The Story "Our Grandmothers" Could Not Tell: Representation of the Comfort Women and the Physical Manifestation of Memory

Abstract

The Story "Our Grandmothers" Could Not Tell:Representation of the Comfort Women and the Physical Manifestation of Memory1 Heo Yoon Translated by Jamie Chang (bio) 1. Remembering the Japanese comfort women2 On August 14, 2018, the 1st Japanese Military Sexual Slavery Remembrance Day was observed. The date chosen in commemoration of Kim Hak-sun's press conference on August 14, 1991, this occasion marked the moment when the movement supporting Japanese military "comfort women," which refers to women who were sent to battlefields in the course of Japan's invasion of the Asia Pacific region and forced to live as sexual slaves in the Japanese military, became an official part of Korean history. The Moon Jae-in administration specified the Japanese military comfort women issues as one of the hundred tasks to be resolved within Moon's term, established the Research Institute on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery, and carried [End Page 311] out recovery and archiving of data, pledging to resolve the matter on the state level. However, for a long time, the comfort women issue had been a civilian social movement and an expression of transnational solidarity. This was not a problem resolved through diplomacy between Korea and Japan (the final agreement between Korea and Japan had occurred in 2015), but a movement with a history of citizens from Korea, Japan, and all over Asia have fought to build. The comfort woman is a historical phenomenon that has arisen from the intersection of colonialism, nationalism, and sexism and is currently the most active civil movement supported by the Korean people. Although Japan was defeated and the colony was liberated in 1945, the comfort women were not able to return to Korea until Kim Hak-sun's testimony in 1991. In negotiations between the United States and Japan, or in the diplomatic relations between Korea and Japan, the issue of comfort women in the Japanese military was never actively discussed. While the student soldiers who returned from the war testified to the horrors of the Japanese army and returned as "sons of the nation" and achieved a turning point in Korean literature, women drafted to the "chŏngsindae [Women's Labor Corps]" did not have proper re-emergence. A few novels during the liberation period briefly mentioned women in the "labor corps," but it was not enough to achieve visibility for these women. Yun Chŏng-ok, the founder of the Chŏngsindae Problem Countermeasures Council (hereinafter referred to as "Chŏngdaehyŏp," present-day "Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan"), had become aware of the Japanese imperial "virgin delivery" at the end of the colonial period through rumors circulating among adults, and she was a female college student trying to avoid it. She thought someone would track down the "women who were taken away" after the Korean War when society settled down, but when no one was talking about the [End Page 312] "women who disappeared" even after Yun returned to Korea from studying in the United States, she set out to find them.3 As Yun Chŏng-ok testifies, Korean society did not make the "comfort woman issue" public for a long time. An Independence Day special feature in 1960 mourned the deaths of women drafted to "Labor Corps" never to return, and comfort women were mentioned in the context of decrying Japan's war crimes, but no one wondered about the comfort women who returned and where they were now.4 The comfort women system, rather, became an everyday part of Korean society. After liberation, as camp towns were established around the U.S. and U.N. military bases, the image of comfort women in the 1950s shifted to U.S. military comfort women who were considered "voluntary" prostitutes. Called by many derogatory names such as "yanggongju [Western princess]," and "Yuen madam [United Nations' Madam]," these comfort women were depicted as gold-digging carriers of STDs who were sullying the good name of an innocent nation.5 Postcolonial South Korea exchanged the bodies of comfort women for the protection of the U.S. military under an American regime in East Asia. The U.S. military...