover her tuition costs, Yun Chung-ok studied hard. Upon returning to Korea, she became a professor of English at Ewha Womans University. Although she could live a comfortable life, Yun felt guilty for a long time as she “was born into a family that was better off than many others” and “others had those experiences [of being comfort women] because they were not as well off,” “even though we were all born in an unlucky country.” Due to the guilt she felt toward women in her generation, the women in the Japanese military comfort stations were always in Yun’s mind: “[The Japanese military comfort women issue] was always in my mind. So I talked about it in the United States and the United Kingdom. I couldn’t indulge in it fully, but later, right before retirement, I started investigating the issue again. I probably started traveling when I had time and confidence” (narrator: Yun Chung-ok, interviewer: Lee Na-Young). The intermittent stories about Japanese military comfort women became ghosts that would occasionally appear. These ghosts continued to circle around Yun, such as through the experiences of a young student soldier at a comfort station that was broadcast as a radio drama in the 1960s11 and through the photo of a woman ch˘ongsindae in the book Punnoui ˘ kyej˘ol (Season of rage) in the 1970s (Research Institute on Voluntary Army Issues, 1977). Yun, who intuitively thought that the pictured ch˘ongsindae were girls who had been taken as Japanese military comfort women, went to meet Kakou

11 This was a Sunday radio drama called Hyun Hye-tan Knows, produced by Hanwoonsa and broadcast August 1960–January 1961. Through the experiences of a student soldier named Arown, the drama dealt with the confrontation between Japanese militarism and humanism, which was violated under Japanese militarism but did not surrender. It was very popular at the time.

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Senda, the author of the book Jugun ianfu (Military comfort women), and requested materials.12 Yun Chung-ok, who had been collecting materials on her own and looking for surviving “comfort women,” learned about survivor Bae Bong-gi through a newspaper article handed to her by her sister.13 Eventually, she visited Bae Bong-gi in 1980, who was living in Okinawa, Japan, at the time. Meeting Bae Bong-gi, who was supported by North Korea– affiliated civic groups, when Korea was still under military dictatorship was risky, but Yun Chung-ok was not afraid. She later recounted her first impression of the small house on the outskirts of Naha, Okinawa, to Kim Hye-won: “[Bae Bong-gi] washed her hands first, telling us she’ll make some tea. She brought the tea to us and then washed her hands again. After finishing tea, she washed her hands one more time. I think she washed her hands around six times that day in front of me” (Kim Hye-won, 2007, 47–48). Bae Bong-gi’s act of “washing hands” is a mundane manifestation of the extreme shame and guilt felt by the perpetrators and victims. Bae was suffering from several mental and physical illnesses then, for her trauma psychosomati-cally ravaged her. Yun Chung-ok may have learned the basic

12 PunnouI ˘ kyej˘ol: Amurhan shidaerul ˘ maenmomuro ˘ san aeguky˘olsat, hakpy˘ong, kangjejingja, y˘ojaj˘ongshindaeui ˘ sugi (Season of rage: Essays by patriots, student soldiers, forced laborers, and women ch˘ongsindae who lived through a dismal era with their bare bodies; Research Institute on Voluntary Army Issues, 1977) is a collection of essays by former forced laborers and student soldiers (Korean Council, 2014, 30). Kakou Senda, a Japanese journalist, published Jugun ianfu (Military comfort women) in 1973. A movie of the same title based on Kakou’s book was produced in Japan in 1974. Kakou Senda started researching the comfort women issue as a reporter for the Mainichi after noticing that there were a lot of women in photos of the Second World War. His essay titled “Wail for Comfort Women” is listed in Punnoui ˘ kyej˘ol. He continued to write books on the Japanese military comfort women, including Sok, jugun ianfu (Sok, military comfort women; 1977), Jugun ianfu Kyong-cha (Military comfort women Kyong-cha; 1981), and Jugun ianfuran mu˘oshin’ga (What are military comfort women?; 1992). Tenn¯ o no guntai to Ch¯ osenjin ianfu (The emperor’s forces and Korean comfort women) by Kim Il-myon, a Zainichi author, also had a huge impact on Korean and Japanese civilians, including Yun Chung-ok. 13 The story of Bae Bong-gi, a former Japanese military comfort woman, was revealed

in the process of her request for a special residency grant to avoid being deported from Okinawa. Japanese media such as Kochi News and Kyodo News reported on the story. This was sixteen years before Kim Hak-soon’s historic testimony in 1991 (Gil, 2015). Afterward, Bae Bong-gi lived with the support of Zainichi Kim Soo-soeb and Kim Hyunok.

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spirit of a redress movement that “is created with victims” through this meeting. She wrote an article titled “People Who Were Taken Away,” published in Hankook Ilbo (September 3, 1981), in which she reported Bae’s story to the public. However, the story did not gain much attention under the Chun Doo-hwan military dictatorship. Was the ghost only visible to her? Why did Yun Chung-ok start talking to it? As she pointed out, if “we were all born in an unlucky country,” why did she feel a particularly strong sense of guilt when all Koreans should have felt it? Why did she try to channel her personal sense of guilt into public action? Yun states that she started researching the issue “right before retirement,” “when she had time and confidence,” but her journey was propelled by more than intellectual curiosity. I haven’t felt that I was born in a fortunate position. But after meeting the hal-monis [halmoni means an elderly woman or granny in Korean, and the halmonis (halmoni-dl ) in plural, in this now intergenerationalized context, has come to metonymize some of these now-vocal comfort women victimsurvivors of Japanese military sexual slavery], I realized that I didn’t know how blessed I was. The first thing they would say when we met was that they were born into an unfortunate country and to unfortunate parents. I might have been born into an unlucky country, but I am grateful that I was born to my parents. I didn’t realize how fortunate I was until I met the halmonis. I am really lucky to have been born to my mother and father. I remain thankful since I met the halmonis. (Narrator: Yun Chung-ok, interviewer: Lee Na-Young)

As Yun pointed out, personal rage and doubt have been paramount in sustain-ing her dedication to the issue. She could not, and would not, suppress her rage at the unprecedented violations of human rights and her doubts about the historical truth that had been silenced. She had a moral sense of responsibility that developed through reflecting on her own positionality and other people’s lives. Yun had avoided suffering: her family moved to Mt. Geumgang, dodging atrocities of Japanese colonial rule, and she studied abroad in the United States while the Korean War raged and became a university professor. A deep reflection on such a life trajectory separated Yun from other complicit bystanders who did not undergo what Arendt terms “a crisis of conscience.” She was grateful to meet the halmonis but also could not suppress her rage at the perpetrators of Japanese military sexual slavery.

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Hannah Arendt noted that the following two conditions have to be present for collective responsibility: “I must be held responsible for something I have not done, and the reason for my responsibility must be my membership in a group which no voluntary act of mine can dissolve, that is, a membership which is utterly unlike a business partnership which I can dissolve at will” (2003, 149). Yun may have felt that she should bear responsibility for the pain that others experienced as a member of the group “which no voluntary act of [hers] can dissolve” even though she had not engaged in the act. Her guilt that other women of the same generation had had to experience brutalities that she was able to avoid and the responsibility of facing and healing their experiences and trauma became the major driving forces behind her lifelong activism. Most importantly, without encounters between people who hoped to take responsibility for a historical issue, the emotions these individuals felt may have remained merely a temporary agenda of a few people with an acute sense of moral responsibility. Through multiple encounters and solidarity with many people who shared similar thoughts and worked toward the same direction, Yun’s critical consciousness and activism expanded and later came onto the global stage.

Uncovering the Truth and the Beginning of Collective Action Yun’s lonely journey expanded to drive collective action and reveal the truth about the Japanese military sexual slavery issue thanks to the help of Professor Lee Hyo-jae, a longtime friend, and the organizational support of the Korea Church Women United. Yun’s friendship with Lee became the foreground for all of Yun’s activities related to the Japanese military comfort women movement. Yun Chung-ok attributes her active involvement in the movement and the organization of the (Korean Council’s) movement solely to Lee Hyo-jae. Considering herself not “feminist activist material,” Yun said that the Korean Council’s movement would not have existed without Lee Hyo-jae (interviewer: Lee Na-Young): Lee Na-Young: (What) other background motivated [the movement]? Yun Chung-ok: No, there wasn’t (anything else). It was Lee Hyo-jae who knew most about my attempts to find out more … I am not feminist

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activist material; I am more of a person who enjoys traveling and such. I did this because of Lee Hyo-jae. I am not feminist activist material.

Yun Chung-ok returned to Ewha in 1945 soon after Korea gained independence, where she met Lee Hyo-jae, who is one year older than her. They reunited in the United States after Lee had left for the country in the middle of her college years (around 1947), and Yun embarked on her study-abroad period in the United States in 1953. The two became close friends and comrades in the movement. In addition to teaching at the same school, the two had many things in common including coming from wealthy families, having many sisters (both of their families had five daughters), possessing literary sensitivity, and their ability to connect when they talked. Thus, Lee Hyo-jae naturally got her friend Yun Chung-ok involved in social movements. Lee Hyo-jae, a professor of sociology at Ewha Womans University at the time, was the founder of women’s studies and sociology on national division. She had also been involved in movements for social change with deep insights into geopolitical issues surrounding the Korean peninsula. Understanding how the patriarchal ideologies of the Yushin era14 were connected to military dictatorship, Lee theorized intersections of sexism, militarism, and classism and provided a foundational model for Korean women’s studies. Since early on, Lee Hyo-jae (1992) approached the Japanese military sexual slavery issue as “the most symbolic issue arising from not having addressed responsibility for anti-humanitarian crimes” and continually asked for the responsibility of not only the Japanese government but also Koreans who had not “addressed proJapanese forces.” She positioned the essence of the Japanese military comfort women issue not only in the history of colonization but as an issue that has been marginalized in a sexist society where gender, class, race, Cold War tensions and the division of the Korean peninsula intersect. This understanding had a formative impact, setting the direction of the movement. Her perspective can be illustrated by her writing, where she states, “Under interest in the pain and sufferings of women

14 The Yushin era refers to the early 1970s, when South Korean president Park Chunghee declared the Yushin constitution that would allow him to remain in the presidency for the rest of his life and prohibited criticism and social move-ments against the Yushin constitution and his dictatorship.

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in the history of the nation’s hardships including colonization and division,” the movement had attended to the similarities between kisaeng tourism (sex tourism)15 and the Japanese military sexual slavery issue. Lee also explained that the Korean Council “was organized primarily by Korea Church Women United and Korea Women’s Association United, which led the women’s movement in the process of national democratic movements for a democratic and autonomous government and overcoming of division of the peninsula” (Lee Hyo-Jae, 1992, 10–11). Sae˘ol (Saeroun o˘ l, “New Spirit”), a research group of Ewha Womans University students led by Lee Hyo-jae, trained many women leaders who later shook the supporting pillars of Korean society, disrupted gender norms, and provided a new foundation for organizing the Japanese military comfort women movement.16 The most decisive moment for the organizing was the meeting with Korea Church Women United (KCWU). In December 1987, Lee Hyojae, who was a representative of the newly formed Korea Women’s Association United (KWAU)17 and a member of the Peace and Unity Committee at KCWU, introduced Yun Chung-ok to KCWU. Founded in 1967, KCWU was composed of seven Protestant denominations and fostered solidarity between church women around the world. As such, it had a solid organizational structure and exerted a bigger influence than any other women’s organization at the time. KCWU had continuously raised awareness of issues such as the victims of nuclear bombings and the kisaeng Japanese sex tourism since the 1970s. They had also accumulated consciousness of and experience in the fields of human rights, women, society, environment, peace, and unity. As such, it was the most suitable organization to raise public awareness of the Japanese military comfort women issue. Furthermore, they had already requested apologies from

15 Kisaeng were female traditional entertainers under the Chosun dynasty (1392–1910), but kisaeng houses persisted into the Japanese colonial era (1910–1945) and later as brothels with a cultural veneer. Here, “kisaeng tourism” refers to the use of Korean women to provide sexual services for visiting Japanese men, which was widespread in the 1970s and 1980s. 16 Notably, Shin Hei-soo, Chi Eun-hee, Chung Chin-sung, and Yoon Young-ae all became involved in the Japanese military comfort women movement through Professor Lee Hyo-jae. 17 The Korea Women’s Association United was formed in February 1987 by twenty-one women’s organizations.

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Japan regarding the military sexual slavery issue for the first time in an open letter sent to President Chun Doo-hwan before his visit to Japan.18 Yun Chung-ok is a professor of English literature. She is friends with Lee. Lee [Hyo-jae] told us that Yun is researching the Japanese military sexual slavery issue alone and it would be good for the Korea Church Women United to help. It would be good to work together. I said yes, and we held an emer-gency executive committee member meeting and formed an investigation team on the issue. (Narrator: Yoon Young-ae, interviewer: Lee Na-Young)

With the dedicated support of the KCWU, Yun Chung-ok got a visa to Japan and started investigating the Japanese military sexual slavery issue. Alongside Kim Shin-sil and Kim Hye-won, Yun visited the Kyushu region, including Fukuoka, Tokashiki Island in Okinawa, Tokyo, and Saitama Prefecture, and Sapporo, Hokkaido, for an investigation they called “tracing the footsteps of Ch˘ongsindae.”19 It was a “difficult trip.” Each person had to pay their own way in addition to the lack of even a specific location or address for people to meet (Kim Hye-won, 2007, 22, 36). Nevertheless, the trip altered both individual lives and history. Kim Hye-won (2007, 11–12), who participated in the investigation and later devoted herself to the Korean Council’s movement, recalls, February 12, 1988, was the day I had set another sail on my course of life. I took a temporary break from my passion for prisoner education that I had taken on over the past 13–14 years with social responsibility as a Christian and set onto a “path not taken.” The sea was a little rocky a few days before the voyage.… I would not have joined easily if I knew that the port to be reached was so far and the waves so high. But my heart was set on the path, heartbroken 18 According to Yoon Young-ae, KCWU’s sixteenth general meeting report stated the following: “Japan should apologize and resolve the Women Ch˘ongsindae issue for the two countries to build a favorable relationship... The mobilization of Ch˘ongsindae was one of the colonial exploitation policies enforced upon Koreans at the end of the Japanese colonial era. Women were forcibly mobilized under the name of Ch˘ongsindae and sent as ‘comfort women,’ where they were brutalized as sex slaves... We cannot stand silent. We must receive an apology” (Korean Council, 2014, 34–35). 19 Yun visited Hokkaido and Thailand by herself in August of that year and Papua New Guinea a year after, in February 1989 (Korean Council, 2014, 37).

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by the intersectional oppression and suffering of the marginalized race and sexuality of women that had left the injustices untold.

The results of the investigation and the accumulation of Yun’s research were officially presented to activists in Korea and abroad at the international symposium titled “Women and Sex Tourism Culture” at the YMCA Darakwon campsite, Jeju Island, from April 21 to 23, 1988, five months before the Olympics. KCWU addressed the Japanese military sexual slavery issue at the international symposium because “sexual exploitation by Japanese who participate in kisaeng tourism is a renewed form of atrocity resembling the Ch˘ongsindae which had been undertaken by economic exploitation of Japanese imperialism” (Lee Hyo-jae, 1992, 266). Those who participated in the investigation explained the imperative driving it: “future generations should learn to not repeat such humiliating history” (Kim Hye-won, 2007, 43). See Fig. 1.

Fig. 1 Yun Chung-ok, Kim Shin-sil, and Kim Hye-won at the investigation trip in Okinawa, Japan (Source Lee Na-Young, provided by Kim Hye-won)

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According to the records, the three-day symposium consisted of field trips, lectures, regional reports, and reports on the results of a oneyear investigation on sex tourism on Jeju Island (Korea Church Women United, 1988). On the first day, April 20, participants visited three major prostitution districts in the Seoul metropolitan area: Miari Texas, the US camp town in Uijeongbu, and the low-income area and red-light district in Yeongdeungpo. The field trip aimed to make participants witness the history and reality of South Korea, to come to terms with the connection between America’s atrocities and the contemporary male-centered prostitution system. Furthermore, it helped participants realize how class and race intersect with women’s issues. On the second day, participants departed for Jeju Island and joined a three-day symposium that included three lectures and discussion groups. The three lectures were titled “Biblical Aspect of Sex” (Elizabeth Dominguez, professor at the University of the Philippines), “Historical Aspect of Sex” (Yun Chung-ok, professor at Ewha Womans University), and “Sex in the Activist Sphere” (activist Lee Ok-jeong, who later led Magdalena’s House, an anti-prostitution women’s group). Yun shocked participants by exposing the issue that had been silenced as a “taboo in history.” Containing detailed information on the form and arrangement of comfort stations, the treatment of women postwar, and the experiences of Bae Bong-gi halmoni, Yun’s presentation is a seminal historical record. Moreover, it provides a glimpse into the spirit that ignited the movement to uncover the Japanese military sexual slavery issue and demand responsibility for the crimes committed not only by Japan but also by Koreans and men at large who had silenced the facts of the matter. There is an urge for solidarity with Japanese civic groups, with emphasis placed on the historicization and collection of materials and testimonies, articulation of the strife-ridden reality of a divided Korea, and stress on the importance of unity. Unaffiliated Korean individuals and international activists including women from such places as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Switzerland, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, and the Philippines, Korean women living abroad, and representatives of relevant organizations in Korea were shocked by Yun’s presentation. They felt guilt at seeing the history of the women who had suffered under sexual slavery during the Japanese colonial era, which is repeated in contemporary forms of kisaeng tourism. Japanese and Korean participants, in particular, were

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immensely stunned. Lee Hyun-sook (1992, 266) recorded the scene as follows: [Yun Chung-ok’s] lecture made the Japanese participants ashamed and miser-able of all. Aiko Carter, a staff member at the Women’s Committee of the National Christian Council in Japan, could not stand the anger and shame on the atrocities committed by Japan and sobbed. As she kneeled and cried, saying “I apologize,” participants were compelled to realize how helpless conscientious individuals were in front of the state that perpetuated aggression. The shame that Korean participants felt was immense as well. Many were ashamed of the indifference toward the numerous “comfort women” who were victimized under an incompetent state, suffered hardships in their entire bodies, and disappeared, long-forgotten.

As Yoon Young-ae recalled, “Everyone was crying as if the Holy Spirit had prevailed upon Mark’s attic” (interviewer: Lee Na-Young). Participants’ experiences of being deeply involved in others’ lives and newly formed woman-hood across space and time had become the driving force for further investigation and research on the Japanese military sexual slavery issue, and the formation of the movement served as the foundation for international solidarity.20 Later, the Japanese participants stood at the forefront of the movement on the issue. For example, Takahashi Kikue of Kyofukai (Japan Christian Women’s Organization) was inspired by Yun’s presentation and continued to actively advocate for and stand in solidarity with relevant issues (interview with Takahashi Kikue by Lee NaYoung, 2017). She informed Korea of the Japanese government’s denial and distortions of the Japanese military comfort women issue in response to questions asked by Motoka Shoji, a member of the House of Councilors at the Japanese Diet (Socialist Party) in June 1990 (Kim Hye-won, 2007, 27). 20 Lee Hyun-sook (1992, 269) evaluated the international symposium as follows: “It brought the issue of Korea’s tourism and prostitution to international discussions, addressed the Ch˘ongsindae issue as a discussion topic officially and internationally for the first time, and provided the foundation for international solidarity to address this issue.” It also “formed emotional solidarity with women involved in prostitution through an official meeting and adopted the protection of their human rights as a priority for church women.” The term prostitution was used to “approach the issue in a macro context with a structural approach and viewpoint” and “dismantl[e]... existing stereotypes and norms on prostitution,” reflecting “understanding of the fundamental root of the issue” (269–270).

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KCWU established a research committee on the Ch˘ongsindae issue under the Committee on Church and Society to support Yun’s research (Kim & Lee, 2017). Composed of the people who conducted the field investigations (Yun Chung-ok, Kim Shin-sil, and Kim Hye-won), the research committee on the Ch˘ongsindae issue started collecting materials such as testimonies and documents related to Japanese military sexual slavery and planned the establishment of a memorial statue as priorities of their agenda. It sent official documents to member denominations of KCWU, requesting collaboration in finding people who could testify and establishing a memorial statue to publicize the issue (Korean Council, 2014, 39). In May of the same year, the research committee organized a press conference with KWAU and the National College Women Students Council before President Roh Tae-woo’s visit to Japan, demanding that the Korean government take a more proactive role on the issue. They called for the “establishment of an autonomous and equal relationship with Japan” and investigations into the truth about Ch˘ongsindae issues, apologies, and reparations (Lee Hyo-jae, 1999, 134). The need for extensive research on the issue surfaced, and many young researchers joined them. As such, the research committee on the Ch˘ongsindae issue separated from KCWU and transitioned into the Korean Research Institute for Military Sexual Slavery (Lee Hyo-jae, 1999, 184). On November 16, 1990, women who had been discussing the need to organize systemic responses to the Japanese government gathered thirty-seven women’s organizations including KCWU to establish the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (abbreviated as Korean Council here).

Multiple Encounters and Reconstructed Identity While the Korean Council and civic groups were urging the Japanese government to apologize and launch an investigation into the truth of the Japanese military comfort women issue and engage the Korean government’s proactive attitude, Kim Hak-soon’s press conference on August 14, 1991, shook not only Korea but the entire world.21 Kim believed 21 A number of survivors had come forward as Japanese military comfort women before Kim Hak-soon. The list includes Bae Bong-gi, who lived in Okinawa and was known to the public in 1975; Lee Nam-nim in 1982; No Su-bok, who lived in Thailand, in 1984; and Bae Ok-soo in 1984.

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that she had survived for the “space of testimony that may open up one day.” Kim Hak-soon, sixty-seven at the time, first revealed her experience of being “drafted” at age sixteen at that press conference. She said, “I had buried what had happened in my heart because it was so utterly painful... but I cannot bear people forgetting the past and clinging onto Japan.” Her testimony led the Korean Council to establish the comfort women hotline on September 18, 1991. Kim Hak-soon’s courage in coming forward as a comfort woman survivor despite people’s contempt inspired many other people. On December 2 of the same year, Moon Okju of Daegu came forward, the second woman to do so. Kim Bok-seon followed. In January of the following year, Kim Bok-dong came forward, and many other survivors of various nationalities started breaking away from the prison of frozen time (Fig. 2). I helped with someone’s farm and lived off of the 30,000 won I got. One day, I saw on television about registering for Japanese military “comfort women.” That was January 17, 1992. I discussed the matter with my younger sister, who told me not to register because my nephews will be ashamed. But I registered because I couldn’t deny my seven years, the seven years I was harassed like an animal in the rainforest. (Narrator: Kim Bok-dong; Kwon, 2018, 123)

Fig. 2 The sign-unveiling ceremony of the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan. On the far left is Yun Chung-ok, and the person next to her is Lee Hyo-jae (Source War and Women’s Human Rights Museum)

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In witnessing the public visibility of other survivors who had similar experiences and facing the pain of “I went through the same,” survivors found that their desire to reveal their resentment burst out. They hoped that someone would finally hear their stories and treat them with human decency as opposed to criticizing or stigmatizing them when they spoke up about the shameful histories that they could not even tell their own families. I was always feeling resentful [about what happened]. I wanted to inform the government of this but there was no opportunity to do so. In November of last year (1991), at 10 o’clock, I saw Kim Hak-soon testifying on television. The next morning, I called Kim’s phone number that I saw on TV and met her. Kim told me how to register as a survivor. (Narrator: Hwang Geum-joo, editor: Chung Chin-sung; Korean Council and Korean Research Institute for Military Sexual Slavery, 1993, 106) I went down to Daejeon after receiving a call from Park halmoni. She was watching television and saw Kim Hak-soon. She thought, “I went through the same.... I went through the same...” So, she told her daughter-in-law that she had the same experience. (Narrator: Yoon Young-ae, interviewer: Lee Na-Young)

Jan Ruff-O’Herne (1994), a Dutch Australian survivor,22 also chose to tell the world the “unforgettable” story she could not reveal even to her family. She confessed, “I wanted to speak up for the past fifty years. But there were reasons I could not do so. I suffered from nightmares and 22 Jan Ruff-O’Herne (1923–2019) was training to become a nun in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) when the Japanese military abducted her and incarcerated her at a comfort station in Semarang, subjecting her to sexual violence for three months. After the war ended, she married an English officer and moved to Australia in 1960. Seeing the news about Kim Hak-soon’s halmoni public tes-timony about being a Japanese military comfort woman victim, Ruff-O’Herne halmoni came forward to share her story with her family and the Australian media in 1992. Ever since she came forward, she has stood in solidarity with victims across the Asia–Pacific region. In December 1992, she testified at the International Public Hearing on Japanese War Crimes in Tokyo, and she testified at the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery in 2000 in Tokyo. In 2007, she testified during the US congressional hearing, therefore contributing to the passing of the United States House Resolution 121 to call for the Japanese government to take legal responsibility. Her activism promoted the truth of the Japanese military comfort women issue across Europe, the US, and Australia. See the obituary by the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (2019) for these biographical details.

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insomnia for the past fifty years and lived in fear every time darkness fell.” Inspired by Kim Hak-soon’s unimaginable courage, she decided to stand alongside her. In speaking up, Ruff-O’Herne sought to resist another form of violence—ignorance, and lack of awareness within a world that refused to hear survivors’ voices: For fifty years, the so-called comfort women had all been in silence. We were very ashamed of what happened to us. We felt dirtied and miserable…. I was watching television in my room and saw Kim Hak-soon. I thought, “I am also a comfort woman. I should help her.” I had to stand with her because she had spoken the truth but the world has not acknowledged her voice and the comfort women. That is when I decided that I shall come forward.23

As Kang Deok-kyung recounted, survivors spoke up in both the Korean and Japanese societies that had silenced them, revealing the historical truth of their suffering with their own voices and seeking “apologies and reparations”: I came forward to complain as much as I could. I used to write about what I went through, but it was torn and disappeared as I moved. I am revealing my experiences because no one should live like us. And we should put in our efforts to receive apologies and reparations from Japan. Some people say this is a disgrace to Korea. They are so far from the truth. (Editor: Kang Jung-sook; Korean Council and Korean Research Institute for Military Sexual Slavery, 1993, 283–284)

The ghosts who had been forced into silence by historical injustice had finally passed the canyons of time, becoming subjected as victims, survivors, and comrades and encountering one another. Sharing positions as women with similar experiences, they challenged colonialist and imperialist histories, disrupting their androcentric societies. Yoon Mee-hyang (former representative of the Korean Council) vividly remembered her first encounter with Kim Bok-dong:

23 This excerpt is part of the video message that Ruff-O’Herne shared with Pope Francis, who visited Korea in July 2014 (Nam & Cho, 2019).

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It was mid-January 1992, when not even a month has passed since I started working at the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan. Upon hearing the news that a Japanese military “comfort woman” survivor had come forward in Busan, I asked around to find her number and gave her a call. I got her permission to visit her house in Busan. Unlike her stubborn appearance, she treated me comfortably even though I was a “young lady.” She told stories about how she came across the news on television encouraging survivors to register and gave a call and was estranged from her sister who disapproved of her registering. She told me stories that might have been difficult to tell a “young lady” while drinking soju and smok-ing cigarettes. We spent time together that night at her apartment. Even though we first met, it didn’t feel that way at all. I still vividly remember what happened that day as if it were yesterday. (Yoon, 2012)

Kim Bok-dong recounted her painful past to a “young lady” she had met for the first time. One who had been hidden from the world encountered a listener, a young lady who had an open heart and ears. In telling her story to Yoon, Kim was able to grieve “Kim Bok-dong, the girl” who had passed away, and could finally console the trauma that plagued her. Yoon also felt at peace spending the night with the halmoni, who treated her comfortably. Yoon Mee-hyang recalled the early years she spent visiting survivors for the first time as moments where experiences that had formed her consciousness and subconscious were somehow consolidated, no longer just floating around as fragments of history further torn apart by colonizers, rapists, and oppressors. She was finally able to recognize the multiple but entwined experiences of women: stories of older sisters in the neighborhood, halmonis, and women whom she had heard of but had not been made fully aware of. Since then, Kim and Yoon have written their lives into new ways of being and becoming. Yun Chung-ok also confessed that she learned about “human society” after encountering comfort women, halmonis . Having previously only understood other people’s lives via text due to the academic characteristics of English literature and the limitations of her upper-class positionality, she learned more directly “from the survivors,” to whom she remains indebted, and it is “through such survivors” that she came to see her social privileges. She had not acted on the survivors; they had opened her eyes.

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As such, the testifier and witness reconstructed their identities through the process of delving into their wounds. The speaker touched upon the structural context in which individual experiences were positioned and realized through the existence of those who listened attentively to their stories. Thus, she learned that what she had experienced was neither because she was “unlucky” or “to blame.” The listener confirmed a common experience that most all women have experienced, are experiencing, or will experience in a patriarchal order and summoned and reordered her own trauma. In telling the testifier “it is not your fault,” the witness extended an affectionate gesture toward the wounded young child within them. As the movement continued, both survivors and activists entered moments of life they had not lived, finding faint ties of which they had been unaware but that had connected them, consoled one another, and shared their hearts. Through such processes of mutual healing, survivors accumulated the strength to live as dignified human beings, and activists developed the energy to construct the resistance movement. This strength and energy helped them persevere through thirty years of the movement for the redress of the Japanese military’s abominable construction of “comfort women.”

Conclusion It was only in the 1990s that the shrieks of ghosts—who had been silenced for half a century even after the Japanese colonial era ended—started being heard in the public sphere. The international factors that enabled the previously silenced voices to speak up included the end of the Cold War system and the death of the Japanese emperor Hirohito (Emperor Sh¯owa) in January 1989, which opened up cracks in which discussions on responsibility for colonization could emerge. In Korea, the longstanding military dictatorship ended, and the government transitioned to liberal democracy. The growth of women’s movements and feminism amid democratic movements also played a role. Most importantly, the pain that some people were sharing resonated with others, helping them to demand responsibility for women of the same generation. They were furious first at perpetrators who took no accountability for their actions and then dreamed of structural changes and enacted them. Through multiple encounters and relations with such people, survivors who revealed experiences previously deemed shameful and “their fault” found others who understood their experiences and subsequently became

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new subjects. They all became part of the movement for the resolution of the Japanese military sexual slavery issue. For a long time, feminists questioned the process of otherization and reconstructed history through their lived experiences. They had not exposed the raw experiences of biological women but rather understood their positionalities through the lived experiences of others who were constructed as women and challenged social structures that conditioned their positioning. The feminist historian Joan Wallach Scott (1999) argued that the identity of “women” should be defined in spatiotemporal terms, as women’s “experiences” are never static. She denied the preexisting subject that is already in being and proposes the idea of becoming a subject constructed through experience. She emphasized that experiences should not be essentialized or fixed based on a preexisting notion of identity. In doing so, Scott attended to the process by which certain experiences are constructed socioculturally and the diversity of the (unheard or heard) contexts in which experience and practice are understood and interpreted and suggested the possibility of open(ing) subjects and (re)constructed identities. The people involved in the movement for the resolution of the Japanese military sexual slavery issue reinterpreted their experiences as having been formed by imperialism, colonialism, and patriarchy while also caring for and healing (with) one another and suggesting the possibility of a new subject formation. Through mutually constructed identities, survivors broke away from social stigma and became agents who led the transformation of a society from which they had withdrawn. Activists faced silenced, forgotten, and uncomfortable memories and constructed counterdiscourses for social change. They coined the term sexual slavery to denote an extreme form of gender injustice created by sexist structures, developed new frameworks on sexual violence in armed conflicts, and subverted androcentric law and order. They worked to restore the dignity and human rights of survivors who had had to remain silent, pursued legal remedies to end the historical impunity of perpetrators, and organized activities for remembrance and inheritance. As a community, they persevered through thirty years of activism to carefully sew the open wound of Japanese military sexual slavery. Thanks to their efforts, “we,” embodied Others as women, have all been deeply engaged in the movement for the resolution of the Japanese military sexual slavery issue. We have been able to listen to the common

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experiences of women. We have been able to see history from “women’s perspectives” and thus reconstruct it.24 We have realized that the issue was not only an unfortunate incident that happened to some women in some parts of Asia a long time ago. Instead, this issue is deeply connected to the violence against women that continues today. We have realized that we should bear responsibility. Therefore, this essay is about long-standing mutual connections and the initiation of structural change. It is also a story about “us” that will continue being written. Below is a quotation from a video message for Vietnamese women by Kim Bok-dong, who passed away in 2019. The message includes apologies for wrongdoings committed by Korean soldiers during the USVietnam war, the responsibility we have to create a world without war, and her wishes for the “future generation.” I end this essay by inviting all of us to witness a scene in history created through the encounters of survivors and activists. I don’t know what to say to you. Wars should not take place. I am sorry to those who suffered under wars. Although I suffered as a Japanese military sex slave, as a Korean citizen, I apologize to the women who suffered sexual violence by the Korean soldiers during the US-Vietnam War. I hope that our fundraising through the Butterfly Fund could provide even a small amount of support to you every year. We will work on fundraising for the Butterfly Fund to support your living. We should all work together to ensure a world without war for our future generations. I urge every country to join in the efforts.25

24 The movement on the Japanese military comfort women issue is considered a major

milestone in the history of Korean (women’s) movements because civic groups resurfaced an issue that had been buried in history, raised it as a social and political agenda, and brought it to the international sphere of discussion. The rage and collective resistance derived from women’s experiences, the collection and accumulation of materials that supported this, and the theorization of the organizing experience of the movement illustrated the feminist slogan “the personal is political.” See Lee Na-Young (2014, 2016) and Seung-kyung Kim and Na-Young Lee (2017) for specific details on the history of Korean movements. 25 Kim Bok-dong in a message of apology to and solidarity with Vietnamese survivors of sexual violence by Korean soldiers, March 8, 2014. See the video clip titled “From Kim Bok-dong to Vietnamese Victims”: https://youtu.be/yjaOc3bNO64.

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Acknowledgements I really appreciate Woohee Kim and Haesel Kim, of the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, for their translation of some of the Korean writings and testimonies of victim-survivors and activists into English.

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Sexual Slavery by Japan.” In Women’s Activism and “Second Wave” Feminism: Transnational Histories, edited by Barbara Molony and Jennifer Nelson, 193–212. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Korea Church Women United. 1988. Y˘os˘onggwa kwan’gwangmunhwa semina charyojip [Booklet for International Symposium “Women and Sex Tourism Culture”]. Seoul: Korea Church Women United. Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan. 2019. “[Obituary/Tribute] Jan Ruff-O’Herne Halmoni.” Last modified August 20, 2019. https://womenandwar.net/kr/obituary-tri bute-jan-ruff-oherne-halmoni/. Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, ed. 2004. Yeoksareul mandeuneun iyagi [History-Making Stories]. Vol. 6 of Testimonies. Seoul: Tos˘och’ulp’an. ˘ 20ny˘onsa [20 Years of the ——— . 2014. Han’gukch˘ongshindaedaech’aek’y˘obuihoe Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan]. Seoul: Hanul. Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan and Korean Research Institute for Military Sexual Slavery, eds. 1993. Kang jero kkully˘ ˘ ogan chos˘onin kunwianbudul ˘ [The Forcibly Drafted Korean Comfort Women], Vol. 1. Comfort Women Testimonies. Seoul: Hanul. ˘ ogan chos˘onin kunwianbudul ˘ [The Forcibly Drafted ——— . 1997. Kangjero kkully˘ Korean Comfort Women], Vol. 2. Comfort Women Testimonies. Seoul: Hanul. Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan 2000 Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery Korea Committee Testimony Team, ed. 2011. Kang jero kkully˘ ˘ ogan chos˘onin kunwianbudul: ˘ Ki˘okuro ˘ tashi ssun ˘ un ˘ y˘oksa [The Forcibly Drafted Korean Comfort Women: History Rewritten Through Memory], Vol. 4. Testimonies. Rev. ed. Seoul: P’ulbit. Kwon Juriae. 2018. Remember her, Ilbon’gun s˘ongnoyeje p’ihaeja 1: Kim Bokdong [Remember her, Japanese military sexual slavery victim-survivor 1: Kim Bok-dong]. Seongnam: Book Korea. Lee Hyo-jae. 1992. “Hanilgwan’gye ch˘ongsanghwawa ch˘ongshindae munje: Minjok, y˘os˘ongsaj˘ong kwajer˘ul chungshim˘uro” [Normalization of KoreaJapan Relations and the Ch˘ongshindae Issue: Focusing on Agendas for the Nation and Women’s History]. Kidokkyosasang 404: 8–17. or˘ul wihan undong˘ui ——— . 1999. “Ilbon’gun wianbu munje haegy˘ ch˘on’gaegwaj˘ong” [The History of the Movement for Resolution of the Japanese Military Comfort Women Issue]. In Han’guky˘os˘ongin’gw˘onundongsa [History of the Korean Women’s Rights Movement], edited by Korea Women’s Hotline, 181–238. Seoul: Hanul. Lee Hyun-sook. 1992. Han’gukkyohoey˘os˘ongy˘onhap’oe 25ny˘onsa [25 Years of Korea Church Women United]. Seoul: Korea Church Women United.

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Lee Na-Young. 2014. “The Korean Women’s Movement of Japanese Military ‘Comfort Women’: Navigating Between Nationalism and Feminism.” Review of Korean Studies 17 (1): 71–92. ˘ i jeonchihak” [Politics of Femi——— . 2016. “Peminist insiknonkwa gusulsa u nist Epistemology and Oral History: Japanese Military Sexual Slavery Issues]. Korean Journal of Sociology 50 (5): 1–40. Lee Young-hoon et al. 2021. Statement in support of Ramseyer, February 9, 2021. Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (website). https://womenandwar.net/kr/%ec%97% ad%ec%82%ac%eb%b6%80%ec%a0%95%eb%a1%a0-%eb%b0%98%eb%b0%95% ec%9d%84-%ec%9c%84%ed%95%9c-%ec%9e%90%eb%a3%8c-%eb%aa%a8%ec% 9d%8c/. Levi, Primo. 2017. Karaanjun ˘ chawa kujodoen cha [The Drowned and the SAved]. Translated by Lee So-young. Seoul: Tolbege. Lim Seung-chang. 2012. “Suyojip’oe 20ny˘on, kk˘unnaji an˘un ch˘onjaeng” [Unending War, 20 Years of Wednesday Demonstrations]. KBS News, November 27, 2012. https://news.kbs.co.kr/news/view.do?ncd=2574208. Nam Sang-goo and Cho Yoon-soo. 2019. “Ilbon’gun wianbu p’ihaeja˘ui yonggiwa y˘oksaj˘ong chinshil” [Historical Truth and Courage of Japanese Military Comfort Women Victim-Survivors]. In Hanil y˘oksa chaengj˘om: Ilche shingmin chibaewa kukpok ˘ [Issues in Korea-Japan History: Japanese Colonization and Recovery], 208. Seoul: Northeast Asia Foundation. Ramseyer, J. Mark. 2021. “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War.” International Review of Law and Economics 65 (March). Published online December 1, 2020. Research Institute on Voluntary Army Issues. 1977. Punnoui ˘ kyej˘ol: Amurhan shidaerul ˘ maenmomuro ˘ san aeguky˘olsat, hakpy˘ong, kangjejingja, y˘ojaj˘ongshindaeui ˘ sugi [Season of Rage: Essays by Patriots, Student Soldiers, Forced Laborers, and Women ch˘ongsindae Who Lived Through a Dismal Era with Their Bare Bodies]. Seoul: Hunbongmunhwasa. Ruff-O’Herne, Jan. 1994. Fifty Years of Silence: The Extraordinary Memoir of a War Rape Survivor. Sydney: Editions Tom Thompson. Scott, Joan Wallach. 1999. Gender and the Politics of History. Rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press. Seoul National University Human Rights Center Chung Chin-sung Research Team. 2018. Kkully˘ ˘ ogada, p˘ory˘ojida, uri ap’e s˘oda 1 [Taken, Abandoned, Standing in Front of Us 1]. Seoul: P’ur˘uny˘oksa. Stanley, Amy, Hannah Shepherd, Sayaka Chatani, David Ambaras, and Chelsea Szendi Schieder. 2021. “‘Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War’: The Case for Retraction on Grounds of Academic Misconduct.” Responses by Concerned Scholars to the Problematic Scholarship of J. Mark Ramseyer. Accessed May

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23, 2021. https://sites.google.com/view/concernedhistorians/contractingfor-sex-in-the-pacific-war?authuser=0. Yi, Joseph, and Joe Phillips. 2021. “On ‘Comfort Women’ and Academic Freedom.” The Diplomat, February 18, 2021. https://thediplomat.com/ 2021/02/on-comfort-women-and-academic-freedom/. Yoon Mee-hyang. 2010. 20ny˘on’ganui ˘ suyoil [Twenty years of Wednesdays]. Seoul: Woongjin Junior. o in’gw˘onundonggaro Kim Bok-dong ——— . 2012. “‘Wianbu’ p’ihaejaes˘ halm˘oni˘ui 20ny˘on” [From a comfort woman victim to an international human rights activist: Kim Bok-dong halmoni’s twenty years]. Voice of the People, November 7, 2012. http://www.vop.co.kr/A00000559524.html.

Ways of Memory, Remembrance, and Healing

New Genres, New Audiences: Retelling the Story of Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery Margaret D. Stetz

Will the quest for justice on behalf of those subjected to Japan’s World War II-era system of military sexual slavery continue to be a pressing matter once the last survivors are gone? This is an issue that Bonnie B. C. Oh raises in her “Foreword” to the 2020 English translation of One Left , by the Korean novelist Kim Soom. There, Oh (2020) describes how “Kim Haksun [sic] had shocked the world” with her testimony in 1991, spurring “a national movement” for justice in Korea and beyond (p. ix). Later, though, “the Korean public became weary of it due to the prolonged, unsuccessful effort of demanding that Japan take responsibility” for its war crimes against women and underage girls (Oh, 2020, p. ix). In response, Soom “felt urgently that the comfort women’s... experiences might be forgotten unless depicted in a personal narrative” (Oh, 2020, p. ix). Soom’s fiction, therefore, which is “based on her

M. D. Stetz (B) University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 Ñ. Carranza Ko (ed.), New Ways of Solidarity with Korean Comfort Women, Palgrave Macmillan Studies on Human Rights in Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1794-5_5

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exhaustive research[,]” is devoted to transmitting to readers “the gutwrenching suffering of the victims” in order to foster interest in their cause, even after those who endured this nightmare of prolonged captivity and organized sexual violence are no longer alive (Oh, 2020, p. x). My chapter for this volume begins with a personal anecdote, as I, too, believe that the future of the so-called “comfort women” issue must be personal—and must be made personal—to everyone; otherwise, it may soon fade into the historical background as a mere footnote. In the autumn of 1994, I held a research fellowship at Tokyo Woman’s Christian University in Japan. I was there to gather material for a new undergraduate course on women and warfare that I planned to offer in the still-growing Women’s Studies Program at Georgetown University, in Washington, DC, where I was then a faculty member. The archives at TWCU had many useful images of young Japanese women students during World War II performing a variety of non-traditional jobs, such as munitions-making and parachute-sewing. That was the kind of information I had expected to find, reinforcing a vision of how women in Japan had been, like their American counterparts—those “Rosie the Riveter” figures celebrated in U.S. popular culture—called upon by their government to break out of conventional feminine roles and had done so successfully. This positive view of what the Japanese government had demanded of women during warfare was about to be turned on its head and inspire in me a feeling of horror and revulsion. Reading the English-language edition of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, I was startled to learn of a debate in the Japanese Diet about ongoing controversies over how to deal with the survivors of the “comfort system” of World War II and with their supporters, who were seeking official governmental apologies and reparations for the sufferings of organized sexual slavery inflicted by the Japanese military on several hundred thousand victims—the majority of them not adult women, but underage girls—from across Asia. All of this was, quite literally, news to me; yet I recognized immediately that this was a subject that I would need to teach to students in the U.S., even as I educated myself about it. I began doing so in 1995 and have continued ever since, bringing into undergraduate classrooms (first at Georgetown University and then, after 2002, at the University of Delaware) materials ranging from testimonies by survivors, to published memoirs, to documentary films, to works of historical fiction, to my later essays on the subject, along with essays by

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other scholars. Among the many texts to which I have turned over the decades have been excerpts from Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military, edited by Sangmie Choi Schellstede (2000); the memoirs Comfort Woman: A Filipina’s Story of Prostitution and Slavery Under the Japanese Military by Maria Rosa Henson (1999) and Fifty Years of Silence by Jan Ruff O’Herne (1994); the films Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women (1999), directed by Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, and The Apology (2016), directed by Tiffany Hsiung; the novels A Gift of the Emperor (1997) by Therese Park, and Comfort Woman (1997) by Nora Okja Keller; and chapters from monographs and edited volumes, such as Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves (2013) by Peipei Qiu, et al.; The Transnational Redress Movement for the Victims of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery (2020), edited by Pyong Gap Min, et al.; as well as Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War II (2001), which my former colleague at Georgetown University, Bonnie B. C. Oh, and I edited. This last was a volume that grew out of the academic conference on “comfort women” history that she and I organized in the autumn of 1996, two years after my revelatory experience in Tokyo. In Spring 2022, moreover, I created a new undergraduate course, titled “Girlhood and Violence,” for the Women and Gender Studies department at the University of Delaware. It allowed me to focus specifically on how girl children and adolescents have been targeted, abused, injured, exploited, and murdered in many circumstances and at numerous locations internationally, whether in places of armed conflict or in what are allegedly peaceful settings, including domestic ones. This seemed the perfect academic framework in which to examine World War II Japanese military sexual slavery and its long aftermath, including the few remaining (and now aged) survivors’ ongoing campaign for justice, as it illustrated how trauma in girlhood endures across one’s lifespan. Nonetheless, I was distressed in the middle of the semester to discover that, of the thirty-five students enrolled in that course, only four had ever heard of the “comfort women” before—the lowest number I have encountered in more than a quarter century—and none of those four could recall the specifics in any detail. That is indeed bad news for the future of awareness about the issue, at least in a U.S. context. Large numbers of students, it seems, are not learning, either before or after arriving at American universities, about this important war crime involving military sexual slavery and evidently are

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not feeling any emotional or political connection to this history. Here, on the other hand. is the good news: never before have so many texts of diverse kinds been available to use in classrooms and beyond, in order to raise consciousness, create empathy, and inspire activism in readers, particularly in younger audiences. The genres to which these audiences often are most attracted—such as dystopian speculative fiction, graphic narratives, and poetry—are now host to outstanding works on the socalled “comfort women” of World War II that have the power both to move and to educate. I would like to point briefly to four of the sorts of works I mean, all available in the U.S. since 2018, in order to highlight their value to other instructors in English-speaking nations who wish to reach undergraduate audiences. These are Plum Rains (2018) by Andromeda Romano-Lax; Grass (2019) by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim; A Cruelty Special to Our Species: Poems (2018) by Emily Jungmin Yoon; and The War Still Within: Poems of the Korean Diaspora (2019) by Tanya Ko Hong (Hyonhe). Of course, the audience for these texts is not limited to students alone. Each has the potential to reach a wide variety of readers outside of an academic setting and to create the sense of a personal bond with the subject of “comfort women” that is often lacking in American contexts, yet absolutely necessary, if the redress movement is to remain an important matter for continued activist efforts. **** Although its author, Andromeda Romano-Lax, is American-born, the novel Plum Rains (2018) is set in Tokyo. This is not Tokyo, however, either during the period of World War II or as readers may know it in the present; instead, the narrative takes place in the near future— the year 2029—when AI (that is, artificial intelligence) has moved ever closer to replacing human workers with robots. These robots are no longer soulless machines, for they have gained a new capacity to feel and even to love, forming deep relationships with people in their immediate surroundings. As a result, they demonstrate greater care for those who are socially marginalized, or who may be dealing with the effects of long-term trauma, than most of their human counterparts seem interested in doing. Indeed, the image of Tokyo here is of a competitive and largely coldhearted environment. It is especially hostile to immigrant populations, even as the native-born Japanese community exploits them in the labor force, treating the foreign-born as though they, too, were machines.

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Plum Rains focuses on a Filipina nurse, a so-called “guest worker,” who is employed in Tokyo as the live-in aide to a well-to-do male official’s aged mother. The latter is a socially isolated woman whom everyone believes to be Japanese, and who is about to be honored, as she turns one hundred years old. But “Sayoko,” as she is known, is not what she seems. It takes the trust she feels in an experimental prototype of a robot, named “Hiro”—a name that is an obvious play on the English word, “hero”—who both actively sympathizes and empathizes with her, in order to enable her at last to reveal publicly her identity and the story of her buried past. As the narrative continues, we are told that Sayoko’s name originally was Laqi, that she was Taiwanese-born of mixed Tayal and Japanese heritage, and that she is actually more than one hundred years old. In fact, she is old enough to have been forced, when just a young girl, into sexual slavery by the Japanese during the Second World War and made to serve soldiers from 1938 to 1942. Her long imprisonment in a “comfort station” occurs through trickery, after she has been recruited to be a nurse and is instead sent first to a military brothel in Taipei, before being trafficked to Indonesia. Throughout this ordeal she is treated, as she puts it, as “just another piece of meat, sore from morning until night” (Romano-Lax, 2018, p. 306). Among the terrible memories that she shares is one involving her sexual abuse and physical torment by a “big-shot officer” who “tied me up by my wrists to the bed, did what he wanted, fell asleep, and left me pinned there, wrists aching, bruises forming, unable to sleep in that position as the cord cut deeper, until I felt like a wild animal, desperate to gnaw off my own arm to make the discomfort cease” (Romano-Lax, 2018, p. 307). Ever since, she has experienced flashbacks, when perceiving her hands or arms as restrained in any way, including by medical devices where “tubes [are] delivering innocent oxygen or saline” (Romano-Lax, 2018, p. 307). As Yonson Ahn (2020) puts it in Whose Comfort?, for those who survived captivity in “comfort stations,” the “women’s memories of their past... are inscribed in their bodies” as “scars... too deep to be cured[,]” and many types of “visual stimuli might trigger memories of their ordeals” (p. 159). Plum Rains shows how inescapable, yet debilitating, it still is for the character called Sayoko to be forced to relive this past, regardless of the passage of time. Such a fictional representation of one survivor’s distress, in RomanoLax’s work, renders viscerally and emotionally powerful for readers the

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actual histories of so many victims—histories constituted of what Kerry F. Crawford has called “widespread acts of unthinkable horror” rampant throughout the “system of forced prostitution” by Japan’s Imperial Army (Crawford, 2017, p. 13). As Crawford further points out, “These atrocities were met with a profound silence from the international community” in subsequent years, “because there was no consensus that sexual violence was anything other than inevitable in war” (Crawford, 2017, p. 13). If there has been a transnational cultural tendency to normalize inhumane treatment during armed conflict, especially where women and underage girls are involved, a novel such as Plum Rains counters this impulse. It attaches the suffering to a multifaceted protagonist who has been brought to life first for readers as an individual with whom they can identify, not as the nameless object of trafficking, rape, sexual commodification, enslavement, exploitation, and torture. In Plum Rains , the climax of the “Sayoko” plot occurs when Japanese reporters arrive to film her celebrating her centenary, and she instead insists on speaking out about her hidden history. The reporters begin muttering about “ianfu”—that is, “comfort women”—as having been merely prostitutes. At that point, as the narrative tells us, “Sayoko would have none of it. ‘Your words are the problem! We were innocent. There were ten-year-old girls in my camp—girls stolen directly from their homes. Are you saying they wanted to be there?’” (Romano-Lax, 2018, p. 331). Although this is a work of dystopian science fiction and literary futurism, the challenge it presents is not to the world still to come, but to the present day. When the reporters dismissively label her as “ianfu,” Sayoko responds angrily, “‘Why do you insist on calling us that? You apologize, but then you take the apologies back’” (Romano-Lax, 2018, p. 331). This is clearly an allusion to the misbegotten diplomatic “agreement” of December 2015, crafted between the governments of then Prime Minister Abe of Japan and President Park of Korea, which was followed by Abe’s public statement, a mere three weeks afterwards, that “‘There was no document found that the comfort women were forcibly taken away’” (Hosaka, 2021). From his remarks it was clear, as Yuji Hosaka has asserted, that “the Japanese government at the time viewed the agreement as more of a political strategy than a sincere apology to the comfort women victims” (Hosaka, 2021). Thus, after hearing Sayoko’s testimony and witnessing the hostile reaction of those present when she gives it, the fictional character of Angelica, too, recognizes that what

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“appeared to be official apologies were often accompanied by reversals: politicians continuing to claim that the women had been prostitutes prior to their enslavement... that this was only normal business rather than a grave human rights violation” (Romano-Lax, 2018, pp. 339–340). As Romano-Lax’s novel is set in the near future of 2029, it gloomily— and no doubt accurately—predicts that the two sides in this dispute will remain at loggerheads. Certainly, she has been proven correct so far, at least since the publication of Plum Rains in 2018. Japanese denialism around this issue has, if anything, been growing more pronounced and active. In recent years, it has also received some support from a handful of ultra-rightwing Korean nationalists who have aligned themselves with their Japanese counterparts. Weekly demonstrations by advocates of the redress movement on behalf of the former military sexual slaves, which have been held every Wednesday across from the Japanese embassy in Seoul since 1992, increasingly have turned into flashpoints for conflict between opposing points of view, as Min-sik Yoon has reported (Yoon, 2022). Defying the catcalling and the insults being hurled lately at those who represent the cause of survivors now too frail to participate themselves in such events, the protestors allied with the Korean Council and other organizations continue to demand that Japan accept full legal responsibility for past war crimes, even as they denounce the Japanese government’s failed attempt to silence them—and also to remove the bronze statue of a young barefoot girl that memorializes the victim— through the coercive “agreement” of 2015. As the character of Angelica reflects in Plum Rains , “activists urged the public to listen to the firsthand accounts before it was too late. But just as many commentators urged the public to forget[,]” influenced by Japanese politicians’ faux “apologies” that were actually “insubstantial brush-offs” (Romano-Lax, 2018, p. 340). The outraged rejection by Korean survivors of that same 2015 “agreement” provides the climax, too, of another work, Grass—one that, like Plum Rains , serves as an effective medium for historical education by utilizing a genre with great appeal for young readers. Both written (in Korean) and illustrated by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, Grass was originally published in Korea in 2017, but it has since been issued in the U.S. in 2019, in an English translation by Janet Hong. Like another recent graphic memoir dealing with the Second World War, albeit on the European front instead—Amy Kurzweil’s Flying Couch (2016), which examines the Holocaust and its aftereffects from the perspective of a

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Polish survivor, her daughter, and her American-born granddaughter— Grass is a multi-generational narrative. Gendry-Kim’s is also a tale of intergenerational trauma, with a younger author-artist as the protagonist who is listening to, transcribing, preserving, interpreting, illustrating, and being deeply affected by the memories that are communicated to her by a much older Korean victim of Japanese military war crimes. In the case of Flying Couch, the testimonies of Jewish women’s suffering during the Holocaust come from Amy Kurzweil’s actual grandmother. With Grass, however, the testimonies recorded and given visual form are those of Lee Ok-sun, who as an elderly survivor is known as halmoni or grandmother, although she is no blood relation of the author-illustrator. Nonetheless, readers feel the psychological weight that listening to Lee’s story lays upon Gendry-Kim, who is also depicted and dramatized throughout as an important presence. Thus, with this visualized representation of young Gendry-Kim modeling emotions of sorrow and anger for them, young readers are led to feel these same reactions along with her. The genre of the graphic novel, with its origins in comics and cartoons, brings to the subject of military sexual slavery a certain degree of danger, precisely because of its emphasis upon visual elements. As Sarah Jaffe writes in “Telling Their Own Stories,” such a format requires that “one must take the time to draw, to stage, to frame an action—one has to show, not tell, by virtue of the medium itself” (Jaffe, 2014, p. 32). Laura Barberán Reinares rightly warns, however, that the “The violence (sexual and otherwise) experienced by the ‘comfort women’ of World War II is so appalling that to transcribe it into language presents an intricately complex task for any writer who does not want to fetishize a raped body just to sell books—and, in so doing, violate these women again” (Barberán Reinares, 2021, p. 384). Yet the likelihood of committing such an ethically questionable violation is even stronger, when it comes to a genre that depends so heavily upon visualization, where “turning the trauma endured by rape victims or survivors into an erotic spectacle” seems almost unavoidable (Barberán Reinares, 2021, p. 384). It is, therefore, especially admirable that Grass, as a so-called “graphic” work, is deliberately not “graphic” in that other sense of the word; it is never sexually explicit nor does it intrude upon the bodily or psychological privacy of the survivor whose story it depicts. Gendry-Kim is, on the contrary, careful never to exploit or sensationalize Lee Ok-sun’s history. As she arrives, for instance, at the moment when Lee speaks of being

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abducted, imprisoned in a military brothel, and gang-raped for the first time, the visuals consist of three full pages showing nothing but black squares, devoid of either image or text. The blankness effectively conveys a reality too horrible to be described or portrayed, while demonstrating respect for Lee’s right not to have her personal torment turned into a salacious spectacle. Gendry-Kim concludes Grass, moreover, not with a portrait of Lee as a hapless victim, but as a determined activist, showing her speaking out on television in 2015 against the highly unsatisfactory diplomatic “agreement” with Japan, about which no one in the Korean government had consulted her to ask what she, as a survivor, required in order to feel that the issue was permanently resolved. Lee’s face, which is framed on a television screen, is drawn as sorrowful, with knitted brows and downturned lips, yet as filled with firm resolve. The audience hears of her participating, too, in one of the weekly Wednesday demonstrations, despite her advanced age, poor health, and the frigid winter weather, so committed is she to making her position known. Grass ends, however, not with the harshness of winter, but with the promise of spring in both a literal and a metaphorical sense. Accompanying several pages of drawings of the Gendry-Kim figure trudging through a barren landscape among leafless trees is written text that speaks of resilience and rebirth, as well as hope, with the imminent growth of new plant life and of new life in general: “GRASS SPRINGS UP AGAIN, THOUGH KNOCKED DOWN BY THE WIND, TRAMPLED AND CRUSHED UNDER FOOT” (Gendry-Kim, 2019, p. 475). The reference to the “trampled” and “crushed” survivors of the “comfort system” and to their unflagging pursuit of justice is obvious, but it is underlined nonetheless by the final images. On the left hand side of a two-page spread is a drawing of tree branches with buds forming on them, and on the righthand facing page is a portrait of “Granny Lee,” who is smiling broadly in a way that she has not done at any earlier point in this graphic narrative. For Western readers—and especially for audiences of young people in general, as well as undergraduates in particular—this optimistic vision is immensely appealing and important, for it suggests that the cause is not a futile one, but one that is worth supporting, because it will eventually yield results. Grass serves, therefore, as a source of information and education, but additionally as a potential recruitment tool for future activists. It also provides examples of multiple forms of activism, beginning with

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the contents of the book itself. The relationship that it depicts between “Granny Lee” as the giver of the testimony and the much younger Gendry-Kim figure, who is dedicated to recording and interpreting visually what she has heard, is itself an attractive model for how others might use their own artistic talents for political ends. Grass follows a path toward a different type of activism late in the narrative, in a section titled “Tracing the Steps of Granny Lee.” There, the character based on Gendry-Kim goes in search of the site of the “comfort station” in China to which Lee, when still a mere girl, was trafficked and forcibly confined. Gendry-Kim is accompanied by another Korean woman involved in the movement for justice for the survivors. Eventually, this quest takes the pair to the city of Yanji in China. Unsurprisingly, the locals whom they query claim not to know the location of any such buildings. It is unclear whether their lack of knowledge is feigned, in order to cover up the painful and somewhat embarrassing past, or whether it is legitimate— the result of government policies that were meant to erase that history from the national consciousness. Certainly, in her 1999 account of seeking out Korean survivors of Japanese military sexual slavery in China for the purpose of interviewing them, the Korean American author and documentary filmmaker Dai Sil Kim-Gibson wrote of the fierce opposition to her project by Chinese officials, who “interrogated” her mercilessly. “On and on the questioning continued” until a police chief ordered, “‘You must go[!]’” and sent her away from the neighborhood where she had been visiting the home of a survivor (Kim-Gibson, 1999, p. 5). The attempt portrayed in Grass to find and to document the “comfort stations” of World War II in China does not, however, meet with any such obvious roadblocks, suggesting that a less hostile political atmosphere has arisen in the intervening two decades, though one that still emphasizes forgetting, rather than remembering, a past associated with national shame. Indeed, when the Gendry-Kim character and her companion do at last locate the building where “Granny Lee” endured captivity and rape, they arrive not a moment too soon, for they are informed that it is scheduled for demolition. The success of their enterprise, however, points to opportunities for others to take up similar missions, whether in China or elsewhere, and to function as historians and documentarians: mapping, recording, preserving, and disseminating evidence of the existence of the widespread “comfort system” across Asia before it disappears (or is destroyed deliberately) and thus helping to establish its reality, as a further way of supporting the political aims of the redress movement.

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As a work of socially engaged art, Grass is more, though, than merely a tool for either education or recruitment; it is also, in a sense, a handbook for how readers—younger readers, in particular—should approach the subject of “comfort women.” In the “Afterword,” Keum Suk GendryKim writes in her own voice about the process of creating the graphic work that audiences presumably have just read. She describes living through a serious automobile accident and thinking, while awaiting help, that “I might die. But at the same time, I knew I couldn’t [for] I truly believed I couldn’t die without finishing Grass,” so important did she feel it was to tell Lee Ok-sun’s story (Gendry-Kim, 2019, p. 479). Driving this commitment was the enormous personal admiration she had developed for Lee: “As I got to know her, I witnessed her incredible will to survive and her love of life. She was a warrior who had fought each second to live and now she is a passionate activist, speaking out against the horrors of war” (Gendry-Kim, 2019, p. 479). In the end, as Gendry-Kim asserts, this history of an individual survivor of the “comfort system” should not be looked at purely through a gendered political lens, but must be placed instead in a wider framework: “I realized that this story wasn’t about men or women. It was about what it meant to be human” (GendryKim, 2019, p. 479). Because of that, it seemed to her crucial, regardless of her own ideological stance as a supporter of the transnational movement for redress, to avoid “sensationalizing” the narrative and “to tell her [Lee’s] story in a calm and even tone” that would also allow readers to feel love for and connection to one of the “precious grannies” who has come through unimaginable horrors with her humanity intact: as “Granny Lee Ok-sun—a good daughter, loving mother, affectionate neighbor, and one courageous woman” (Gendry-Kim, 2019, p. 479). This ethical issue of how to represent someone else’s experience sensitively, without seeming to appropriate or use it to advance one’s own interests, is one that poets such as Emily Jungmin Yoon have also confronted directly. Her 2018 volume, A Cruelty Special to Our Species: Poems , which contains a thirteen-page-long section titled “The Testimonies” comprising seven poems, opens with an “Author’s Note.” In it, the Korean-born writer, who now lives in the U.S., states explicitly that she has employed as the source of her own work the first-person “voices” of “former ‘comfort women’ of the Japanese Empire” who “began to share their testimonies” (Yoon, 2018, p. xi). At the same time, she makes clear that she wants her “poetry to serve to amplify and speak these

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women’s stories, not speak for them” (Yoon, 2018, p. xi; emphasis in original). Her aim, as she explains further in that “Author’s Note,” is to utilize her poetry “to remind readers that even if a part of history may not seem to be relevant to their lives, it is—it is their reality too. An experience that is not mine is still part of the society and world that I occupy. It is crucial to know, listen, tell, and retell various stories, so we may better theorize and understand our existence” (Yoon, 2018, p. xi). Hers is not an argument to employ poetry for the purpose of recruiting readers to any specific cause, such as the redress movement for the survivors of military sexual slavery, but as a lens through which to examine the human condition. Despite this, the narratives of appalling brutality inflicted on girl victims—each of whom is identified by name as an individual and given her own poem in Yoon’s A Cruelty Special to Our Species , with details taken from her recorded public testimony—may also have that secondary effect of political consciousness-raising. Certainly, the narratives collected in all of the “Testimonies” and transformed into poems are filled with unspeakable horrors and losses that are articulated plainly here and that will outrage any readers of Yoon’s volume. These include Hwang Keum-ju’s matter-of-fact statement, “I lost my uterus” (Yoon, 2018, p. 16); Jin Kyung-paeng’s report that “I was wianbu [a “comfort woman”] between 14 and 19/ I became feverish/I became infertile” (Yoon, 2018, p. 17); Kim Sang-hi’s memory of how “The first night an officer grabbed me/ I drank disinfectant/ but I didn’t die” (Yoon, 2018, p. 20); and Kim Yoon-shim’s account of how “One by one they raped all/ night long/ with filthy wordless bodies/my child’s body/ they impregnated girls and still forced sex/” and “When a girl got too sick/ a guard wrapped her body/ in a blanket/ and carried her away” (Yoon, 2018, p. 22). Among the most appalling of the “Testimonies” is Kim Soon-duk’s searing story, which occurs in the final poem of this sequence, of how the manager in charge of the “comfort station” where she was imprisoned had given her, after her first rape, a “black powder/ to reduce my bleeding/ from the vagina/ He then told me it was made/ from a leg/ of a Chinese soldier’s corpse/ I dream of human legs rolling around/ I dream it/ to this day/ I scream to wake myself up” (Yoon, 2018, p. 26). Perhaps even more haunting in some ways, however, is a series of poems scattered throughout Yoon’s volume that all appear under the identical title of “An Ordinary Misfortune.” These are poems that link the past with the present, juxtaposing the war crimes committed against

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Japan’s military sex slaves with the many wrongs—including racist abuse, patronizing lectures by white people, and sexual harassment—endured by a woman speaker in the context of twenty-first-century life, both in the U.S. and in Asia. In the first of these poems, the speaker reports having to deal with an ignorant and insulting “question by a Canadian/ girl, a friend: Why don’t you guys just get along? The guys: Japan and Korea./ Meaning: move on. How do I answer that?” (Yoon, 2018, p. 3, italics in original). The speaker’s rhetorical question is followed immediately by historical memories—examples of atrocities to which Korean girls were subjected by the Imperial Japanese Army, and for which the Japanese government has accepted no legal responsibility: “Move on, move on, girls on the/ train. Destination: comfort stations. Things a soldier can do: mount you/ before another soldier is done. Say, Drink this soup made of human blood” (Yoon, 2018, p. 3, italics in original). The poems titled “An Ordinary Misfortune” are innovative in both presentation and content, bringing together the gendered experiences of different generations of Koreans. They recall Carolyn Forché’s commentary on what she calls poetry of witness that records warfare and other forms of psychic and physical violence: “Extremity... demands new forms or alters older modes of poetic thought. It also breaks forms and creates forms from these breaks” (Forché, 1993, p. 42). Such explicit linkage of the extraordinary horrors of the so-called “comfort women” with the more mundane and “ordinary misfortunes”—or, rather, insults and abuses—suffered now by Korean Americans also has the salutary effect of giving present-day readers an additional way to connect with the past, through identification. Bringing together the past with the present and rendering it personal to the audience is also the project the Korean-born poet, Tanya Ko Hong (Hyonhe), who publishes in both Korean and English. Her 2019 volume, The War Still Within, which is subtitled Poems of the Korean Diaspora, reproduces on its front cover one of the few authenticated photographs of Korean girls and women enslaved by the Japanese military. These were survivors who had just been captured by Chinese troops in 1944 and were then photographed by American forces. It is an image that Hong and Clare MacQueen, in “About the Cover Photo” at the conclusion of The War Still Within, write of having found in the National Archives in Washington, DC (Hong and MacQueen, 2019, p. 76). That disturbing sight of three individual faces and bodies, including the pregnant body of Park Young-shim—who, as Hong and MacQueen point out, eventually

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gave testimony in the year 2000 at the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal in Tokyo regarding “the atrocities she and others suffered”— leaves its mark upon readers and foreshadows some of the most distressing of the volume’s contents. (Hong and MacQueen, 2019, p. 76). One seven-page-long section near the start, titled “Comfort Woman,” begins with a poem set in 1991 that employs an unidentified first-person speaker in Seoul. She is an elderly woman reacting to a television news report, following a broadcast of the testimony of the “comfort system” survivor Kim Hak-Sun. Later that night, “Waking in a cold sweat,” she is tormented by memories, especially involving the fate of a victim named “Soonja” (Ko-Hong, 2019, p. 18). Each of the next four poems recounts a series of unutterably terrible memories, from 1941 through the year of the speaker’s return to Korea in 1946. The most appalling of these is contained in the poem “1943, Shanghai, China,” as the speaker reflects on what happened after she and the other young military sex slaves were told by their Japanese captors to volunteer themselves to be sexually assaulted by one hundred men each: “I raised my hand/ Soonja did not/ The soldiers put her in boiling water/ alive/ and fed us/ What is living?/ Is Soonja living in me?” (Ko-Hong, 2019, pp. 20–21). This “Comfort Woman” sequence also includes the speaker’s homecoming in 1946, when she returns to her family and her mother, washing her body, observes the scars left by the years of abuse. In his study Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II , the historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi has written of the many instances when, at the end of the war, Japanese soldiers “in despair... forced comfort women to commit double suicide with them” (Yoshimi, 2000, p. 151). Hong tells of a different tragedy, for in this poem the speaker’s mother is the one who commits suicide, unable to live with what has been done to her daughter. Intergenerational trauma can and does move in multiple directions, as Hong wants her poetry to suggest. The final poem, “1991, 3:00 AM,” however, concludes not with despair, but with a vision of the speaker being lifted up by a thousand butterflies, the spirits of the many dead girls. It ends with the words “At/ dawn,/ I stand” (Ko-Hong, 2019, p. 23). This is a statement of persistence, resistance, resilience, and heroism that mirrors the positive ending of Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s Grass and helps to keep readers new to the subject of the “comfort women” feeling energized, rather than hopeless (Ko-Hong, 2019, p. 23). The texts by these four contemporary women authors—Andromeda Romano-Lax, Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, Emily Jungmin Yoon, and Tanya

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Ko Hong (Hyonhe),—are, especially for undergraduate readers in the English-speaking world, more than merely accessible; they are examples of works that young audiences tend to find both memorable and inviting, representing genres that such audiences often choose to explore outside, not merely inside, the classroom. They supplement what is usually a very meager exposure, in the years leading up to their university education, to the subject of World War II-era military sexual slavery. This absence of information in textbooks and in secondary school curricula is frequently traceable, as Pyong Gap Min reminds us, to “interventions of the Japanese government and neonationalists in trying to block” its dissemination (Min, 2021, p. 253). Works of literature and art, however, can accomplish what other sorts of texts cannot and, moreover, can reach audiences on a deeper emotional level. Writing about the achievements of a host of women artists who have employed historical material, while making clear and sharing their own engaged perspectives on the topic, Jung-Sil Lee puts the matter best: “By recapturing past events and objects, each artist aligns herself with the spirit of the ‘comfort women’ of the past in order to... capture and present historic events whose importance might have been lost or distorted by time” (Lee, 2020, p. 144). At the same time, these “artists have fulfilled their role not just as reporters of the past but also as narrators and editors by adding their own interpretations to these images of war found in archived materials... [and have] made the images meaningful, powerful, and truthful” for present and future generations (Lee, 2020, p. 144). Observing undergraduate students’ overwhelmingly positive reactions to the four authors’ works that I have discussed briefly here, I have been inspired recently to go beyond my own usual medium of scholarly essay. In an attempt to reach out actively to wider audiences, especially of young people—as they are the hope for keeping alive the commitment to justice and the rejection of sexual violence in wartime and peacetime alike, long after the last “comfort system” survivors are gone—I have, like Yoon and Hong, turned to the medium of poetry. While doing so, I have also encouraged my students to compose creative works of their own, to ensure that the historical subject of military sexual slavery will be relevant to them and will have a personal impact that they might express to others. I conclude, therefore, with three of my poems, which I have begun to bring into undergraduate classrooms and wish to make available for use elsewhere, as examples of what even those who do not ordinarily write poetry can do.

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“Three Poems by Margaret D. Stetz”. I. “Dirt” (for the Korean military sex slaves of WWII)

They were not dirt though carted like excrement hauled off by trucks packed onto ships and crammed into stalls with only a bucket, a mat They were not dirt though called “p” or kyodo benjo— “public toilets” for soldiers “relieving” themselves. They were not dirt though shoveled in mounds not graves at the end of the War to cover their gaping orifices into which pain was forced, out of which blood was drained. They were not dirt though meant for the rain to dissolve, the wind to disperse, and insects to seize in a final rape. They were not dirt but their corpses, their stories have now become clay. Will you use it to build them their monument?

II. “Disbelieved” (“for the survivors”)

Each lie is a slash on her back with a sword with a pen that draws blood.

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How many more times must she say that she gave no “comfort” that she was no “woman” when taken at twelve-years-old? Courtrooms, conferences, Congresses echo with accusations. Where is the proof? Where are the photographs? Burned into her eyes— blood-red pictures that can’t be seen beyond or through they steal her vision still in her nose her mouth the stench of soldiers the filth of bodies assaulting her senses her face in the dirt. How can she breathe? When she speaks words clog her throat like wads of semen. A figure welded to a bronze chair she waits and waits for apologies

III. “Redivivus” (For Emily Jungmin Yoon, Author of ‘A Cruelty Special to Our Species ’)

Her blood (never drying) pours out of your mouth her scars (not fading) crosshatch your pages the pus (always oozing) after ten thousand rapes seeps into your words

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the welts on her back (still swelling) from soldiers’ fists serve as your punctuation the slash through her belly by a military sword where the fetus was ripped opens a paper cut on your hand that spreads wide as a poem is born alive, screaming.

References Ahn, Y. (2020). Whose comfort? Body, sexuality and identities of Korean ‘comfort women’ and Japanese soldiers during WWII . World Scientific. Barberán Reinares, L. (2021). Writing unspeakable things: Speechlessness, abjection, and the ethics/aesthetics of (not) representing sexual violence in three Korean American ‘comfort women’ novels. Journal of Asian American Studies, 24(3), 383–416. https://doi.org/10.1353/jaas.2021.0033. Crawford, K.F. (2017). Wartime sexual violence: From silence to condemnation of a weapon of war. Georgetown University Press. Forché, C. (1993). Introduction. In C. Forché (Ed.), Against forgetting: Twentieth-century poetry of witness (pp. 29–47). W. W. Norton. Gendry-Kim, K.S. (2019). Grass (J. Hong, Trans.). Drawn & Quarterly. (Original work published 2017) Hosaka, Y. (2021, November 18). Why did the 2015 Japan-Korea ‘comfort women’ agreement fall apart? The Diplomat. https://thediplomat.com/ 2021/11/why-did-the-2015-japan-korea-comfort-women-agreement-fallapart. Jaffe, S. (2014). Telling their own stories. In S. Lightman (Ed.), Graphic details: Jewish women’s confessional comics in essays and interviews (pp. 29–34). McFarland. Kim-Gibson, D.S. (1999). Silence broken: Korean comfort women. Mid-Prairie Books. Ko-Hong, T.H. (2019). The war still within: Poems of the Korean diaspora. KYSO Flash. Kurzweil, A. (2016). Flying couch: A graphic memoir. Black Balloon.

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Lee, J.S. (2020). Can the arts heal the wartime trauma of sex slaves? Case study of visual art, film, and performing arts. In J.S. Lee and D. Halpin (Eds.), Comfort women: A movement for justice and women’s rights in the United States (pp. 125–154). Hollym. Min, P.G. (2021). Korean “comfort women”: Military brothels, brutality, and the redress movement. Rutgers University Press. Oh, B. (2020). Foreword. In S. Kim, One left: A novel (pp. vii–xiv) (B. Fulton & J.C. Fulton, Trans.). University of Washington Press. (Original work published 2016) Romano-Lax, A. (2018). Plum rains: A novel. Soho Press. Yoon, E.J. (2018). A cruelty special to our species: Poems. Ecco. Yoon, M.S. (2022, September 28). [From the scene] Memorial for comfort women turns into ground zero of conflict and chaos. Korea Herald. https:// www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20220928000734. Yoshimi, Y. (2000). Comfort women: Sexual slavery in the Japanese military during World War II (S. O’Brien, Trans.). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1995)

Korean “Comfort Women” Films Following the 2015 Korea–Japan Comfort Women Agreement: Historical Perceptions of Military Sexual Slavery Amid Strained Korea–Japan Relations Hyo-won Lee

Introduction In late February 2016, the small independent film Spirits’ Homecoming debuted at No. 1 at the Korean box office1 and became one of the year’s biggest box-office hits. It was the first time that a film about “comfort 1 Korea Film Council’s KOBIS database (www.kobis.or.kr).

Former Korea Bureau Chief of Blouin Artinfo, Lee Hyo-won was a correspondent for The Hollywood Reporter and Monocle and has written for Billboard, CNN and The Korea Times. She is an MA Candidate in international studies at Seoul National University. H. Lee (B) Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 Ñ. Carranza Ko (ed.), New Ways of Solidarity with Korean Comfort Women, Palgrave Macmillan Studies on Human Rights in Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1794-5_6

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women” resonated so widely with the public. However, its success is perhaps not surprising: Society is reflected in movies, and movies, in turn, influence society by changes in depictions of subject matter and by challenging the audience’s beliefs and perceptions (Thangavelu, 2020). This is particularly true of popular movies, and Spirits’ Homecoming mirrored the current events and public interest of the period. The issue of comfort women, a euphemistic term referring to women and girls forced into sexual slavery for soldiers of the Japanese imperial army before and during World War II, has long been a most relevant and largely unresolved subject of debate. The 2015 Korea–Japan Comfort Women Agreement (which is also known as the 2015 Korea-Japan Ministerial Agreement on Comfort Women, hereafter “2015 Comfort Women Agreement” or “2015 Agreement”) had been announced just a couple of months prior to the film’s release, and the topic drew even more of the public’s attention in Korea amid worsening Korea–Japan relations at the time. The 2015 Comfort Women Agreement was announced by the foreign ministries of Korea and Japan on December 28, 2015. Fumio Kishida, Japan’s then-foreign minister (2012–2017) who is currently the prime minister since 2021, expressed his apologies for comfort women, which was followed by the confirmation of the agreement by Korean President Park Geun-hye (in office 2013–2017) and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (in office 2006–2007, 2012–2020). In a press release from the Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Kishida is quoted as saying, “The comfort women issue is an issue that deeply wounded the honor and dignity of many women under the involvement of the military at the time, and from this point of view, the Japanese government is deeply responsible” (Republic of Korea Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2015). In the press release, Kishida further explained, “Abe, as prime minister of Japan, once again expresses a sincere apology and remorse for all those who have suffered so much as comfort women and have endured hard-toheal wounds both physically and mentally” (Republic of Korea Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2015). Kishida also announced that the Japanese government planned on supporting the launch of a foundation for “projects that can help restore the honor and dignity of the former comfort women and heal their wounded hearts” (Republic of Korea Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2015). Unlike the 1994 Asian Women’s Fund, which was launched with a mix of private donations, Japan pledged one billion yen to the Reconciliation and Healing Foundation solely using government funds as a part of the 2015 Comfort Women Agreement. Both Korean

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and Japanese support groups fighting on behalf of the surviving former comfort women have long demanded two things: (1) an official apology and (2) financial compensation. The 2015 Comfort Women Agreement, in particular Kishida’s statement and pledging of state funds, appeared to have answered these two demands. However, seven years down the road, the subject of comfort women continues to plague ties between Korea and Japan, which have historically shared economic and political interests, particularly as leading regional powers espousing values of democracy and liberalism, and having close ties with the United States. Less than two years since its signing, the 2015 Comfort Women Agreement began to fall apart by 2017 (Panda, 2017) and was virtually annulled in 2019 when then-Korean President Moon Jae-in dissolved the Reconciliation and Healing Foundation (South Korea, 2019). Why did the 2015 Agreement fail to assuage tensions? Following the announcement of the 2015 Agreement, the Korean media largely reported that Japan “disgraced” the surviving comfort women by trying to “silence them with money” and that Korea’s Park administration signed the agreement without consulting the surviving victims or related support groups.2 The latter accusation has recently been found to be untrue. Yet, the supposed lack of consultation has largely become a significant part of the discourse on the subject, and it is even mentioned as a matter of fact in many Korean academic articles (Kwon, 2019). Even a largely pro-Japan article by an American scholar, which defends Japan’s level of repentance vis-à-vis other former colonizers, states that Japan offered “no new apology” in 2015 (Berger, 2020). Why was Japan’s gesture met with such backlash? The author of the article, Thomas Berger (2020), points out that Japan is “not particularly unapologetic, but rather that it is perceived as being such” (p. 280). Such a historical perception— that is largely shared by Koreans—continues to be a source of tension with Japan that shapes and is shaped by the depiction of comfort women in mass media, including films.

2 A simple Google search for Korean news articles on “2015 Korea-Japan Comfort Women Agreement” between December 2015 and December 2016 will show such headlines as “25 Years of Cries Silenced with 1 Billion Yen” by Hankyoreh News.

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Diverging Historical Perceptions An expert on comparative East Asian government, German politics, and arms control, Berger emphasized that even Germany, “the exemplar of forthright apologizers,” avoided redress over the Holocaust in the early postwar period (2020, p. 275). He explains that Germany, like many other former colonizing states, took several decades to apologize for past wrongdoings and has done so mostly for economic reasons, international pressure, or political incentives (p. 275). In fact, Japan was the first to have offered even a partial apology over its wartime aggression and colonial oppression. In 1985, Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone (in office 1982–1987) referred to Japanese rule over Korea as shokuminichi no shihai or “colonial oppression.” In spite of the Nakasone statement and other remarkable apologies and actions from Japan regarding its past colonial rule and the issue of comfort women however, problematic remarks by right-wing, conservative Japanese politicians frequently overturned possibilities of reconciliation. This explains the negative reaction in Korea over the 2015 statement and pledge by Kishida as well as the overall perception of Japan as being unremorseful. Furthermore, whether comfort women stations should be considered sexual slavery, or a form of prostitution has been critical to arguments made by both sides of the debate, particularly in comparison with Germany and other Western powers that were involved in World War II. Kanji Nishio, the chairman of the right-wing Japanese civic group New Historical Textbook Club, has argued that Germany also adopted “forced prostitution” during the war, but it has neither apologized for the matter nor provided compensation to the victims. He is known for stating that it is “unfair” to focus solely on the Japanese case. However, Nishio went a step further to claim that the comfort women issue was brought to the fore with the intention of tarnishing Japan’s national image from the outset (Takahashi & Lee, 2000, p. 182). Likewise, Yumiko Yamamoto and Kiyoshi Hosoya of Japanese Women for Justice and Peace argue that the comfort women issue was brought up by the political campaigns to dishonor Japan. Other civic groups, including the Japanese Society for History, Textbook Reform Society for Dissemination of Historical Fact, Nadeshiko Action, and Global Alliance for Historical Truth, have also made such arguments that comfort women were not enslaved but only prostitutes—a claim that has repeatedly infuriated Korean civic groups and the public (Japan-US Feminist Network for Decolonization, n.d.).

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In 2016, Nadeshiko Action published a booklet called “Comfort Women Issue: Capitalize Solution.” The booklet states that comfort women were never slaves, explaining that they were “recruited by advertisements in newspapers, proprietors of brothels, employment agencies, panders, etc. They were never abducted by the military or the police” (Yamamoto & Hosoya, 2016, p. 22). Showing a picture taken in wartime, the booklet explains that the comfort station owner and employees, including comfort women, went on a picnic to admire flower blossoms. “They went with children, and all seem cheerful. Is there such a picture as going on a picnic with slaves?” it says. The publication also reasons that comfort women were treated as valuable employees who could enjoy a quite luxurious life, receiving a good deal of annual payment, which was enough to buy two houses in Tokyo back then (Yamamoto & Hosoya, 2016, p. 25). In a nutshell, the essence of the argument is that comfort women were not forced to serve but were voluntarily employed for a lucrative job. However, most testimonies given by Korean comfort women cannot be more different. Rather, they tell a similar tale of being coerced or tricked into the role of comfort women as young, innocent teenagers. The diverging tales will be further explored later in the paper. Former colonizers and World War II aggressors including Germany have made efforts to amend their historical issues only when there was a strong practical need to do so, according to Berger (2020). A similar pattern can be discerned in the case of Japan, which most likely signed the 2015 Comfort Women Agreement due to security concerns and trilateral ties with the United States. However, Berger (2020) sees Japan as not comparing poorly to other OECD countries that have come under pressure to address historical injustices. During the initial Cold War period, historical justice issues were put aside in Japan for the urgent task of postwar reconstruction. But views of “responsibility for the war (senso sekinin)” (Berger, 2020, p. 281) became an ideological dividing line in Japanese domestic politics. At the same time, general anger and desire for revenge against Japan brewed outside the county, particularly in neighboring Korea and China. However, the US-led international environment allowed Japan to dispense with the historical issue with minimal contrition in the form of limited apologies—such as Foreign Minister Shiina Etsusaburo’s apology to Korea in 1965—as well as economic aid and trade. In fact, the 1965 Korea–Japan Normalization Treaty was signed despite being 14 years in the making—or perhaps precisely because it was so

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prolonged. It is largely accepted in both Korea and Japan that the governments at the time knowingly adopted a method of “strategic ambiguity” (Hyun, 2008). The treaty, which established basic diplomatic relations between Korea and Japan, addressed the issue of forced labor of Koreans by colonial Japan, and amends to victims were included in a “bundle deal” comprising of financial compensation and loan assistance. The Agreement on the Settlement of Problems Concerning Property and Claims and the Economic Cooperation Between the Republic of Korea and Japan reveals that Korea’s Park Chung-hee regime (1962–1979) believed that the responsibility to compensate individuals shifted from Japan to Korea by the treaty and agreement For instance, a public letter from the Korean foreign minister states that “our claim included individual claim rights held by Korean citizens (including corporations), so if we now solve the claims rights issue with Japan, the [Korean] government will be obligated to compensate the individual claim rights” (Northeast Asian History Foundation, n.d.). In 1966, the Act on the Operation and Management of Funds for Compensation was enacted. It stated, “The Korean people’s private claims for compensation from Japan […] must be compensated from the funds for compensation prescribed by this Act” (Republic of Korea Supreme Court, n.d.). Various topics were covered in the treaty, such as forced labor, but the issue of comfort women was never even discussed. And so, Korean activists continue to demand an official apology and financial compensation from the Japanese government, claiming that the comfort women issue is separate from forced labor and other individual claims. On the other hand, Japan had long insisted that it had already apologized for its colonial past and compensation for individual claims had already been settled in the 1960s prior to the 2015 comfort women agreement.

Domestic Sociopolitical Climates in Korea and Japan To better understand the conflict between Korea and Japan, it is necessary not only to examine the history of bilateral ties but also to consider the domestic situation in both countries in recent decades. In the 1980s, Japan saw a rise of conservative nationalism manifested through a more positive appraisal of modern Japanese history and visits by political leaders to the controversial Yasukuni shrine, where Class-A World War II war

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criminals are enshrined. However, toward the 1990s, as the liberal international order took hold, historical issues became central in international relations due to the spread of democracy and human rights norms. The advent of democracy and liberal values in Korea in the 1980s and 1990s allowed hitherto silenced voices to speak up. The issue of “comfort women” is known to have been “discovered” by a group of churchwomen in the 1990s (Chung, 1997), and the term has since become part of the everyday Korean vocabulary following Kim Hak-sun’s landmark testimony in 1991. Kim was the first former comfort woman to speak publicly about her experience, and the issue became an increasingly large part of Koreans’ historical perception and collective memory of Japanese colonial occupation. Local civic groups helped garner public attention both near and far, making the issue of comfort women a central topic in the international discourse on gendered war crimes. Japanese leaders began to respond pragmatically. This resulted in a string of apologies and culminated with the Murayama statement on July 1, 1995. On the occasion of the establishment of the “Asian Women’s Fund,” then-Japanese Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama (in office 1994–1996) said, [Japan] worked hard to cultivate, step by step, friendly relations with our neighboring Asian countries and others. However, the scars of war still run deep in these countries to this day. The problem of the so-called wartime comfort women is one such scar, which, with the involvement of the Japanese military forces of the time, seriously stained the honor and dignity of many women. This is entirely inexcusable. I offer my profound apology to all those who, as wartime comfort women, suffered emotional and physical wounds that can never be closed. (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, 1995)

These were followed by the landmark Korea–Japan summit in 1998, through which heads of state Kim Dae-jung (in office 1998–2003) and Keizo Obuchi (in office 1998–2000), respectively, heralded a new era of reconciliation between the neighboring Asian countries. Pop culture and entertainment play a significant role by symbolizing the complex, the multilayered relationship between the two countries. The ban on imports of Japanese cultural content was finally lifted in Korea, and Korean fans of Japanese manga and anime were finally able to consume officially imported work instead of pirated copies. The agreement also contributed to a rapid increase in the number of Koreans visiting Japan. Meanwhile,

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a string of Korean TV dramas and pop music created massive waves in Japan, and Koreatowns became hotspots. To this day, fans of the 2002 series Winter Sonata still visit filming locations in Korea, such as Nami Island. Korea and Japan also co-hosted the 2002 World Cup, which helped facilitate Hallyu or the “Korean Wave”—the Korean culture boom overseas measured by the popularity of Korean popular entertainment, food, beauty products, and fashion, etc. Data from the Korea Tourism Organization show that women accounted for 60 percent of all Japanese visitors prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the majority of their activities were related to K-pop, K-dramas and/or Hallyu stars (Korea Tourism Organization, 2021, p. 11). However, warming ties between the former colonizer and the colony did not last long on the political front. The mid-2000s saw the reemergence of conservative nationalism in both Korea and Japan, and the Roh Moo-hyun administration (2003–2008) waged diplomatic warfare as Japanese conservative politicians visited the Yasukuni Shrine. Historical issues began to be explicitly linked to territorial disputes, such as the ongoing Dokdo/Takeshima issue. Moreover, the dominant mood in Japan became one of “apology fatigue” by the 2010s. For instance, the sentiment among Japanese leaders and portions of the conservative public was as follows: No matter how much Japan appears to settle on the historical issue, it is doomed to fail as Koreans do not appear to favor reconciliation. Conflicts further escalated when former Korean president Lee Myung-bak (in office 2008–2013) visited Dokdo Island on August 15, 2012. August 15 marks the end of World War II, which is celebrated in Korea as its Independence Day, while it is a memorial day in Japan for honoring and mourning the war dead. Hence, a head-of-state’s visit to a disputed territory was bound to deepen tensions between the two countries. Experts on Korea–Japan relations call the 2012–2022 period “the lost decade during which Korea–Japan relations worsened in an unprecedented manner (Park, 2020). Strained ties became further weakened due to Korea’s landmark 2018 Supreme Court ruling on Japan’s forced labor of Koreans during the colonial period. The court rule overturned the understanding of the issue addressed in the 1965 Korea–Japan Normalization Treaty. Meanwhile, in Japan, conservative rightist politicians continued to visit the Yasukuni Shrine; revoked the Kono statement, Miyazawa policy and/or Murayama statement; or made noisy publicity campaigns asserting Japan’s reclaims over Dokdo/Takeshima. On the cultural and economic

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front, Korean consumers boycotted Japanese brands. Popular Japanese beers disappeared from local convenience stores, while the Japanese fast fashion brand UNIQLO suffered significant losses in recent years. The latter has been the top SPA brand in terms of sales in Korea since opening its first Korean location in 2005, and in 2015 crossed 1.182 trillion won (“Japanese brands,” 2017). But the “No Japan” movements around 2018 brought down its market share in Korea (Bae et al., 2021). In July 2019, Japan regulated exports of raw materials integral to semiconductor production in Korea and eventually removed Korea from its white list of trade partners in August of that same year. The number of Japanese visitors to Korea also decreased through the mid-2010s, reflecting the deteriorating diplomatic relations between the two countries (Arai, 2020).

Crowdfunded Comfort Women Films During the ‘Lost Decade’ Korean films on comfort women released during this “lost decade” and their public influence most accurately reflect the anti-Japanese sentiment. Films are one of the most popular forms of art and entertainment, and audiences cannot psychologically or emotionally connect with the storyline or characters if they do not encapsulate a certain degree of realism or convincing internal logic. Commercial movies intended for mass distribution are decidedly created with this aspect in mind. Spirits’ Homecoming centers on the friendship between 16-year-old Young-hee and 14-year-old Jung-min, who are forcibly removed from their poor yet happy homes by Japanese soldiers. They are coerced into providing sexual services to Japanese soldiers in Manchuria, before being saved by Korean guerillas. Young-hee is the only one who manages to find her way home. Decades later, she joins other former comfort women to speak about her traumatic experience. However, it is through the help of a young shaman that she is able to find some degree of inner peace—through a long-awaited homecoming ritual that allows her long-lost friend Jung-min to return to her hometown in spirit. This film is significant not only for its box-office success but also because it was created with the public’s participation and help. It took writer-director Cho Chung-rae 14 years to conceptualize, produce, and finally open the film in cinemas. Actors and producers donated their time and pay, while almost half of the total production cost—roughly one million out of two million US dollars—was raised through crowdfunding

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by over 70,000 doners. The film was a smash hit that hauled in a cumulative 21 million US dollars in ticket sales (Korean Film Council). It can be fair to say that public interest in the issue of comfort women was significant through the case of not only Spirits’ Homecoming but also that of 2017’s Snowy Road. Another notable film on comfort women, Snowy Road, made headlines for achieving its fundraising goals in record time on Wadiz, a leading crowdfunding platform in Korea. The initiative crossed the mark of 30,000 US dollars in just 30 minutes during its first round of fundraising and then met its second target amount of 232,000 US dollars after just four days (“Crowdfunding movies,” 2017). This is viewed as “a form of active moviegoing” that combines the role of the fan and investor, adding a layer of diversity in cinemas amid the dominance of big-studio releases (“Crowdfunding movies,” 2017). Similar to Spirits’ Homecoming , Snowy Road also features the friendship between two girls and their efforts to survive in a Manchurian comfort station. Unlike Spirits’ Homecoming , in which presented girls from poor, provincial families were victimized, Snowy Road shows how even daughters of wealthy families could not escape the fate of becoming comfort women. Jong-bun, a teenager from a humble family, had always been envious of Young-ae, “the lovely princess of our town.” But princess or not, the two girls both end up in a Manchurian comfort station and rely on each other to survive. Like Young-hee in Spirits’ Homecoming , Jong-bun also harbors guilt over having survived alone. After coming back to Korea, however, Jong-bun, settles far away from home and takes on Young-ae’s identity. Artwork reflects and influences the value of each epoch, and this is particularly true of pop culture in the modern day. Alison Landsberg’s concept of “prosthetic memory” (1995, p. 176) explains how everyday mass media, such as television and cinema, are crucial to “programming” the collective memory. Pop culture appropriates personal memory in the public sphere and persuasively presents indirect historical experiences through audiovisuals: The public is provided with a curated historiography of sorts about the past and historical events through their select representations onscreen. This allows anyone, including those who have not personally experienced particular events, to vicariously live through them, to empathize with those who have, and to share in the collective memory. Furthermore, such prosthetic memories contribute to the politicization of certain events or subject matter. The significance of movies in Korea is worth examining as the Asian country has consistently ranked high among the world’s biggest cinema-going markets in

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recent years. Prior to the pandemic, Korea often came in first or sometimes second—only after Iceland—with the average Korean attending the cinema 4.3 times in 2018 (Korean Film Council).1 Korea also ranked ahead of the United States, the world’s No. 1 film market, where Americans headed to the movies 3.7 times that year. Cinema powerhouses, including India, home to Bollywood cinema, and China, which quickly rose to become the No. 2 global film market after the US, did not even make it among the top 30 entries by The Economist (“World in figures,” 2018). Moreover, the penetration rate of top-performing movies has been phenomenal. The biggest movies of all time in Korea have been seen by an audience size accounting for one-fifth of the population. As of June 2022, 26 titles have crossed 10 million admissions in a country of just over 50 million. Among these, 18 are domestic films, as are the remainder of the best-performing movies of all time. Korea is among the few countries in the world with strong and steady demand and supply for domestic films, alongside the US, France, and India, with over 100 titles released each year prior to the pandemic. The power of cinema lies in allowing viewers to share similar feelings and sensations toward specific people, objects, and/or events as a collective whole, and it is a most effective generator of prosthetic memories. That Roaring Currents , a film about an epic sixteenth-century battle against the Japanese, blazed through the box office in 2014 is not a coincidence: Korea–Japan relations hit an all-time low in 2011, and anti-Japanese sentiment was on the rise. The action film, which remains the biggest movie of all time with over 17.6 million admissions, was a highly anticipated summer release starring esteemed actor Choi Min-sik in the title role of Admiral Yi Sun-sin. Yi is undoubtedly Korea’s most idolized historical figure, the result of decades of schooling that can be attributed to the Park Chung-hee regime’s deliberate policies aimed at boosting national pride in the 1970s and 1980s (Park, 2022). But also, largely adding to Koreans’ collective reverence for Yi are other popular movies and TV series, such as Immortal Admiral Yi Sun-sin, which consistently topped ratings when its 104 episodes aired on KBS from 2004 to 2005. Moreover, such popular entertainment helps to program the historical perspective of a given society. When Spirits’ Homecoming opened in 513 theaters across the county, it attracted some 160,000 moviegoers on its opening day alone. This can be compared to the performance of 2012’s Masquerade, which sold

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about 169,000 tickets on its first day and became one of the highestgrossing films of all time in Korea. However, the latter was a big-budget period epic by CJ Entertainment which had the advantage of having CGV, the country’s largest cinema chain, as a sister company. Despite its humble beginnings, Spirits’ Homecoming continued to perform well after its timely release just before the anniversary of the March 1, 1919 Independence Movement against colonial Japan. It became the No. 12 best Korean film of 2016.3 Not long after the film’s success, 2017 saw the release of two more movies on comfort women, Snowy Road and I Can Speak, and then Herstory hit theaters the following year in 2018. Unlike Spirits’ Homecoming and Snowy Road, larger studios and star A-list actors were involved in the making of the latter two titles. Major production companies in Korea, like in Hollywood or other parts of the world, must take profitability into account, and the discourse on comfort women was deemed as having market potential. I Can Speak and Herstory also differed from previous films on comfort women in terms of narrative. Both films focus more on the efforts of modern-day activists fighting on behalf of the surviving comfort women. Critics have noted their decidedly feminist perspectives, just in time as the #MeToo Movement gained momentum in Korea around 2017 and 2018. I Can Speak, starring household name Na Moon-hee as a formidable grandmother who surprises her neighbors when she goes public with her past as a comfort woman, was a box-office success that brought in 19.6 million US dollars and 3.28 million admissions. Herstory was not as lucky in terms of commercial success. However, it still received critical acclaim and was noted for the performance by popular actress Kim Hee-ae in the leading role of a businesswoman who helps fund a court case against the Japanese government on behalf of comfort women. Intergenerational Trauma and Collective ‘Postmemory’ It is worth noting that these films are not conventional historical dramas. Instead of recreating history through the experiences of comfort women and girls in a more or less linear flow, both Spirits’ Homecoming and Snowy Road begin in the present and are propelled by a sense of guilt 3 Spirits’ Homecoming ranked No. 17 overall in the 2016 box office when including foreign movies. However, I mentioned the ranking among Korean titles only as they have long dominated the local film market.

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over how comfort station victims had to be silenced for so many decades. Both movies adopt flashbacks to introduce personal memories, but ironically, such representations of imagined intimate experiences enable viewers to truly “live” through them in real time. Through these films, viewers become deeply acquainted with the protagonist, a very real contemporary figure who could easily be one’s very own grandmother or elderly neighbor, and step into their minds and memories. Flashbacks thus make for the most powerful of prosthetic memories and enforce the public’s sentimental ties to past events. Moreover, these past events continue to haunt the present and headline the news, as seen with the 2015 Comfort Women Agreement and related controversies and debates. Marianne Hirsche uses the term “postmemory” to explain the way in which past traumas are passed down to the next generation, and how such intergenerational traumas are mediated and transmitted through their imagination and creative process. According to Hirsche, postmemory “describes the relationship that ‘the generation after’ bears to the personal, collective and cultural trauma of those who came before— to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up”; but the author explains that these experiences, however, are inherited so deeply that they “seem to constitute memories in their own right” (Columbia University Press, n.d.). Such postmemories reinforce certain historical perceptions or interpretations of historical events by a particular generation based on the attached significance and less on historical facts. The dominant historical perception of comfort women in Korea is that they were victims of unlawful coercion and mobilization by Japanese colonial authorities (Kimura, 2014). This contrasts strikingly with Japan’s perception that it was a lawful act of conscription and hiring of prostitutes during a period in which such actions were considered legal. By the mid-2010s, Japan developed a historical perception that it was neither involved nor responsible for the coercion of comfort women due to reliance on its own findings that produced no documented evidence or results (Yamamoto & Hosoya, 2016, p. 25). Abe, who began his first term as prime minister in 2006, stated that “it’s the duty of the nation’s leader to offer prayers to the souls of people who lost their lives for our country” about the issue of former leaders visiting the Yasukuni Shrine (Yamamoto & Hosoya, 2016, p. 25). Koreans publicly scrutinized Abe’s stance due to a statement made in 2007, where he denied that the Japanese government had any responsibility for forcing women into sexual slavery. “There is no

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evidence to support the claim there was coercion,” the former prime minister said. Similarly, Yoshihiko Noda, who took office as the Japanese premier in 2011, said that no documents exist to support the fact that women were forced to serve. Japan Diet Members’ Association for Bright Japan, a group comprised of 116 Japanese politicians, was established in June 1996 to oppose the Japanese government’s official apology for the war and the description of comfort women in middle school history textbooks. Meanwhile, in Korea, the testimonies of former comfort women have influenced the local historical perception and postmemory, which were further solidified through the prosthetic memory of onscreen portrayals. For instance, in Spirits’ Homecoming , a happy and innocent 14-year-old girl is suddenly torn away from her loving family and taken away by armed soldiers. But is this historically accurate? According to the Asian Women’s Fund (AWF, n.d.) digital museum, Yasuji Okamura, then-vice chief of staff of Japan’s Shanghai Expeditionary Force, first promoted the establishment of comfort stations for the Japanese army in the 1930s. He eventually helped organize the comfort station system, where the military would designate certain people as business agents and commission them to bring women from Japan. The Director of the Police Bureau of the Home Ministry stipulated that all recruited women be already involved in prostitution in Japan and be at least 21 years old. However, when Japan ratified the 1925 International Convention for the Suppression of Traffic in Women and Children, it excluded colonies, including Korea, from its application. Initially, prostitutes were rounded up from Korea for overseas comfort stations. However, daughters of poor families were later recruited by various means, including fraud in the name of good jobs, coercion, and intimidation, according to the AWF museum. These included girls under the age of 21, with some as young as 16 or 17. The main characters and other comfort women of the movies in question are not too far off in age and are sometimes as young as 13, as in the case depicted in I Can Speak. Snowy Road’s Young-ae is also a budding teen. She volunteers for a studying abroad program but ends up in a Manchurian comfort station. The iconic Statue of Peace honoring comfort women itself is literally a representation of a young girl—perhaps in her early or mid-teens— and is known as “Sonyeosang” in Korean or “Shojo-zo” in Japanese to mean “statue of a girl.” These bronze statues help sculpt a very particular image and perception of comfort women—or rather, “vulnerable girls”— in the collective Korean mind and memory. In 2011, the Korean Council

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for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan proposed the creation of a memorial for comfort women. The Statue of Peace was unveiled in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul in time for the 1000th Wednesday demonstration, which had taken place since 1992. Since then, the statue has come to symbolize gendered war crimes and has sprung up in Korea and other parts of the world, including Europe and America. There are currently 145 statues in Korea and 34 overseas. Unsurprisingly, the statue has long been the subject of debate and contention between Korea and Japan at both state and civic levels. The removal of the comfort women memorial is a major agenda item for the Japanese right (Yamaguchi, 2020). In April 2022, Prime Minister Kishida made headlines for seeking help from German Chancellor Olaf Scholz for the removal of a Statue of Peace in Berlin (“Japan PM asked German leader,” 2022). A vocal opponent of the statues is the Japanese right-wing movement Action Conservative Movement (ACM), which emerged around 2006 and is noted for its significant presence of women—contrary to the more elderly male-dominated, militant reputation of Japanese rightwing groups. Among ACM groups, Nadeshiko Action was founded specifically to fight against the comfort women issue. The group’s first major public appearance was a counterdemonstration against a December 2011 comfort women demonstration in Tokyo, which coincided with the unveiling of the Statue of Peace in Seoul. The group has mobilized anticomfort women movements outside of Japan, especially in the United States, sending mass protest emails against municipalities with memorials. The US is a significant location for the topic as there are 16 Statues of Peace installed there, accounting for almost half of all the statues located outside Korea. The Japanese civic groups’ major argument for the removal of statues was the claim that Japanese children in the US were “being bullied” due to anti-Japan campaigns by Koreans. A female journalist initially made this claim without any concrete evidence. New groups have since sprung up, such as New Jersey’s Himawari Japan (Sunflower Japan), to speak out against comfort women memorials (Yamaguchi, 2020). And so, the iconic symbols of comfort women—or girls as emphasized by the design of the statues—continues to loom over delicate Korea–Japan ties. Some scholars point out that emphasizing that many of these comfort women were underage girls is important, as perceiving the victims as adults downplays the gravity of the issue (Carranza Ko, 2022). Moreover, the recent comfort women films highlight how young and vulnerable

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these comfort girls were. The characters and their experiences in Spirits’ Homecoming are not shown as distant figures or events of the past; the shaman character, who connects the past and present by channeling the spirit of a dead comfort girl, is herself a victim of sexual violence. The analogy is clear: the shaman = comfort girl; her father who is killed trying to protect her = the father of the comfort girls who were unable to stop authorities from taking them; and the sexual predator = Japanese imperialism and its soldiers. Cause for Cautious Optimism? However, Spirits’ Homecoming and the other three aforementioned titles focus more on healing and redemption in the latter part of the running time rather than resorting to black-and-white vilification of Japan’s imperial past. This is a notable improvement in Korean cinema, particularly considering recent trends in cinema and television—an effort led by the US—to focus on the post-traumatic experiences of sexual violence rather than crudely depicting the act of violation itself and sensationalizing it as a form of gratuitous violence onscreen. In 2017, for example, the Korean action film V.I.P. was heavily denounced for its insensitive reenactment of a murder of a young girl. However, more sensitivity and caution must be applied in depicting the former comfort women and girls as active survivors rather than passive victims. Fortunately, the most recent films, I Can Speak and Herstory, do a more commendable job of presenting the survivors as ordinary women. Both Herstory and I Can Speak start in a way in which the victims of comfort stations are initially portrayed as regular grandmas: one a diligent domestic worker and the other a feisty old neighbor with a penchant for reporting petty crimes and code breaches to the district office. The people who become staunch supporters of these women are also ordinary Joes who unexpectedly find themselves doing something rather extraordinary. I Can Speak goes one step further in this respect: it begins as a comedydrama with the protagonist Min-jae, a civil servant played by popular actor Lee Jae-hoon, being among district officers that fear the constant reports and complaints by Ok-bun. Much of the running time is dedicated to the comic bickering between the two main characters, as Ok-bun tries to persuade Min-jae to give her English lessons so she can reconnect with a brother living in California. Only about the last 45 minutes of the twohour movie are dedicated to the fact that Ok-bun is a former comfort

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woman, and her decision to speak out about her story lends the film’s title a different meaning. Importantly, Ok-bun is not just a victim of gendered wartime crime but also a victim of war and poverty with whom most Koreans can relate. For example, her brother was adopted by an American family at a young age, which was common among many children who were either orphaned or separated from their families during the Korean War (1950–1953). Her guilt over being unable to protect her family also gives meaning to why she is such a staunch protector of her community. Herstory stands out from the other films in that it does not proactively vilify the Japanese like many Korean films and TV dramas have done in the past. Even I Can Speak resorts to older tendencies in its short, superficial portrayals of Japanese politicians who are unhappy about the US Congress bringing to light the issue of comfort women discussing it as a resolution (HR121) in 2007. But in Herstory, many Japanese activists and lawyers stand firmly by the women to give them unwavering support. While Japanese politicians and other people in positions of power serve as antagonists in the film, Korean men also try to shame and silence the former comfort women. This is similar to how Snowy Road’s Jong-bun had to live away from her hometown after returning from Manchuria, in order to avoid the shaming by villagers. The film’s decidedly feminist tone amid the #MeToo movement makes it clear that some chauvinistic males, regardless of whether they are Japanese or Korean, are a common threat to the cause. But women are also not free from blame or judgment. Japanese women complain to the owner of a Japanese inn, getting the former comfort women and their retinue kicked out during their stay. Even the protagonist of the film, the CEO of a traveling agency and member of a businesswomen’s network that spearheads the civil suit against the Japanese government, is no hero. While her motives to help the women are good, sometimes her overly competitive nature and proclivity to manipulate are called into question. Such elements make for a more multilayered narrative that is unafraid of leaving things in the gray zone and is more rooted in reality. Pessimists have argued that deteriorating political relations between Korea and Japan, particularly in 2018 and 2019, led to declines in favorable perceptions of the other country. However, opinion polls conducted annually by the Korean think tank East Asia Institute and its Japanese counterpart Genron NPO suggest the opposite. In their 2019 survey, around 60 percent of Korean respondents with favorable perceptions toward Japan mentioned “the kind and hardworking nature of Japanese

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people,” while over half of its Japanese counterparts noted “Korea’s appealing culinary and shopping cultures” (East Asia Institute & Genron NPO, 2020, p. 5). Results suggest that visits to the other country do affect the formation of positive perceptions toward the local people. While the commercial success of comfort women movies does reflect Koreans’ historical perception of the colonial era, other mass media content, such as the smash-hit 2019–2020 Korean TV series Crash Landing on You, has hauled in Japanese visitors to Korea despite the pandemic (Korea Tourism Organization, 2021, p. 13). Even the Statue of Peace is not always a subject of contention but one of its namesake, peace, and freedom. A Tokyo art exhibition featuring a Statue of Peace opened in April 2022 in a government-funded gallery, as an important part of the event’s message about freedom of speech (“Art event,” 2022). The exhibition finally took place in spite of months-long protests by right-wing activists, thanks to the support and organization of 16 Japanese artist collectives. A group of supporters showed up in favor of the art event, with some carrying placards with the phrase “We support freedom of expression.” A Statue of Peace can also be found at Dongguksa Temple in Gunsan, North Jeolla Province. Gunsan, one of Korea’s first international port cities and an important commercial point for Imperial Japan, was one of the major backdrops for the March 1st Independence Movement in 1919. Dongguksa remains the last standing Japanese Buddhist temple in Korea following the country’s postwar efforts to eradicate remnants of its “shameful” colonial past. However, the temple today serves as an important point in the cultural and religious exchange between Buddhist communities in Korea and Japan. The bronze statue of the girl serves as an important symbol of peace, according to Dongguksa’s head monk, Ven. Jonggeol (Lee, 2018).

Conclusion Artworks are not only shaped by the values and opinions of their times but also help shape the ideas and perceptions of the viewers. Through cinema and other forms of art, entertainment, and pop culture, the masses come to share the framework of a very specific interpretation of history and the relationship between the past and present. Films are an immersive, audiovisual medium that make for especially powerful prosthetic memories: Onscreen depictions of young, innocent Korean girls being torn away from homes by Japanese soldiers help program a very particular,

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collective postmemory of the intergenerational traumas that are associated with Japanese colonial rule among Koreans. The effects of such popular commercial movies are especially wide-reaching, and even younger generations who have not been able to hear personal anecdotes or accounts from their parents or grandparents are able to form an emotional attachment to historical events. Comic bickering between a young man and his elderly neighbor, for example, help establish former comfort women not as distant figures of the past but as living, highly relatable grandmothers, neighbors, and friends that need healing and support. This often contributes to shaping historical perceptions that are rooted more on emotional attachments rather than historical facts. This, coupled with how the 1965 Korea–Japan Normalization Treaty was strategically ambiguous, or the fact that emotionally charged territorial disputes are still ongoing, are bound to contribute to tensions between Korea and Japan, in spite of their close socioeconomic ties and cultural exchange. Korean cinema has been noted for its unique mix of genres in a single title, with comedies taking a sudden tragic twist and the dramatic and multilayered stories of historical figures and events always being apt source material for storytelling. Perhaps it is for this reason that historical dramas have always performed consistently well in Korea on both the small and big screens. Historian Edward Hallet Carr once said, “The facts are available to the historian in documents…The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him” (What is History? 1967). The writer and director have even more creative control and artistic license to stylize and embellish these “meals,” which, ironically, feed straight into the postmemory and historical perception of the collective.

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Keeping the Memory of Comfort Women Alive: How Social Media Can Be Used to Preserve the Memory of Comfort Women and Educate Future Generations Lauren Seward

The group of thousands of women and girls who were subjected to a period of sexual enslavement at the hands of the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II (WWII), are referred to as comfort women. Prior to, and during, the war, Japan invaded and occupied several different countries throughout Asia and upon entry, Japanese soldiers often wreaked havoc in their newly occupied territories, killing many, raping women and girls, committing theft, and other crimes. During times of war, armies wanted their enemies to feel dehumanized, especially once conquered, and this is seen repeatedly as a tactic from the Japanese Imperial Army (Caprio, 2011: 8). One of the most prominent examples of this behavior occurred in Nanjing, China, in an event now known as the 1937 Rape of Nanjing. Occurring in two waves of violence, “the first… when soldiers

L. Seward (B) University of Baltimore, Baltimore, MD, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 Ñ. Carranza Ko (ed.), New Ways of Solidarity with Korean Comfort Women, Palgrave Macmillan Studies on Human Rights in Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1794-5_7

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were left free to run wild in a panic of rape, theft, and incendiary violence. The second period of intensity is the seven-day orgy between 28 January and 3 February” (Brook, 1999: 8). During World War II, in order to maintain control of Japan’s newly occupied territories, locals needed to have some semblance of trust in the Japanese Imperial Army. So, to avoid a repeat of the 1937 Rape of Nanjing, the Japanese military requested the creation of “comfort stations,” buildings used to house women and girls to work as “comfort women” or sex slaves (Yoshimi, 1995: 33). The Japanese Imperial Army hoped to achieve two aims when establishing these comfort stations, “‘cracking down on troop misconduct,’ i.e., rapes, while quickly increasing the number of ‘facilities for sexual comfort;’ and to conceal, paradoxically, the high incidence of military sexual abuse” (Hong & Ricketts, 2020: 84). In some areas that were occupied territories of Japan and did not already have comfort stations ready for use, sexual misconduct by the Japanese soldiers continued, creating distrust and feelings of dislike between locals and Japan. In Okinawa, specifically, we see this occurrence. According to a report by the 41st Infantry Regiment dated July 1938, “a fierce anti-Japanese consciousness is spreading rapidly caused by widespread accounts of rape by Japanese soldiers. Those acts have generated unexpectedly serious anti-Japanese sentiment” (Hong & Ricketts, 2020: 83). China and Okinawa were not unique in the establishment of comfort stations, as they began emerging all over Japan’s occupied territories, filled with women and girls from Thailand, Papua New Guinea, Japan, Taiwan, China, Korea, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Macau, Myanmar, Singapore, and Vietnam (UNHCR, 1996). Scholars estimate the total number of comfort women to be around 200,000, however, between 1943 and 1945, the number of Korean women, specifically, coerced into comfort stations rose dramatically (Hong & Ricketts, 2020). During this period, local civilians, colonial police, and sometimes Japanese military personnel in uniform, “targeted adolescents between the ages of 14 and 20, accosting them as they chatted with friends, worked in fields or factories, walked by the roadside, or sat in their own homes—often dragging them off bodily if they resisted” (Hong & Ricketts, 2020: 84). These women and girls were dehumanized in the years they were held in comfort stations and the traumatic memory of the violence they endured made the rest of their lives more difficult. This chapter focuses on the oppressive treatment of women who were forcibly recruited as comfort women within the Japanese colonial context

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and the misplaced political discourse surrounding the topic of comfort women. Thinking further in terms of memory and remembrance, this chapter explores innovative ways of keeping the memory of comfort women alive—using social media. Highlighting research on how social media can memorialize and educate new generations on the stories of comfort women, ensuring their memory is preserved and history never repeats itself in this regard.

Methodological Approach This study explores the use of social media as a place of memorialization for comfort women. For this study, two social media platforms— Facebook and TikTok—were selectively examined as they provide a multigenerational sample of users who are exposed to information in an online format. In 2021, Facebook had over a quarter of the world’s population on the platform, at 2.45 billion (mn2s, 2021) and according to Pew Research Center, 69 percent of American adults use Facebook (Auxier & Anderson, 2021). While TikTok’s numbers are not as significant as Facebook’s, it is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms with its user base growing by 70 percent since its first quarter (mn2s, 2021). As of January 2021, TikTok has 689 million monthly active users worldwide and specifically in the United States, 62 percent of users are between the ages of 10 and 29 (Mohsin, 2021). In 2019, Generation Z (Gen Z) became the largest generation in the world and has grown up in the digital age (Sutherland, 2021). With the rise of Gen Z, their increased use of social media, and the COVID-19 global pandemic keeping many inside their homes, connecting with others online has become a primary source of entertainment, communication, activism, and education. As such, considering Facebook and TikTok together can provide a summative reflection of how memory is perceived across different age groups, and evaluate and determine if social media posts and pages related to comfort women reach a wide audience, and are successful spaces for hosting the collective memories of comfort women. The research uses both descriptive statistics and qualitative measures between the two platforms. These measures are collected through the search term “comfort women” and the hashtag “#comfortwomen” throughout social media networks. Descriptive quantitative measures include the aggregation of numerical data produced by these searches, such as the number of interactions on posts in the form of likes, shares,

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views, and comments. Along with this information, the qualitative data is collected by observing the type of content posted on each platform and the type of comments left on each post. If the comments were positive, negative, questioning, or seeking more information. Together, this data represents the interest of social media users surrounding the topic of comfort women as well as the potential for the topic to reach a larger audience and were taken as measurements to demonstrate the living memory of comfort women in an online setting.

Historical Context: During and Immediately After World War II Prior to the start of World War II, a power imbalance had already existed between Japan and Korea. In 1910, the Empire of Japan colonized Korea after years of war, “intimidation and political machinations; the country would be considered a part of Japan until 1945” (Blakemore, 2018). While under Japanese colonial rule, a policy to expunge the ethnicity of Koreans was enacted by, “depriving them of their own names and forcing them to adopt Japanese names, imposing Japanese as the language of instruction in schools, and forcing Koreans to take an oath as imperial subjects” (Yoshimi, 1995: 153–154). Using these tactics during the colonization of Korea demonstrated cultural differences rather than geographical or historical affinity and, “assumed a vertical relationship that precluded their incorporation as internal subjects” (Caprio, 2011: 10). During World War II, feelings of superiority among the Japanese and ethnic discrimination against non-Japanese women were exacerbated within the comfort system of sexual slavery. The Japanese Imperial Army appeared to be aware that the comfort system was an infringement of human rights, as directly following their defeat in War World II, they destroyed a majority of documentation proving the existence of the comfort system. While most documents were destroyed, some that were recovered included topics related to comfort women, comfort stations, and Japan’s establishment and involvement in the system of sexual slavery. These remaining documents were vital to the history of the comfort system and provide evidence supporting the stories told by victims. Historians have previously investigated the documentation surrounding comfort women as well as interviewed survivors directly. Interviews with survivors provided insight into the harsh reality of the comfort system as “women

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[were constrained] continuously, and soldiers raped them without considering their behavior as rape” (Yoshimi, 1995: 205). These young women were fully taken advantage of, with little to no regard for their health, feelings, or own desires, and they were forced to live this way throughout the remainder of World War II. Following the end of the war, comfort women suffered long-term physical and mental health effects due to their time in sexual servitude. Korean comfort women specifically testified to many having lifelong physical afflictions due to sexually transmitted diseases, many women had uterine diseases or hysterectomies, and others had arthritis from beatings they received (Yoshimi, 1995: 193). Many women also suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), depression, anxiety, and other neurological disorders due to living through years of trauma and abuse (Yoshimi, 1995: 195). For many survivors, it took years for them to share their stories as “most women tried to bury their past experience. They felt extremely ashamed of what had happened to them, but also somehow believed that they were in part responsible for the hardship that they experienced” (Kimura, 2015: 195). The actions taken by those in power prior to, during, and following the end of World War II oppressed and further silenced comfort women, influencing their willingness and ability to share their stories, delaying the first public testimony to the early 1990s.

Historical Context: Testimonies and Political Discourse Following the end of World War II in 1945, a majority of comfort women kept their stories to themselves out of fear of rejection and reliving sexual abuse and trauma for 46 years. In 1991, a former South Korean comfort woman, Kim Hak-Sun, publicly spoke of her experience in a courtroom, demanding justice for the crimes committed against comfort women (Yoshimi, 1995: 34). Kim’s statement sparked the beginning of a movement in South Korea, encouraging more former comfort women to come forward and take a stand against Japan. However, “talking about ‘sex’ and ‘sexuality’ is still considered to be taboo and shameful in many cultures, and it is quite likely that victim-survivor women would avoid making direct reference to sex or describing precisely what their experiences were like” (Kimura, 2015: 154). While some may consider the act of testifying as a rape victim empowering, victims have to “relive the painful experience

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of vulnerability and the loss of dignity” (Kimura, 2015: 157). Feelings of shame, embarrassment, and guilt prevented many women from ever speaking out, even after Kim’s public hearing. The response from Japan to survivors’ statements varied over time. Initially, in January 1992, Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa made two public apologies, one in a press conference, saying: “concerning the comfort women, I apologize from the bottom of my heart and feel remorse for those people who suffered indescribable hardships” (Miyazawa as quoted by Columbia, 2021). Following the Prime Minister’s statements, a study was conducted, looking into the historical facts of the comfort system, and in 1993, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono issued a public statement on the findings. In his statement, Kono gave an apology for Japan’s involvement in the comfort system stating, “undeniably, this was an act, with the involvement of the military authorities of the day that severely injured the honor and dignity of many women” (Kono, 1993). In 1997, a request to include information about comfort women in Japanese textbooks was approved, despite protests (Kimura, 2015: 14). However, references to comfort women declined throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century and after Shinzo Abe was named Japan’s new Prime Minster in 2006, there is a more apparent shift toward a revisionist history (Kimura, 2015: 17). In 2007, Shinzo Abe made public comments regarding comfort women, denying that the military was responsible for the women’s coercion. In his statement, Shinzo Abe claimed, “it is a fact that no evidence has been found to support coercion as initially defined” (Hayashi, 2008: 123). After making this public statement, the validity of comfort women’s experiences were called into question and their personal stories slowly transformed into a political topic of interest as it soon became a driving factor in the bilateral relationship between Japan and South Korea. Comments of denial by the Japanese government fueled protests in South Korea and in 2011, South Korea installed the Peace Monument, a statue dedicated to comfort women, in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul, South Korea. The statue was put in place following weekly protests held by five previous comfort women in their 80s and 90s. The statue was paid for by donations from South Korean citizens (Choe, 2011). Only one day after the installation of the statue, Osamu Fujimura, Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary, called the installation of the statue “‘extremely regrettable’ and said that his government would ask that it be removed” (Choe, 2011). South Korea initially declined to remove the statue, however,

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Japan continued to push for its removal, leading to the 2015 agreement between South Korea and Japan on the topic of comfort women, intending to settle the dispute between the two countries. Japan gave an apology and agreed to pay South Korea to help fund comfort women, however, payments weren’t directly given to the women. Another aspect of the agreement requested that South Korea remove the statue in front of the embassy, which initially they did not agree to, but the statue was soon removed (Choe, 2015). While the 2015 agreement between South Korea and Japan was supposed to be a “final and irreversible resolution,” (Choe, 2015) the media attention surrounding the agreement made the topic of comfort women a “diplomatic tug-of-war between two parties that ignores former comfort women themselves” (Hong & Ricketts, 2020: 445). In addition to the back and forth between South Korea and Japan on comfort women, there have been several disputes surrounding memorials and statues dedicated to comfort women globally. Representations of memory and memorials “preserve and reproduce painful memories that on the one hand keep the victims from being forgotten, and on the other hand hope to use the contemplation of tragedy to help visitors understand the moral responsibility they hold in their own societies” (Wang, 2020). One dispute that took place was in 2017, when a statue dedicated to comfort women was erected in San Francisco, California. The statue caused Osaka’s mayor, Hirofumi Yoshimura, to cut ties with San Francisco, which had been a sister city to Osaka, unless the statue and the plaque were removed (Hauser, 2018). Another example occurred in 2018 in the Philippines, when a statue was placed in honor of the Filipina comfort women, but was promptly taken down “after the Japanese government expressed disappointment in its construction” (Varona, 2019). The third and most recent example occurred in September 2021 in Germany, “the Japanese government lodged a protest with local authorities in a central Berlin district after it was decided a statue symbolizing Korean comfort women would remain in place for an extra year” (Kyodo News, 2021). Comfort women have been oppressed by those in power from the day they were taken to their assigned comfort stations and for many, until the day they died. These women were shamed and mistreated, they were questioned and put on trial, and when attempts were made to memorialize their experience in the form of statues and history textbooks, they were shut down. The surviving comfort women showed courage, using their real names, when they exposed Japan’s wartime system of sexual

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servitude and opened a new chapter in gender studies (Hong & Ricketts, 2020: 445). The very public battle for justice has taken away from the stories these women have shared, the trauma they have endured, and the memory of those who have since passed away.

Similarities and Divergence in Literature There is much literature that has been published surrounding the historical significance and the long-term struggle of comfort women. Hayahshi (2008), Hong and Ricketts (2020), Yoshimi (1995), Brook (1999), and Oldenbourg (2020) all posit that Korean comfort women have been oppressed for many years, confronted with efforts to hide this part of history from future generations domestically and internationally. Along with literature focused on the history of comfort women, there are also several works published surrounding violence against women, comfort women’s voices, and the process of female victims’ testimonies in legal settings. Some of the literature used for historical context in this article also crosses over into these topics. Specifically, Kimura (2015: 105), Hong and Ricketts (2020: 432), and Yoshimi (1995: 99) all touch on these themes. Yoshimi (1995: 130) and Hong and Ricketts (2020: 206) both similarly thread the historical evidence of the comfort system and themes of oppression toward women throughout their books by combining archival history, personal stories of comfort women and witnesses, demonstrating how their treatment was unjust. Kimura (2015: 85), Hong and Ricketts (2020: 21), and Yoshimi (1995: 156) all discuss the illegality of the comfort system and the difficulty surrounding the testimonies of survivors of sexual assault and prolonged trauma. Relatedly, Kimura (2015: 156) discusses how sexually related matters are evaded in many cultures and feelings of shame or blame can cause victims to be silenced. Kimura (2015: 157) also highlights in her book that studies on victims of sexual violence usually focus on the moment of breaking their silence, however, there is not much research surrounding the continued speaking that is required of the victim over an extended period. Because victims tell their stories and may not need to speak again for an extended period, it can create inconsistencies in their testimonies over time. These inconsistencies have provided opportunities for Japanese officials to poke holes in the testimonies of comfort women, claiming they are simply untrue as they claim there is no physical evidence. Hong and Ricketts (2020: 445)

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also touch on these themes, stating “survivor testimonies are an indictment of an enduring colonial and misogynist discourse that is deeply anchored in society and structured to dismiss such challenges out of hand.” These three studies (Yoshimi, 1995; Hong & Ricketts, 2020; Kimura, 2015) all contribute to themes in this chapter surrounding the oppression of women in the colonial context. From memory studies, scholars have long argued about the importance of preserving historical memory and the significance of sites of memory in preserving traumatic memory, such as that of comfort women, for future generations. Wang (2020: 57) discusses physical sites of memory, specifically, museums dedicated to comfort women, and how trauma memorials should construct collections of memories and assume social responsibility. Wang (2020: 57) highlights the importance of museums as they create a space for visitors to reflect on history, form their own feelings and opinions, and constructing identities. While Winter’s (2010: 323) research also touches on the significance of sites of memory, it also discusses the importance of family, using generations of familial connections to pass down ancestral memories. Winter links these family ties to generations of a family visiting physical sites of memory, contributing to the longterm maintenance that is required for physical sites of memory to remain open. Without that maintenance, visits to these physical sites will lessen, as will the memories the site of memory represents. While Wang (2020: 56) and Winter (2010: 313) stress the importance of memorials and sites of memory, neither suggest a virtual way forward for future generations. Other memory studies scholars have moved away from the study of traumatic memories, striving to focus on the transmission of positive memories. Erll and Rigney’s (2018: 372) research brings out the debates surrounding memory and activism. Specifically, how there is memory activism and memory in activism (Erll & Rigney, 2018: 373). Keeping memories of dead activists alive and renewed demonstrations for past atrocities shows a commitment to civil liberty and resistance to arbitrary rule (Erll & Rigney, 2018: 373). These ideas are useful in this chapter, supporting the ideas surrounding social media as a new place for activism among Generation Z and how that could contribute toward the memory of comfort women. In recent years, the literature surrounding social media in connection with memory studies has become more prevalent with the rising popularity of social platforms. Cooper (2021), Dufays et al. (2021), Birkner and Donk (2020), and Liu (2018) all research the use of social media in

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today’s world. Cooper (2021) mainly provides the historical background of social media and how it has become increasingly popular over the past 20 years. However, Dufays et al. (2021: 47), Birkner and Donk (2020: 368), and Liu (2018: 1676) all specifically research the use of different social media platforms as spaces for memory, conversations surrounding history, and opportunities to educate communities unfamiliar with particular historical topics. Birkner and Donk (2020: 368) observe the use of a Facebook page, dedicated to renaming a historical community square within a community in Germany. They find that while there were sometimes some unhelpful comments, there was mostly substantive, issueoriented discourse surrounding the renaming of the square (Birkner & Donk, 2020: 377). Like Birkner and Donk (2020), Liu (2018: 1676) observes Weibo, or China’s equivalent of Facebook, and how it can be used for people to articulate previously unspoken experiences and memories, question the authenticity and accuracy of official history, and shape social recollection in China, specifically (Liu, 2018: 1675). Liu found that the integration of individual experiences and memories on a social platform contributes to social memory and can also serve as a knowledge base on any given topic (Liu, 2018: 1689). Like Birner and Donk (2020) and Liu (2018), Dufays et al. (2021: 48) examine the use of hashtags on Twitter to be instrumental in the international spread of the Ayotzinapa movement, protests of around 30,000 people in Mexico after the massacre and disappearance of 43 students in Mexico at the hands of Mexican officials. Hashtags on Twitter helped to create both national and global awareness about this human rights atrocity. These scholars explore three different social media networks (Facebook, Weibo, and Twitter) as spaces of memorialization that are used to spread awareness of historical topics of interest. The existing scholarship all contributes to aspects of the history and collective memory, including those of comfort women discussed in this chapter. Many focus on the historical timeline, the historical facts of the comfort system, the treatment of women, and the memory of their suffering. Others specifically emphasize the significance of memorials and sites of memory as well as using social media as a place for memory and education. However, what previous literature and research lacks, is a way to view, use, and explore social media platforms as a site of memory for comfort women, specifically. In so, this chapter approaches the memory of comfort women in similar ways to Dufays et al. (2021), that use social media to analyze the generation of interest in human rights

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violations, by exploring Facebook and TikTok as the two social media platforms through which memory is revitalized, remembrance continued, and memory preserved. The topic of comfort women associated with social media is not something that has been researched widely, if at all. This chapter fills in this gap by exploring the possibility of using social media platforms as a way to ensure the stories of comfort women are not hidden or erased, and they can remain relevant by reaching new generations on the internet.

Memory and Social Media Efforts to solidify the memory of comfort women are crucial to preserving a piece of history. When ensuring memory is preserved and historical facts are taught to future generations, it not only pays respect to those who have endured horrific experiences but ensures that similar things don’t happen again in the future. As history has progressed since World War II, the memory of comfort women has been challenged, attempts to memorialize the victims have been controversial, and their stories are slowly disappearing from history. Sites of memory are established based on a shared conviction in a broad community to commemorate past experiences. One critical aspect of sites of memory is that “they are there as points of reference not only for those who survived traumatic events, but those born long after them” (Winter, 2010: 313). As we have observed in the case of comfort women, multiple sites of memory have been established worldwide, however, they have elicited a negative reaction from the Japanese government. Also, these psychical sites of memory require upkeep and routine acts of public commemoration surrounding them to stay relevant. To avoid the obstacles hindering the establishment of physical sites of memory, online or virtual spaces of memorialization for comfort women is a plausible solution. A previous study conducted by Liu (2018) on the use of Weibo, or China’s equivalent of Facebook, found that, “social media embraces wide and diversified subjects to engage in the production of historical knowledge and facilitates the dissemination of alternative frameworks of memory” (Liu, 2018: 1689). Because of the diversity of subjects on social media platforms, posting about comfort women would be a welcome topic. These posts would allow for new audiences to learn, discuss, and share the memory of comfort women to a wide range of people. Social media networks also have a global reach and are much

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easier to access than a physical site of memory, which is limited to visitors in the geographical area. As previously stated, around 3.6 billion people use social media around the world, with that number increasing each year. As new generations consistently become more involved in the rapidly growing world of social media, it further solidifies social media as a sensible space for the memorialization of comfort women. A key piece to preserving the memory of comfort women is acknowledging the historical memory, or the piece of those histories that are “transmitted socially, culturally, and politically through a group or community of people” (Helmsing, 2021). Often when incorporating historical memories into an educational context, people tend to relate more to an individual’s recollection of an event, as that historical memory creates “a meaningful nexus between the past, present, and future” (Rüsen, 2005: 25). Because the comfort system is not taught in traditional classrooms, using social media to not only preserve their memory but also spread their stories to new audiences, is key to ensuring their memories don’t fade. The interconnectivity of digital networks “creates a media environment that affects not only memory contents or discourses but memory forms and practices” (Dufays et al., 2021: 55). The combination of Gen Z’s social media usage and the COVID-19 global pandemic also contributed to a rise in online social activism among young people. Social media platforms “have become organizing spaces for digital activism in an era where in-person social action has not consistently been safe or available” (Sutherland, 2021). In recent years, activism and memory have begun to intersect and there is a clear link between the two topics. Ann Rigney and Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney (2018: 372) propose that the link between memory and activism can be discerned in “how actors struggle to produce cultural memory and to steer future remembrance… how earlier struggles for a better world are culturally recollected… and how cultural memory of earlier struggles informs new movements in the present.” Social media platforms create an environment that “blends cultural public forms of memory and personal processes of remembering and increasingly intertwines the functions of memory, communication and identity formation” (Dufays et al., 2021: 55). Focusing on Gen Z’s interest in social activism and channeling that into historical topics, such as comfort women, further facilitates the potential space for online memorialization.

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Research Findings Facebook Facebook is a social networking website that allows its users to create and customize their own profiles with photos, videos, and information about themselves. Users can connect with friends and write messages on their pages. Additionally, pages and groups can be created related to any topic of interest, which can be followed by others who also like that topic (Meta, 2021). In searching the term “comfort women” on Facebook, there were 15 groups specifically dedicated to comfort women. When looking at the number of likes, or followers, each group had, many lacked a significant amount on this platform, however, a few pages stood out more than others. One of these pages that was no longer active but relevant in terms of the number of following it has, is the site “Stand with Comfort Women.” The group is based in the United States with a little over 700 likes and followers. One post on this page from March 2020, after the installation of a statue dedicated to comfort women in Connecticut, modeled after the original Statue of Peace. The post states, “[the statue] symbolizes the painful history, but courageous activism of the comfort women victims” (2020). In addition to the post about the statue, there are more recent posts with information about virtual panels relating to comfort women, inviting those interested in the topic to join. Looking at a few pages that are currently active, the first is the “Comfort Women Justice Coalition (CWJC),” which is a page run by a nonprofit organization by the same name, with a little over 2000 likes and followers. This group is made up of members from organizations based in the San Francisco Bay Area with others in both Southern California and Japan. The goal of the group is to continue the conversation surrounding comfort women, to ensure justice is achieved for the victims and survivors (CWJC, 2021). On the CWJC page, there are regular posts highlighting events open to the public related to comfort women, including one from May 2021 that was dedicated to the primary sources and evidence on comfort women issues. Another event posted in March 2021 was an in-person, socially distanced vigil following a shooting in Atlanta, Georgia earlier that month, that killed eight victims total, seven of which were Asian, and six of them women (CWJC, 2021). This vigil was held at a site of memory dedicated to comfort women in San Francisco, CA—the Column of Strength Memorial. A second page that is consistently active on Facebook is the “Lila Pilipina,” page, which is a

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non-governmental organization (NGO) dedicated to the Filipina comfort women’s fight for justice, with a little over 2000 likes and followers. There is a wide variety of posts on Lila Pilipina’s page, ranging from stories from survivors, artwork, memorials dedicated to victims, workshops, and protests all relating to comfort women. As seen in Fig. 1 below, on December 6, 2021, Lila Pilipina posted about Lola Dolores Molina, who was 13 or 14 years old when she was grabbed on the street by a Japanese solider (Lila Pilipina, 2021). Another post from December 2021 lists information about Lila Pilipina’s new website launch, stating “as the world is shifting everything to digital, we’re finally immortalizing the history of our Lolas through a web platform” (2021). In November 2021, Lila Pilipina posted a statement highlighting the recent passing of Lola Lita Vinuya, who was the President of the Malaya Lolas, a separate comfort women organization based also based in the Philippines. Not only does the Lila Pilipina page post almost daily about comfort women as individuals, but they also use the page to highlight online webinars dedicated to comfort women as well as events they have hosted in the past, such as a local art workshop, “Rise For Peace: Rage for Women’s Rights” (2021). Observing the findings from Facebook and the usage of a page or group to form a space dedicated to the memory of comfort women has shown to be a feasible way to preserve memory. Those who are interested in the topic and want to learn more about it can find educational resources

Fig. 1 Lilia Pilipina Facebook Group Page (Note Lila Pilipina Facebook Group Page [December 6, 2021] [Facebook Post]. Retrieved from https://www.fac ebook.com/lilapilipina1992)

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on these pages, have discussions, and share information. However, on the pages and posts, there were not many meaningful conversations surrounding comfort women as those who interact with each page seemed to be already familiar with the topic. Comments more often showed support, offered condolences, or tagged someone else. Additionally, each page has a small and specific audience, so one must already be familiar with comfort women to seek these pages out. TikTok TikTok is a social media app that allows users to create, watch, and share short videos relating to any topic. Personalized feeds are created based on the users’ interests and likes and can change over time (TikTok, 2021). The TikTok algorithm is driven by interactions with each video posted, in the form of likes, shares, comments, and downloads. The platform slowly learns what the user is interested in, based on videos they like or profiles they visit. For example, if you show an interest in books, your personalized feed will show you videos about books. So if someone were to search about a geographic location such as South Korea or Japan, a historical topic even semi-related to World War II, or search a hashtag related to education such as #LearnOnTikTok, the topic of comfort women could come up on their page without even seeking it out specifically. Looking at TikTok through an educational lens, the platform is available in 150 markets worldwide and is available in 75 different languages. TikTok’s accessibility makes it a potential space for learning, with the hashtag #LearnOnTikTok having more than seven billion views (Faktor, 2021). When searching the hashtag #comfortwomen on TikTok, over 9,800,000 views related to comfort women resolved. Views on TikTok correlate with the number of times a video is watched and can be found by searching a specific hashtag or term. This does not guarantee that every video that uses the hashtag #comfortwomen is a factual representation of comfort women, however, with such a significant number, there is a high probability that many people are seeing relevant videos related to the topic. In watching the top videos that resolved when searching the term, “comfort women,” these videos were mostly created by young people who are passionate about the topic, not necessarily historians or academics. The top results all list #comfortwomen or the term “comfort women” in their video’s description. One video that uses the hashtag #comfortwomen is by the user, “dsunbae,” posted on January 24, 2021,

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in which the user describes the history of comfort women. This video alone has 799,000 likes, 408,800 views, over 5000 shares, and 1515 comments. One commenter on the video says, “yes Japan paid money, but they want to erase it from all [of] history. Like nothing happened” (comacas, 2021). Another commenter says, “yes, we need to talk about this! We cannot erase it” (therealtinamonet, 2021). A second video included in the top videos (see Fig. 2) among the search results for “comfort women” is by the user, “stellahmoon,” posted on August 9, 2020, telling the story of comfort women and ends the video with a call for action to help survivors before time runs out. This second video alone has 129,600 likes, 566,800 views, over 28,600 shares, and 3790 comments. One commenter says, “I lived in Japan until I was 12 and the first time I ever heard about this was after I moved to the U.S” (avangellion, 2021). The third video examined within the search results for “comfort women,” is by user, “tsukada.studios,” which is a page dedicated to activism while showcasing the user’s own artwork. The specific video about comfort women on “tsukada.studios” page, was posted on August 12, 2020, and features the user painting a picture while using a voiceover from the previously mentioned user, “stellahmoon,” telling the story of comfort women. This video alone has 2,100,000 likes, 8,400,000 views, over 100,000 shares, and 16,251 comments. One commenter on the video says, “thank you, as a Korean I’m so happy someone is bringing this to light. It’s a tragedy and people ignore Japanese imperialism history” (soontoberichgaywineuncle, 2020). This user’s comment has 166,400 likes, which on TikTok, commonly reflects other users agreeing with the comment made. A second commenter on the video says, “I never knew this—I have learned more from TikTok than school. I can’t understand why they don’t apologize or do stuff like this I am so sorry for [comfort women]” (willregretthissoon, 2020). This comment also has a significant number of likes: 26,900, showing that others agree with this commenter’s statement. The research surrounding TikTok as a space for memorialization and education on the topic of comfort women, demonstrated that it is a successful platform for these purposes. Additionally, TikTok is the platform that reached the largest number of people and also seemed to elicit the most meaningful conversations surrounding comfort women in the comment sections of each post. While only focusing on the three videos listed in this chapter, around 9,370,000 people were exposed to the story of comfort women on TikTok exclusively, with an additional 133,600 shares to others who may not be on the app at all. Because TikTok personalizes each user’s feed based on their likes and interests, any video that has

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Fig. 2 TikTok Site for @StellaMoon (Note @Stella Moon. Tsukada.Studios. [August 12, 2020] [TikTok]. Retrieved from https://www.tik tok.com/@tsukada.stu dios)

a high number of engagements, in the form of likes, comments, shares, or downloads and is similar to other videos that the user watches, can randomly generate on any given user’s home page. This distinct aspect of TikTok allows for the possibility of a new audience to hear the stories of comfort women, preserving their memories in an online setting. TikTok’s broad search function, similar to Facebook, allows users to search the term “comfort women” or the hashtag #comfortwomen and can find videos and pages related to the topic from a variety of different users. TikTok’s search capabilities, create an opportunity for the topic of comfort women to reach new people, educating them on the stories and in turn, further preserving the memory of comfort women.

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Conclusion This chapter analyzed the oppressive treatment of women who were forcedly recruited as comfort women within the Japanese colonial context and the misplaced political discourse surrounding the topic of comfort women. Focusing on the historical timeline of events following the end of World War II and how actions taken by those in power assisted in keeping comfort women silent for many years, and ultimately have contributed toward the erasure of their stories from history. At the same time, this chapter considers social media as a potential space for memorialization surrounding the topic of comfort women to reach younger generations, ensuring that their memory is not forgotten, and that history never repeats itself in this regard. The research conducted in this chapter demonstrated that social media can be a successful space to preserve the memory of comfort women and to educate future generations on the topic. With the continued rise in popularity of different social media platforms, Gen Z and the generations to follow will keep online social networking relevant and more people will begin to use the platforms for topics that they care about. When looking at each social media platform individually, there are similarities and differences that contribute toward the effectiveness of using one platform over another, but ultimately, both proved to be viable options to preserve the memory of comfort women.

Works Cited Asian Women’s Fund. (1993, August 4). Statement by chief cabinet secretary Yohei Kono on the result of the study on the issue of “comfort women”. Digital museum: The comfort women issue and the Asian Women’s Fund. https://www.awf.or.jp/e6/statement-02.html Auxier, B., & Anderson, M. (2021, April 7). Social media use in 2021. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/04/07/soc ial-media-use-in-2021/ Ava. [@avangellion]. (2021, January 10). I lived in Japan till I was 12, and the first time I ever heard abt this was after I moved to the US. Japanese schools rly need to do better then this [Video]. TikTok. https://www.tik tok.com/@stellahmoon/video/6858856287954832646is_copy_url=0&is_ from_webapp=v1&sender_device=pc&sender_web_id=701669390582828 3910

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Birkner, T., & Donk, A. (2020). Collective memory and social media: Fostering a new historical consciousness in the digital age? Memory Studies, 13(4), 367–383. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698017750012 Blakemore, E. (2018, February 27). How japan took control of Korea. History. https://www.history.com/news/japan-colonization-korea Brook, Timothy. Documents on the rape of nanking. University of Michigan Press, 1999. Caprio, M. E. (2011). Japanese assimilation policies in colonial Korea, 1910– 1945. University of Washington Press. https://books.google.com/booksid= oj_IhRConN8C&dq=japan+discrimination+racial+superiority+korea+coloni zation&lr=&source=gbs_navlinks_s Choe, S.-H. (2011, December 15). Statue deepens dispute over wartime sexual slavery. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/ world/asia/statute-in-seoul-becomes-focal-point-of-dispute-between-southkorea-and-japan.html Choe, S.-H. (2015, December 28). Japan and South Korea settle dispute over wartime ‘comfort women’. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/ 2015/12/29/world/asia/comfort-women-south-korea-japan.html Columbia Law School. (2021, January 1). Japanese government statements and ministry of foreign affairs statements. Columbia Law School, Center for Korean Legal Studies. https://kls.law.columbia.edu/content/japanese-govern ment-statements-and-ministryforeign-affairs-statements Comfort Women Justice Coalition. (2021). https://www.facebook.com/comfor twomenjusticecoalition Commission on Human Rights UNHCR. (1996, January 4). Report on the mission to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Republic of Korea and Japan on the issue of military sexual slavery in wartime. University of Minnesota Library. http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/commission/country52/53add1.htm Cooper, P. G. (2021). Social media. Salem Press Encyclopedia. https://sea rch.ebscohost.com/login.aspx.direct=true&AuthType=sso&db=ers&AN=891 39034&site=eds-live&scope=site&custid=s8425478 Dufays, S., Zícari, M., Mandolessi, S., & Cardoso, B. (2021, Fall/Winter). Twitter as a mnemonic medium from an ecological perspective. History & Memory, 33(2), 46–79. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/histmemo. 33.2.03refreqid=excelsior%3Ad586b3df9479d5e29cdc4875d970d2ab Erll, Astrid, Rigney, Ann. 2018. Remembering hope: Transnational activism beyond the traumatic. Memory Studies, 11(3), 368–380. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/1750698018771869 Faktor, C. (2021, April 12). TikTok is a thriving learning community—and may be the future of education. Fast Company. https://www.fastcompany.com/ 90624117/tiktok-future-of-education-learning

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Hauser, C. (2018, October 4). ‘It is not coming down’: San Francisco defends ‘comfort women’ statue as Japan protests. The New York Times. https://www. nytimes.com/2018/10/04/us/osaka-sf-comfort-women-statue.html Hayashi, H. (2008). Disputes in Japan over the Japanese military “comfort women” system and its perception in history. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 617, 123–132. http://www.jstor. org/stable/25098017 Helmsing, M. (2021, September 1). Historical memory: What is it good for? National Council for History Education. https://ncheteach.org/post/Histor ical-Memory-What-Is-it-Good-For Introduction of Okinawa. (2013, January 1). Okinawa prefecture. https:// www.pref.okinawa.jp/site/chijiko/kohokoryu/foreign/english/introduct ion/index.html Kimura, Maki. (2015). Unfolding the ‘comfort women’ debates: modernity, violence, women’s voices. Palgrave Macmillan. Kyodo News. (2021, September 6). Japan protests Berlin district “comfort women” statue extension. Kyodo News. https://english.kyodonews.net/ news/2021/09/bf8eb5424adfjapan-protests-berlin-district-comfort-womenstatue-extension.html Lila Pilipina. (2021). https://www.facebook.com/lilapilipina1992 Liu, J. (2018). Who speaks for the past? Social media, social memory, and the production of historical knowledge in contemporary China. International Journal of Communication (Online), 1675. Lost. [@willregretthissoon]. (2020, August 19). I never knew this-I have learned more from TikTok than school. I cant understand why they don’t apologize or do stuff like this I am so sorry for them. [Video]. TikTok. https://www. tiktok.com/@tsukada.studios/video/6860107791277821190?is_copy_url= 0&is_from_webapp=v1&sender_device=pc&sender_web_id=701669390582 8283910 Meta. (2021, December 1). Meta. About Facebook. https://about.facebook. commn2s. (2021, January 1). How TikTok became the new face of social media for 2021. mn2s. https://mn2s.com/news/social-media-management/ tiktok-social-medias-next-evolution/ mn2s. (2021, January 1). How TikTok became the new face of social media for 2021. https://mn2s.com/news/social-media-management/tiktok-socialmedias-next-evolution/ Mohsin, M. (2021, February 16). 10 TikTok statistics you need to know in 2021. Oberlo. https://www.oberlo.co.uk/blog/tiktok-statistics Monet, Tia. [@therealtinamonet]. (2021, January 24). Yes we NEED to talk about this! We CANNOT erase it! [Video]. TikTok. https://www.tiktok. com/@dsunbae/video/6921451331928526085is_from_webapp=1&sender_ device=pc&web_id7016693905828283910

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Moon, Stella. [@stellahmoon]. (2020, August 9). Please watch the YouTube link in my bio to watch an interview with a comfort woman #comfortwomen #위 안부 #korea #fyp #justice. [Video]. TikTok. https://www.tiktok.com/@stella hmoon/video/6858856287954832646?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1 Rüsen, J. (2005). History: Narration, interpretation, orientation. Berghan Books. STAND with comfort women. (2020). https://www.facebook.com/STANDw ithComfortWomen Sutherland, J. (2021, June 11). Gen Z’s online activism helps and harms social movements. Catalyst. https://catalyst.cm/stories-new/2021/6/11/gen-zsonline-activism-helps-and-harms-social-movements The Research Team of the War & Center, W. (2020). Stories that make history: The experience and memories of the Japanese military ›comfort girls-women. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg. https://doi.org/10.1515/978311 0670523 TikTok. (2021, January 1). Our mission. TikTok. https://www.tiktok.com/ about?lang=en Tsukada Studios. [@tsukada.studios]. (2020, August 12). Lets talk about #comfortwomen#useyourplatform #japanese#korean #history #ww2 #art #artist #tiktokartist #painting #acrylic#paint #educational #fyp. [Video]. TikTok. https://www.tiktok.com/@tsukada.studios/video/686010779127 7821190?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1 User7400715293957. [@soontoberichgaywineuncle]. (2020, August 12). Thank you!!! As a Korean I’m so happy someone is bringing this to light. It’s a tragedy and people ignore Japanese imperialism I history. [Video]. TikTok. https://www.tiktok.com/@tsukada.studios/video/6860107791277821190? is_copy_url=0&is_from_webapp=v1&sender_device=pc&sender_web_id=701 6693905828283910 Varona, R. (2019, January 5). Statue of ‘comfort woman’ in PH removed after Japanese gov’t expresses disappointment. Asian Journal. https://www.asianj ournal.com/philippines/across-the-islands/statue-of-comfort-woman-in-phremoved-after-japanese-govt-expresses-disappointment/ Wang, Siyi. (2020). Memorials and memory: The curation and interpretation of trauma narratives—using the examples of exhibitions on the theme of “comfort women” in East Asian Society. Chinese Studies in History, 53(1), 56–71. https://doi-org.proxyub.researchport.umd.edu/10.1080/00094633. 2019.1682405 Winter, J. (2010). Sites of memory. In S. Radstone & B. Schwarz (Eds.), Memory: Histories, theories, debates (pp. 312–324). Fordham University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1c999bq.25

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Wisk. [@comacas]. (2021, January 24). Yes Japan paid money but they want to erase all history. Like nothing happened. [Video]. TikTok. https://www.tik tok.com/@dsunbae/video/6921451331928526085?is_from_webapp=1&sen der_device=pc&web_id7016693905828283910 Yoshimi, Y. (1995). Comfort women. Columbia University Press. Yunshin Hong, & Robert Ricketts. (2020). “Comfort Stations” as remembered by okinawans during World War II. Brill.

Kut as Political Disobedience, Healing, and Resilience Merose Hwang

Introduction: Ritual Specter and Hauntings Rituals of mass injustice offer new vantage points for elucidating the specters that repeatedly enter and re-enter the Cold War landscape. I consider mass atrocity-based shamanic rituals as a form of specter that foregrounds historiography. Derrida’s notion of specter is useful to consider these rituals as a haunting that has an ephemeral, affective presence in South Korea (Derrida, 1994). Specter’s revenant (invoking what was) and arrivant (announcing what will come) signal several temporalities. The future is made to interact with the past and present by

I wish to thank Seong Nae Kim for guiding me through the Haew˘on chinhon kut site and for her mentorship over the years, and the Korea Foundation for their generous support in my research (KF Ref.: 1022000-003867). M. Hwang (B) History Department, Hiram College, Hiram, OH 44121, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 Ñ. Carranza Ko (ed.), New Ways of Solidarity with Korean Comfort Women, Palgrave Macmillan Studies on Human Rights in Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1794-5_8

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imposing the past upon the present and by imbuing the future with possibility (Shringarpure, 2019). So, for Derrida, hauntology liberates events from historical overdetermination and offers a welcome disruption from chronology. The post-atrocity ritual is a time portal and a spectral experience of hidden injustices. What I mean by this is that those ghosts of unjustly killed reveal the past to the living, press hard on questions of today and tomorrow, they give historical starting points without a clear resolve. Postcolonial Korean studies should submit to these hauntings and to the inherent possibility that they invoke. Ritual hauntings are a success and a failure, they are concrete as well as symbolic, they are real as well as ghostly, and they live but occupy the realm of the dead. The presence of “comfort women (일본군 위안부) rituals,” like other rituals to appease the spirits of mass violence, signal ongoing injustice and historical unresolved like the persistence of colonialism, unending Cold War, and the genocidal tendencies of militarism. For me, politically disobedient kut (굿) represents what I wish to call “ritual vigilantism” that resides on the other side of colonial difference. This reminds me of what Frantz Fanon (1967) calls a “solidarity of the colonized… a kind of illuminating and sacred communication” (p. 145). Although shamanic communities claim they do not work on political agendas, it appears that participants reenact epistemic injustice, internecine violence, and complicate Cold War epistemologies within “shamanic ritual spaces” (kuttang , 굿당). These communities come from the dark side, affirming bodies of knowledge that colonizers otherwise erase or deny; they may operate covertly to challenge the logic of military defense, point to administration bigotries, and call on grassroots measures to protect precarious populations. In this chapter, I will conduct a historiography that covers some characteristics of the postwar era to demonstrate a continuation of colonial systems of power from the Japanese to American to Vietnam’s Cold War periods. I reflect on the late 1980s in South Korea when grassroots organizations began using shamanistic and other “Indigenous” motifs in their political movements to uncover untold stories from those periods, including those to commemorate the souls of former sex slaves of the Japanese military. Lastly, I will broaden the conversation to contemporary global circumstances where violence against precarious populations continues to persist.

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Colonial Palimpsests of the 1940s To begin, I will revisit the tumult of the 1945 transitional period in Korea to explain why it took nearly fifty years for the first public testimonies of atrocities to emerge. The end of World War Two and the fall of the Japanese empire were meant to mark the end of hardship and devastation for Koreans. But, a few days before Japan announced its surrender, the U.S. had already created “unilateral and hasty” plans to separate the Korean peninsula along the 38th global latitudinal line. “American officials consulted no Koreans in coming to this decision, nor did they ask the opinions of the British or the Chinese, both of whom were to take a part in a planned trusteeship for Korea” (Cumings, 1997, p. 187). The U.S. immediately assumed and controlled the south, dashing Korea’s hopes for sovereignty and “liberation” (해방). The U.S. military brought with them a kind of modern universalism where administrators were trained to suspect Indigenous cultural practices as “backwards” and “unfriendly.” The U.S. Defense Department amassed a team of scholars to draft cultural orientation packets for their military. Among their key researchers was a New Zealand anthropologist by the name of Felix M. Keesing (1945) who began his career with the U.S. Office of Strategic Services in 1942. He lectured to highranking naval officers on South Pacific culture and in 1946, went on to become Associate Director of the Stanford School of Naval Administration, where he trained personnel headed for the Japanese-occupied South Pacific. Keesing recommended anthropologists be employed for “efficient administration” over the Pacific area and to prioritize, “especially the adjustment of the so-called ‘native’ or Indigenous populations to modern civilization” (p. 374). One such training manual noted: “Of the Korean religions, Shamanism or Spirit Worship is the most ancient, its introduction among the Korean people have been lost in the gloom of prehistoric times” (p. 392). Army General John Hodge (n.d.) echoed this advice for Korea, that “primitives… for their own self-respect and protection must adjust their lives progressively to modern world conditions” (pp. vii, 73–78). Other leading American anthropologists like Ruth Fulton Benedict and Franz Boaz (who came to be known as the “father of anthropology”) were also recruited by the U.S. State Department. The general consensus among social scientists engaged in global

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postwar projects was that the people inhabiting the U.S. occupied territories were antiquated and needed to be molded to American modernism.1 Rather than factoring in a people who had been ravished by colonial and world war, statelessness, and cultural assimilationism, these foreign experts gathered that Koreans were essentially culturally flawed. The so-called liberation, “was overshadowed by violence… assaults, lootings, and new rounds of displacement… The violence signified the arbitrary nature of the social relations that were consolidated through a patchwork of colonial laws and policies but instantly vanished when the forces sustaining them disappeared” (Park, 2005, p. 231). By 1945, Koreans comprised a third of Japan’s entire industrial labor force, with many forced to work in the “harshest” industries and the most depraved environments. Whatever types of violence Koreans faced under Japanese colonialism could not prepare them for the amount of devastation they would face in the early years of “liberation.” With the Truman Doctrine of 1947, the U.S. declared its mission to expand the “free world” and “contain” communism. “South Korea was the first place in the postwar world where the Americans set up a dictatorial anticommunist government” (Kim, 2004, p. 526). America’s global mission to eliminate “reds” was combined with South Korea’s agenda to root out pro-Japanese collaborators. In 1948, a South Korean National Assembly passed the National Traitors Act and outlawed the Workers Party, setting the stage for communist purges. The escalating conflict was a combination of revolution, civil war, and proxy war. From the U.S., more bombs were dropped on the Korean peninsula than had been dropped in the entire Pacific theatre of the Second World War. The scorched earth campaign produced several million deaths, with an estimated 10–15% of the population wiped out, making it one of the bloodiest militarized conflicts in modern history. Comfort women were a testament to this “postwar” tumult (Cumings, 1997, p. 177). Claims for Korean repatriation were compounded by the social instability 1 Ruth Fulton Benedict (1887–1948) and Franz Boaz produced a textbook for the U.S. Defense Department on the Indigenous people of deterritorialized areas in the wake of WWII. Ruth Benedict (1946, reprint 1978) is most well known for her book, The Chrysanthemum and the sword. Franz Boas (1858–1942) established the U.S.’ first Ph.D. program in Anthropology at Columbia University. Benedict contributed a chapter on religion in Boas’ (1938) proceedings, covering “varieties of primitive religions” in Siberia, North America, and Melanesia (pp. 627–65). For more on Boas’ colonial frontier see Kulkarni, 2010. For more on anthropology’s racialized assessments of international cultures see chapters 2 and 3 of Visweswaran (2010).

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of deterritorialization. Some comfort women accounted that when the Japanese colonial government was replaced with an American one, their sexual slavery never stopped—they were simply ordered to change their outfits and to serve combat men in new uniforms. The new South Korean government restored and, in some cases, set up “comfort stations” for the new South Korean and United Nations forces during and after the Korean War. Even after the war ended, women in U.S. military bases were long referred to as “comfort women,” heavily regulated to “safely pleasure” the U.S. military, some dying in their enslaved conditions.2 The fall of the Japanese empire did not bring these women liberation. For Americans, decolonization was not a priority; in fact, criticisms against the U.S. were suspected of stemming from Soviet conspiracies.3 The U.S. military government could not fathom the idea of Indigenous governance beyond a Cold War binary while many Koreans could not understand an American liberation that erased battle lines and rules of engagement. The U.S. military government in Korea believed it was better that the South to be under the thumb of its Western “allies” and kept from turning “red” by any means possible. The U.S. and Syngman Rhee’s administrations committed “licensed mass killing” of thousands of suspected “traitors” before, during, and after the Korean War (Kim, 2004). A 1948 massacre on Cheju Island (제주 4.3 사건) may have been among the first of such anticommunist purges, with the well-known Nog˘unri (노근 리 사건) and Sinch’on (신촌 사건) Massacres occurring two years later. Jeongran Yoon (2017) calls this transnational network between newly decolonized states and the U.S. a kind of “evangelical anticommunism” where South Korea demonstrated their allegiance to American forms of democracy and capitalist development by creating an “anti-Communist hegemony” (p. 235). American postwar priorities were political stabilization, military reinforcement, and foreign private capital (Park, 1999). The Korean War proved quite lucrative for the U.S.; their gold and dollar values increased 2 On this often-overlooked matter, Park Chung-mi (2019) questions, “not why the South Korean government did it, but why do people believe that the South Korean government could never have done such a thing” (2019, p. 712)? For more on U.S. sexual slavery in South Korea, see Park (2015). 3 The U.S. also treated the 1955 Bandung Conference, third worldism, non-aligned neutralism, and anti-nuclear weaponization with suspect. It is not surprising that North and South Korea along with the U.S. and USSR were not invited to the Bandung Conference.

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overseas as did the U.S. merchandise trade surplus to the extent that by the late 1950s, the Eisenhower administration created the Development Loan Fund, shifting their attention from military-based grants to third world economic-development loans (International Monetary Fund, 1957, p. 8). U.S.’ South Korean objectives were twofold: to increase foreign economic aid and maintain U.S.-friendly dictatorships.

South Korean Sub-Empire in Vietnam We may gain a better understanding of what remains around the comfort women atrocity by expanding the conversation to consider the human rights issues that surround how imperial violence pushes the most vulnerable populations into precarious work for foreign militaries (Lee, 2018). After the Korean War, the U.S. became the wealthiest while South Korea became one of the poorest countries in the world (lagging behind most African countries). Camptowns (基地村), wealthy U.S. military bases in rural locations around South Korea, pulled in girls from impoverished families and widows from decimated neighborhoods; they became semipermanent districts for military sex industries after the Korean War. In the 1960s, South Korean President Park Chung-hee attempted to pull the country out of its dire state by instilling an export-oriented industrialization campaign where he implemented aggressive agrarian reforms, nationalized the financial system, and gave incentives for large family conglomerates to diversify. He bolstered national defense and sent three divisions of troops to the combat zones in central Vietnam: a total of 312,853 men over an eleven-year period, making South Korea the second largest foreign military force in Vietnam after the U.S. (Kwon, 2006, pp. 30–31, 43). With this war, South Korea became an offshore military-industrial complex for the U.S. creating its own “sub-empire” in Southeast Asia (Lee, 2009; Hong, 2014). In short, the Vietnam War shifted South Korea from working toward self-determination to being fully immersed in a U.S.-led global capitalist economy (Park, 1998, p. 225). In the late 1960s, South Korean and American military forces conducted a series of civilian massacres against unarmed Vietnamese civilians.4 In June 1969, President Richard Nixon announced that he would 4 From 1964 to 1973, the U.S. conducted a covert CIA operation to take down a communist group in Laos (a neutral country), dropping over two million tons of cluster

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gradually withdraw his troops.5 Later that year, the My Lai story broke across the country describing how U.S. soldiers killed up to 500 unarmed civilians in a small cluster of villages in South Vietnam. These governments launched their own internal investigations and then covered up their findings. Nixon reneged on his earlier promise to end the war by invading Cambodia and Americans took to the streets in protest.6 Then in 1972, American aid workers collected information on South Korean mass civilian killings in Quang Ngai and Quang Nam provinces. They reported that more than a hundred villagers were killed in thirteen of more than forty-five incidents in which ROK (South Korean) soldiers may have killed groups of unarmed civilians.7 South Korean civic groups worked with Vietnamese survivors to prepare a legal suit, collect, and archive historical materials and testimonies of eyewitnesses. In April 2018, on the 50th anniversary of the South Korean massacre at Quang Nam, a mock trial against the South Korean government was held in Seoul to find that South Korean troops had killed 136 civilians in Ha My village, Quang Nam Province, Central Vietnam (Kim, 2019). The Vietnamese government paid little attention to these events when the Sixth Congress of the Vietnamese Communist Party decided instead to prioritize building its foreign relations and to adopt a “Ðôi M´o,i policy,” steering them toward a new socialistoriented market economy (An, 2006). In their turn toward capitalism, South Korea has become Vietnam’s biggest investor and its third-largest trading partner (Kim, 2019, p. 2). ij

bombs (more than all the bombs dropped during the Second World War), making Laos the most heavily bombed nation in history. 5 A few months before this announcement, Nixon orchestrated secret bombings in northern Cambodia (a neutral country) to cut off a North Vietnamese supply chain. 6 For many Americans, the most memorable of these anti-war demonstrations may be the day when four Kent State University students were killed by the Ohio National Guard on May 4, 1970. 7 In the 1980s, Hanoi politburo conducted its own internal investigation to find an estimated 5000 civilians in central Vietnam were massacred by South Korean troops between 1965 and 1973. In 1999, Ku Su-jeong published her thesis through a weekly magazine, Hankyoreh21, where she summarized these findings and estimated that as many as 9000 civilians may have been massacred. It is unclear how they distinguished between unarmed civilians and guerilla fighters. Another civic investigation found that 80 different massacre incidents were committed by South Korean troops in five provinces throughout central Vietnam between 1966 and 69 (Kim, 2019; Kwon, 2006).

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1980s Shamanic Reclamation and Disobedience What happened to those who died atrocious deaths? Korean shamans, commonly known as mansin (萬神), have been working as afterlife doulas to repair relationships and to restore peace after death. They have attended to the unchartered waters of ghost care of former sex slaves in ways that were practical, political, and spiritual. Mansin massaged the tensions between the bad conditions of death and the political circumstances that erased them from public memory. In the early aftermath, they did these things in private homes and among hushed neighbors. From a Cold War imperialist perspective, shamanism was used to link countries of vast differences together, from Asia to Oceania, Africa to the Americas under an umbrella of “premodern” culture, characterizing countries of the Global South as precariously aligned territories. This logic stemmed from the New Age of Empires when shamanism was used as a kind of symbolic bigotry over everyday practices to produce “indigenes” as imperial subjects. Throughout the twentieth century Korean intellectuals attuned to the colonialist effects of cultural evolutionism used the print media to hunt down, incarcerate, beat, ostracize, humiliate, and dehumanize popular ritual specialists. Believing that women across all service sectors blindly gravitated toward shamans (무당), these men demanded shamanism be destroyed without reservation. Since 1945, researchers were focused on the ritual space as a place where social degenerates and antiquarian behavior could be found. At the same time, new postwar governments like the one in South Korea celebrated certain aspects of their “folk culture” to help bolster their national identity. South Koreans did so by establishing an Intangible Cultural Assets System that registered masked dance performances, farming songs, and shamanic kut as a means to validate their heritage. The celebrations to reclaim folk culture in the 1980s did not reconcile the academic genealogy of bigotry and hatred toward shamanism. Instead, in the cultural revival of the 1980s, all anti-shaman sentiments were blamed on the Japanese as anti-Korean, colonialist bigotry, glossing over perennial problems of androcentric scholarship.8 Shamanism studies was appropriated in a newly democratic South Korea as it became a “synthesizing agent of knowledge,” an intellectual “posture of domination” against non-aligned states (Alarcón, 1990, p. 364). 8 For an example of such historiography, see Chapter 2 of Yang (2003).

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Stories of the Japanese “comfort women” system also reached the public eye in the late 1980s–early ‘90s (nearly 50 years after the fact) when South Korea’s National Intelligence Service arrest and torture of its citizens was brought to the fore, international spotlights were placed on South Korea’s pro-democracy demonstrations, and the state ordered the reinstatement of civil rule. Only after then, was the majority population able to explore contemporary mass atrocities and such rituals became public. The democratic era of the late 1980s opened new possibilities to explore nationhood, subalternity, and civil disobedience. Korean shamans orchestrated rituals for some of those stories to be told. A new civic custom of “ritualized” protest helped to collectively express political resistance against oppressive state initiatives, with a particular focus on Anti-Americanism (Janelli, 1986, p. 24).9 Frantz Fanon (1967) finds that the setbacks of colonial domination actually “strengthens the collective will of the oppressed against the oppressor” (p. 145). Through shamanic symbols, subaltern communities of the 1980s commiserated on their common struggle to gain their right to constitute a people. Fanon calls this a “carnal and spiritual union between colonized peoples”—“the historic commitment of the oppressed to help one another and to impose a definitive setback upon the forces of exploitation.” Guk ˘ as “theatre” (극) was used to replace the spiritual connotation of kut as “ritual” (굿) with a secular emphasis on re-enacting social issues as a part of public political expression. This rise in “people’s theatre” ( 마당극 madangguk) ˘ incorporated elements of folk theatre and shamanic ritual. Chungmoo Choi (1993) observes how the people’s theatre “constantly re-member[ed] the people’s history or social memory” (p. 92). Madangguk ˘ became a method of performing a narrative of marginalized people, to voice their collective concerns which helped to establish shamanism as a pinnacle characteristic of a new democracy. Political resisters and the South Korean state both found usages for

9 Laurel Kendall (1996) also reflects on the shift in public attitude toward shamanism in Korea. In her earlier work, she was “exasperated, when the very existence of shamans was denied by many urban and middle-class Koreans… These attitudes have been less prevalent since the 1980s, when shaman rituals gained popular appeal and media attention as celebrations of national culture” (p. 17).

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shamanism.10 The very cultural motifs created by, for, or against the state were appropriated in assertions of Indigenous folk identity.

Comfort Women Kut and Collective Experience The kut or shamanic rituals to appease the spirits of Japanese “comfort women” centered on the mansin, or master shamans, who were possessed by spirits of girls and women who lived tragic lives and or who might have been wrongfully killed. Those stories were percolating in Japan as early as the 1960s11 but they didn’t gain traction in South Korea until the late 1980s when a South Korean organization, Another Culture (“ 하나의 문 화) discussed ways for create a shamanic kut around this issue. In 1991, once Kim Hak-sun publicly testified about her experience as a former comfort woman, the Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sex Slavery by the Japanese, an umbrella of 36 women’s organizations, started a regular weekly, Wednesday Protest in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. On November 29, 2003, I attended one such haew˘on chinhon kut ( 解寃 鎭魂, untying restless spirits) at the Center for the Development of Eastern Women put on by the Association for the Preservation of Hwanghae Province Ritual (황해도굿 보존 전수회) in Seoul. I was spirited back with other observers to the life of a former comfort woman in this way: It was wintertime, and yet inside the auditorium, the air was hot and musty from a sea of people – old and young, women, children, and a smattering of men sat, packed next to one another on the floor of the auditorium. People were oblivious to the heat and musk of garlicky sweat that permeated out of their winter coats as they watched, whispered, cried,

10 Some of these political resistance groups that utilize mudang images and rituals as a part of their protest include student activists and agricultural laborers. See N. Lee, 2007. The types of post-colonial movements in North Korea may only be speculated since researchers of U.S. Allied countries have been denied access to North Korea ever since the country’s division. 11 When newspaper reporter, Senda Kako began investigating materials on “military comfort women” (jugun ianfu). Senda went on to write several bestsellers on the topic in the 1970s. In 1984, Matsui Yayori published a short article in Asahi Shimbun about comfort women which took little notice until Yun Chung-ok interviewed Matsui in the late 80 s and published her findings in newspapers in 1990.

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laughed, and were transported to a past most had never experienced before. The ritual commemoration, run by twenty-five mansin and their assistants, was covered by national broadcasts and lasted for over four hours that November afternoon. In the front of the auditorium hung exact rows of white ritual paper (honsin) with women’s names perfectly calligraphed on each piece.12 In front of this memorial wall stood a long table of ritual paraphernalia, piled with white cloth long strips that would be used to pave the long journey away from the ritual space to the spiritual resting place. Ritual food was ornately piled to entice hungry spirits to feast. From the descent of one lamenting woman’s spirit to the next, “comfort women’s” stories grew in detail from the number of soldiers that raped them, the daily abuses they suffered, their miserable deaths, to how much they missed home. I vividly recall how one girl’s spirit quite reluctantly “descended” onto the mansin after an unusually long invitation. The mansin’s assistants were afraid for her life; some tried to “bring her back,” while others watched, weeping in fear. After a precarious several minutes in which the mansin laid unresponsively on the floor, the comfort woman finally emerged. The spirit of a scared child manifested through the large mansin’s body. She jumped back from the audience, apparently confused of where she was. She searched the room for some familiarity and then locked her gaze on a stack of food placed on a ritual table. She cried about how hungry she was before some audience members encouraged her to eat. She looked around fearfully and then ran to a ritual table to her left, as audience members mumbled confirming her birthplace. She shoved food into her face, hardly chewing as she devoured enormous pears, apples, and oranges. A wave of emotion took over the auditorium as we realized this child was much too young to be a “comfort woman.” Ripples of people sniffling broke into an ocean of tears as we watched this ravenous child gorging in ways that did not seem humanly possible. Some people in the audience asked her to slow down; told her that she could eat all she wanted. After she ate her fill, she walked back to the memorial wall, staring at the list of names. She demanded to know why her name was missing from the wall. The other mansin apologized profusely for overlooking her name and stated that they did not know who she was.

12 These white sheets of traditional paper (honsin) were posted behind the main ritual shrine. Each sheet with a woman’s name represented the spiritual embodiment of a deceased comfort woman. Observers placed white flowers on the main shrine to pay their respects to these spirits, to honor their lives, and to acknowledge their past experiences of injustice.

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The girl fell still and began to sob that she was cold. At this point a small grandmother from the audience gave her a coat and led her back to the center stage. The grandmother tried to calm the girl down by telling the girl that she was among friends. Engaging in small talk to coax her, the grandmother asked the girl where she was stationed. The girl replied, “Manju.” The grandmother responded in surprise, that she herself was stationed there; that she understood the girl’s pain. She said, “Now that you have eaten her fill and have warm clothes, you can go back in peace.”13 The girl abruptly stopped the grandmother, demanding, “Why do you talk down to me? I am older than you!” The sobs stopped and the audience started hollering with comedic relief as the grandmother apologized for breaching spoken etiquette. A more subdued “comfort woman” stood up to deliver a monologue that pulled me away from the historical experience and begin critically reflecting on a contemporary political dialogue. This woman exclaimed, “We must avenge those bastard Japanese and save our country!” The “comfort woman” spirit summoned the spirits across the traditional eight provinces by pointing to each large red banner posted around the auditorium, each inscribed with a province heralding back to a pre-Cold War country.14 Expressions turned from grief and sorrow to anger. Some audience members began yelling, “Bastard Japanese!” The spirit girl joined their cries to avenge their deaths.15

David Kim (2013) observes how in this ritual, “The spirits themselves are always somehow spectacularly and temporally out of joint. There is a kind of paradoxical incorporation involved – they are at once body and ghost, matter, and specter… Past and present converge and at times become muddled. In her realm [the spirit] is lost, but in entering the present she is equally disoriented… With a foot in each world, she is both in and out of time, filling the moment with her ghostly, yet material presence” (p. 733). The kut establishes a “supratemporality of history” (Choi, 1993, p. 95). In such ritual spaces, spirits descend into live bodies of mansin 13 The spirits that enter into shamanic ritual space are often characterized as lamenting,

restless, and resentful. A major objective of the kut is to help the dead make peace with the living so that they may peacefully join the world of the dead (Hong, 2011). 14 The provincial shrines of the kuttang metonymically linked North and South Korea toward a forward-looking, unified, and pre-modern nation. 15 This ritual was sponsored by the Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery (정신대 문재 대책 협의회) and ran annually for several years in that decade.

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acting out the horror of their past, casting their experiences into a shared historical consciousness by conversing with other beings in the ritual space. Sometimes through excruciating detail and reenactment, ritual observers experience the tragedy and are traumatized by association, given intervention, catharsis, and historical meaning. Observers and participants experience the historical torture in “real time” and authenticate the event through intense communal engagement. From another former “comfort woman” grandmother, spiritual cries for help, to restore national honor, may simultaneously target what has happened in the colonial past while hinting toward unresolved issues (the strained relationship between South Korea, North Korea, Japan, Russia, and the U.S.). Surviving generations of comfort women grandmothers utter their grief over the internecine killing of their ancestors in large memorials and television programs. These have escalated into highly publicized rituals to become a part of the bedrock of South Korea’s nationalist recollections before 1945. As demonstrated in the above kut, mansin store tremendous amounts of historical data on both natural and supernatural agents to navigate counter-narratives that encourage descendants to mourn for their anc”estors who may have been tagged as enemies of the state, dangerous, or irrelevant. Their rituals are often scripted (Falola, 2017), produced, and recorded by politically marginalized women, enabling a dialogue about histories that would otherwise be ignored or covered up. By welcoming people to regularly revisit and experience an unresolved, unforgiven past, kut continually offers the possibility for alternative points of view. These types of rituals question our colonial present, experiment with potential resolutions, and provide possibilities to break from ongoing systemic oppression.16

˘ ) Shamanic Work (Muop and the Specter that Remains In 1999, the Associated Press published a story in which Seventh Calvary veterans corroborated survivors’ accounts about a U.S. Army order issued from July 26 to 29, 1950, to massacre a group of Korean civilians who were sheltering under a twin-underpass railroad bridge at No Gun Ri 16 The effect of militarization produces systemic violence against women and children as seen in these individual life stories of abuse and killing of girls during the colonial period.

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(about 160 kilometers southeast of Seoul). In 2001, as a gesture of good faith, the U.S. led a public investigation into these civilian killings to find the U.S. not responsible. In 2011, A No Gun Ri Peace Foundation estimated that 250–300 of mostly women and children were killed over those three days and they demanded the South Korean government establish an investigative commission. They found that more than 200 cases of largescale civilian killings may have been conducted by the U.S. military. To date, none of these Cold War atrocities have resulted in official recognition as massacres or genocides; no official government apologies or sufficient reparations have been made—a specter continues to haunt Korea.17 Anachronism and inertia afflict the case of “comfort women” because such atrocities are presented as disparate matters when they should point to a cycle of violence (Korean colonial victims becoming ROK victimizers) that neoliberal governments want to bury in the past. These nationalist narratives deny shared experiences of colonial injustice and fail to complete a reflection on systemic forms of gendered/sexualized oppression that have helped to establish the South Korean state.18 It is possible that rulings on “comfort women” cases as genocide may not correct the bad habits we have inherited to reproduce those systems of violence.19 Without official apologies, some grandmothers and their families have managed to engage in rituals, commemorations, film interviews (Ahn, 2021; Feng, 2016), television dramas (Kim and Lee, 2017), etc., to help them grieve and return to their communities. But what about the others (Lee, 2020)? What happened to the many militaries’ “sexual proletarianization” (Lee, 2009; Park, 2021) that mobilized the rural, working class into prostitution, sexualized service work, and military labor?20 How about the grandmothers whose feelings were lost in translation,21 the women whose bones remain in unearthed mass graves, the U.S.-oriented

17 For the most recent series of judgments and rulings on “Comfort Women” cases, see Kim (2021a, b, c, d) and Min and Oh (2021). 18 Lee Na-Young (2018) argues that from the beginning, the “comfort women” movement have spearheaded international attention and collaboration. 19 To better understand the limited success of a genocide ruling, see Jung (2021). 20 Jeong-Mi Park (2011) discusses the Korean soldiers involved in the “comfort”

system. 21 One such case may be seen in how parts of Kim Mun-suk’s (2021d) early interviews were used while important affective information was lost in later testimonial records.

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“comfort women” and their camptowns,22 the sex slaves and rape victims who were outside the Japanese empire or who stayed undetected in the archipelago, what of the military brides who assimilated into the global diaspora? Sex for and around war transmitted diseases in the form of ghosts and nightmares as the specter of colonial and Cold War violence oozed across the world. No one has been held responsible for mixedrace and spina bifida babies violently conceived during the Vietnam War (lai Ða.i Hàn) and abandoned when ROK soldiers went back home.23 Countless numbers of people were raped, robbed, maimed, and murdered in guerilla wars, through chemical warfare ecocide, and postwar political cleanup campaigns.24 Those non-combatants are surely no less victims of genocide and no less related to our grandmothers. And yet, their new economic dependencies (masked as progressive modernity) are making it increasingly difficult for people in countries like Vietnam to vocalize historical tensions; it is especially unlikely when newly developed countries like South Korea have become triumphalist, evidenced in the formation of neoconservatism and their own nostalgias for dictatorial days gone by.25 I wish to offer a philosophy of responsibility and spirit of radical critique. When there is no ceremony, no memorial, there is no way for victims of atrocities to return home. The deceased and their survivors become sick, psychotic, and continue to infect children,26 orphans, and migrants. This

22 Important to this discussion is Paek Yilsoon’s (2021) argument that U.S. “comfort women” have been ignored because of the extraterritorial protections of the U.S. military bases in South Korea. See also Hong (2014). 23 Pusan Daily (Pusan Ilbo) reported an estimated 30,000 children may have been born in this way. They and their mothers continue to live in poverty because they are ostracized by Vietnamese society (부산일보, 2005). 24 After the Vietnam War, more than one million people fled the country to escape political persecution. Vietnamese Americans now comprise the fourth largest Asian immigrant group in the U.S. (Maffini and Pham, 2016). 25 Vietnam (like South Korean, like the U.S.) believes in the myth of linear development from welfare predicaments to democratic freedom as if increased engagement in global capitalism will amount to national security. The Make America Great Again (MAGA) campaign in the U.S. has infected overseas communities to long for a Cold War era (completely ignorant to a Korean peninsula that continues to be gridlocked in Cold War division). This new nostalgia for lost futures signals the risk of reemerging Cold War atrocities as seen in the Ukrainian conflict. 26 A group of Korean psychiatrists have found children of these former “Comfort Women” exhibiting signs of PTSD but a critical number of informants is lacking; most

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is how I come to see those traumatized girls and women—as our grandmothers who birthed our camptown women, who birthed our refugee migrant mothers, and who birthed our children of the global Asian diaspora.27 We cannot escape our colonial pasts if our global ancestors cannot gather, if some cannot demand apologies from those who beg for forgiveness; if we cannot shoulder our shared burdens, how can we begin our healing journey?28 Although shamanic communities claim they do not work on political agendas, they have the capacity to unveil large secrets in their ritual spaces to bring us together as ancestors in action. The shaman community can explore their Indigenous networks to work with other experts in “traditional medical fields” (傳統醫學) as alternative sites of testimony and healing.29 These transnational communities can affirm bodies of knowledge that are otherwise erased or denied; they can push against the threat of America’s Asian Pivot, point to Cold War anachronisms, and demand lasting measures to heal our lands and protect our precarious populations.

References Ahn, M. (2021). 박수남 감독 다큐멘터리 속 오키나와의 강제징용 군속과 위안 부 재현 연구: 마이너 트랜스내셔널한 기억과 ‘비커밍 아웃’으로서의 증언 [A study on the representation of forced laborers and comfort women in zainichi female director Park Soo-nam’s documentary: focusing on minor transnational memories and the performativity of testimony as ‘becoming-out’]. 문학과영 상, 22(3), 739–778.

are unwilling to be studied stemming from social and psychological challenges (Lee et al., 2019; Park, 2019). 27 “The majority of Korean immigration to the U.S. during the 1970s and early 1980s can be traced to military brides, who sponsored relatives and thus became the first link in chain migrations… military brides are responsible (directly and indirectly) for bringing forty to fifty percent of all Korean immigrants since 1965” (Yuh, 2005, p. 278). 28 Eunkyung Kim (2021b) critiques the Western biases of the “comfort women” issue to demonstrate this lack of constructive collaboration. See also Kim (2021c) and Lee (2021a). I find great potential in alternative youth educational materials in translation like the graphic novel Grass, reviewed by Mah and Kim (2021) and in animations like A NeverEnding Story and Herstory (Wojcik-Andrews & Yoo, 2019). 29 For instance, Korean mansin may collaborate with ritual specialists working with survivors of Hmong genocide (Moua, 2020). For inter-tradition practices in Korea, see Bak (2012).

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Alarcón, N. (1990). The theoretical subject(s) of ‘this bridge called my back’ and Anglo-American feminism. In G.E. Anzaldúa (Ed.), Making face, making soul/haciendo caras: creative and critical perspectives by women of color (1st ed., pp. 356–369). Aunt Lute Foundation Books. An, D.V. (2006). Building up and improvement of the institution of the socialist oriented market economy in Vietnam (Development Economics Working Paper No. 22837). East Asian Bureau of Economic Research. https://eaber.org/ wp-content/uploads/2011/05/CIEM_Dinh_2006_01.pdf. Bak, G.Y. (2012). 생애사적 맥락을 통해 본 전통지식으로서의 민간요법 –단절과 변화, 지속의 메커니즘 [A folk therapy as a traditional knowledge through the context of life history. The mechanism of discontinuation, change and continuation]. 역사민속학, 38, 223–262. G704–000849.2012.38.002. Benedict, R. (1978). The chrysanthemum and the sword: patterns of Japanese culture (29th ed.). World Publishing. (Original work published 1946). Boas, F. (1938). General anthropology. D.C. Heath and Company. Choi, C. (1993). The discourse of decolonization and popular memory: South Korea. positions: East Asia cultures critique, 1(1), 77–102. https://doi.org/ 10.1215/10679847-1-1-77. Cumings, B. (1997). Korea’s place in the sun: a modern history. W.W. Norton and Company. Derrida, J. (1994). Specters of Marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning and the new international. (P. Kamuf, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1993). Falola, T. (2017). Ritual Archives. In A. Afolayan & T. Falola (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of African Philosophy (pp. 703–728). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59291-0_45. Fanon, F. (1967). Toward the African Revolution. (H. Chevalier, Trans.). Grove Press. (Original work published 1964). Feng, P. (2016). An “uncomfortable” past: documenting Taiwanese “comfort women” in a secret buried for fifty years. Feminist Studies in English Literature, 24(1), 5–31. https://doi.org/10.15796/fsel.2016.24.1.001. Hodge, J. (n.d.). Our mission in Korea. Korea. Troop Information & Education Sect. Headquarters, XXIV Corps. Hong, G. (2014). Ghosts of Camptown. MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S., 39(3), 49–67. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/550253. Hong, T. (2011). 서울 진오기굿의 재차구성과 의미 [The composition and principles of Seoul jinogigut (shamanistic ritual)]. 공연문화연구, 22, 94–121. https://doi.org/10.35150/korear.2011..22.004. International Monetary Fund (1957) Annual report of the executive directors for the fiscal year ended April 30, 1957 . https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/ ar/archive/pdf/ar1957.pdf.

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Kwon, H. (2006). After the massacre: commemoration and consolation in Ha My and My Lai. University of California Press. Lee, C. (2021a). Can the comfort women speak?: mainstream US media representations of the Japanese military sex slaves. Korea Journal, 6(1), 22–45. https://doi.org/10.25024/kj.2021.61.1.22. Lee, J., Kwak, Y., Kim, Y., Kim, E., Park, E., Shin, Y., ... Lee, S.I. (2019). Transgenerational transmission of trauma: psychiatric evaluation of offspring of former “comfort women,” survivors of the Japanese military sexual slavery during World War II. Korean Neuropsychiatric Association, 16(3), 249–253. https://doi.org/10.30773/pi.2019.01.21. Lee, J. (2009). Surrogate military, subimperialism, and masculinity: South Korea in the Vietnam war, 1965–73. positions: East Asia cultures critique, 17 (3), 655–685. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-2009-019. Lee, J. (2021b). 일본군 ‘위안부’ 운동 초기 증언의 교차적 듣기 『조선인 군 대 위안부(朝鮮人軍隊慰安婦)』(1992)와 『강제로 끌려간 조선인 군위안부 들』 1,2(1993, 1997)을 중심으로 [Cross reading of early testimonies from the Japanese military’s comfort women movement: focusing on Korean military comfort women (朝鮮人軍隊慰安婦)(明石書店, 1992) and forcibly taken Korean military comfort women. 1, 2 (1993, 1997)]. 역사연구, 42, 61–96. https://doi.org/10.31552/jh.2021.09.42.61. Lee, K. (2020). 일본군 위안부의 ‘주체화’에 관한 고찰 [A study on ‘becoming subjective’ of comfort women]. 日本思想, 38, 161–185. https://doi.org/10. 30615/kajt.2020.38.7. Lee, N. (2018).경계에서 출발해 경계를 넘어: 1990년대 일본군 ‘위안부’ 운동의 초국적 연대를 중심으로 [From boundary, beyond boundaries: transnational women’s solidarity of the Korean ‘comfort women’ movement in the 1990s]. 구술사연구, 9(2), 191–230. https://www.earticle.net/Article/A337909. Maffini, C.S. & Pham, A. N. (2016). Overcoming a legacy of conflict: The repercussive effects of stress and intergenerational transmission of trauma among Vietnamese Americans. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 25(6), 580–597. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926771.2016.1182955. Mah, S., & Kim, S.(2021). 만화 번역전략 및 역사 만화 번역 특수성: ‘위안부’ 만 화 “풀” 번역을 중심으로 [Translation strategies of comics and distinctiveness of historical comics: focusing on the analysis 풀 and its translation grass]. 동서 비교문학저널,58, 73–101. https://doi.org/10.29324/jewcl.2021.12.58.73. Min, Y., & Oh, S.(2021). Global perspective on the comfort women issue: thirty years after first being publicized. Korea Journal, 61(1), 5–21. https://doi. org/10.25024/kj.2021.61.1.5. Moua, J. (2020). Shamanism: the healing tradition of Hmong people. Writing Waves, 2(2), 1–8. https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/writingwaves/vol2/iss 2/11.

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Paek, Y. (2021). 왜 미군 위안부는 잊혀져야 했는가?– 기지촌의 로컬리티와 기억의 정치 [Why ‘U.S. camptown prostitutes’ had to be forgotten? – the locality of US camptown and politics of memory]. 로컬리타 인문학,25, 39–76. https:// doi.org/10.15299/tjl.2021.4.25.39. Park, H. (2005). Two dreams in one bed: empire, social life, and the origins of the North Korean revolution in Manchuria. Duke University Press. Park, J. (1998). The colonized colonizers: Korean experiences of the Vietnam war. The Journal of American-East Asian Relations, 7 (3/4), 217–240. https://doi.org/10.1163/187656198793646004. Park, J. (2011). 한국전쟁기 성매매정책에 관한 연구:‘위안소’와 ‘위안부’를 중심 으로 [A study on prostitution policies during the Korean war: focusing on ‘comfort stations’ and ‘comfort women’]. 한국여성학회, 27(2), 35–72. G704– 000349.2011.27.2.002. Park, J. (2015). 한국 기지촌 성매매정책의 역사사회학, 1953–1995년: 냉전기 생 명정치, 예외상태, 그리고 주권의 역설 [A historical sociology of the Korean government’s policies on military prostitution in U.S. camp towns, 1953– 1995: Biopolitics, state of exception, and the paradox of sovereignty during the Cold War. 한국사회학회, 49(2), 1–33. https://doi.org/10.21562/kjs. 2015.04.49.2.1. Park, S. (2019). The role of putative epigenetic mechanisms in the intergenerational transmission of trauma effects in “comfort women” survivor offspring. Psychiatry Investigation, 16(6), 475–476. https://doi.org/10. 30773/pi.2019.05.01. Park, T. (1999). Change in U.S. policy toward South Korea in the early 1960s. Korean Studies, 23, 94–120. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23719217. Shringarpure, B. (2019). Cold war assemblages: decolonization to digital. Taylor & Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429242649. Visweswaran, K. (2010). Un/common cultures: racism and the rearticulation of cultural difference. Duke University Press. Wojcik-Andrews, I., & Yoo, H.(2019). Revisiting comfort women history and representing trauma in South Korean films: A never-ending story and herstory. 미래영어영문학회, 180–184. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-03017620-4_5. Yang, J. (2003). Cultural protection policy in Korea: intangible cultural properties and living national treasures. Jimoondang. Yoon, J. (2017). Victory over communism: South Korean protestant’ ideas about democracy, development, and dictatorship, 1953–1961. The Journal of American-East Asian Relations, 24(2/3), 233–258. https://doi.org/10. 1163/18765610-02402016. Yuh, J. (2005). Moved by war: migration, diaspora and the Korean war. Journal of Asian American Studies, 8(3), 277–291. https://doi.org/10.1353/jaas. 2005.0054.

Global Actors, Legal Frames, and Contested Memories

Memory and Politics: Discovery of North Korean “Comfort Stations” and the Politics of “Places of Memory” Hyesuk Kang

The Past and Present Issue of Comfort Women The “comfort women” issue is directly linked to the history of Japanese colonization and the harm caused by Japan’s military expansion and militarism before and after World War II. The extent and scale of the damage are beyond imagination, not only on the Korean Peninsula, China, and Taiwan but also as far as the Netherlands.1 Although the duration, frequency, and degree of sexual, physical, and verbal violence perpetrated on women in occupied war areas—which this study regards as one of the many tragedies of the twentieth century—differ, the harm inflicted upon the human dignity of all comfort women is commonly 1 The number of comfort women in the Japanese military is estimated to be around 200,000. Based on the calculation of Professor Yoshimi Yoshiaki of Chuo University, the figure of 200,000 is the total number of comfort women during wartime (1942–1945). If we look at the period from 1932 (Shanghai), when comfort women first appeared, the number will increase significantly. In particular, in the case of North Korean comfort woman victim Ri Kyung-saeng, she testified about the damage in 1929. This is why it is believed that the damage caused by the Japanese military’s sexual enslavement was already considerably high even before the 1930s.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 Ñ. Carranza Ko (ed.), New Ways of Solidarity with Korean Comfort Women, Palgrave Macmillan Studies on Human Rights in Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1794-5_9

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shared and unchanged. The damage and wounds experienced by comfort women before and after Japan’s Asia–Pacific War are not only social and domestic political issues, but they also encompass a universal and global domain. Specifically, comfort women were the victims of crimes that violated norms related to the basic rights of individuals, especially those that guarantee human dignity, as evident in the documents that form the International Bill of Human Rights (United Nations Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 1966). As important as it is to legally hold a state accountable for its war crimes, it is just as important to pay tribute and comfort the victims and survivors. Retributive justice (i.e., punishment) and reparative justice (e.g., financial reparations) matter, but there are other factors that also merit consideration. For instance, how should the state and society respond to the specific crimes (e.g., assault, torture, sexual, and verbal abuse) comfort women experienced or endured? Along with official recognition, an apology, and some level of reparative measures from the perpetrator state (i.e., Japan), this study argues that domestic policy changes on social welfare, the rectification of history (i.e., history education through textbooks), and memorialization activities (i.e., construction and promotion of girl statues), all of which fall within the broader framework of symbolic reparations, are needed and necessary responses from the state. At the center of these symbolic reparative measures lies the question of the construction of public memory about past human rights abuses. How are the physical spaces and places where comfort women’s human rights violations occurred remembered now? Thousands of comfort stations had been set up in western China, including Shanghai and Nanjing (i.e., the battlefields of World War II), and throughout Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, the Philippines, and Myanmar (Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace [WAM], n.d.). Although comfort stations were installed in South Korea, few places remain currently intact due to

H. Kang (B) Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea e-mail: [email protected]

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the impacts of the Korean War (1950–1953) and economic and industrial developments.2 However, in the case of North Korea, the situation is slightly different. On three separate occasions, in 1999, 2000, and 2018, the North Korean government excavated and reported to have found Japanese military comfort stations. This study aims to examine how the history of North Korea’s comfort women is reproduced through the place of memory (in this case, comfort stations) and how the narrative and remembrance of the victims take place. Until now, discussions on North Korea’s comfort women have not been well known; rather, they have been occasionally introduced to the international community and the United Nations through the joint solidarity of comfort women victims between the two Koreas. There are 219 cases officially registered as comfort women victims in North Korea, and a total of 52 of them are known to have publicly testified. However, most of the victims who testified publicly appear to be dead. There are little data, and related research is also far from sufficient. Nevertheless, Korean women (including the ones residing in North Korea) on the Korean Peninsula were the largest victim group, and an equal historical spotlight on the North Korean women’s cases seems necessary. There was never a right time or opportunity to discuss the history of widespread sexual, mental, and physical violence that occurred across the Korean Peninsula before and after the Asia–Pacific War. Immediately after liberation from Japanese colonial rule on August 15, 1945, the Korean Peninsula was divided by the Soviet Union and the United States. Then came the Korean War (1950–1953), which exacerbated political and geographical divisions in the Peninsula between the North and the South. The instability on the Korean Peninsula was a difficult ordeal for both Koreas. Throughout these violent political changes, security emerged as the top priority for the governments in the South and North. As a result, universal human rights and welfare were placed aside, often at the expense 2 WAM (n.d.) marked the places where comfort women were at the time of the war on a map to inform the damage of comfort women who suffered throughout Asia and the Pacific and recorded testimonies of victims. There are 13 comfort women on the Korean Peninsula, and 13 brothels on the Korean Peninsula recorded on the map. Some of the places in South Korea include, Seoul, Incheon, Busan, Mokpo, South Jeolla Province, Changwon, Gyeongnam, and Seogwipo, Jeju Island. In North Korea, they include, Wonsan City, Gangwon Province, Suncheon-gun, South Pyeonganan Province, Hamjugun, Yanggang Province, Hyesan City, Cheongjin City, North Hamgyeong Province, Hoeryong City, and Nasun City.

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of achieving economic development. For this reason, there was little opportunity to address the needs and concerns of the victims-survivors of the Japanese military’s sexual enslavement who found themselves in a socially and economically vulnerable position in society. Additionally, as sexual violence was considered taboo in the patriarchal culture of both Koreas, victims-survivors were even more marginalized and unable to speak out about their experiences. In fact, in South Korea, it was only in the late 1980s, with the wave of civil society activism and democratization, that comfort women’s issues emerged in the public domain. In the case of North Korea, however, since there was—and there remains—no civil society presence, the publicization of specific issues remains dependent on the state’s framing objective (i.e., the political goals of the Chairman or the leader of North Korea). The North Korean authorities voluntarily focused on drawing international attention to the comfort women issue, primarily with the goal of emphasizing the criminal accountability of the Japanese state, and then demanded apology and compensation. However, any processes of comforting and attending to North Korean victims-survivors of comfort stations and the harm they suffered were hardly emphasized. In fact, due to North Korea’s nuclear development, which has intensified since the 2000s, and the resulting tensions in the inter-Korean relationship, the comfort women issue became even more of an alienated matter. The subject of North Korea’s comfort women has been absent from mainstream societal, political, and media attention, both globally and in North Korea and South Korea. In the meantime, all 52 comfort women victims in North Korea who had publicly testified have died. With the government priorities in nuclear development and the death of surviving comfort station victims, have we missed the opportunity to recognize, acknowledge, and reflect upon the memory of North Korea’s comfort women? This is unlikely. The issue of memory, particularly related to human rights violations—such as those experienced by comfort women—is unique, as it is a problem that emerges from the past but has a strong presence today and is central to the building of future memory. In short, it is a living memory. The opportunity for remembrance and reflection that considers this case of living memory from a more universalist view—one that regards this as a situation that embodies a human rights crisis of peoples—is important to keep in mind as we examine the comfort station sites in North Korea. While those who were victimized in the North Korean comfort stations may have been different from

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the North Korean comfort women who testified publicly, the harms that were inflicted on comfort women in comfort stations (in North Korea, South Korea, Taiwan, China, and other areas under Japanese occupation) were universal. As such, these sites of memory, sites of crime, and sites of history are symbolic to all victims-survivors and societies that suffered the aftermaths of these atrocities. We must consider what and how to remember the memories of victims through these physical places and spaces of comfort stations. How are North Korean comfort stations reproduced as collective memories by the authorities? Here, this study aims to examine these comfort stations and their meaning as well as how their representation influences and impacts the construction of collective memory. In this regard, this chapter discusses North Korean comfort stations reproduced through collective memory. It examines comfort stations existing in North Korea and analyzes the North Korean authorities’ discourse describing them. Through this analysis, we can explore the political implications of the comfort stations selected as a place of memory in the reclusive country of North Korea.

Places, Sites, and Memories A place of memory or site of memory refers to a place where the social, cultural, and political meaning of memory for a particular event is implied and reflected (Hoelscher & Alderman, 2004; Till, 2005; Shin, 2016). If collective memory is a political product, so is the place of memory. The place of memory, which serves as a way of comforting victims, is often accompanied by state intervention in that they need policy support to establish and construct a physical space as well as publicity. At this juncture, the state’s consolation approach is not only welfare policy or payment of compensation, but it also involves the designation of a specific place as part of the compensation for damages, which is, at times, referred to as a form of symbolic reparations. The state can sometimes play a role in building a space of memory that breathes life into various places, including history halls, memorial halls, museums, and historical sites, and serves the dual function of being a material (physical) foundation against social forces that try to distort and silence the damages of the past (de Greiff, 2008). The damages involving comfort women consist of the individual women who suffered disastrous levels of sexual, physical, mental, and

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verbal violence and the physical space where they suffered these wrongs. Aging and the inevitability of our finite human being condition is no exception to the victim. Many of the comfort women, whose survival and testimony alone have been used as evidence and proof of the human rights crimes, are passing away. But the physical place where sexual, physical, and mental assault were inflicted on comfort women—comfort stations—remains unaltered through time. Nora (1989) derives the concept of a place of memory, which refers to a place related to memory, from a sociological discourse that discusses the process of political and social generation of collective memory. He identifies memory as a means of strengthening the identity of a nation or people or of making certain values generally accepted and shared in society (Edensor, 1997). Sites of memory convey the meaning of memory to visitors of these spaces by pinning the non-material symbolism on the landscape of a physical form (Huyssen, 1997; Hoelscher & Alderman, 2004; Rose-Redwood et al., 2008; Jin, 2020). It is important to note, however, that the creation and existence of a place of memory do not mean that its meaning is fixed forever. The political and social interaction of memory has an organic relationship with the memory present in the place of memory, and it is constantly reconstructed by the complex and relational interactions of time and space (Harvey, 2004, p. 81). In this way, spaces of memory and the memory it channels are all a part of living memory. For example, social activities such as memorials, exhibitions, and viewings are all linked with the strengthening and reconstruction of symbols. The reinforcement of this symbol is very important in that the sovereignty and power of the nationstate (i.e., an imagined community) are extended and reproduced through memory (Osborne, 2001, pp. 3–8). In the end, the issues of what image the memory place embodies, what meanings it carries, who it protects, and who it antagonizes serve a political function. Despite the lack of quantitative data, poor data retention, challenges accessing literature and information, and difficulty in interacting with victims, there is merit to the study of North Korean comfort women. North Korea is the place where the Japanese military sexual slavery issue, which was a tragedy and disaster that should never happen again history, took place most fiercely. For this reason alone, one might argue, there is much to contribute to this camp of research. Additionally, North Korean authorities have disclosed the excavation of three “comfort houses” on

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two separate occasions.3 Of course, it is not known if the North Korean authorities have adopted active policies or other active measures against comfort women. Even so, the disclosure of comfort stations is a reflection of the North Korean government’s willingness to recognize their presence, including the damages that were caused and wounds that were inflicted on women and girls who were victimized and the meaning and weight the space may hold for present and future descendants of victimssurvivors (i.e., comfort women). Thus, this move by the North Korean side merits a closer look. Of course, there are bound to be impediments to analyzing the entire North Korean comfort women experience—let alone all comfort women’s stories. In fact, we are not trying to argue that the study of comfort stations in North Korea may speak or be related to all the comfort women’s experiences. However, there is something to the effect that these sites of comfort stations remain standing, even with the deaths of surviving comfort women. The historical meanings they carry and the collective memories they may shape for both victims-survivors and the generations to come are central to what this study attempts to explore with the sites of comfort stations.

Comfort Women of North Korea The Korean comfort women issue has been relatively unknown until the 1990s. There are many contributing factors that conditioned this situation, but principally the patriarchal atmosphere in South and North Korea and the sexual and moral guilt unfairly inflicted on the victims were the most influential. After their defeat in the Asia–Pacific War, Japanese authorities scrapped Japanese military sexual slavery official data along with numerous other military data, as there was no sense of crisis or prudence that the Japanese military sexual slavery issue may be treated as a special and separate war crime (Ueno, 2014, p. 116). In the Tokyo 3 There were two separate comfort stations found in Cheongjin City in Hambuk Province. One was situated in Bangjin-dong and the other was in Ranamgu Raheung-2-Dong. These are the first comfort stations that were established in the Korean Peninsula. There have been published reports of additional comfort stations in Hambuk Province, Gyeongheung-gun, and Gyeongheung-myun. For more information, see: https://dprktoday.com/news/34881; http://h21.hani.co.kr/arti/photo/ story/40236.html; https://nkinfo.unikorea.go.kr/nkp/argument/viewArgument.do?pag eIndex=1&argumentBbsId=6515&tabType=.

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trial—also referred to as the International Military Tribunal for the Far East—which was held after World War II, the occupying forces did not deal with the issue of comfort women as they did with the abuse of prisoners or the massacre of civilians. One of the reasons for this is that, at the time of the Tokyo trial, South Korea failed to recover its state sovereignty and could not bring legal action against Japan. Not only South Korea but also many Asian countries that were invaded and occupied by Japan, including China, Taiwan, Indonesia, and the Philippines, were not directly involved in the Tokyo trial. Since this trial period, South Korea has not considered the comfort women issue as a key topic in the political negotiations that involved Japan, even in the Korea–Japan Basic Treaty on Compensation for the Postwar Period (February 15, 1965).4 The paradigm shift to include comfort women issues in the bilateral relations between the two states (i.e., South Korea and Japan) had to wait until Korean victims came forward with their stories in 1991. Following South Korean woman Kim Hak-soon’s public testimony about her experiences in comfort stations (January 1991), a North Korean comfort station victim-survivor Ri Kyung-saeng provided her public testimony (March 1992), which marked the beginning of the North Korean comfort women issue. Subsequently, with the formation of the Korean Measure Committee on Compensation for Wartime Comfort Women and Victims of Pacific War (in North Korea)—also referred to as Jongtaewi—in August 1992, official discussions on comfort women issues in North Korea were established.5 Nevertheless, few books or

4 On June 22, 1965, four agreements, including a basic treaty, were officially signed at the Japanese Prime Minister’s Office. Under the basic treaty, Korea and Japan established diplomatic and consular relations and confirmed that all treaties and agreements concluded between Korea and Japan were invalid, and Japan recognized that the Korean government was the only legitimate government on the Korean Peninsula. In the controversial Agreement on Claim and Economic Cooperation, Japan agreed to provide 300 million USD in free funds, 200 million USD in long-term low-interest government loans, and more than 300 million USD in commercial loans. 5 Korean Measure Committee on Compensation for Wartime Comfort Women and Victims of Pacific War was established by the North Korean regime in 1992. This organization is not a civil organization with autonomy. It is close to a government-affiliated organization that is strictly controlled by the Workers’ Party of Korea. This organization has the characteristics of a fishing organization, but it has an advantage in that it can directly grasp the position of the government authorities on the discussion of comfort women (Moon, 2015, p. 223). In 2003, the name was changed to the Korean Measure Committee Demanding Compensation for “Comfort Women” and Victims of Forced

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papers related to the status of North Korea’s comfort women have been published. In South Korea, as discussions on comfort women took off in the early 1990s (with the testimony of Kim Hak-soon and others), full-fledged research began, and various studies were published. From the North Korean side, the Korean Measure Committee on Compensation for Comfort Women for Army and Victims of Pacific War (a North Korean government entity) published the “Screaming of Life: Military Comfort” (1995), which was one of the few publications that uncovered the comfort women situation in North Korea.6 Other academic studies on North Korean comfort women—not sponsored by the North Korean government—dealt with the reality of comfort women in North Korea until the early 2000s (Kim 2002) and focused on the cooperation and joint response between the two Koreas on the comfort women issue (Moon 2015; Kim & Seo, 2018). Given the difficulties in accessing any material related to comfort women in North Korea and the lack of political will and spotlight on this issue from the North Korean side, these publications, alone, may be regarded as valuable achievements.7 The absence of existing new research on comfort women in North Korea, however, does not mean that there is no discussion about the issue

Trafficking by the Japanese Imperial Army. This organization is also referred to as the North Korean Committee on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery and Forced Trafficking Victims [일본군성노예 및 강제연행피해자문제대책위]. This chapter uses some of these names interchangeably. 6 This study mainly deals with spatial literature, such as North Korean data available on the web, the North Korean newspaper Rodong Sinmun, and the Korean Central News Agency, as well as oral interviews by several journalists, and the Japanese civic group WAM. 7 These studies commonly pointed out that inter-Korean cooperation was conducted through comfort women discussions in the 1990s, and inter-Korean cooperation played an important role in the process of internationalizing comfort women and gaining universal sympathy. According to them, the two Koreas cooperated in relation to the comfort women discussion, beginning with the “Asia Peace and Women’s Role Debate” (Kang, 1992, pp. 48–49). In addition, the foundation for cooperation was laid through the Asia Solidarity Conference, which has continued from 1992 to the present after opening the door for exchange. However, despite the major achievements, the joint response between comfort women is not so smooth due to political and military issues between the two Koreas. North Korea’s nuclear and missile issues are the biggest stumbling block, especially as they are widely known. In addition, the exclusion of North Korea from the 2015 Korea–Japan comfort women talks, difficulties in negotiations between North Korea and Japan, and the South Korean government’s control of civilian exchanges between the two Koreas make it difficult for the two Koreas to jointly respond to comfort women.

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in North Korea. Starting with grandmother Ri Kyung-saeng’s8 public testimony in 1992, the aforementioned inter-Korean cooperation and joint response related to comfort women were also recorded as important achievements in the study of North Korean comfort women. Particularly, the involvement of the North Korean government in the preparation and submission of a joint indictment against the Japanese government in 2000 to the International Court of War Crimes of Japanese Sexual Slavery can be considered an important achievement in the peace movement in Asia (Kim, 2002). Nevertheless, the comfort women issue was not a central thematic focus of the North Korean government’s political agenda. There is value in contributing to the lack of research about the history and memories of North Korean comfort women.9 This is because the narrative of brutal sexual violence inflicted on the Korean Peninsula during the Pacific War will only be complete when the work of reviewing the history of North Korea’s comfort women victims and the damages they suffered is taken into account. According to the Korean Measure Committee on Compensation for Comfort Women for Army and Victims of Pacific War, there are 218 victims of military comfort women in North Korea, of which 43 (19.7%) have made public testimony. Ri Kyung-saeng testified that she was forcibly taken to a military factory in Japan in 1929 and forced to live as a comfort woman for five years. In fact, according to her recollection, she was the youngest among the comfort women. On August 4, 1993, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono announced the results of the second fact-finding mission on comfort women. According to him, at the time of the Shanghai Incident in 1932, when Japanese forces first clashed with the Chinese (the second major clash was in 1937), a comfort station was established for the troops stationed there. Taking into account both the announcement by Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Kono and Ri’s testimony, they suggested that comfort women were sexually enslaved around military units or inside military units as well as in military factories. According to North Korea’s Korean Measure Committee on Compensation for Wartime Comfort Women and Victims of the Pacific War, the 8 She was taken to the Japanese army at the age of 12 and forced into sexual slavery in a secret military factory. Having been pregnant during a five-year sexual assault, she even had to experience the uterus being removed. On May 3, 1992, Ri Kyung-saeng publicly testified through the North Korea’s newspaper Rodong Sinmun. 9 The following is a summary of Dang (2002).

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damages and human rights violations by the Japanese military’s comfort women took four forms. First, victims were forcibly taken or kidnapped while traveling in or near the area where the victim lived. This was the case for 96 out of 218 people, accounting for 44%. Second, many victims were taken to a comfort station for job placement and then forced to live as comfort women. This was the case for 74 people or 34% of the North Korean comfort women. The third type of case was where victims were sold by the Japanese military to pay off debts to a private business, which oversaw the recruitment of comfort women. Lastly, there were cases of women who were recruited for a different type of employment and then were forced to work as comfort women. According to the testimony of Seiji Yoshida, a Japanese writer who published a book about his involvement in recruiting comfort women, the wartime army headquarters provided trucks and soldiers and forcibly took women away from the military (Yoshida, 1992).These historical accounts were similar to the age group that South Korean comfort women attested to being forcedly recruited. This is evident in the age group of North Korean comfort women, as shown in Table 1. The comfort women who were forcedly recruited were minors and unmarried, and most of them belonged to the middle and lower classes socially and economically (War and Women’s Human Rights Center, 2002, p. 147). This is confirmed by looking at the jobs of those before they were forcibly taken away. Most of the victims were ordinary people, Table 1 Age of comfort women victims living in North Korea at the time of the arrest

Age

People

Ratio

Marital status

12–15

34

18.7

16–19

92

50.5

20–24

54

29.7

Over 30 years of age Unidentified Total

2

1.1

All unmarried Six married women One married woman Married

(36) 318

0 100

Note Reprinted from “A Study on the Actual Condition and Characteristics of Military Comfort Women in North Korea” (p. 57), by Dang Kim, 2002, Women and Peace, 1(1)

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Fig. 1 Victims’ professions prior to the comfort station (Note Reprinted from “A Study on the Actual Condition and Characteristics of Military Comfort Women in North Korea” [p. 73], by Dang. Kim, 2002, Women and Peace, 1[1])

as shown in Fig. 1. However, most of them did not have many places to ask for help because they worked in housekeeping or did housework, restaurant work, or farming. They were often in a position where it was difficult to receive social protection amid economic desperation. Yoshimi Yoshiaki,10 who has long studied the issue of comfort women, stresses that the enslavement of comfort women was a violation of human rights, combining violence and racism against wartime women with discrimination against the poor (Jung, 2016). Because of their poor economic status, most of the women were not protected, making it easy for the Japanese military to take and enslave them through means of kidnapping and fraud. In addition, even after the end of Japanese colonialism, there were few family members or connections that could resolve the sexual violence these women endured.

10 Despite appeals from South and North Korean comfort women victims, Japan denied involvement by the government and military. However, Japan could no longer deny the comfort women issue as “nothing to do with the Japanese military” when Japanese historian Yoshimi Yoshii released data he found at the Japan Defense Agency’s Defense Research Institute Library in 1992.

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North Korean Comfort Stations as a Place of Memory The Japanese comfort stations were densely scattered in about 22 areas occupied by the Japanese military. WAM (n.d.) released a map of Japanese military comfort stations on December 7, 2019, and stated that there were various types of comfort stations, such as those directly managed by the military, others of private entrusted management, or those involving private prostitution facilities. Despite their variation, they were all ultimately supervised by the Japanese military. According to WAM (n.d.), “In addition to comfort women, there were places where troops detained and raped local women in occupied territories and fronts, and there were women who were selected for the exclusive use of certain officers.” It is explained that places regarded as convenient locations for many Japanese soldiers, even temporarily, were marked as comfort stations (Lee, 2019) (Fig. 2). According to data released by WAM (n.d.), North Korean comfort stations were installed and operated across different areas of the country, including in Wonsan City, Gangwon Province, Suncheon-gun, South Pyeonganan Province, Hamju-gun, Yanggang Province, Hyesan City, Cheongjin City, North Hamgyeong Province, Hoeryong City, and Nasun City. As the Japanese entered the Asia–Pacific War, they invaded a wide range of East Asian countries in the southwest. Comfort stations were set up wherever the Japanese military went. In the process of invading the Eurasian continent beyond Russia, comfort stations were also expanded to the northwest of the Korean Peninsula. The Japanese Imperial Army invaded all the countries in the west of Japan except the east of the Japanese archipelago, which was blocked by the Pacific Ocean, and most of the places appear to have comfort stations installed. Among them, in the case of North Hamgyeong Province, the North Korean authorities officially confirmed and disclosed the existence of the comfort stations in Cheongjin and Horn, North Hamgyeong Province. North Hamgyeong Province is located at the eastern end of the Korean Peninsula, which provides Japan a geographical advantage in entering Eurasia to achieve its objective of the Greater East Asian Commonwealth11 and also invading China. This was the area where Japanese 11 Please refer to Chapter 11 of this edited volume for a more detailed discussion on this concept.

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Fig. 2 Comfort station distribution chart (provided by WAM) (Note Retreived from Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace, n.d., https://wam-peace.org/ ianjo/area/area-kp/)

troops were actually stationed or anchored, and as a result, the Korean Peninsula was largely converted into a military base. In this process, it is understood that entertainment facilities for Japanese soldiers were also established and operated. There were two comfort stations in Cheongjin City in North Hamgyeong Province.12 The North Korean government claimed, on August 24, 1999, that a comfort station site and the tomb of a slaughtered comfort woman were found in Bangjin-dong. The comfort station buildings and sites were named Poongnghae-ru (built in 1938) and Eunwol-ru (built in 1936; The Government Information Agency for

12 The following descriptions of Poonghae-ru and Eunwol-ru are quotes from Naoko Sato’s (2010) writings in the Kyunghyang Shinmun.

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Republic of Korea, 1999), and both were designated specifically for the Japanese navy. Poonghae-ru and Eunwol-ru were located quite close to one another. It is difficult to understand, from our modern perspective now, how there were two comfort stations operating in the middle of rice fields in a city like Cheongjin with a small population. According to eye-witness Shin Nak-cheon, who resided about 20 meters from Poonghae-ru, her mother often warned her not to go near Poonghae-ru. When Shin managed to sneak by Poonghae-ru as a young child through the windows of the building, she found men wearing uniforms (referring to sailors) waiting in the hallway, checking the time, yelling the phrase “do it quickly,” and at times kicking the door loudly. This was clearly a comfort station managed by Japan’s Imperial Army, where about 20 women were held in captivity and assaulted by more than 10 soldiers each day. It was closed to the public, and the buildings were under surveillance by Japanese military police. When comfort women contracted venereal disease, they were examined by a Japanese naval doctor, not a Korean doctor, and women’s screams were heard endlessly every night (Lee, 1999). Moreover, it was a facility reserved exclusively for Japanese navy personnel, and it banned the use of the Korean language and forced enslaved victims to wear kimonos. According to Naoko Sato’s (2010) publication in South Korea’s Kyunghyang Shinmun newspaper, only limited data remain because there were no Japanese troops stationed in the region, and Japan ordered the incineration of all colonial military-related data immediately after postcolonial liberation. However, there is evidence that points to the fact that, nearby this area, there was a neighborhood called Eugene, where Japanese army and navy facilities were built, and the port was used as a dedicated naval and military port (Sato, 2010). According to Sato’s (2010) findings, the landing site for special security units that monitored the East Sea coasts and borders with the Soviet Union was the Port of Eugene. As the Port of Eugene was close in proximity and in walking distance to Bangjin, it thus seems that the naval soldiers, officers, and military police who landed in Eugene visited the comfort stations as often as they could. Meanwhile, on August 14, 2018, the North Korean Committee on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery and Forced Trafficking Victims released a report in which it noted the finding of another comfort station in

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Gyeongheung in North Hamgyeong Province.13 Through the testimony of a Japanese woman named Sumie Nakamura, the comfort station in Gyeongheung became known to the world. According to Nakamura’s testimony, there was a Japanese military comfort station in Wonjeongdong in the Gyeongheung region. The Gyeongheung comfort station, located in Nasun City, was used primarily by the Japanese Military’s Nanam 19th Division Gyeongheung border defense forces and the military police. It was a military comfort station frequented by those in the army who were in charge of subjugating anti-Japanese guerrillas in northeastern China and the Japanese military that was passing through to advance inland to the continent. Like the comfort stations in Cheongjin, the military police supervised the comfort station. Women had to wear ragged Japanese clothes, speak Japanese, and use Japanese names, and they underwent regular exams for sexual diseases by military doctors. As sex slaves, comfort women were subjected to sexual violence several times a day in comfort stations. Gyeongheung-gun, a small village with a population of only 6000 in the 1920s, thus, became an important location for border defense personnel. The comfort stations in Cheongjin and Gyeongheung can be said to be both sites of devastation discovered by North Korean authorities and places of memory with extraordinary historical significance. However, research on these regions or reports by North Korean authorities has not exceeded the use of them as grounds for accusing Japanese imperialism. This is because North Korea’s historical events and artifacts related to the Japanese colonial period and the Korean War are mainly used as political resources by the leadership to justify the dictatorship of Kim Il-sung and his family.14 For instance, the Sincheon Museum in North Korea that heavily discusses the Korean War and sites symbolizing antiJapanese stances, are geared toward the construction of North Korea’s collective memory, one that rests strongly on building the history of anti-imperialism.

13 The following was cited in a report by the Rodong Sinmun on August 14, 2018, “The Truth of Japanese Sexual Slavery Crimes committed in Gyeongheung-gun before liberation: An Investigation Report by the Committee on Sexual Slavery and Compulsory Performance Victims of the Japanese Army.” 14 Kim Il-sung’s official title is “President,” as stipulated in the Socialist Constitution of 1972. He officially ruled North Korea for a total of 46 years from 1948, when the regime was established, to 1994, when he died.

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In this respect, comfort stations excavated from the two regions and what they represent may also be further used and strengthened by the North Korean authorities as part of their anti-Japanese colonial struggle history. However, in order to be accepted as a symbolic cultural property or as a revered historical site and to have more historical significance, the historical narrative centered on the leader of North Korea must be transferred to the victim. In doing so, it may be helpful to distinguish, understand, and assess the position of the two separate actors involved in North Korea’s call to the Japanese government for compensation and apology, which includes the victims of comfort stations and the North Korean regime. North Korea’s search for comfort stations still requires more work and effort. The authorities’ attention ought to go beyond calling attention to the physical site of the comfort stations themselves and, instead, focus on establishing a connection with the victims. At the moment, reports on comfort stations in the two regions discovered in North Korea only emphasize the Japanese authorities’ responsibility for the damage without centering the stories and histories on the victims-survivors. In fact, there is no memorial or expression of comfort for the victims of comfort stations from the North Korean government. This positioning of the North Korean government raises concerns, as it appears that these comfort stations and related comfort women’s stories are being used by the government as a means to hold Japan accountable at the national level. That is to say that North Korea considers the issue of comfort women and comfort stations as a completely political matter. In fact, the political calculations of the North Korean government became more complex due to the overlapping kidnappings of Japanese citizens led by the North Korean authorities from the late 1970s to the early 1980s (McCoy, 2017). The recent news that, in 2016, Chairman Kim Jong-un opposed the installation of the comfort girl statue shows North Korea’s political views on the issue of comfort women and comfort stations (Moon, 2015; 2017). This opposition completely disregards the victims and their experiences, as the statue has been regarded as a form of symbolic reparations for the comfort women. As one of the many topics on the negotiating table in the North Korea– Japan relationship, the comfort women issue, and related “healing” of victims-survivors is a historical matter that merits the joint attention of North Korean and Japanese authorities. In addition, the collective

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memory of this historic crime should leave a space for victims as well as the North Korean regime.

Japanese Comfort Stations and Remembrance Japanese military comfort stations are scattered in 22 areas around the world. In particular, in eastern China, where the number is large, there are more than 1000 Hwanggun (皇軍)15 comfort stations (Hankyoreh 2021). These include Daisalong (大一沙龍), which was the first comfort station in the world. In Taiwan alone, there are more than 1200 comfort stations. The damage brought on by wartime sexual violence and related crimes of imperialism was too harsh and overwhelming for an individual to bear. Therefore, it is necessary to be comforted through the memory and remembrance of humankind beyond the memory of the victim. It is difficult for individual comfort women victims alone, who have lived a life of consolation as well as discrimination and disgrace, to claim the right to restore their honor and heal their wounds. This issue should be supported by citizens’ interest and support and through policies and laws. Over time, the facts of the damage and memories of the victims are fading. In the meantime, it is clear that there is a concerted effort by those who want to cover up and silence the horrors of the Japanese colonization and occupation period. The Japanese government and military have not officially apologized for their responsibility and compensation, although vast amounts of evidence have been made evident to prove that they were directly involved in the operation of comfort stations. Even in the 1993 Kono Statement, which was acknowledged as the first official recognition of Japanese military involvement in the comfort women issues, coercion was denied. In addition, despite the 2015 Korea–Japan comfort women agreement, the Japanese government continues to reverse its position on coercion and intervention. On the other hand, many of the comfort women who remember the crimes all too personally are nearing the end of their lives. In this critical moment, thus, there may be a need to reprioritize the remembrance related to comfort women. First, it is necessary to secure and record the victims’ stories. South Korean grandmother

15 Hwanggun is a term that was used to refer to the Japanese Imperial Army.

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Kim Hak-soon revealed, for the first time in August 1991, the human rights violations she suffered by the Japanese military. North Korean grandmother Ri Kyung-saeng also gave public testimony to comfort women victims in March 1992. Despite the patriarchal social atmosphere common to the two Koreas in the early 1990s, these women courageously restored a sense of historical calling and human rights. After the death of comfort woman victim Kim Yang-joo on May 1, 2022, only 11 of the 240 Japanese comfort women victims officially registered with the South Korean government remain alive. In North Korea, a total of 52 women out of the 219 officially recognized victims gave their testimonies. Unfortunately, all 52 people are known to have died. As such, it is very difficult to secure and preserve the comfort women’s oral histories and stories. Among the survivors, there are many who have mental and physical disabilities due to the aftereffects of living in comfort stations. Oral history and archives of these women’s stories are the most important memory data because they record the victims’ narratives in their own words. Second, it is necessary to secure documents and data related to comfort women and comfort stations. For a long time, the issue of comfort women has generated a strong reaction from the Japanese government. The Japanese government has denied any direct intervention, citing the lack of data. Then, the issue of corporate comfort women in 1973 and the issue of military comfort women in 1985 first appeared in the Japanese National Assembly, drawing attention from the world. In December 1991, Minister Kawashima from the Japanese Embassy in South Korea was officially asked by the South Korean Foreign Ministry to take factfinding measures on the “Korean comfort women issue” and deliver the list of comfort women to the Korean government as soon as it was discovered (Yonhap News, 1991). In response, Chief Cabinet Secretary Kato held a press conference and said he would do his best to collect the data.At the end of January 7, 1992, documents showing military involvement were discovered at the Japan Defense Research Institute but were not released to the media. And on January 11, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported on the front page that Yoshimi Yoshiaki found proof at the Defense Agency’s Defense Research Institute Library that the Japanese military was responsible for comfort women. Chief Cabinet Secretary Kato said he could not deny the Japanese military’s involvement in recruiting comfort women and managing comfort stations. Chief Cabinet Secretary Kato then announced the Statement on the so-called military

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comfort women issue of those from the Korean Peninsula through the first results of the fact-finding investigation. Since then, the so-called Kono discourse (1993) has been derived through the results of the factfinding investigation. However, the Japanese government has consistently denied government and military involvement in the comfort women issue. Therefore, the most important issue is securing documents and materials related to Japanese military comfort stations scattered in the United States and Japan from the Korean Peninsula. Finally, it is important to think about the importance of places and sites of memory explored in this chapter. On April 1, 2017, the first Japanese comfort women museum meeting was held in Japan. Since it was first established in South Korea in 1998, various comfort women museums have been built in South Korea, China, Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines. Contrary to Japan’s position to constantly silence and see an end to the issue of comfort women, the victims have steadily tried to keep their memories and histories alive, and these efforts have, at times, resulted in the establishment of museums. All four museums dedicated to comfort women in China use the old comfort stations’ grounds with support from the local government. In January 2015, the Nanjing Li Zi Xiang Comfort Relics Exhibition Hall, which was a branch of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, was the largest existing comfort house in Asia. As a result of an 11-year dispute between academia, the media, the government, and real estate companies over the preservation and development of more than 3000 square meters, Nanjing City finally decided to preserve it. It was reborn as a museum. The late North Korean grandmother and comfort woman Park Young-sim visited the site and verified history through testimony. In total, more than 11 museums (until 2017) have been built for comfort women issues. They share the meaning of respect toward comfort women and their lived experiences. These spaces inherit the memories of the victims and, through peace and human rights education, strive for a better future. It is true that, in the case of North Korea, the government actively chose to remember these sites and memories of comfort women. However, the future direction or conservation plans related to these sites are unknown. North Korea’s repeated provocations with nuclear weapons have resulted in sanctions against the regime by the international community (through the United Nations) and have made things even more

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difficult for the reclusive state. But the problem of comfort women— specifically, the historical violence they endured—is a problem of human rights that transcends political differences. It is in this vein of thought that there is a need to encourage the North Korean authorities to think further about the memories of the victims-survivors.

References De Greiff, P. (2008). The handbook of reparation. Oxford University Press. Edensor, T. (1997). National identity and the politics of memory: Remembering Bruce and Wallace in symbolic space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 15(2), 175–194. Hankyoreh. (2021, February 28). e대밭 위 ‘황군 위안소’ 공개.. 문명사상 이런 대규모는 없다 [The “Hwang Military Comfort Center” on the mugwort field is revealed...There is no such large scale in the history of civilization]. https://www.hani.co.kr/arti/society/society_general/984763.html?_ ga=2.191033962.1599608371.1670146120-1540403698.1589606504 Harvey, D. (2004, May 29). Space as a keyword. Marx and Philosophy Conference [Conference paper]. Institute of Education, London, United Kingdom. http://frontdeskapparatus.com/files/harvey2004.pdf Hoelscher, S., & Alderman, D.H. (2004). Memory and place: Geographies of a critical relationship. Social & Cultural Geography, 5(3), 347–355. Huyssen, A. (1997). The voids of Berlin. Critical Inquiry, 24(1), 57–81. Jin, Y. (2020). Production and reconstruction of the placeness of memory: A case on the local politics over places-of-memory of Sewol ferry disaster [Master’s Thesis, Seoul National University]. Seoul National University of Geography. Jung, E. (2016, February 20). 그들은 가 아니라 성노예였다 [They were Military sexual slaves, not comfort women]. Rodong Sinmun. http://lps3. kcnawatch.app.libproxy.snu.ac.kr/newstream/1530487570-104589779/% EA%B7%B8%EB%93%A4%EC%9D%80-%E3%80%8A%EC%9C%84%EC%95% 88%EB%B6%80%E3%80%8B%EA%B0%80-%EC%95%84%EB%8B%88%EB% 9D%BC-%EC%84%B1%EB%85%B8%EC%98%88%EC%98%80%EB%8B%A4/ Kang, S. (1992). Report on participation in the 3rd Pyongyang Debate—Activities will be conducted in earnest on the issue of military comfort women. New Family Company. Kim, D. (2002). 북한의 종군위안부 실태 및 특성에 관한 연구 [A Study on the actual conditions and characteristics of ‘comfort women’ in North Korea]. Women and Peace, 2, 41–94. Kim, D., & Seo, J. (2018). Recognition of cooperation between South and North Korea for solving Japanese military sexual slavery issue. Korean Local Government Review, 69, 81–104

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Lee, H. (1999, August 13). 일본군위안소 북한에 원형대로 전재, 위안부 증언 공개 [Japanese military sexual slavery is reprinted in the original form to North Korea, and Japanese Military Sexual Slavery testimony is released]. iMBC News. https://imnews.imbc.com/replay/1999/nwdesk/art icle/1784935_30729.html Lee, Y. (2019, December 18). 日시민단체, 아시아·태평양 전역 ‘일본군 위안소 지도’ 공개 [Japanese civic groups disclose ‘Map of Japanese Military Comfort Centers’ across Asia and the Pacific]. Hankook Ilbo. https://www.hankoo kilbo.com/News/Read/201912081584062168 McCoy, R. E. (2017, February 20). Why is North Korea so quiet on the comfort women issue? NK News. https://www.nknews.org/2017/02/why-is-northkorea-so-quiet-on-the-comfort-women-issue/ Moon, S. (2015). ‘Comfort women’ and solidarity between North and South Korean women. Journal of Peace and Unification Studies, 7 (2), 213–246. Moon, S. (2017, May 7). 북한도 위안부 소녀상 세우려 했다 [North Korea also tried to build a statue of a Japanese military sexual slavery girl]. Radio Free Asia. https://www.rfa.org/korean/in_focus/human_rights_def ector/comfort_woman_statue_b-05172017091002.html Nora, P. (1989). Between memory and history: Les lieux de mémoire. Representations, 7–24. Osborne, B. S. (2001). Landscapes, memory, monuments, and commemoration: Putting identity in its place. Canadian Ethnic Studies, 33(3), 39–77. Rose-Redwood, R., Alderman, D., & Azaryahu, M. (2008). Collective memory and the politics of urban space: an introduction. GeoJournal, 73(3), 161–164. Sato, N. (2010, May 9). 한반도서 첫 확인된 일본군위안소 [Japanese military brothels first identified on the Korean Peninsula]. Kyunghyang Shinmun. https://www.khan.co.kr/article/201005091744125 Shin, H. (2016). The territorialization of memory: The making of place of memory for Sewol Ferry accident. Space & Environment, 26(3), 115–154. The Government Information Agency for Republic of Korea. (1999, July 24). 북한 종군위안부 대책위, 청진에서 일제시대 위안소 건물 [Korean Measure Committee on Compensation for Wartime Comfort Women and Victims of Pacific War, comfort women building from the Japanese colonial era in Cheongjin]. South Korea Policy. Briefing. https://www.korea.kr/news/pre ssReleaseView.do?newsId=50039575 Till, K. E. (2005). The new Berlin: Memory, politics, place. University of Minnesota Press. Ueno, C. U. (2014). Nationalism to gender. Hyunsil Publishing. United Nations Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966, December 16). https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/internati onal-covenant-civil-and-political-rights

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War and Women’s Human Rights Center. (2002). Military ‘Japanese Military Sexual Slavery’ Testimony Statistical Data Collection. Korea Council for Countermeasures against Mental Health & Women’s Department. Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace. (n.d.). https://wam-peace.org/ ianjo/ Yonhap News. (1991). 정부 일본에 정신대 진상규명 촉구 [The government urges Japan to find out the truth about Japanese military sexual slavery]. https:// n.news.naver.com/mnews/article/001/0003523199?sid=100 Yoshida, S. (1992). Station Yoon Chul-soon. Korean Women’s Spirit University Book Publishing.

On Comfort Women’s Way to the United Nations Jieyeon Kim

The 77th anniversary of the Republic of Korea’s1 liberation from Japanese colonial rule occurred on August 15, 2022. After President Yoon Sukyeol’s (2022–present) 77th Liberation Day event (Korean Ministry of the Interior and Safety, 2022), Lee Yong-soo, a survivor of “comfort women,” complained that President Yoon only spoke about improving the country’s relationship with Japan without mentioning the unresolved, historical comfort women issue. Consequently, she distributed her statement via a commission advocating for the comfort women issue to be tried at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at the Liberation Day celebration to assert her position on the issue of comfort women and to make it clear that she still intends to accuse the Japanese government through international organizations, such as the ICJ, the highest judicial organ of the United Nations (Lee, 2022). She strongly urged 1 The Republic of Korea refers to South Korea.

J. Kim (B) Department of Political Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 Ñ. Carranza Ko (ed.), New Ways of Solidarity with Korean Comfort Women, Palgrave Macmillan Studies on Human Rights in Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1794-5_10

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the Korean government to refer the comfort women issue to the United Nations Committee against Torture (CAT) if Japan is unwilling to properly resolve the issue on its own. The issue of comfort women is no longer limited to the two-country relationship between the Republic of Korea and Japan. This chapter explores the international dimension of the comfort women issue. Particularly, it considers the role of the United Nations, an intergovernmental organization, and its efforts to resolve this historic crime.

Why the United Nations? There are two primary reasons why victims attempt to solve the problem through international organizations like the United Nations. First, the United Nations is concerned not only with the order of its own system but also with raising standards for individual countries’ operations (Norris, 2000; Taylor & Groom, 2000). A new method of maintaining international order has emerged in which international organizations intervene directly in domestic problems based on morality and legitimacy. Above all, the United Nations is a venue for a country’s international prestige to grow. Being a member of a major committee or leading major operations through the United Nations is thought to boost a country’s status and legitimacy in the international community, which can lead to securing more diplomatic power on the international stage. It is critical to reach an agreement on the strengthening of the international system and the appropriateness of morality. This is due to the fact that, if a country does not uphold the international human rights norms it has established with other members of the international community, it loses its value and legitimacy (Cooper et al., 1993; Jordaan, 2003). Today, one example is the emergence of countries that are strengthening their presence in the United Nations by actively developing efforts to improve human rights and women’s status. There are several instances in which middle powers are trying to solidify their position in the international community by playing a role in establishing these universal values. Solving international issues that require immediate resolution and obtaining consent from participating countries provides an advantage in the establishment of international standards. Second, we see the rise of global conferences led by the United Nations as a forum for discussion. The United Nations frequently organizes large-scale global conferences outside of the organization to achieve

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international agreement on major socioeconomic issues such as the environment, population, women, social policy, and children. These global conferences are notable for the participation of many high-level officials, such as heads of state and government, who have strong political characters and play a key role in the discussion of international issues. This garners domestic and international media attention and plays a significant role in shaping domestic and international public opinion (Knight, 2000; Weiss, 2000; Weiss & Thakur, 2010). It is critical for the United Nations to establish human rights rules and an international regime through these meetings. This is because a wide range of United Nations protocols and mechanisms related to human rights have established standards for human rights and implemented compliance monitoring, acting to pressure countries. The surviving comfort women seek justice through international organizations such as the United Nations due to its strong influence on global standards pertaining to specific humanitarian issues and its high potential to serve as a large forum for discussion of the comfort women issue.

Past Trials via International Organizations In the past, there have been attempts to take the comfort women issue to international dispute organizations for resolution. In 1994, civil society organizations in the Republic of Korea, including the Korean Council for Women Drafted by Japan for Military Sexual Slavery (Jeong Daehyup), attempted to refer the interpretation of the 1965 Republic of Korea–Japan Claims Agreement2 and the Japanese government’s obligation, to the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague, the Netherlands. Unlike other international courts, The Hague Court allows individuals to participate as parties rather than states. At the time, the Republic of Korea and Japanese civil society attempted to file a lawsuit by forming a legal advisory group, but the proposal was rejected by the Japanese government in 1995. Contrary to its active efforts at the domestic level, the Korean government has not formally referred the comfort women issue to the ICJ. It only investigated related issues internally, including with the Ministry 2 The official name of the agreement is the “Agreement on the Settlement of Problems concerning Property and Claims and the Economic Cooperation between the Republic of Korea and Japan.”

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of Foreign Affairs, and did not take the comfort women issue seriously enough to warrant a separate policy. Comparatively to the status of the comfort women issue, the ICJ, which necessitates complex strategic consideration, cannot be a viable solution (Chou, 2003; Lee, 2014). After the comfort women issue resurfaced in 1991 with Kim Haksun’s public testimony, the Japanese government attempted to resolve it through the Asian Women’s Fund (1995–2007),3 a Japanese group, to collect funds through private sources and pay compensation money to the surviving military comfort women in Asia. However, even after the fund was established, the Korean government made no active efforts to address the issue. The government’s stance shifted after the Constitutional Court of Korea’s ruling on August 30, 2011. The Court ruled that the government’s failure to make specific efforts to resolve the issue of compensation claims for Japanese military sexual slaveries was unconstitutional. Following this legal decision, the government held consultations to resolve issues such as whether the claim against Japan under Article 2 of the Agreement in 1965 includes the right to seek compensation for surviving comfort women through “diplomatic channels” (paragraph 1) or “referral to arbitration board” (paragraph 2).4 Because of a rejection from the Japanese side, the arbitration board was not formed.

3 The organization was founded in July 1995, during the era of former Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama, as a follow-up measure to the announcement of the Kono Statement (2019), which expressed “apology and regret” for the forced mobilization of comfort women in 1993. On August 14, 1996, the Japanese government and the Asian Women’s Fund delivered two million yen in compensation and Hashimoto’s “letter of apology and regret” to four victims in the Philippines, stating that the victims’ resistance level was the lowest and their economic level was the worst. Following that, on January 11, 1997, representatives from the Japanese Peace Fund met with five victims in Seoul to deliver the compensation of two million yen along with Hashimoto’s letter (1996). However, the Korean party objected, claiming it as an expedient to avoid the Japanese government’s liability for compensation to comfort women victims. Furthermore, the majority of victims and related groups refused to receive compensation, and this group dispersed in March 2007 when the planned compensation project was terminated (Soh, 2000, 2003). 4 The full title of the agreement is the “Agreement on the Settlement of Problem

Concerning Property and Claim and on the Economic Co-operation between Japan and the Republic of Korea.” Article II of the agreement states, 1 The Contracting Parties confirm that problem concerning property, rights, and interests of the two Contracting Parties and their nationals (including juridical persons) and concerning claims between the Contracting Parties and their nationals, including those provided for in Article IV, paragraph (a) of the Treaty of Peace

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However, during President Park Geun-hye’s (2013–2017) administration,diplomatic consultations between the Republic of Korea and Japan resulted in a comfort women’s agreement between the Republic of Korea and Japanese governments in December 2015. In this agreement, as a way to apologize, the Japanese government decided to give one billion yen. The South Korean and Japanese governments both said that the issue of comfort women will be solved finally and permanently if these steps are taken steadily (Nam, 2022). The Japanese government has also discussed filing a complaint with the ICJ on a number of issues, including the territorial disputes between the Republic of Korea and Japan over Dokdo Island in the East Sea in the Republic of Korea, the ruling on compensation for victims of forced labor, and the issue of “comfort women,” but it has never made an official proposal to the Republic of Korea. In fact, Japan never cared much about issues that arose during the colonial period. When the Korean Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiff in a lawsuit filed against Shinil Iron & Steel Co. on October 30, 2018, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (2012–2020) brought up the possibility of a direct referral. This was the first time Japan had a public response to a sensitive issue between the Republic of Korea and Japan. Concerning the issue of Japanese military sexual slavery, the Seoul Central District Court ruled on January 8, 2021, that the Japanese government must compensate the surviving comfort women with 100 million Korean won.5 More specifically, the Japanese government (defendant) with Japan signed at the city of San Francisco on September 8, 1951, is settled completely and finally. ... 3 Subject to the provisions of paragraph 2 above, no contention shall be made with respect to the measures on property, rights and interests of either Contracting Party and its nationals which are within the jurisdiction of the other Contracting Party on the date of the signing of the present Agreement, or with respect to any claims of either Contracting Party and its nationals against the other Contracting Party and its nationals arising from the causes which occurred on or before the said date.

5 In 2013, the victims and families of the deceased filed a mediation application with the Japanese government to seek compensation. It was intended to compensate the Japanese

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was sued by 12 Korean comfort women (plaintiff), including the late Bae Chun-he, and ordered to pay each plaintiff 100 million Korean won on January 8, 2021. First, the court assumed that the question was whether the Korean court could exercise jurisdiction over the defendant because the customary international law exemption of national sovereignty was applied in this case. The court then determined that the defendant had violated international compulsory provisions with deliberate, systematic, and widespread acts against humanity in the comfort women case and found it reasonable that the state immunity would be difficult to apply. Furthermore, the court stated that the defendant’s illegal acts were recognized, and the plaintiffs appeared to have suffered from extreme mental and physical pain that was difficult to imagine. Given the circumstances under which the plaintiffs did not receive compensation, the court determined that it was reasonable to consider compensation in excess of 100 million Korean won per plaintiff. After the ruling in favor of the plaintiff was announced, the Japanese government stated that it could not accept the Korean court’s decision to compensate comfort women victims of the Japanese military. The Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kat¯o (2020–2021) stated that such a decision was very regrettable and unacceptable, and Minister for Foreign Affairs Toshimitsu Motegi (2020–2021) said he would put all options in perspective and consider countermeasures, including the return to the ICJ (Whytock, 2013; BBC, 2021; Song, 2002). State immunity is the principle that Japan has always invoked when facing complicated issues with the Republic of Korea. State immunity, also known as sovereign immunity, is a principle of customary international law stating that a court of one nation cannot try a litigant from another nation. The former Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga (2012–2020), who acted as a spokesperson for the Japanese government, asserted at a regular press conference in November 2019 that the issues of property claims between Korea and Japan, including those of comfort women, had been completely and finally resolved in the 1965 Agreement on the Claims between Korea and Japan, and both countries had confirmed the final and irreversible resolution. According to

government for the damage caused by recruiting comfort women through violence or deception during the Japanese colonial period. Previously, the victims filed four lawsuits against the Japanese government in Japanese courts, but they all failed. Finally, the victims’ gaze was drawn to the Korean court (Hwang, 2021).

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him, the Japanese government did not accept Korean jurisdiction under the national exemption under international law, so the lawsuit had to be dismissed. The position of the victims enslaved by the Japanese Army, on the other hand, is that the illegal acts of the Japanese government in recruiting and mobilizing the comfort women of the Japanese military took place on Korean territory and the illegality of “human rights abuse” was excessive; therefore, the national exemption should not be applied. In a situation so exceptional that no other means of dispute resolution remained to achieve the relief of the comfort women victims, they said they hoped to be the starting point for the development of a solution (BBC, 2021; Kang, 2022). However, nothing has changed from the victims’ perspective. At a press conference in February 2021, Lee Yong-soo stated, “I’ve done everything I can so far,” adding, “there’s no way now. Please allow our government to clarify Japan’s transgressions under international law. Please allow Japan to be judged by the ICJ in order for it to recognize and reflect on its own mistakes” (Gil & Kim, 2021).The Korean government emphasized that it would be more receptive to the Japanese military’s and others’ arguments, but they maintained their reluctance to file a lawsuit with the ICJ. At the time, the Japanese government only stated that it was attempting to refrain from commenting because it did not know what intentions or thoughts it had expressed. Until now, the Japanese government had neither admitted nor actively denied that the system of Japanese military sexual slavery was a violation of international law at the time, instead insisting that it was agreed upon with the Korean government. A year has passed with no results, and when the newly inaugurated president, President Yoon Suk-yeol (2022–present), only mentioned improving Republic of Korea–Japan relations, Lee Yong-soo insisted on resolving the issue through the United Nations.

“Comfort Women” and the United Nations Despite the victims’ significant voices, there are three reasons why their demands will not be met. First, the parties to the dispute must reach an agreement before the ICJ, the principal judicial organ of the United Nations specified in the United Nations Charter. Even if the Korean government decides to put the comfort women issue on trial,

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it is impossible to return it to the ICJ without the Japanese government’s permission. The officials of the Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs believed that the Japanese government did not file a lawsuit against the ICJ because it did not want the issue of comfort women to resurface in the international community and because it was difficult to receive a favorable response from the US administration. This was one of the reasons why the Japanese government did not attempt to file a lawsuit with the ICJ over the issue of forced labor as well. Second, it is also stated that, even if both parties agree on a broad framework for proceeding to the ICJ, reaching an agreement on what issue will be brought before the court is difficult. The possibility of winning will be the first consideration for the state before conducting an international trial with other countries, which appears to have determined that the government’s review process cannot predict whether it will win or not. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that the return to the ICJ is preferable to arbitration under the claim agreement, and there is a task to prove, based on solid evidence, that the victims of Japanese military sexual slavery were the actual sexual slaves of the Japanese military. It is difficult to organize consistent testimonies when those who can communicate well are prioritized among the 11 surviving elderly victims. Japan’s claim that the 1965 claim agreement and the 2015 Republic of Korea–Japan agreement resolved the issue of comfort women cannot be legally dismissed nor can it be dismissed that Japan’s actions were illegal under international law rather than current human rights law. This is why, according to government officials, the possibility of referring the case to the ICJ is almost zero at this point. Third, certain components have already been acknowledged by agencies affiliated with the United Nations. The historical facts about victims of Japanese military sexual slavery have already become common knowledge in the international community, including at the United Nations, and Japan has acknowledged that this knowledge is limited in scope. This is one of the reasons why it is difficult to hold Japan fully accountable through the agencies of the United Nations (Shin, 2012; Gil & Kim, 2021).

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Their Efforts and International Recognition The issue of comfort women is primarily a Republic of Korea-Japanese issue that has been recognized as a historical conflict in both the Republic of Korea and Japan. However, the comfort women issue is not as limited to the Republic of Korea and Japan as general discourse suggests. Of course, the people of the Republic of Korea have been the most vulnerable victim of Japan’s military sexual slavery system, being subjected to systematic mobilization (for sexual enslavement) as a result of Japan’s direct colonial rule. Korean women were the primary recruitment targets, the number of Korean slaves was the highest, and the period was significantly longer than that of other Asian women abducted from occupied territories. The exact number is unknown due to a lack of research, but the fact that Korean women made up a large majority of comfort women clearly shows that this is an ethnic discrimination problem. Furthermore, because Japan used Korean territory to supply its war and human exploitation, the comfort women issue is a result of colonialism (Shin, 2008, 2016a). However, not only Korean women but also Japanese women within its colonies and Taiwanese women, were sexually enslaved. The Japanese government and military were known to routinely take advantage of women from other countries and subject them to sexual slavery. It is possible that this is also a class issue, given that the majority of the women who were primarily mobilized during this time were low-income women who were more likely to be victims of job fraud. While some Japanese and colonial women were compelled to serve as sexual slaves for the Japanese military while they were accompanying Japanese troops, the majority of women in Asian-occupation areas were kidnapped or taken by force from their homes. As a result of Japan’s expansion of the war’s scope beyond Northeast Asia and into all of Southeast Asia, victims of Japanese military action began to appear in other parts of Asia. Despite the fact that different forms and methods of mobilization were used, victims of sexual violence during times of war in Asia share a common experience (Shin, 2008, 2016a). As a consequence of this, the issue of comfort women is a complex one that involves gender, class, ethnicity, and colonialism, making the attention and recognition of the international community even more critical.

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Legal Responsibility Has Finally Been Confirmed by the United Nations Since 1991, when the comfort women issue became visible at the global level as a result of Kim Hak-sun’s testimony, victims have been actively participating in domestic and international forums, testifying, and informing the international community of their experiences (Lee, 2018). When Korean women brought up the issue in 1990, the Japanese government denied the involvement of the state. Since 1992, support groups have brought up the issue with the United Nations Human Rights Organization. At that time, not only the United Nations but also the international network for the advancement of women’s rights were both active. To put it another way, the issue of comfort women has received unanticipated attention on a global scale and has developed into a global human rights concern. Various reports, recommendations, and resolutions were adopted as part of this effort to hold the perpetrator legally accountable. The World Conference on Human Rights, which took place in Vienna in 1993, was also a pivotal occasion in the development of women’s rights. This is due to the fact that it was held to reflect on the failure of the existing human rights regime to adequately respond to human rights issues, which had become a major concern since the end of the Cold War. The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) was the body that ultimately led to the adoption of the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women in December of the same year. The 50th Human Rights Commission passed a resolution in 1994 establishing a special rapporteur on women’s violence, and in April of that year, Sri Lankan lawyer Radhika Coomaraswamy was appointed as a special rapporteur. Based on a field survey of the Republic of Korea, North Korea, and Japan, she wrote a “Report on the Mission to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Republic of Korea, and Japan on the Issue of Military Sexual Slavery in Wartime,” which is called the “Coomaraswamy Report” and submitted an investigation report to the 52nd Human Rights Commission in 1996 (UNESC, 1996). In this report, which was the first time that the issue of Japanese military sexual slavery had been brought up at the United Nations, she referred to the system of using comfort women as “sex slavery” and urged the Japanese government to acknowledge and compensate for legal responsibility.

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The comfort women issue was labeled as wartime sexual slavery because the victims were clearly enslaved and the women were controlled by someone against their will, according to the report. She stated unequivocally that they had double-checked many historical data points based on interviews with comfort women victims and input from Japanese women’s civic groups. It includes a definition of sexual enslavement, historical context, victim testimony, the positions of the three countries (i.e., South Korea, North Korea, and Japan), and recommendations to the Japanese government. The report identified comfort women in the Japanese military as military sexual slaves, acknowledging the meaning of the “national fund,” but noting that the problem of legal solutions to international law violations remains. At the end of the report, the Japanese government was given six suggestions: (1) admit that opening brothels was against international law, (2) compensate each victim according to the principles of the special rapporteur, (3) release all documents and data, (4) apologize to individual victims via an official statement, (5) teach the truth about history in schools and raise as much awareness as possible, and (6) find the people who did it and punish them. In addition, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other parties should keep bringing up the matter at the United Nations and seek opinions from the ICJ or the Permanent Court of Arbitration. Furthermore, the governments of the Republic of Korea and North Korea should seek opinions from the ICJ to resolve legal issues such as Japan’s responsibility and compensation. In addition, taking into consideration the ages of the victims, the government of Japan ought to address this matter as quickly as it can (Oh, 2007; Kim, 2022). The Fourth Conference on Women by the United Nations was held in Beijing in 1995 to discuss the abolition of violence against women. According to the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UNESCWA), the most significant meaning of the Beijing World Conference on Women was to define the violation that causes physical, sexual, and psychological harms and pains to women as a genderbased violation and to stipulate that arbitrary deprivation by threat, force, or freedom is a gender violation regardless of whether it occurs in the public or the private sphere. In addition, during the war, women were subjected to violence and exploited as a form of gender-based sexual violence that contributed to the problem of sexual violence. In this particular setting, the issues regarding comfort women were repeatedly brought up as being the most important ones to discuss. The comfort women

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issue was also brought up as an important topic and was given due consideration in this context as well. The report entitled “Systematic Rape, Sexual Slavery and SlaveryLike Practices During Armed Conflict,” which was submitted by Ms. Gay J. McDougall, the Special Rapporteur, was presented to the United Nations Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities in 1998. Referred to as the “McDougall Report,” it is also very important for the comfort women issue. In August of 1998, McDougall presented a very important report on the issue of Japanese military sexual slavery to the United Nations Subcommittee on Human Rights. The report was developed further while McDougall was compiling the results of the reports from the ICJ and Kumaraswamy reports. The report was based on the close cooperation of the Jeong Dae-hyup and a number of years of investigation. The McDougall report clearly notes that the brothel is referred to as a “rape camp.” In addition, based on the information disclosed by the Japanese government, it refutes each claim by invoking international law in effect at the time of the incident, admitting Japan’s and the Japanese Army’s legal responsibility, and requesting criminal prosecution and state compensation (Say, 2004). Measures such as “comfort money” provided by Japan’s “Asia Women’s Fund” are merely moral (not even enough), and the Japanese government should fulfill its legal obligations. It was not only a precise study questioning the Japanese government’s liability for compensation, but it was also significant in that it shattered the Japanese government’s logic of avoiding responsibility. Since then, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the United Nations Committee Against Torture (CAT), International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (CCPR), and several UN-related entities (Table 1) have all urged the Japanese government to accept responsibility and compensate victims (Say, 2004; Shin, 2016b; Lee, 2018; Gil & Kim, 2021).

High-Ranking United Nations Officials’ Attention and Support Public and official statements by senior United Nations officials also drew attention to the issue of Japanese military sexual slavery. Navi Pillay, when she resigned from her position as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2014, issued a statement in which she claimed that Japan had failed to pursue a comprehensive, neutral, and long-term

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The Path of comfort women Issue and the United Nations

United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)

International Commission of Jurists (ICJ)

United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR)

United Nations Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities

Committee Against Torture (CAT)

International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (CCPR)

Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR)

Urged Japan to acknowledge the responsibility of the Japanese government and punish those responsible for the comfort women issue (1994, 2003, 2004, 2009) ICJ report “Comfort Women: An Unfinished Ordeal” confirmed Japanese military involvement in the comfort women system and moral and legal responsibility for victims (1994) Kumaraswamy Report (1996) asserted that the Japanese government is held legally accountable for establishing brothels. In addition, it demanded that victims be compensated, a special administrative court be established to disclose documents and materials, a public apology (in documentation) be made to each victim, and that criminals be apprehended and punished as severely as possible Gay McDougall Report (1998) concluded that Japan violated human rights and humanitarian law. She also called for UN involvement in the comfort women issue, requiring the High Commissioner for Human Rights to prosecute those responsible for the brothels, secure evidence, listen to victims’ testimonies, and prepare for the trial of Japanese war criminals. The report recommended that Japan report to the United Nations Secretary-General twice a year Confirmed the responsibility and recognition of the Japanese government and defined the acts comfort women endured as forms of torture (2007, 2013) Urged official recognition of the Japanese government’s responsibility for human rights violations in Japanese Military Sexual Slavery and a public apology (2008, 2014) Urges the guarantee of economic, social, and cultural rights of victims of comfort women (2013)

(continued)

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Table 1

(continued)

Navi Pillay, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights

Zainab Hawa Bangura, United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict

Ban Ki-moon, United Nations Secretary-General

Adopted a position on comfort women and urged Japan to find a comprehensive, fair, and permanent solution (2014) Congratulated the Republic of Korea and Japanese governments on reaching a historic agreement to end the long-running issue of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery. Also urged the United Nations’ top human rights official to put the agreement into effect as soon as possible to heal the long-endured wounds (2015) Emphasized the importance of listening to the voices of victims and survivors with compassion for the suffering they have endured (2016)

Note Compiled by author

solution to human rights violations in Japanese military sexual slavery. She emphasized how heartbreaking it was to see brave women die one by one without rights and appropriate compensation. Pillay also praised the Japanese government for its proactive efforts to prevent violence in the event of a conflict, urging it to “pursue comprehensive, neutral, and continuous solutions to wartime sexual slavery issues with comparable zeal” (UN News, 2014). Pillay continued to stress the point that the issue of comfort women continues to violate the human rights of victims today, not just in the past, and human rights violations against these women will continue until their right to seek justice and compensation is realized. Of course, the official United Nations statement did not represent all the voices in the Republic of Korea or the victims’ feelings. During the 2015 Korea–Japan agreement,6 Zainab Hawaii Bangura, the SecretarySpecial General’s Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, praised

6 The Japanese government prepared a one-of-a-kind funding mechanism to be estab-

lished with the goal of comprehensive project implementation, “‘recovery of victims’ honor and dignity, and healing of their mental trauma” as the systemic tool to execute the acknowledgment of the historical fact with the military intervention, expressing the liability of the Japanese government, and expressing the remorse of the South Korean government.

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the two governments for their historic agreement to end the longsuffering comfort women. Furthermore, the United Nations higher official on human rights urged the agreement to be implemented as soon as possible to heal the wounds that have yet to heal (UN News, 2015). Many people criticized the agreement, which stated that Japan should officially apologize for the treatment of comfort women during World War II and pay 8.3 million US dollars to the victims because their voices were not properly heard. Nonetheless, Bangura emphasized the timely implementation of projects to restore their honor and dignity as well as psychological support and urged the two countries to do so as soon as possible in accordance with the spirit of the agreement. However, when the United Nations’ position was revealed in this manner, Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations Secretary-General at the time, met with and consoled victims who would have been harmed by the 2015 Korea–Japan agreement (UN News, 2016). He emphasized the importance of listening to the victims’ and survivors’ voices once more, feeling pity for Gil Won-ok and other victims’ pain and suffering. According to its official press at the time, independent United Nations human rights experts expressed concern about the December 2015 agreement, claiming that it falls short of victims’ demands for a clear formal apology from Tokyo. They reiterated that the agreement did not meet the needs of survivors and strongly defended the victims, claiming that at the time, a clear and official apology from the Japanese government and military would protect and support their rights to truth, justice, and compensation.

In the previous case of the Asian women’s fund, the Japanese prime minister expressed the apology and regret in a private letter only to the victims who had received compensation money from Japan. In terms of the subjects and formality of the apology, Abe’s expression of apology and regret at that time was far more advanced. The government expressed regret at the time that this issue had been resolved while some victims were still alive. However, the victims were positioned as objects in the 2015 accord, despite the fact that they should have been considered as the most important actors from the inception of the comfort women movement until now. The agreement process fully excluded victims’ participation and testimonial rights. Additionally, the 2015 agreement failed to address a number of concerns, including the United Nations resolution on victims’ rights, ICC regulations, and so on. Given the agreement’s nature, perhaps it is not a surprise that the problem-solving concepts advocated by the United Nations, advocacy groups, victims, and others were never considered. The “2015 agreement,” like the statement’s unclear object, was essentially a diplomatic event with no legal basis or actions (Yang, 2016).

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Although they speak in different voices at times, they eventually return to the correct opinion, and even if they disagree, it is very significant that high-ranking officials of international organizations such as the United Nations “officially” keep mentioning and discussing “comfort women,” remembering it, and making perpetrators feel uncomfortable about the issue.

Conclusion In addition to the complex nature of the relationship between the Republic of Korea and Japan, the root of the issue lies in a system in which civil society, the state, and international society all have an impact on one another. In other words, the contents of the agreement need to be consistent with the multifaceted nature of the comfort women issue, and it needs to receive approval from both the international level and civil society. Transnational civil society, which effectively advocated for the issue of comfort women, and the United Nations, which responded to it, have established a normative standard for considering the issue of comfort women at a level that is not subordinate to the level at which the Republic of Korea and Japan are interacting with one another. It should no longer be resolved through bilateral diplomacy alone because the issue of comfort women is a complex one involving ethnicity, class, colonialism, and gender. Instead, it should be resolved with a focus on the protection of human rights that are part of the normative obligations of the international community, which includes the responsibility toward the protection of the rights of comfort women. As of October 2022, 11 Korean victims enslaved by the Japanese Army have expressed the desire to find a solution to the issue by regularly communicating with the international community, as opposed to doing so only through their (i.e., South Korean) government. As a consequence of this, efforts should be made that are both concrete and systematic—and not just on a whim—to view the problem of comfort women as a subject of universal women’s rights norms. The objective of these efforts should be to produce outcomes that are in line with the universal values that are guaranteed by international organizations and United Nations’ agencies. In sum, the issue of comfort women ought to be approached from the standpoint of human rights rather than in the context of just a conflict between the Republic of Korea and Japan. In order to demonstrate mature problem-solving on human rights issues, Japan, as a powerful

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and developed country, must acknowledge and accept responsibility for its past wrongdoings. If this is not done, Japan will be unable to demonstrate successful problem-solving on human rights issues. It would be preferable if Japan admitted its wrongdoing on its own, but if that is not possible, then the order in which the wrongdoing is fully recognized as wrong should be followed. This would be the preferred scenario. The United Nations can get started, and it can also hold them “sufficiently” accountable for their actions, if those actions are recognized as being wrong to a sufficient degree. The United Nations will also have to demonstrate its value by addressing the issue of comfort women in a manner that is unaffected by power politics but is “sufficiently” important to concerns regarding human rights.

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Weiss, T. G. (2000). Governance, good governance and global governance: Conceptual and actual challenges. Third World Quarterly, 21(5), 795– 814https://doi.org/10.1080/713701075 Weiss, T. G., & Thakur, R. (2010). Global governance and the United Nations: An unfinished journey. Indiana University Press. Whytock, C. A. (2013). Foreign state immunity and the right to court access. Boston University Law Review, 93(6), 2033–2093. https://www.bu. edu/bulawreview/files/2014/01/WHYTOCK.pdf Yang, H. Y. (2016). Where have the victims of ‘Japanese military sexual slavery’ been located in the Korea-Japan foreign ministers’ agreement in 2015? Democratic Legal Studies, 60, 13–44.

Lessons from International Human Rights Norms and Korea’s Comfort Women-Girls Ñusta Carranza Ko

As defined by Radhika Coomaraswamy—the former United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, its Causes and Consequences—comfort women were victims of sexual enslavement and slavery-like practices by the Japanese military during the Asia–Pacific War (1931–1945) (United Nations, 1996). These women at the comfort stations “were taken against their will” (United Nations, 1996) and were forced to work in comfort stations located near battlefields, where they were systematically raped by Japanese soldiers. The “comfort” attribute to their identity and place of forced exploitation served the single purpose of “comforting” the Japanese soldiers during the war. For the women, there was no comfort. The practice was “nothing but rape and sexual enslavement” (Y¯oko, 1999, p. 54). These findings from the UN Special Rapporteur confirmed the decades of scholarship published on the human

Ñ. Carranza Ko (B) School of Public and International Affairs, University of Baltimore, Baltimore, MD, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 Ñ. Carranza Ko (ed.), New Ways of Solidarity with Korean Comfort Women, Palgrave Macmillan Studies on Human Rights in Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1794-5_11

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rights violations against comfort women (Yoshimi, 1995; Howard, 1997; Hicks, 1997; Stetz & Oh, 2001; Chung, 2016; Son, 2018, 2020; Min et al., 2020; Lee et al., 2021)1 ; the statement from Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono in 1993 that acknowledged the brutalities of the comfort system (i.e., the Kono Statement) (Asian Women’s Fund, 1993); the judgment of The Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal 2000 for the Trial of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery that found the government of Japan responsible for the “establishment and maintenance of the comfort system” (Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice, 2001); and the 2001 study conducted by the Japanese government that recognized “wartime comfort women” as a “grave affront to the honour and dignity of a large number of women” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, 2001). These published findings were centered on the personal stories and memories of comfort women who were willing to share their recollections about the human rights abuses they endured. The courage of victims and survivors provided the basis for the growth of the transnational redress movements for Japanese Military Sexual Slavery, which have continued their work in the search for justice and recognition for comfort women. However, despite the efforts from transnational advocates and published evidence from intergovernmental organizations and scholarship, efforts to challenge and erase the historical truth about comfort women have persisted. Imperialist governments with nationalist and militarist tendencies have rewritten histories to indoctrinate schoolchildren about past historical wars and justify past historical injustices and human rights violations. In Japan, these values were deployed as early as the 1930s and 1940s, during which the education system instructed pupils about the Greater East Asian War2 as a “holy war designed to bring the ‘whole word under one roof’ (hakko ichiu)” (May, 1983) and normalized war crimes and related human rights crimes that took place for this greater cause. With the Allied Occupation, which began promptly after the Asia–Pacific

1 These are just a few of the many scholarly works on comfort women. 2 Greater East Asian War refers to Japan’s involvement in wars across East Asia

throughout the 1930s and 1940s. The wars were motivated by Japan’s vision of a “new order” or a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” in the form of a unified economic and political bloc free of Western colonial powers. These objectives also carried some of Japan’s convictions as racial superiority. For more information see Dower (1986) and Swan (1996).

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War (1931–1945) and World War II (1939–1945), teachings based on nationalist and militarist dogmas were purged. However, the history of human rights violations from this period has often become a subject of debate in Japanese politics, involving distortions about the truth related to the violence committed by the Japanese military and pushback from Japanese human rights activists who have advocated for the recognition of Japan’s past human rights crimes.3 Disputes about the memories of comfort women have even spilled over to academic scholarship.4 The latest of such attempts—a publication by a Japanese Legal Studies scholar—has argued that sexual enslavement was, in fact, a legitimate contractual arraignment (Ramseyer, 2020). Central to this controversial study is the argument that comfort women, when recruited, were aware of the sexual work in which they would engage, consented to this line of work based on economic logic, and carried out the work for their personal gains. Specifically, on the Korean comfort women, the study explains that “it was not that the government…forced women into prostitution” (Ramseyer, 2020, p. 5). Instead, the author argues that young women being recruited to work in comfort stations “understood” the dangers of their work and, at times, even urged recruiters to pay a “large faction” of their earnings upfront (Ramseyer, 2020, p. 5). This chapter examines the role of the international human rights system in reflecting upon the politicized memory of Korean comfort women. Is there an alternative argument to be made based on human rights that can protect the accountable and ethical representation of comfort women and their stories and silence the controversies about the memories of Korean comfort women? What can we draw from the global sphere and human rights norms on collective group rights that may be of use? This chapter analyzes the comfort women experiences through the lens of international human rights involving children’s rights. This is the first study that takes both the normative and the legal aspects of children’s rights seriously, providing a norms-based analysis of a victim group that has been overlooked in the current literature. The forced participation of minors in comfort stations has been discussed by Stetz (2020) and A. Son 3 For more information about the political debates that have obscured the truth about Japan’s role in human right abuses, please see Tai (2020). 4 See the Introduction chapter of this edited volume for more information on scholarship that has mischaracterized comfort women’s experiences.

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(2018, 2020), whose studies employ the term “comfort girls-women” to underscore the young age of victims forced into sexual slavery. However, research has not considered the human rights violations, comfort women endured from a legal framework on collective group rights that examines international human rights norms on children’s rights. To provide an in-depth analysis of comfort women as a children’s rights violation, this chapter interweaves archival research, testimonies from Korean victims,5 and normative markers from international human rights law on children’s rights. On norms, it applies the human rights standards from the International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children, the Geneva Declaration on the Rights of the Child, and the International Labor Organization’s Minimum Age Convention. As these legal documents existed and were recognized while the human rights violations were being committed, they are important to categorically analyze these violations from a children’s rights perspective. After establishing these historic normative arguments, this article then explores the normative links with more modern legal frameworks that protect children’s rights as a collective, namely the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). These connections are purposefully examined to emphasize the gravity of the crime against children from the comfort girls-women’s experiences. Such reflections are important as they offer an alternative way of thinking about the memories of comfort women as a case that is children-centered, thus reinforcing the gravity of the victims’ and survivors’ experiences and confronting the politicization of comfort station survivors’ memories and experiences. Such findings also serve to present a new angle of legal argument that may be of use for advocates, advocacy movements, and victims.

Human Rights and Comfort Women Sexual violence is one of the most recurring wartime human rights abuses. Some feminist scholarship on wartime rape and sexual violence examines these violations from “male–female gendered power relations.”6 In her

5 Victims’ testimonies used in this study includes those published in Korean and English, either from the victims themselves in newspapers, court proceedings, or in books as part of a collection of testimonies gathered by researchers. 6 For more information see Brownmiller (1976) and Nikolicc-Ristanovi´c (1996).

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study about prosecuting rape as a war crime, Tompkins (1995) documents the history of rape in wars, noting how these practices were “raised to an artform by men” in the twentieth century. She discusses how during World War II, Japan, similar to Germany, used rape as a wartime tactic. Japan established “battlefront sex camps,” and a “staggering” number of Korean women were forcibly enslaved (Tompkins, 1995). These practices, she explains, are a phenomenon “rooted in inequality, discrimination, male domination and aggression, misogyny, and the entrenched socialization of sexual myths” (Tompkins, 1995, p. 851). Other scholars argue that while the approach of examining wartime rape and sexual violence as a reflection of male–female power imbalance may be true, “often systematic and orchestrated occurrences of wartime rape” are “more complicated” (Alison, 2007, p. 79). For instance, in thinking about sexual violence during wartime, there is an intentionality of who the targeted victim groups are, “namely ‘enemy’ women” (Alison, 2007, p. 79). Thus, there is an extra added element of positionality that gets embedded in sexual violence, which tends to manifest from one group toward those who are on the other side of the war. Scholarship on the study of comfort women embeds both approaches to wartime sexual violence as one that complicates the nature of the crime and a reflection of inequality and gendered relations. They are fairly consistent in framing the comfort women case as one involving the premeditated sexual enslavement of women from Asia and the Pacific, which reflects colonial power and gendered elements. Scholarly interest on comfort women received greater attention with Japanese historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi’s (1995) work on comfort women, which relies on the archives from the Japanese Self-Defense Agency. Yoshimi’s (1995) publication, influenced by Korean comfort women who came forward publicly to discuss their experiences in the early 1990s, was one of the first publications that confirmed the existence of military comfort stations and the involvement of the Japanese army in “the rounding up of comfort women” (Yoshimi, 1995, pp. 47, 65). In his study, Yoshimi (1995) recognizes the forced sexual slavery by Japan’s Imperial Army and discusses how, “after the occupation of Nanking, Chinese women in the region were coerced into becoming comfort women,” noting the Ministry of War documents that detail instances where women were kidnapped and rounded up to work in comfort stations (pp. 51, 59). Similar observations are made by Hicks (1997), who further argues that the comfort

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system “consisted of the legalized military rape of subject women on a scale…previously unknown in history” (p. 15). The systematization of rape is emphasized with the observation that, for the most part, women working in comfort stations were “duped, abducted or coerced into sexual slavery” (Hicks, 1997, pp. 18–19). For instance, in the case of Korea, girls “were seized in virtual slave raids” by private individuals, police, and local government authorities working to fill the demand of the Japanese military (Hicks, 1997, pp. 18–19). Complementing archival studies on comfort women, scholarship has also taken a victim-centric approach to deliver victims’ narratives and testimonies of the sexual violence. Howard’s (1997) study is a collection of oral stories of Korean comfort women who were recruited with false information and forced to work in comfort stations. Similar efforts have been undertaken by the Research Team of the War and Women’s Human Rights Center (2020), which presents the voices and memories of comfort girls-women in an effort to “bring these women back to life.” As the Research Team (2020) explains, the victims’ experiences have been shamed into nonexistence actively by the Japanese government and passively by the Korean government. The active nature of the Japanese government’s efforts to turn the page on past human rights violations has been discussed in greater length by Chung (1997, 2016), who has argued that Japan’s colonization and national prejudice against Koreans were fundamental for the victimization of Korean comfort women. On the point of colonization and discrimination, other scholars have taken an intersectional analysis to argue that “colonization, gender, and class,” which were “inseparably tied together,” made the experiences of Korean comfort women particularly “miserable” (Min, 2003, p. 940). Focusing on advocacy and activism, Chung’s (2016) study presents both a victim-centric analysis of their experiences, archival research on the development of the comfort women stations, its effects on Korea– Japan bilateral relations, and the role of advocacy networks (international and domestic) in shedding light on the grave human rights violations. Relatedly, E. Son (2018) has focused on how performance as a form of activism has incorporated “redress, representation, and the transmission of memory” that address the “history of girls and young women who were subjected to sexual enslavement.” Performance here refers to the role of how diverse actors handle and communicate the truth about the historical crimes and “the erasures of such experiences” (E. Son, 2018, pp. 3–4). These include the rise of transnational activist movements and

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artistic interventions in public and private spaces (i.e., street corners, theatre stages, and public parks), which represent “restitution through acknowledgement” of the harm and “memorialization” of the past (E. Son, 2018, pp. 3–4). Other scholarship on comfort women directly responds to historical mischaracterizations of sexual enslavement. Lee et al. (2021) point out the “fallacy of contract in sexual slavery.” They consider the “brutality of the forced sex stations,” including the rape, torture, and even killings that routinely took place in comfort stations, as evidence of the deplorable conditions of work that could not have been possible under a normal employment contract. Referencing government documents from Japan and reports from the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations on comfort stations, the author’s further question scholarship that contradicts the Japanese government’s admission of forced sex labor in comfort stations (i.e., the Kono Statement from 1993). The authors argue that the mischaracterization of comfort women experiences denies the “existence of wartime atrocities” and is an attempt at rewriting history, which is a dangerous practice (Lee et al., 2021, p. 318). There is a broad consensus in the comfort women literature about what took place during the Asia–Pacific War, the legal liability of Japan’s Imperial Army, the importance of victims’ and survivors’ stories, experiences, and memories, and discussions about human rights norms. However, there is little consideration about approaching the comfort women’s human rights violations from a collective rights perspective, namely as a children’s rights story. Apart from A. Son’s (2018, 2020) works that created the term “comfort girls-women” to underscore the “young age of victims who were put into sexual slavery” and Stetz’s (2020) study that problematizes the terminology of “comfort women,” which overlooks the sexual assault of underage girls, there is still a lack of research that centers the case as a children’s rights matter. This chapter aims to complement the literature by introducing a new scholarship on international human rights norms linked to the Korean comfort girls-women.7 In doing so, it also contributes to the existing scholarship that examines comfort girls-women’s experiences. It is important to state the relevance

7 From this point forward, this article uses the term comfort girls-women from A. Son’s (2018, 2020) and Stetz’s (2020) works to emphasize and frame the comfort women case as a children’s rights matter.

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of international instruments of human rights, namely the Geneva Declaration, International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children, International Labor Organization’s Conventions, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, in reflecting upon the experiences of sexual violence against minors forcedly recruited to work in comfort stations. The categorization of the crime and rights violations defined under a children’s rights matter brings to light the gravity of the crime committed against a vulnerable population. Moreover, the continued lack of recognition of this case as involving children reveals the prevalence of impunity and injustice that overshadows this unprotected group.

The Crime The human rights violations in comfort stations first became publicized in Japan in 1975 when the Kyodo News published Korean comfort woman Bae Bong Gi’s story. Bae revealed her past experiences not by will but due to the Okinawa Reversion that came into effect on May 15, 1972. The Japanese government announced that it would provide a special residency permit for Koreans residing in Okinawa who had entered Japan before August 15, 1945. In the process of attesting to her status, Bae’s story came to light in Japan (Hyung, 2015). Her story, however, got lost in South Korea amidst the tumultuous political developments during the 1970s, which included authoritarian governance, massacres of civilians, and democratization movements. After the democratic overture in South Korea, the crimes against comfort women gained more spotlight. These were aided in part by a series of newspaper reports in the South Korean newspaper Hankyoreh. Titled “Jeongsindae 8 : Investigating the Wronged Spirits,” the reports discussed Japan’s sexual slavery as well as the public testimony of Korean comfort woman Kim Hak-Sun on August 14, 1991. Inspired by Kim Hak-Sun and other comfort women’s testimonies and related emerging scholarship, on January 11, 1992, a Japanese newspaper

8 Jeongsindae is a Korean term that has often been used interchangeably to refer to

the comfort women. However, there has been a recent controversy regarding the term’s usage. As one of the victims who was forced into sexual slavery in comfort stations, Lee Yong Soo noted there is a difference between Jeongsindae victims who were victims of forced labor and comfort women, and comfort women who were subject to enforced sexual slavery by the Japanese military. For more information see Hankyung (2020).

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Asahi Shimbun reported on comfort women. In its report, Asahi Shimbun discussed the research from Japanese historian Yoshiaki and his discovery of the six official documents from the Library of the National Institute for Defense Studies in Tokyo that implicated “the Japanese government in the establishment and maintenance of the military comfort system” (Soh, 2008, p. 44). In response to the increasing interest and developments related to the comfort women issue, a series of acknowledgments from the Japanese government soon followed. In 1992, Prime Minister Miyazawa Kiichi (1991–1993) issued a public apology to the Korean people for the comfort women issue (Soh, 2008, p. 44). Shortly after, the Chief Cabinet Secretary Kono issued the Kono Statement that also acknowledged the Japanese military’s involvement in recruiting women against their will, managing the wartime comfort stations, and noting how the women “lived in misery” under a “coercive atmosphere” (Asian Women’s Fund, 1993). Other statements from the Japanese government continued, including Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s 2001 letter of apology to the former comfort women. However, along with these progressive developments that provided recognition for victims of these horrendous crimes, there was also a strong resistance to these changes. First, there were setbacks to criminal accountability. The lawsuit filed in 1991 by the three Korean comfort girlswomen against the Japanese state had originally been ruled in favor of the victims in 1998. Nonetheless, as the monetary compensation that had been ordered was significantly lower than the requested amount from the victims, the plaintiffs appealed the ruling. In response to the appeal, the Tokyo District Court, presided by Judge Shoichi Maruyama, dismissed the compensation appeal, noting that the “plaintiff’s right to damages was ended by a June 1965 agreement between Japan and South Korea” (“Wartime redress suit rejected,” 2001). Moreover, Judge Maruyama explained that, although the plaintiffs (i.e., comfort women) had suffered harm, their claims for “damages against the victimizer country are not thought to be acceptable under international law” (“Wartime redress suit rejected,” 2001). The plaintiffs appealed the case again in March 2001, which was rejected on July 22, 2003, by the Tokyo District Court and once again denied in 2004 by the Supreme Court of Japan. The court rulings were accompanied by a strong revisionist political movement that was led by Shinzo Abe, the former Prime Minister of Japan. During his first administration from 2006 to 2007, Abe questioned

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the veracity of comfort women’s stories, denied that comfort women were “coerced” by the Japanese military, and publicly stated that “Japan will not issue an apology, even if a resolution is passed in the United States House of Representatives” (Congressional Record, 2007). His position remained unaltered during his second administration (2012–2020). Abe first asked for a re-examination of the 1993 Kono Statement, questioning the veracity of the forcible recruitment of girls and young women into wartime military sexual slavery (Kim, 2013, p. 1). Then, to move forward from the past, he pushed for a new agreement between South Korea and Japan. In this 2015 agreement, Japan admitted having gravely damaged the “honor and dignity of large numbers of women,” issued an apology, and vowed to establish a Japan–South Korea joint foundation to provide support for former comfort women with a “one-time contribution” from the government of Japan to “heal” their psychological wounds and “recover the honor and dignity” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, 2015). While pledging these commitments, however, Japan added that, from 2015 forward, the comfort women issue was “finally and irreversibly resolved,” and South Korea and Japan will refrain from accusing each other and criticizing one another over the comfort women matter (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, 2015). The specification that the comfort women issue had been resolved via an agreement and would no longer be discussed from 2015 onward contradicted the meaning of reparations, which could not be curtailed by a certain timeline or a deadline. Moreover, as the Japanese government began publicly opposing memorials and memory representations related to the comfort women issue (Kim, 2013; Yamaguchi, 2020), it revealed the state’s position against the symbolic reparations of victims and their memories. From the South Korean side, the government adopted the Law on Protection, Resources, and Related Commemoration for Victims of Japanese Military Comfort Women in 2008. The Law opened a victims’ registry within the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family so victims and their family members may be eligible to receive reparations from the government (Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, 2020). Article 4 and 11 of the Law further details the responsibility of the state in providing medical, financial, and symbolic reparations for registered victims. Specifically, on symbolic reparations and in compliance with the Law, the state has designated August 14th as the Memorial Day

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for Japanese Forces’ Comfort Women Victims and celebrated its first commemoration on August 14, 2018. Regarding criminal accountability, on August 30, 2011, the South Korean Supreme Court handed down a historic ruling that effectively nullified the 1965 bilateral agreement established between South Korea and Japan. This ruling opened the possibility for Korean comfort women to sue the Japanese government for financial and medical reparations. However, as evidenced on April 21, 2021, ruling by the Seoul Central District Court, the Court, citing the 2015 bilateral agreement and the sovereign immunity of Japan, rejected the lawsuit filed by Kwak YeNam, Kim Bok-Dong, and twenty other comfort women and their family members (Kyung, 2021). This decision is emblematic of the political difficulties and the legal obstacles that surround the comfort girls-women issue and particularly the need to consider a new approach to this case.

Thinking About Children’s Rights Legally Binding Argument One of the earliest efforts to codify the collective rights of children in international human rights law was attempted in 1921 with the International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children. The Convention focuses on establishing international norms for the suppression of traffic, prosecution of those involved in trafficking children of both sexes, and the rectification of regulations of employment to “ensure the protection of women and children seeking employment in another country” (United Nations, 1921). Regarding employment, the Convention refers to the standards outlined in the 1910 International Convention for the Suppression of White Slave Traffic, which specifies how those who contract, lead away, or procure employment “even with her consent, a woman or girl underage” may be punishable and can be prosecuted (United Nations, 1910, 1921). The sole attempt to employ a minor, particularly a “girl underage,” is sufficient grounds to constitute a violation of the norms of the Convention. Additionally, if the employment of a minor was for “immoral purposes,” as noted by the 1910 Convention and cross-referenced in the 1921 Convention, then it also constitutes a punishable offense. Japan was a signatory to the Convention. However, in its accession to the Convention, Japan declared a reservation, noting that

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“Chosen, Taiwan, the leased Territory of Kwantung…” among others were excluded from the normative obligations of the Convention (United Nations Treaty Collection, 2021). Chosen was Japan’s reference to Chosun, which was the last and longest-lived imperial dynasty of Korea prior to Japan’s colonization. In other words, the normative obligations from the Convention did not apply to activities taking place within Korea. As scholars note, it is likely that the Japanese government at the time interpreted the signing of the Convention as having no relevance to its colonies (Tanaka, 2002, p. 26). Therefore, Japan had “no intention of suppressing illegal trafficking of Korean and Taiwanese women for military prostitution,” as indicated by the illegal trafficking of women that was commonplace throughout northern and central China (Tanaka, 2002, p. 26). What is relevant and overlooked is the Convention’s framework. While not applicable to the territories Japan listed in its reservation clause, it did not exclude Japan’s responsibility for the activities taking place in parts of China through which women and girls from Korea were trafficked to the comfort stations. The Korean victim Kim Chun-Ja’s case is relevant to consider here. While her age is not specified, Kim is referred to as one of the “four other girls” who were “pressured to volunteer for the Women’s Patriotic Service Corps” (Hicks, 1997, p. 63). The girls were misinformed of the type of employment, were raped by five Japanese army officers, and shortly after were forced aboard a “troop train headed for China, “like contraband,” since they were not officially part of the unit personnel” (Hicks, 1997, p. 64). Japan’s reservation clause to the Convention specified, Kwangtung (in southern China) and not northern China—where the train route from Korea to China was established. Therefore, the moment Kim Chun-Ja and other girls crossed the border from Korea to China, Japan was bound by the norms established in the Convention. These included multiple clauses of the Convention involving the employment of underage minors and the illegal trafficking of children. Moreover, the reservation clause did not exclude the illegal activities related to the trafficking of comfort women taking place inside Japan. The International Commission of Jurists explains that “once Korean women were taken from the peninsula into Japan…the Convention became applicable to them” (United Nations, 1996, p. 24). Consider, for instance, the case of an underage minor such as Kim Tokchin. She was a 17-yearold Korean girl deceived by a Korean man who was “recruiting girls to work in the Japanese factories” in the beginning of February 1937,

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taken to Nagasaki, Japan, and forced to work in sexual slavery (Kim, 1995, p. 152). In Tokchin’s case, the moment she arrived in Japan, the Japanese government was bound by the international obligations under the Convention. As Tokchin, who was underage, was subject to rape and sexual violence, the Japanese government, therefore, breached the norms that protected minors from any form of employment. This is one of many Korean comfort girls-women cases that demonstrates Japan’s liability in direct violation of international human rights norms. Legally Non-Binding, Yet Symbolic Argument Out of the historic international legal frameworks that were adopted, declared, and entered into force during the time of the Asia–Pacific War, only the 1921 International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children was legally binding. The 1924 Geneva Declaration was not a legally binding document, and Japan had not ratified the International Labor Organization’s (ILO’s) Minimum Age (NonIndustrial Employment) Convention of 1932 and the Minimum Age (Non-Industrial Employment) Recommendation of 1932. Nevertheless, as these international instruments were one of the early attempts to codify a collective set of norms related to children’s rights and were developed during the period of the Asia–Pacific War when comfort stations were set up, there is merit to reviewing the extent to which comfort stations challenged children’s rights. Although aspirational,9 nonbinding, and relatively brief, the Geneva Declaration was the first international document to recognize the specific rights of children. The context leading up to this declaration involved the work of the International Save the Children Union in Geneva, which drafted the first declaration in 1923, largely in response to the famine and suffering of children during World War I (Jarvis, 2018, p. 70). The 9 Scholars have traced even earlier instances of laws protecting children such as that of Britain’s series of acts of Parliament to prevent children from working in industry. These include the “Education Act of 1870,” which made it “compulsory (and free) for children aged between five and ten to attend school,” and the Prevention of Cruelty to, and Protection of, Children Act 1889, which was the first British legislation that imposed punishment for “ill-treatment and neglect of children,” and “restrictions on employment of children” (see Prevention of Cruelty to, and Protection of, Children Act [1989] and Jarvis [2018]). And yet, child labor was commonplace during the nineteenth and early twentieth century throughout the world.

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Geneva Declaration outlines several rights that ought to be protected for children. These include the right for children to be “given the means requisite for its normal development, both materially and spiritually” (United Nations, 1924). Here, normal development refers to a condition where children are fed, nursed, helped, sheltered, and succored if they are in a situation of hunger, sickness, delinquency, or orphanhood. Moreover, the Declaration recognizes the duty of all “men and women” to protect children against “every form of exploitation” (United Nations, 1924). From this categorization of children’s rights, adults that were putting children under conditions of sexual exploitation, such as that of the comfort girls-women, were committing human rights violations. The Declaration did not include any exemptions for those who performed these acts of cruelty, nor did it provide an exception from accountability and responsibility, even in moments of war and conflict. Hence, from this vantage point, Japan’s actions, which jeopardized the lives of comfort girls-women by subjecting them to sexual slavery in wartime, represent a violation of children’s rights as enshrined in the Geneva Declaration. Other related international instruments that emerged during this period were the ILO’s Minimum Age (Non-Industrial Employment) Convention of 1932 and the Minimum Age (Non-Industrial Employment) Recommendation of 1932. The normative standards from these two documents are important to consider, as they also set guidelines regarding the collective rights of children, particularly related to age, employment, and protection from exploitation. The Geneva Declaration does not specify the age that defines a minor or a child. The ILO’s Minimum Age Convention circumvents a direct categorization of the age; however, it provides some guidelines as to under what age or conditions a child may be regarded as a minor. Under Article 2 of the Minimum Age Convention, “children under fourteen years of age, or children over fourteen years who are still required by national laws or regulations to attend primary school, shall not be employed in any employment to which this Convention applies except as hereinafter otherwise provided” (International Labor Organization [ILO], 1932). By this definition, children either under 14 or over 14 but protected by national law on obligations of education would therefore be exempt from work. Similar ideas of age categories of minors are noted within Japanese domestic law. The Child Welfare Act of Japan was instituted on December 12, 1947, a few years after the comfort girls-women controversy and the end of World War II. According to this Act, a “child” is defined as a

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“person under 18 years of age” (Child Welfare Act, 1947). From this standard, girls working in comfort stations who were younger than 18 would therefore be categorized as a child. Additionally, the Labor Standards Act of Japan, enacted on April 7, 1947, “provides restrictions on working hours and work on rest days, prohibition of night work…and restrictions on engaging in dangerous and harmful jobs” for a person “under 18 full years of age” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, 2021). According to both the Child Welfare Act and the provisions of the Labor Standards Act, comfort station-related work would be a violation of children’s rights, as it subjected children to work underage and in conditions of danger. Considering the age standards from the ILO Convention and the lateradopted Japanese Child Welfare and Labor Standards Acts, most of the Korean comfort girls-women victims were underage. Kim Tokchin’s case, which was referenced previously with the 1921 International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children, once again serves to present the argument about the minimum age violation. Kim was 17 years old when she left to work in Japan via a Korean employment recruiter (Kim, 1996, p. 152). As her family had been destitute, she believed her work overseas, which she had been told was in Japanese factories, would help lift the family from poverty. On the first night when she arrived in Nagasaki, she was put into a guesthouse, taken before a “high-ranking soldier and raped” (Kim, 1996, p. 152). She was continuously raped for days in Japan, then taken to Shanghai, and from that point forward forcibly moved to comfort stations with the Japanese troops. In her case, she was a minor who was forced to work against her will. Like Kim Tokchin, Gong Jeom-Yeop was also deceived at 16 years of age and recruited for work at the Pyeongyang Employment Agency, then was forced into the life of a Japanese military comfort girl-woman in China (Research Team, 2020, p. 17). Others were forcibly taken. Seok SoonHee was abducted at age 14, and Kim Bong-Yi was taken at age 16; both were forced to work in sexual slavery in Japan and in a Japanese military comfort station, presumably in Inner Mongolia (Research Team, 2020, p. 111). Their minor age alone was a direct violation of the Minimum Age Convention. If one were to consider the applicability of the International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children within all these individual contexts, the Japanese state would also be in violation of the Anti-Trafficking Conventions’ norms since most of the girls-women were trafficked outside of the jurisdiction Japan had noted in

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its reservation clause in signing the Convention, such as northern China and Japan. Article 3 of the ILO’s Minimum Age Convention expands on the age factor, further noting that children over “twelve years of age may, outside the hours fixed for school attendance, be employed on light work,” hence specifying the restriction of hours of work, the type of labor that required, and even prohibiting children from work on Sundays (ILO, 1932). This is a particularly important protection since young girls working in comfort stations worked more than two hours per day. As described in Tokchin’s testimony and corroborated with comfort girlwoman Mun P’il-gi’s account, from about nine o’clock in the morning “soldiers began to arrive and form orderly lines,” and from “six o’clock in the evening high-ranking officers came, some of whom stayed overnight” (Kinm, 1995, p. 154). Each woman had to “serve an average of 30 to 40 men each day,” and during the weekends, as Mun P’il-gi explained, roughly 40–50 soldiers would come beginning at eight o’clock in the morning (Soh, 2008, p. 123). For this reason, some survivors have explained that “Scary Sunday” was a feared day, when their “heart would already start pounding” because there were so many soldiers who were sent out (Research Team, 2020, p. 22). As another comfort girl-woman Kim Bong-Yi explained, there was no “time to rest” as the soldiers kept coming (Research Team, 2020, p. 228). These accounts reveal the continuous work that girls endured without any regard for “school time” or hours when school would be in session, as specified in the ILO Convention. Moreover, as girls were subject to work even on Sundays—which is prohibited by the Convention—and were left with little time to recuperate from their forced sexual labor, the works in comfort stations were in clear violation of the norms on labor time and standards laid out in the Convention. The ILO Minimum Age Recommendation outlined a normative framework that complemented those discussed in the Minimum Age Convention by setting further guidelines for the protection of children’s rights, including the details of the involvement of children in acts that would put them in danger. The Minimum Age Recommendation emphasizes the protection of children from “dangerous employment,” which might include employment in “establishments for the cure of the sick such as employment involving danger of contagion or infection” (ILO, 1932). Therefore, work that involved the exposure of children to contagion or infection, which may include employment in establishments where

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sexually transmitted diseases and infections were common, could also be considered “dangerous employment” and thus banned by the Minimum Age Recommendation. The prohibition of certain types of employment is also discussed in the ILO Minimum Age Convention that defines “light work” permitted for children as one that is “not harmful to their health or normal development” (ILO, 1932). Hence, a work environment that exposes children to health risks, such as that of sexually transmitted diseases would not fit the standards of light work in the Convention or the Recommendation issued by the ILO in 1932. This was the experience of many girls working in comfort stations. Kim Bong-Yi, who was forcedly taken at age 16, recalls how Japanese soldiers’ refusal to use condoms contributed to her contracting sexually transmitted diseases. She explains how the soldiers would scream “bakayaro” (stupid) to her when she would ask them to wear condoms and, not long after she arrived at the comfort station, she contracted “gonorrhea and saw pus coming out” (Research Team, 2020, p. 229). Other girls such as Gong Jeom-Yeop, who at the age of 16 was given false information about work and then later forced to work in comfort stations, recall similar stories of pain. Due to her intensive work, she had to use a “whole block of ice” on her vaginal area to numb the area so “it would be less painful for the next few days” (Research Team, 2020, p. 23). Jeom-Yeop also recalls how “syphilis was widespread among the girls and young ladies,” and it was only after they had contracted syphilis that the girls-women were “told not to receive customers” (Research Team, 2020, p. 25). The exposure of children to dangerous working conditions and an environment that risked their health through the contraction of sexually transmitted diseases was in direct violation of the ILO Minimum Age Convention and the Recommendation’s standards. Along with historic documents that establish the grounds for children’s rights, when we consider the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), there is even a stronger argument for how the human rights violations in comfort stations ought to also be considered as a case of children’s rights violations. According to Article 34 of the CRC, state parties shall undertake to “protect the child from all forms of sexual exploitation and sexual abuse,” such as the “inducement or coercion of a child to engage in any unlawful sexual activity” (Office on the High Commissioner for Human Rights [OHCHR], 1989). The deception, abduction, trafficking of children for sexual exploitative purposes and forced sexual labor discussed in previous comfort girls-women’s testimonies would all

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constitute a violation of Article 34. Specifically, they were violations of Article 34 Section (a) and (b), under which state parties shall prevent “the inducement or coercion of a child to engage in any unlawful sexual activity” and “the exploitative use of children in prostitution or other unlawful sexual practices” (OHCHR, 1989). Korean comfort girls, as evidenced in the victims’ testimonies, were coerced into sexual slavery. Moreover, under Article 20 of the CRC, a “child temporarily or permanently deprived of his or her family environment, or in whose own best interests cannot be allowed to remain in that environment, shall be entitled to special protection and assistance provided by the State” (OHCHR, 1989). In other words, girls who were abducted, and therefore temporarily deprived of their family environment, ought to have been provided special protection and assistance by the “State.” That is to say, the Japanese military that was responsible for the abductions, whether working with or through local officials who were pressured to meet the demands of the Japanese army, needed to provide the protection. Such would have been the case if the Convention had been active during the Asia–Pacific War and Japan had been party to the Convention. Nonetheless, the importance of the normative framework that is established on protecting children from an environment that deprives them of their family is worth noting in thinking about comfort girls-women’s experiences as a matter involving children, a vulnerable population that needs protection, and a family environment. To make an even stronger case for children’s rights, let us take a controversial position and consider the contentious argument on “contract” work. If so, the claim that the “comfort women” knowingly subjected themselves to forced sexual labor (Ramseyer, 2020) becomes even more problematic, as “comfort women” included children. By children, I refer to the definition of “child” according to the Convention on the Rights of the Child which stipulates a child to mean “every human being below the age of eighteen years” who “needs special safeguards and care by reason of its physical and mental immaturity” (OHCHR, 1989). Bearing this definition in mind, children are, again, not in a position “by reason of its physical and mental immaturity” (OHCHR, 1989) to make the decision to subjugate themselves to a “contract” involving sexual work. In fact, these contracts would be a violation of the rights of children noted in the Convention. Namely, Section (b) of Article 34 explains that the state shall protect the child from “prostitution or other unlawful sexual practices” (OHCHR, 1989). Hence, drafting a sexual

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labor contract that involves children—a premeditated plan to involve children in prostitution—would, on its own, be a violation of children’s rights. Moreover, the implementation of this “contract” or the actus reus (the guilty act) would constitute another violation of children’s rights, as it carries out the acts of “prostitution” and “unlawful sexual practices” from which children ought to be protected by the state. Relatedly, the resulting impact on children, which includes long-term physical and psychological abuse, is another violation of the rights of children. On this point, Article 39 of the Convention explains that state parties “shall take appropriate measures to promote physical and psychological reintegration of a child victim” (OHCHR, 1989). Hence, from the normative standards of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the state party entering a “contract” with a child for sexual labor has violated various grounds of children’s rights with the premeditated plan, the guilty act, and the resulting effect of sexual violence on children. As evidenced by previous testimonies from comfort girls-women, there could not be clearer evidence of the Japanese military’s intent to violate children’s rights.

What Remains From the period of the Asia–Pacific War (1941–1944), the Japanese military began actively recruiting and forcing women and girls into sexual slavery in comfort stations, many of whom were of Korean descent. The majority were recruited against their will, either because they were abducted or deceived with false information about the type of work they would be doing as agents working for the Japanese military. Transnational redress movements related to comfort women have continued raising awareness about the issue, particularly the crimes committed against these victims and the criminal accountability developments related to this case. However, there has also been a consistent effort to challenge victims’ and survivors’ experiences. Considering the experiences of comfort women as a children’s rights matter and a human rights violation that involves crimes against children may be an approach that resolves any remaining political disputes about the comfort women’s experiences. Crimes against children are considered by global human rights standards as a grave violation of a vulnerable group of peoples. Particularly, that is, if it entailed enforced sexual labor, abduction, mistreatment, psychological and physical abuse, and forced

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mobilization of minors away from their families. Hence, the question of justice could be a non-disputed matter when comfort women’s experiences are regarded from the lens of children’s rights. As even the most iconic symbolic representation of Korea’s comfort women issue is the Statue of Peace—a statue of a girl sitting down on a bench with her fists balled in her lap—it may, in fact, be most fitting to explore and reflect upon the memories of comfort women as children’s or girls’ experiences. The statue is “meant to reproach” Japan for “its refusal to address moral issues and lack of remorse” and represents the “continuing resistance” from victims against impunity (Kim, 2013, p. 3). Thus, the statue serves to portray the painful history of comfort stations as one involving crimes against comfort girls and, more specifically, as crimes against Korean comfort girls.

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United Nations. (1921). International convention for the suppression of the traffic of women and children. https://treaties.un.org/doc/Treaties/1921/ 09/1921093005-59AM/Ch_VII_3p.pdf. United Nations. (1924). Geneva declaration of the rights of the child. http:// www.un-documents.net/gdrc1924.htm United Nations. (1996). Commission on Human Rights: Fifty-second session, item 9 (a) of the provisional agenda. http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/commission/ country52/53-add1.htm. United Nations Treaty Collection. (2021). Chapter VII: Traffic in persons, international convention for the suppression of the traffic in women and children. https://treaties.un.org/pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mtdsg_ no=VII-3&chapter=7&clang=_en. Wartime redress suit rejected. (2001, March 21). Japan Times. https://www.jap antimes.co.jp/news/2001/03/27/national/wartime-redress-suit-rejected/. Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice. (2001). Re: Judgement of the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal 2000 for the trial of Japanese military sexual slavery. http://iccwomen.org/wigjdraft1/Archives/oldWCGJ/tokyo/ judgmentannounce.html. Yamaguchi, T. (2020). Japan’s right-wing women and the “comfort women” issue. Georgetown Journal of Asian Affairs 6, 46–47. Y¯ oko, H. (1999). Issues surrounding the wartime comfort women.” Review of Japanese Culture and Society, 11/12, 54–65. Yoshimi, Y. (1995). Comfort women: Sexual slavery in the Japanese military during World War II . Columbia University Press.

Index

0–9 1910 International Convention for the Suppression of White Slave Traffic, 253 1965 Hart-Cellar Immigration and Nationality Act, 65 1965 Korea-Japan Normalization Treaty, 137, 140, 151 1965 Republic of Korea-Japan Claims Agreement, 225 1965 Agreement on the Claims, 228 Korea–Japan Basic Treaty on Compensation for the Postwar Period, 206 1965 Voting Rights Act, 65 1966 Act on the Operation and Management of Funds for Compensation, 138 1988 Civil Liberties Act, 66 2002 World Cup, 140 2015 Agreement between Japanese and Korean governments

2015 agreement, 4 2015 Comfort Women Agreement, 134, 135, 137, 138 December 2015, 52, 227 2015 Korea and Japan agreement, 230, 236, 237 2015 Korea–Japan Comfort Women Agreement, 134 2015 Korea-Japan Ministerial Agreement on Comfort Women, 134 diplomatic “agreement” of December 2015, 118 faux apologies, 119 final and irreversible resolution, 161, 228 one-time apology, 4 38th global latitudinal line. See Korean War (1950–1953)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 Ñ. Carranza Ko (ed.), New Ways of Solidarity with Korean Comfort Women, Palgrave Macmillan Studies on Human Rights in Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1794-5

267

268

INDEX

A Abe, Shinzo (Japanese Prime Minister), 118, 134, 145, 160, 227, 237, 251, 252 Academy of Korean Studies, 7 A Cruelty Special to Our Species: Poems , 116, 123, 124, 129 Action Conservative Movement. See Japanese right-wing movement; Nadeshiko Action A Gift of the Emperor, 115 Agreement on the Settlement of Problem concerning Property and Claims and the Economic Cooperation between the Republic of Korea and Japan. See 1965 Korea-Japan Normalization Treaty; 1965 Republic of Korea-Japan Claims Agreement Another Culture, 186 Anti-Americanism, 185 anti-Communist hegemony, 181 anti-communist purges. See anti-Communist hegemony; evangelical anticommunism anti-Japanese sentiment, 57, 141, 143, 156 "No Japan"movement, 141 "lost decade", 141 April 3 atrocities. See Cheju Island April 3 massacre April 3 incident, 20 1948 massacre on Jeju Island, 181 April 3 incident. See Jeju Island Arendt, Hannah, 85, 91, 92 arrivant , 177 Asahi Shimbun, 114, 251 Asian American. See Asian American Studies; Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI); Korean American

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI), 53, 57, 64, 67–70 Asian American Studies, 66, 67 Asian Women’s Fund (AWF), 134, 146, 226, 234, 251 Asia-Pacific War, 8, 37, 200. See also World War II Asia Peace and Women’s Role Debate, 207 Association for the Preservation of Hwanghe Province Ritual, 186 atrocity, 3, 6, 11, 61, 96, 164, 178, 182 mass atrocity, 177 August 14, 3, 252 B Bae, Bong-Gi, 2, 5, 34, 90, 91, 97, 99, 250. See also People Who Were Taken Away Bae, Chun-he, 228 Bandung Conference, 181 Bangura, Zainab Hawa, 236, 237 Ban, Ki-Moon, 236, 237 Beijing World Conference on Women, 233 Berger, Thomas, 135–137 C Cambodia, 183 Camptowns, 182, 191, 192 Carr, Edward Hallet, 151 Carter, Jimmy (President of the U.S.), 66 Center for Research and Documentation on Japan’s War Responsibility (JWRC), 37 Center for the Development of Eastern Women, 186 ceremonies, 40, 42, 100, 191 Cheju Island April 3 massacre, 181

INDEX

Cheongjin (City in North Korea/ DPRK). See comfort stations children’s rights. See comfort women-girls Child Welfare Act of Japan, 256 China, 2, 3, 9, 37, 51, 55, 56, 82, 122, 126, 137, 143, 155, 156, 164, 165, 199, 200, 203, 206, 211, 214, 216, 218, 254, 257, 258 Chinese "comfort women", 42 Choi, Chungmoo, 185, 188 Choi, Yi-Seon, 13 Chongshindae (Korean Research Institute), 43 Chongsindae. See Chongshindae (Korean Research Institute; Korean comfort women Chosen, 254 Chun, Doo-Hwan (President of South Korea), 91, 95 civilization, 179 CJ Entertainment, 144 Clinton, Bill (U.S. President), 59 Cold War, 93, 104, 137, 177, 178, 181, 184, 190–192, 232 Collective memory, 20, 142, 157, 164 future memory, 202 memorialization, 249 memory, 15, 142, 203 narrative formation, 124 remembrance, 7 Colonialism colonial, 14–16, 30, 55, 64, 78, 80, 84, 86, 88, 91, 94, 95, 97, 104, 136, 138–140, 145, 150, 151, 156, 163, 172, 178, 180, 181, 185, 189–192, 201, 213–215, 223, 227, 228, 231, 244, 247 exploitation, 64, 95, 231 history, 14, 215

269

Japanese colonialism, 14, 180, 210 Column of Strength Memorial, 167 comfort houses. See comfort stations comfort stations, 2–4, 6, 8, 13, 16, 20, 29, 30, 35, 42, 44, 63, 86, 87, 89, 97, 117, 122, 125, 146, 148, 156, 158, 161, 181, 200–206, 211–218, 243, 245, 247–251, 254, 255, 257–259, 261, 262 establishment of, 156 Japanese military’s control of, 3, 201, 211, 214, 216, 218 location, 211 reasons for establishment of, 146 types of, 211 Comfort Woman: A Filipina’s Story of Prostitution and Slavery Under the Japanese Military, 115 comfort women, 29. See also comfort women memorial, Statue of Peace; Korean Comfort Women (KCW) ages at mobilization, 30, 33, 43, 45, 78 captivity, 122, 213 class background, 67, 231, 248 debates on contract work/ commercial prostitution, 29, 42, 62 experiences on their way to comfort stations, 16, 144, 160, 205, 218, 245, 249, 261, 262 forced mobilization, 30, 33, 43, 44, 226, 262 girls, 2, 89, 113, 134, 144, 147, 148, 156, 249, 262 halmoni or halmeoni (grandmother), 91, 103, 120 "ianfu", 2, 118 memorials, 3, 5, 161, 163, 168, 252

270

INDEX

mistreatment of Korean Comfort Women, 261 nationality of, 12 rape, 55, 63 reparations, 20, 60, 190, 203, 215, 252, 253 sexual violence and injuries sustained by, 67, 233, 247, 248 sites of memory of, 15, 157, 158, 163–166, 168, 171, 172 survivors/victims, 7, 35, 47, 91, 99, 148, 158, 202, 205, 215, 244, 249, 261 testimonies, 7, 8, 12, 16–19, 29, 30, 39, 42–44, 47, 56, 58, 137, 146, 162, 217, 250 total number of, 156, 199 treatment at the end of war, 44 "wianbu", 124 Comfort Women Action Redress & Education (CARE), 70 comfort women-girls, 246. See also comfort women comfort women hotline. See Korean Council Comfort Women Justice Coalition (CWJC), 42, 68, 167 comfort women memorial, 67–69, 147 Statue of Peace, 146, 147, 150, 167, 262 Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military, 58, 115 Comfort Women Victims Act (Act 4565), 3 Commission on Verification and Support for the Victims of Forced Mobilization under Japanese Colonialism in Korea, 13

Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), 234, 235 Constitutional Court of Korea, 226 Convention Against Torture (CAT). See United Nations (UN) United Nations Committee against Torture (CAT), 224 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), 246, 250, 259–261 1989. See children’s rights; United Nations (UN) Coomaraswamy, Radhika, 43, 78, 232, 243 COVID-19, 140, 157, 166 Crash Landing on You, 150 Crawford, Kerry F., 118 customary international law, 228

D Daisalong. See comfort stations dangerous employment, 259 protection of. See International Labor Organization Minimum Age Convention Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women. See Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW); United Nations (UN) Derrida, J., 177, 178 Development Loan Fund, 182 Ðôi M´o,i policy, 183 Dokdo (Takeshima) issue/dispute, 140 dual identity, 52–54, 58, 59, 64, 70 immigrant identity. See Asian American; Korean American ij

INDEX

271

E East Asia Institute, 149 Eisenhower, Dwight D. (President of the U.S.), 182 Etsusaburo, Shiina (Foreign Minister of Japan), 137 Eugene Port, 213 evangelical anticommunism, 181 Evans, Lane, 56, 61

Global Alliance for Historical Truth, 136 Gong, Jeom-Yeop, 257, 259 Grass, 119 Guangdong, 82, 87 Gyeongheung (City in North Korea/ DPRK), 214 Gyeongheung Comfort Center. See comfort stations

F Facebook, 167. See also Comfort Women Justice Coalition (CWJC); Lila Pilipina; Stand with Comfort Women Fanon, Frantz, 178, 185 feminist ethnography, 80 Fifty Years of Silence, 115 film, 10, 19, 58, 114, 115, 118, 133–135, 141–145, 147–150, 190 Korean box office, 133 Korean film, 19, 141, 144, 149 Flying Couch, 119 folk culture, 184 Fourth Conference on Women by the United Nations. See Beijing World Conference on Women

H haew˘on chinhon kut , 186 Hahm, Dong Woo Lee, 38, 55 Hallyu, 140 K-drama, 140 K-pop, 140 Hambuk Province (Province in North Korea/DPRK), 205 Hankyoreh, 216, 250 Ha, Sang-Sook, 2 Hayashi, Hirofumi, 30, 37, 43, 160 Herstory, 144, 148, 149, 192 Hicks, George, 2, 52, 244, 247, 248, 254 Hirsche, Marianne, 145 historical revisionist movement in Japan education reforms in Japan, 11 obstruction of truth for children, 11 revisionism, 11 textbook controversy, 11, 33 Hodge, John (U.S. Army General), 179 Holocaust, 40, 59, 60, 79, 119, 120, 136 Honda, Mike, 61, 69 Hosokawa, Morihiro (Prime Minister of Japan), 59, 60 Hosoya, Kiyoshi, 136, 137, 145 House of Sharing. See Korean comfort women

G Gendry-Kim, Keum Suk. See also Grass Generation Z (Gen Z), 157, 163, 166, 172 Geneva Declaration, 255 Geneva Declaration on the Rights of the Child. See children’s rights Genron NPO, 149 Germany, 136, 137, 161, 164, 247 ghosts, 89, 102, 104, 178, 191 Gil, Won-Ok, 2, 87, 237

272

INDEX

Human Rights Commission, 54, 60, 232 human rights norms (human rights rules/human rights standards) children’s rights, 21, 245, 246, 249, 261 labor rights, 258 trafficking of women and children, 255 women’s rights, 238 human trafficking, 62, 68, 69 Hwang, Keum-Ju, 31, 54, 57, 124. See also Korean comfort women

I I Can Speak, 144, 146, 148, 149 Immortal Admiral Yi Sun-sin, 143 Intangible Cultural Assets System, 184 inter-Korean relationship, 202 International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), 254 International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children, 21, 45, 246, 250, 253, 255, 257 International Court of Justice (ICJ). See United Nations (UN) International Court of War Crimes of Japanese Sexual Slavery, 208 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). See United Nations (UN) International Labor Organization (ILO), 255–259 International Labor Organization Minimum Age Convention, 21, 246, 256, 258, 259 International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMFFE). See Tokyo Trials; Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal

international organizations, 223–225, 238 International Save the Children Union, 255 internment camp, 60, 66, 68 intersectional perspective on class, 14 on colonization of Korea, 83, 158 on ethnicity, 14 on patriarchal social norms and sexual abuse of women, 88 J Japanese American Bar Association of California, 68 Japanese American Citizens League, 66, 68 Japanese Army, 46, 125, 146, 208, 213, 214, 234 Japanese government Asia Women’s Fund (AWF), 226, 234, 251 controversial 2015 agreement between Japan and Korean governments, 4, 229 unsuccessful efforts to resolve comfort women issue, 5, 6, 138, 216, 218, 225, 229 Japanese Imperial Army, 63, 134, 155, 156, 158, 207, 211, 216 Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act, 52 Japanese military brothels (JMB). See comfort stations Japanese National Assembly, 217 Japanese right-wing movement, 147 Japanese Self-Defense Agency, 247 Japanese Society for History, 136 Japanese Women for Justice and Peace, 136 Japan’s Imperial Army, 1–3, 118, 213, 247, 249

INDEX

Hwanggun, 216 Japanese Army, 229, 238, 247, 254, 260 Jeju Island, 96, 97, 201 K kagaisha ishiki, 14 Kang, Soon-Im, 54–56 Kato, Katsunobu (Chief Cabinet Secretary of Japan), 217 Keesing, Felix M., 179 Kendall, Laurel, 185 Keum Suk Gendry-Kim. See also Grass Kiichi, Miyazawa (Japanese Primer Minister). See Miyazawa policy Kim, Bok-Dong, 19, 62, 80–82, 84, 87, 88, 100, 102, 103, 106, 253 Kim, Bong-Yi, 257–259 Kim, Chun-Ja, 254 Kim, Dae-Jung (President of South Korea), 139 Kim, Dang, 209, 210 Kim, David, 188 Kim, Dduk-Bbal, 13 Kim, Hak-soon/Kim, Hak-Sun, 30, 31, 36, 42, 51, 100, 101, 113, 159, 207, 217, 226. See also Korean comfort women Kim, Hye-won, 36, 37, 90, 95, 96, 98, 99 Kim, Il-Sung (Chairman/leader of North Korea/DPRK), 214 Kim, Jung Un (Chairman/leader of North Korea/DPRK), 215 Kim, Shin-sil, 95, 96, 99 Kim, Soom, 113 Kim, Tokchin, 254, 255, 257, 258 Kim, Yang-Joo, 217 Kim, Yang-Ju, 1, 3 Kim, Yoon-shim, 59, 62, 124 Kim, Yunghi, 56 kisaeng , 94, 96, 97

273

Kishida, Fumio (Foreign Minister of Japan), 134–136, 147 Koichi, Kato (Chief Cabinet Secretary of Japan), 35 Koizumi, Junichiro (Japanese Prime Minister), 251 Kono Statement (1993), 43, 160, 216, 244, 249, 252 Kono, Yohei. See Kono Statement (1993) Korea Church Women United (KCWU), 92, 94, 95, 97 Korea-Japan Summit (1988), 139 Korean American. See Korean diaspora activism, 18, 64 Korean American Civic Empowerment (KACE), 67 Korean American Students’ Conference (KASCON), 59 Korean American Voters Council (Korean American Civic Engagement), 56 Korean comfort women (KCW), 1–3, 5–10, 15–21, 54, 56, 58, 63, 90, 137, 159, 161, 162, 203–210, 228, 245, 247, 248, 253 halmeoni, 31 Korean Committee on Measure for Sexual Slavery for Japan’s Army and Drawing Victim, 207, 213 Korean Council, 30, 32–37, 39, 43, 44, 47, 52, 54, 57, 58, 78, 81, 84, 87, 90, 92, 94, 95, 99–103, 107, 119, 146, 186, 188, 225 Korean Council for Women Drafted by Japan for Military Sexual Slavery (Jeong Dae-hyup). See Chongshindae Munje Daechaek Hyopuihe (the Association for the Resolution of the Chongshindae Issue); Korean Council; Korean Council for Justice and

274

INDEX

Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan Chongshindae Munje Daechaek Hyopuihe (the Association for the Resolution of the Chongshindae Issue), 33 Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, 33 Korean diaspora "American-ness", 57 Korean American, 18, 125 "Korean-ness", 56 Korean Measure Committee on Compensation for Wartime Comfort Women and Victims of Pacific War, 206 Jongtaewi, or DPRK Measure Committee for Demanding Compensation to "Comfort Women"for the Japanese Imperial Army and Victims of Forcible Drafting, 206 Korean United Methodist Church of Greater Washington (KUMC), 54, 55 Korean War (1950–1953), 31, 149, 181, 201 Korean Women’s Association United (KWAU), 5, 94, 99 Ku, Su-jeong, 183 Kut (굿), 184, 185, 188. See also ceremonies; ghosts; haewon chinhon kut; mansin; rituals; shamanic ritual spaces; shamans; spirits Kuttang . See ceremonies; ghosts; mansin; rituals; shamanic ritual spaces; shamans; spirits Kwak, Ye-Nam, 253 Kyodo News, 90, 161, 250

Kyoto Press, 32 L Labor Standards Act of Japan, 257 Landsberg, Alison, 142 Lantos, Tom, 60 Law on Protection, Resources, and Related Commemoration for Victims of Japanese Military Comfort Women, 252 L.A. Working Group (Korean American Forum of California), 56 Lee, Dong Woo Hahm. See Hahm, Dong Woo Lee Lee, Hyo-Jae. See Yi, Hyo-jae Lee, Na-Young, 80, 81, 83, 86, 89, 91, 92, 95, 96, 98, 101, 106, 190 Lee Ok-sun. See also Korean comfort women Lee Yong-su/Lee Yong-soo, 42, 223, 229 Levi, Primo, 78, 79 Liberation Day, 223 light work, 258 protection of, 259 Lila Pilipina, 167, 168 Lipinski Resolution, 60, 61 Lipinski, William O. See Lipinski Resolution Lola Dolores Molina. See also Lila Pilipina “lost decade ”. See anti-Japan sentiment M madangguk, ˘ 185 mansin. See kut; kuttang March 1 Independence Movement (1919), 144

INDEX

Mar, Eric, 41, 69 Masquerade, 143 McDougall Report. See United Nations (UN), United Nations Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities Memorial Day for Japanese Forces’ Comfort Women Victims. See August 14 Minimum Age (Non-Industrial Employment) Convention. See International Labor Organization (ILO) Minimum Age (Non-Industrial Employment) Recommendation. See International Labor Organization (ILO) Ministry of Foreign Affairs (South Korea), 134, 230 Ministry of Gender Equality and Family (South Korea), 3 victim’s registry, 252 Ministry of War (Japan), 247 Min, Pyong Gap, 5, 16, 18, 115, 127 Mirkinson, Judith, 41, 42, 57, 68, 70 Miyazawa policy, 140 Mongolia, 257 Moon, Jae-In (President of South Korea), 5, 135 Moon, Ok-Ju, 100 Motegi, Toshimitsu (Minister for Foreign Affairs of Japan), 228 Mun, P’il-gi, 258 Murayama statement, 139, 140 Murayama, Tomiichi (Prime Minister of Japan). See Murayama statement My Lai story. See Quang Ngai; Quang Nam

275

N Nacino, Losita, 62 Nadeshiko Action, 136, 137, 147 Nakasone, Yasuhiro (Prime Minister of Japan), 136 Nanjing Li Zi Xiang Comfort Relics Exhibition Hall, 218 Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, 218 National College Women Students Council, 99 National General Mobilization Law, 32 National Institute for Defense Studies Library, 35 National Mobilization Law, 83 New Historical Textbook Club, 136 Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress, 68 Nishio, Kanji, 136 Nixon, Richard (President of the U.S.), 182, 183 Nogunri, 189 No Gun Ri Peace Foundation, 190 North Korea, 20, 201, 202 O Obuchi, Keizo (Prime minister of Japan), 139 Office of Special Investigations (OSI) of the DOJ, 40, 62 Oh, Bonnie, 9, 39, 113, 115 Okinawa, 5, 31, 32, 34, 90, 95, 96, 99, 156, 250 One Left, 39, 113 P pan-AAPI movement, 51 pan-Asian "comfort statue", 41 Park, Chung-hee (President of South Korea), 31, 93, 138, 143, 182 Park, Chung-mi, 181

276

INDEX

Park, Geun-Hye (President of South Korea), 134, 227 Park, Yu-Ha, 6 People Who Were Taken Away. See Bae, Bong-Gi Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA). See The Hague Court Pillay, Navi, 234, 236 Pilzer, Joshua, 2, 17 place of memory, 20, 201, 203, 204, 211 sites of memory. See symbolic reparations Plum Rains , 116–119 postcolonial, 19, 178 postmemory, 145, 146, 151 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), 159, 191 pro-democracy demonstrations (South Korea), 185 prosthetic memory, 142, 146 Pyeongyang Employment Agency, 257 Q Qiu, Peipei, 16, 52, 115 Quang Nam, 183 Quang Ngai, 183 R Ramseyer, J. Mark, 6, 8, 16, 29, 42, 44, 45, 77, 245, 260 Rape in Nanjing Redress Coalition, 41, 68 Rape of Nanjing, 155, 156 Reconciliation and Healing Foundation. See 2015 Korea and Japan agreement redress movement criminal accountability, 261 justice, 40, 67, 244

reparations, 4 transnational redress movement for Japanese Military Sexual Slavery, 31, 47, 115, 244 reparative justice, 200 repatriation, 180 Research Team of the War and Women’s Human Rights Center, 12, 14, 248 retributive justice, 200 revenant , 177 revisionist movement, 47, 251 right-wing revisionists, 69 Rhee, Syngman (President of South Korea), 31, 181 Ri, Kyung-Saeng, 199, 206, 208, 217 Rise for Peace: Rage for Women’s Rights, 168 rituals, 177, 178, 185, 186, 189, 190 Roaring Currents , 143 Rodong Sinmun, 207, 208, 214 Roh, Moo-hyun (President of South Korea), 140 Roh, Tae-Woo (President of South Korea), 99 Rosenbaum, Eli, 39, 62, 63 Ruff-O’Herne, Jan, 52, 101, 102 S Scott, Joan Wallach, 105 Season of Rage (Punnoui Kyejol), 89, 90 senso sekinin, 137 Seok Soon-Hee. See comfort women-girls Seoul Central District Court, 227, 253 sexual enslavement, 1 sexual proletarianization, 190 sexual slavery, 1, 2, 9, 11, 29, 30, 32, 33, 37–39, 42–45, 47, 51, 52, 59, 78–81, 83, 85, 91–100, 105,

INDEX

113–115, 117, 120, 122, 127, 134, 136, 145, 158, 181, 204, 205, 208, 230–234, 236, 246–250, 252, 255–257, 260, 261 shamanic ritual spaces, 178. See also Kut shamanic work (muop). See kut; kuttang shamanism, 179, 184–186 spirit of worship, 179 shamans, 184–186 Shimizu, Tsutao (Director General of Employment Security Bureau of Japan), 32 Shinil Iron & Steel Co., 227 Shin Nak-Cheon, 213 Shoji, Motoka (Member of the House of Councilors at the Japanese Diet), 32, 98 Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women, 56, 115 Sinch’on, 181 Sincheon Museum, 214 Sing, Lilian, 41, 68 Snowy Road, 19, 142, 144, 146 social media, 157. See also Facebook; Tiktok; Weibo Soh, Sarah, 15, 16, 37, 52, 56, 61, 258 Son, Angella, 10–12, 21, 244, 245, 249 Song, Shin-do, 12, 38 South Korean National Assembly, 180 South Korean Supreme Court, 253 Soviet Union, 201, 213 spirits, 20, 126, 178, 186–188 Spirits’ Homecoming , 19, 126, 133, 134, 141–144, 146, 148 Stand with Comfort Women, 167 Stetz, Margaret, 10, 16, 19, 21, 31, 39, 52, 244, 245, 249

277

Suga, Yoshihide, 228 Chief Cabinet Secretary of Japan, 228 Prime Minister of Japan, 228 Sunday, 89, 258 Scary Sunday, 258 Supreme Court of Japan, 12 symbolic reparations, 5, 12, 200, 203, 215, 252 T Tai, Eika, 2, 14, 17, 245 Taiwan, 82, 97, 156, 199, 203, 206, 216, 218, 254 Takahashi Kikue of Kyofukai (Japan Christian Women’s Organization), 98 Tang, Julie, 41, 68 Tanya Ko Hong, 125 Textbook Reform Society for Dissemination of Historical Fact, 136 The Apology, 115 The Hague Court, 225 ICJ or the Permanent Court of Arbitration, 233 The War Still Within: Poems of the Korean Diaspora, 116 TikTok, 157, 165, 169–171 Tokyo District Court, 12, 38, 251 Tokyo Trials, 206 Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, 52, 63 Tokyo Women’s International Crimes Tribunal on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery, 16, 36, 82, 101, 244 Toshiki, Kaifu (Prime Minister of Japan), 33 transnational advocacy movements countermobilization, 6 norms, 6 regression/regressive changes, 6

278

INDEX

Truman Doctrine, 180 trusteeship for Korea. See Korean War (1950–1953) Tsukamoto, Sachiyo, 14, 15 U Unit 731, 63 United Nations (UN). See McDougall Report United Nations Charter, 229 United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UNESCWA), 233 United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), 232 United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 223, 234, 236 United Nations Secretary General, 237 United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, 236 United Nations Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, 234, 235 United Nations Subcommittee on Human Rights, 234 United States (US), 4, 5, 9, 16, 18, 19, 30, 32, 36, 38–41, 47, 53, 61, 77, 88, 89, 91, 93, 97, 101, 135, 141, 142, 144, 157, 167, 180, 181, 189, 190, 192, 201, 218, 230, 252 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights of the U.S. Bureau of the Census, 66 U.S. Congress, 60–62 U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus, 60

U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). See Office of Special Investigations (OSI) of the DOJ U.S. Department of State, 62 U.S. House of Representatives, 60–62, 252 U.S. Interagency Working Group (IWG), 52 U.S. Supreme Court, 68 V venereal disease, 82, 213 Vietnam, 156, 178, 182, 183, 191 Vietnamese Communist Party, 183 W wartime rape gender-based violence, 52 inequality, 247 sexual violence, 37, 42, 47, 231, 246, 247, 255 Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues (WCCW), 38, 53–65, 67, 70 Watanabe, Mina, 9 Wednesday Protest. See weekly demonstrations weekly demonstrations, 119 Weibo, 164, 165 Winter Sonata, 140 Women and Sex Tourism Culture, 96 Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM), 9, 200, 201, 207, 211 Women’s Caucus of the U.S. House of Representatives, 62 Women’s Patriotic Service Corps, 254 World War I, 255 World War II (WWII), 31, 32, 34, 39, 40, 52, 59, 60, 62, 63, 66, 68, 87, 113–116, 120, 122, 127,

INDEX

134, 136, 138, 140, 155, 156, 158, 159, 165, 169, 172, 199, 200, 206, 237, 245, 247, 256 Y Yamamoto, Yumiko, 136, 137, 145 Yamashita, Yeong-ae, 32 Yasukuni shrine, 138, 140, 145 Yi, Hyo-jae, 54, 58 Yi Sun-Sin (Historical Admiral of Korea). See Immortal Admiral Yi Sun-sin Yoon, Chung-Ok, 19, 77, 79, 82, 83, 86, 88–100, 103, 186 Chong-ok Yoon, 31

279

Yun Jung-Ok, 5 Yoon, Emily Jungmin. See also A Cruelty Special to Our Species: Poems Yoon, Mee-hyang, 102, 103 Yoon, Suk Yeol (President of South Korea), 223, 229 Yoshimi, Yoshiaki, 30, 35, 37, 42, 45, 52, 126, 156, 158, 159, 162, 163, 199, 210, 217, 244, 247 YWCA, 37

Z zainichi, 11, 12, 90