The English translation of the Book, Comfort Women of the Japanese Empire, has been released:

Yuha, Park. 2024. Comfort Women of the Japanese Empire: Colonial Rule and the Battle over Memory. 1st edition. Abingdon, Oxon New York, NY: Routledge.

https://thediplomat.com/2024/05/park-yu-ha-speaks-out-on-her-battle-against-censorship/

Seoul High Court Judgment_2023No3351_translated(Personal_info_redacted)

April 12, 2024

translated by AI Lingo & The Law Times

Historian’s comfort women trial was ‘cancel culture on steroids’

I recently attended a memorial ceremony for Kenzaburo Oe held in Tokyo, Japan. He won the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature and died on March 3 at age 88. From the mid-1990s to this year, I have translated and introduced five of Oe’s works to Korea.

Building a trust-based relationship is key (joins.com)

The New Yorker, February 26, 2021

“Meanwhile, in South Korea, resentment about Japan’s attempts to downplay its responsibility had been building, sometimes hardening into intolerance of anything short of a purist story of the Japanese military kidnapping Korean virgins for sex slavery at gunpoint. In 2015, a Korean academic named Park Yu-ha was sued civilly by comfort women for defamation, and criminally indicted by Korean prosecutors, for the publication of a book that explored the role of Koreans in recruiting the women and the loving relationships that some comfort women developed with Japanese soldiers while they were confined in a “slavelike condition.” The book did not, as some have claimed, absolve Japan of responsibility or deny the comfort women’s brutal victimization. Gordon, the Harvard historian of modern Japan, signed onto a letter with sixty-six other scholars, in Japan and the U.S., expressing “great consternation and concern” at the South Korean government’s indictment of Park, and conveying appreciation for her book’s scholarly achievement. Park was ultimately found civilly liable, and was ordered to pay damages to comfort women; she was acquitted of the criminal defamation charges, with the trial court citing her academic freedom, but an appellate court overturned that verdict and fined her.”

Link to the article: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/seeking-the-true-story-of-the-comfort-women-j-mark-ramseyer

JAY SONG Senior Lecturer in Korean Studies, University of Melbourne
JUN OHASHI Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies, University of Melbourne

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF KOREAN STUDIES
VOLUME 20, NO. 1 (2020), pp. 159–184.

Abstract
In December 2015, South Korea and Japan reached an agreement on resolving the “comfort women” issue that sparked media interests. This article analyses how the South Korean and Japanese media covered comfort women in 2013–2018. The study collects over 20,000 newspaper articles and analyses distinctive media framings in liberal, conservative and leftist newspapers in South Korea and Japan. During this period, the South Korean media have gone beyond the extant nationalist and feminist narratives and incorporated a class dimension. The authors find that there have been dynamic interplays among nation, gender and class that make the debates more complex and transnational, yet the dominant narratives are still from liberal or leftist nationalists in Korea and conservative statists in Japan.

Keywords: comfort women, sexual slavery, media framing, gender, nation, class

Link to the publication: https://www.ejks.org.uk/the-nation-over-gender-and-class-media-framing-of-comfort-women-in-south-korea-and-japan-page-159-184/

On October 27, 2017, the Seoul High Court ruled in favor of the prosecution which had alleged Professor Park Yuha in her recent work Comfort Women of Empire had impugned the honor of the former comfort women, and as a consequence found her liable for the sum of one million won. The decision represented an absolute shock for all people both within and outside of Korea who believed the country to be one which respected and upheld academic freedom of expression. The first trial, conducted at the Eastern District Court in Seoul, over the course of a year weighed up the academic and historical evidence and found Professor Park innocent of the charges brought by the prosecution and representatives of a group of former comfort women. We cannot escape the sense of profound disquiet at the seeming ease with which the second trial overturned the verdict of the lower court and returned a verdict of guilt.

All the evidence presented by the prosecution at the second trial as evidence of defamation in the book Comfort Women of Empire, had in the first court case been examined by the Eastern District Court which acquitted Professor Park of the charges of defaming the former comfort women. Simultaneously, given the historical issues surrounding the comfort women are a matter of deep and passionate public concern, the opinion of the court gave broad assurance of the willingness to uphold and protect freedom of academic expression. This judgement, which symbolized both the rationality and publicness of the Korean judicial authorities, was however completely overturned at the time of the second trial.

Turning to the verdict itself, the basis of the conviction can be summarized into two parts. First, that the author presented “false fact,” and secondly that there was “deliberation” behind the motive to defame the former comfort women. The Seoul High Court accepted the view of the prosecution that the author’s perception of the comfort women was “false” on the ground that it diverged from the “correct” view held in certain circles of domestic Korean and international society. Moreover, as to the criterion of “willfulness” introduced in the court verdict this was based on the determination Professor Park Yuha wrote her work with the awareness it would have the “effect” of lowering the social evaluation of the comfort women.

Inescapably, this decision represents a disquieting stance towards academic research. In relation to the historical issues surrounding the comfort women, the decision of the court introduced a criterion of “correctness” and “falsity” that is sure to hinder active scholarly research into an issue at the heart of Japanese and Korean contemporary disputation. Moreover, treating Professor Park’s work as defamatory, regardless of whether the book itself is defamatory per se, but as a consequence of the “effect” which would occur when one reads the text with a specific political or ideological purpose, is exaggerated. We have little recourse but to question whether in fact the verdict of the second trial will have a chilling effect on academic activities into issues which touch on sensitive societal and national questions.

Still regardless of the so-called pros or cons of the work Comfort Women of Empire, we strongly believe that the judgement of the Seoul High Court in the second trial represents a profound threat to the freedoms of the Korean academic and cultural worlds. Through its rendering of a guilty verdict, the judiciary set forth a criterion by which Korean scholarly and cultural worlds must hew only to the historical perception sanctioned as “right” by mainstream groups in Korean society.

As long as scholarly work that differs from the interests and position of mainstream social groups are subject to punishment, the text of the Korean constitution guaranteeing academic freedom is little more than rhetoric. Before the verdict of the second trial, many felt ideological control had disappeared with the demise of the military dictatorship, yet now one cannot escape the sense that ideological control has again been resurrected as a means to enforce a uniform and unvarying interpretation of history.

As a result of the decision of the High Court, the road before Professor Park is indeed steep. By the same token, the road before Koreans struggling to express views different from those “deemed to be correct” is unquestionably also steep. When criminal charges were first filed against Professor Park, many in society, as well as academic circles in Korea, Japan, and the West, aware of the seriousness of the situation, called for the judiciary to render a considered judgement. The decision of the first trial confirmed that such efforts were not in vain.

The erroneousness of the conviction handed down at the time of the second trial illustrates indisputably the continued existence and working of state power and societal interests intolerant of “different” opinions which they instead seek to suppress. The occasion of this verdict is the time to express the will of citizen groups to oppose this state of affairs.
Therefore, we are beginning with a drive for donations to support Professor Park Yuha’s case. Although we hold differing views of the problems of history and politics, our fundamental aim in launching of this drive is the defense of the principle of academic freedom, and with it the right to express unpopular opinions even on sensitive national and social issues in Korean society. We sincerely wish for scholars and cultural figures from across the world to participate in our endeavor to ensure that in the future, no one will face conviction and criminal charges for the simple fact of “holding and speaking differing views.”

December 7, 2017
Comfort Women of Empire Litigation Support Group

Participant
강신표 Shin-pyo Kang (Inje University, Professor Emeritus）
강운구 Kang Woongu (Photographer)
고영범 Young B. Oh (Playwright)
고종석 Koh Jongsok (Author)
김경옥 kim kyungok (Critic)
김성희 Seonghee KIM (Kaywon University of Art & Design)
김영규 Kim YoungQ (Inha University, Professor Emeritus)
김영용 KIm YoungYong (CEO of The Korea Economic Daily, Retired)
김용균 Yong Kyun Kim (Ehwa Womans University)
김용운 Yong-Woon Kim (Hanyang University)
김우창 Kim Uchang (Korea University)
김원우 Kim Wonwoo (Author)
김택수 Taik Soo Kim (CEO of Publisher The Orijin)
김철 Kim Chul (Yonsei University, Professor Emeritus)
남기정 Nam Kijeong (Seoul National University)
라종일 Ra Jongyil (Former South Korea Ambassador)
박경수 Park Kyungsoo (Kangneung-Wonju national University)
박삼헌 Park Samheon (Konkuk University)
배수아 Bae Suah (Author)
서현석 Seo Hyun-Suk (Yonsei University)
신형기 Shin Hyung Ki (Yonsei University)
안병직 Byong Jick Ahn (Seoul National University, Professor Emeritus)
유 준 Yoo Jun (Yonsei University)
윤성호 Yoon Songho (Dongseo University)
윤해동 Hae-Dong Yun (Hanyang University)
이강민 Kangmin Yi (Hanyang University)
경순 Kyung Soon (Film director)
이경훈 Lee Kyounghoon (Yonsei University)
이대근 Dae-Keun LEE (Sungkyunkwan University, Professor Emeritus)
이순재 Lee, Soon-Jae (Sejong University)
이영훈 Lee Younghun (Seoul National University, Retired/Naksungdae Institute of Economic research)
이제하 Je Ha Lee (Author)
정종주 JEONG Jong-joo (CEO of Publisher Of puripari)
조관자 Jo Gwanja (Seoul National University)
조석주 Seok-ju Cho (Sungkyunkwan University)
조용래 Cho Yongrea (The Kukmin Daily Executive Editor)
최규승 Choi Kyu Seung (Poet)
최범 Choi Bum (Critic)
황영식 Hwang Youngsik (Chief editorial writer)
황종연 Jongyon Hwang (Donguk University)
황호찬 Ho Chan Hwang (Sejong University)
김학성 HAK SUNG KIM (Dabud Law Office)
김향훈 Kim HyangHoon (Law Firm Centro)
이성문 LEE SEONG MUN (Law Firm Myongdo)
이동직 Dong Jik Lee (law Firm Sinwon)
이민석 Minseok Lee (Minseok Lee law Office)
최명규 Choi Myung Kyu (Choi Myung Kyu Law Office)
허중혁 Hur ZungHyuk　(Hur ZungHyuk Law Office)
홍세욱 Hong Sae Uk (Law Firm H’s)
한정호 Han Jung-Ho (Chungbuk University)
50 Participants

浅野豊美 Asano Toyomi (Waseda University)
天江喜七郎 Amae Kishichiro (Diplomat, Retired)
岩崎稔 Iawasaki Minoru (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies)
池田香代子 Ikeda Kayoko (Translator)
上野千鶴子 Ueno Chizuko (Tokyo University, Professor Emeritus)
大江健三郎Oe Kenzaburo (Author)
小倉紀蔵 Ogura Kizo (Kyoto University)
尾山令仁 Oyama Reiji (Pastor, Theologian)
加納実紀代 Kano Mikiyo (Keiwagakuen University, retired)
清眞人 Kiyoshi Mahito (Kinki University, retired)
金枓哲 KIM Doo-Chul (Okyama University)
熊木勉 Kumaki Tsutomu (Tenri University)
古城佳子 Kojo Yoshiko(Tokyo University)
小森陽一 Komori Yoichi (Tokyo University)
佐藤時啓 Sato Tokihiro (Tokyo University of Arts, Photographer)
篠崎美生子 Shiozaki Mioko (Keisen Woman University)
竹内栄美子 Takeuchi Emiko (Meiji University)
東郷和彦 Togo Kazuhiko (Kyotosagyo University)
東郷克美 Togo Katsumi (Waseda Universuty)
成田龍一 Narita Ryuichi (Nihon Woman University)
中川成美 Nakagawa Shigemi (Riteumeika University)
中沢けい Nakazawa Kei (Hosei University/Author)
西成彦 Nishi Masahiko (Riteumeika University)
西田勝 Nishida Masaru (Literary Critic)
朴晋暎 Area Park (Photographer)
朴貞蘭 Park Jeongran (Oita Prefectural College of Arts and Culture)
深川由起子 Fukagawa Yukiko (Waseda University)
藤井貞和 Fujii Sadakazu (Tokyo University, Professor Emeritus)
和田春樹 Wada Haruki (Tokyo University, Professor Emeritus)
Gregory Clark (International University of Japan, Professor Emeritus)
四方田犬彦 Yomota Inuhiko (Film history, Comparative Literature)
千田有紀 Senda Yuki (Musasi University)
榎本隆司 Enomoto Takashi (Professor Emeritus, Waseda University)
33 Participants

Andrew Gordon (Harvard University)
Brett de Bary (Cornell University)
Bruce Cumings (Chicago University)
Chizuko Allen (Hawaii University)
Daqing Yang (George Washington University)
Jin-Kyung Lee (University of California San Diego)
John Treat (Yale University)
Mark Selden (Cornell University)
Michael K. Bourdaghs (University of Chicago)
Miyong Kim (University of Texas at Austin)
Noam Chomsky (MIT)
Sakai Naoki (Cornell University)
Sheldon Garon (Princeton University)
Tomi Suzuki (Columbia University)
Thomas Berger (Boston University)
William W. Grimes (Boston University)
Sejin Park (Adelaide University, retired, Australia)
Alexander Bukh (Wellington Victoria University, New Zealand)
Reiko Abe Auestad (Oslo University, Norway)
Amae Yoshihisa (Chang Jung Christian University, Taiwan)
20 Participants

103 Participants

If you have any questions, please send us an e-mail to
[email protected]

 

[email protected] (Voices of Reconciliation and Peace in East Asia)

Park Yuha and the uncomfortable realities of South Korean democracy [EastAsiaForum] Link

Link to the article

‘Comfort women’ issue is far from black and white [HIROAKI SATO, Japan Times] Link

The ‘comfort women’ issue after the fall of Park Geun-hye [East Asia Forum] Link

Homepage manager’s comment on the text, “In Japan, there was unanimous support for this verdict. The Asahi Shimbun and Sankei Shimbun newspapers, which are usually divided on the ‘comfort women’ issue, both praised the verdict.”;

Different from Asahi Shimbun, which has acknowledged and appreciated Prof. Park’s publications, Sankei Shimbun has shown no interest on her works. This indicates how problematic this indictment was. This verdict braked Japanese disappointment toward Korea becoming despair.

The debate over South Korea’s ‘comfort women’ [Al Jazeera] Link

http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/775564.html

Park Yuha (Professor of Sejong University; Author of The Empire’s Comfort Women) x Takeshi Nakajima (Editorial Board Member)

The Empire’s Comfort Women, authored by Professor Park Yuha of Sejong University, South Korea, has been at the epicenter of a long-running controversy among scholars in Japan and South Korea. Nine former Korean comfort women filed a libel suit against Professor Park. Last November, Professor Park was indicted without detention.  Fifty-four scholars based in Japan and the United States issued a public protest against this legal action by the South Korean authorities. In the meantime, some scholars reacted against this public protest. Professor Takeshi Nakajima, a member of this journal’s editorial board, was among the fifty-four who voiced their objection to Professor Park’s indictment. He interviewed Professor Park last February during her visit to Japan. What is at the core of the public debate over The Empire’s Comfort Women?

Nakajima: I first became familiar with Professor Park’s work when your 2006 book, ­Towards Reconciliation, came out. I then heard that your subsequent book, The Empire’s Comfort Women, was sparking an acrimonious debate in South Korea. I made a point of reading the book’s Japanese translation as soon as it became available.

I see this book and its analytical framework to be driven by a series of questions formulated by Subaltern Studies. This scholarly framework emerged mainly in India in the 1980s. It interrogates the subjectivities of the oppressed individuals and groups. The Empire’s Comfort Women foregrounds the multifaceted subjectivities of Korean comfort women and lays bare the violence inherent in the “Empire” that condemned these women to these horrendous historical circumstances. Some have charged that the book is an apologia for Japanese imperialism, but nothing can be further from the truth. The book, as I see it, is a piercing indictment of Japanese imperialism.

Park: That’s exactly the way I problematized things. Some critics took issue with the title of the book itself.  What I meant by The Empire’s Comfort Women is that these were the women forcibly mobilized for the empire. Secondarily, the title also refers to the ways in which these women were forced to cooperate with the empire. I’ve been often asked: “which is your more central point?” I think that such a question – or a way of positing such a binary upon which the question is premised – resulted from the fact that the person who asks it remains captivated by a conventional conceptual framework: he or she can not abide the ambivalence and impermanence of comfort women’s positionalities and subjectivities.

Patriotism as a Fallout of Over-adaptation

Nakajima: One of the most important problems you raised in the book is the question as to how to define the positionality of Korean colonial subjects who acted as brokers of the comfort women system. They were complicit in the forcible transport of these women. At the same time, though, they had their own livelihood to worry about. They found it necessary to do what their Japanese colonial masters dictated. On the other hand, some of the comfort women began to hold a sense of pride as handmaidens of the Japanese Imperial Army, condemned as they were to the most hopeless of life circumstances. What you are arguing here is the polar opposite of those Japanese right-wing pundits who argue that these Korean comfort women somehow benefited from their lot. Your critics got this totally wrong: they are falsely accusing you of agreeing with those Japanese right-wingers. Far from it.

I studied anthropology and went into history later. In that process I became aware of the existence of myriad individuals whose stories fell through the cracks between the ideological extremes. This awareness informed my book、Nakamurayano Bosu (Subhas Chandra Bose and the Nakamura Company). Bose sought to use Japanese military might as a way to liberate Asia and India at the same time he was extremely critical of Japanese imperialism.  As such, he can not be defined in the conventional rightist-leftist binary.

The same thing can be said about the so-called Korean collaborationists of Japanese imperialism. For example, Lee Kwang-su did not pander to Japan.  He was a very harsh critic of Japan. In the 1930s, his position began to shift. What changed? Well, the Japanese state articulated the theory of universal subjecthood under Japanese imperial rule. Lee’s rhetorical strategy was to turn this theory on its head to argue that if all subjects were equal under Japanese imperial rule, then Korean should be treated equally as Japanese. His was a shrewd rhetorical acrobat using the Japanese imperial theory for his own end. I believe it’s important to unpack Lee’s complex subjectivity by taking stock of his ideological strategy.

Park: A book entitled The Diary of A Manager of the Japanese Comfort Station was published in South Korean in 2013. This book portrays a Korean manager of a comfort station who internalized the mindset of a Japanese imperial subject. On page 321 of the book, the man’s diary entry for New Year’s Day, 1944, reads: “the majestic power of the emperor should emanate to all directions” and “I prayed for the unending valor of the Japanese Imperial Army.” This man was born in 1905.  As such, he lived through Korea’s colonial period. To me, it’s not surprising for Koreans in this generation to harbor what may ironically be called “patriotism” under the Japanese imperial regime. These people were mobilized under the system of total war mobilization that began in the late 1930s. My intent was to emphasize the complexities of their subjectivities. I also pointed out in my book what was wrong with the thinking and argument of Japanese right-wing pundits.

Not supporting the Right Wing

Nakajima: Japanese right-wingers take your argument about the semi-familial sense of bonding some Korean comfort women shared with Japanese soldiers to mean that these Korean women benefited from their circumstances. Nothing is more brutal than the despair these women must have lived in.

Your book also talks about how Japanese soldiers, torn apart from their own families back home, began  to identify with Korean comfort women as their virtual family. These men lived next to death. They were not allowed to cry. Korean comfort women were the only ones they were free to expose their vulnerabilities to. The Korean women, on their part, tried to embrace these soldiers’ despair and hardship. Some of these soldiers were drafted against their will – just as the Korean comfort women were recruited against theirs. And yet, what these Japanese imperial soldiers did vis-à-vis the Korean comfort women remained within the structure of imperial violence against its victims.

Park:  I believe it is important to remind ourselves that complex and multiple emotions coexisted within an individual Korean comfort woman, and this multiplicity comes from the multiplicity of the experiences she had in terms of time and space. Even within the same location and timeframe, Korean comfort women’s experiences were diverse because their ages and Japanese language proficiencies were diverse.

What I wanted to portray in this book was “people who do not fit comfortably into the vessel of a national story.” Whether heartfelt or superficial, we identify with a national story. In reality, however, there are a whole range of experiences and emotions that can’t be neatly contained within such a national story. Facing that fact, those situated in the center of a national story try to hide it or penalize it.  Needless to say, the question of gender surfaces in that process too.

Nakajima: I think it is an ultimate travesty to interpret your argument as an apologia for the Japanese right-wingers or giving a pass for Japanese imperialism. Many Japanese young men died in kamikaze missions. Their story is centrally controlled by the Japanese right wing. They say these young men sacrificed their lives for the nation and the emperor. However, there were many former kamikaze pilots whose experience didn’t comport with this orthodoxy. Some deserted because they did not want to die. There were many different subjectivities. Bracketing these diverse subjectivities into a single story is tantamount to erasing the diversity and complexity of their experiences. The Left should not make the same mistake of violent erasure.

Park: Only a few people were actively engaged in the problem of comfort women, but the Korean mass media became deeply invested in the question and polarized national opinion about this question. On the surface of it, it may appear that the fault line runs along national boundaries (Japan vs. South Korea), but I think it is actually divided between the Left and the Right. We all tend to form our opinions according to our ideological positions.  As a result, people who seek to think free from such ideological shackles have tended to have only limited room to maneuver. That’s why I wanted to listen to the voices of these unsung people and stake out an alternative space for such historical voices.

What I meant by “Empire” goes beyond nation or ethnicity. It subsumes within itself the problems of subjugation, exclusion and discrimination perpetrated around the categories of gender and class. In other words, the problem of comfort women has been generally defined as a problem regarding Japan as a nation, and in that sense, it was understood as a political problem. In this way of thinking, one misses the problems of economy, the factor that compelled people to move in the first place. Many people migrated within and outside the empire as they internalized the economic aspirations of the state. The conventional framework failed to heed these people.

Who actually reaped economic benefits from exploiting other people? I also wanted to be self-reflective by acknowledging the fact that some Koreans were also complicit in that exploitation. Of course, many of the managers of the comfort stations were Japanese and I did write about them in my book also.

Writing in spite of binary

Nakajima:  Activists supporting the former Korean comfort women are hard put to reconcile their idea of what the victims should be like with your portrayal of the Korean comfort women, some of whom even bonded with Japanese soldiers. On the other hand, your portrayal does not comport with the image of prostitutes, one bandied about by the Japanese Right wingers either. I think that your book tried to get to the core of the structure of violence inherent in the Empire by exposing these multiple fissures emanating from the false binary.

Park: Initially, many of my critics in South Korea were male scholars. Their position was that one should never, ever, foreground things that might end up exonerating Japan. But I wanted to ask and ask again what they were exonerating, suppressing and obscuring.  There is no gainsaying that the Korean people were ruled and victimized by the Japanese and the Japanese state. But just acknowledging that fact erases from view structures of violence not reducible to nation and ethnicity.

Nakajima: I think that’s exactly the question of representation that Subaltern Studies problematized at the tail end of the 1980s and in the 1990s. What many Subaltern scholars, such as Gayatri Spivak, have criticized is the power and violence of attempts to create and represent “the right” Subaltern subjectivity as orthodoxy.

Park: You are right. I was often criticized for “not being an expert” or “not being an activist.” Some held that since I was not the victim myself I had no business proposing reconciliation. This idea of anointing only one “stakeholder” – the idea that dies hard – has ended up excluding parties that do not fit the anointed model. At the same time, this kind of argument has tended to obscure the fact that people who deign to speak for the victims are similarly stakeholders. The violence I see in the situation lies in the fact that these multiple elisions have not been heeded.

Nakajima: I, too, was criticized as a “non-expert” after I signed on to the public protest against your indictment without detention. I consider myself a historian, broadly speaking – one who studies the history of ideas and the history of the Showa period. If we should argue that, in order to be an “expert” in the Korean comfort women question, one must be able to read Korean sources or be scholars specializing in comfort women, then many of us are even barred from participating in the discussion about comfort women. Once you begin suppressing discussion among “non-experts,” it becomes impossible to explore a question from multiple angles.

Subjectivity elided

Nakajima: Your book also highlights former Korean comfort women who felt alienated from the House of Sharing set up by supporters. I think they felt that way because once the orthodoxy about Korean comfort women becomes entrenched, their emotions that don’t quite fit into that mold will be inevitably displaced.

Of course it is important to value the work of those women who criticized from inside the House of Sharing what Japan did to them. It’s not a question of whose position is more valid.  We must acknowledge the diversity of opinions and positions among former comfort women.  At the same time, we must capture the entirety of the historical experiences of former comfort women who have all too often been tossed around in the politics and polemics of the entire problem. Unless we can do that, we can’t even begin to make a first step towards the problem’s resolution.

Park: This former comfort woman was not comfortable with the general direction of the relief movement and the understanding about comfort women. Partly because she was bereft of family, she often gave me a call to chat. She shared with me her predicament, such as, if she fails to criticize Japan, she gets accused of being a Japanophile or a “hypocritic” comfort woman. She also wondered if she took the initiative by forgiving Japan, Japan might respond in kind, whatever that may be. I talked about this woman’s views at a symposium held in South Korea in April 2014 (before I was indicted). At this forum I also talked about former comfort women who expressed a wish to receive Japanese atonement money without going through the Korean supporters’ group. A month and a half later, I was sued.

Nakajima: At the core of the problem is these discords and ambivalence of views. But when it comes to the problem of comfort women, these factors go out the window, unfortunately. You shined a light on this reality and called for an honest public discussion. I believe that what you have problematized is an important question informed by Subaltern Studies.

February 5, 2016  at Osaka

Translated by Sayuri Shimizu

Japanese Original Link 対談片面

Comfort women issue: A message to students in Western society

Yuha Park

—-

Among Japan, Korea, China, and other countries in Asia, there exists a big divergence in their understanding of the unfortunate history of the past. Therefore, there exists a deep rooted animosity among them as a consequence.

Between the people of (South) Korea and Japan especially, there exist a big difference in the perception of and the opinion on how to resolve the issue of the “comfort women” that existed during the time of the Asia Pacific War. Underlying the differences of the opinion are the exclusionist nationalism and the conflict between the left and the right.

The issue of the “comfort women” in the 1930s is commonly regarded as a problem created by the Japan of the 1930’s, but such an approach is overly simple because there are many other related issues that cannot be ignored. If the responsibility for an issue is over-simplified, it prevents us from seeing the responsibility of other actors. The consequence of this is that we cannot prevent the violence toward women that continues in other forms. The problem of comfort women should be seen as the problem of the women who were moved in accordance with the desire of the state to expand its power, and mobilised to serve men who were segregated.

What made the migration of women in such a large scale possible was the expansion of imperialism in the modern period when the big powers began to take advantage of the development of transportation. And the women who were mobilised as comfort women were the ones who, due to poverty, could not be protected by the community they belonged to.

Furthermore, there were numerous middle agents who worked to fill the demand created by the desire of the state and men. In other words, there existed private businesses that were benefitting economically by making use of the political and economic desire of the state as well as the sexual desire for domination among men. In addition to the men who visited the comfort stations (as customers), these business men used human body for economic interest. They betrayed Emanuel Kant’s principle that human beings should be treated as ends and not as means.

I could see that the tragic happenings that occurred nearly seventy years ago repeating again to the poor women in Korea today as well as many women in the less affluent countries. Nevertheless, the majority of Korean people continues to hold the view this problem as that of Japanese, thus foreign, men raping our, Korean, women.

However, this problem is more fundamentally that of the women who were sacrificed by the patriarchy as well as that of class exploitation of the lower class. Thus, the problem of Korean comfort women is that of mobilization of poor women in the colonized area. In order to resolve and prevent the problem of comfort women, we need to see the full picture of this kind of structure.

In this sense, the problem of the comfort women is not only that of Japan, but also that of all ex-imperialist states, such as Britain, France, Netherlands, which had exploited local women by making colonies in order to expand the state power. The USA that even today has constructed military bases in many locations around the world, and maintains a setup in which local women serve American soldiers is also implicated in this problem. In other words, the comfort women problem is not simply about what happened due to the war, but an issue of the expansion of state power which includes the presence of military bases before the war.

The comfort women for the Japanese military were originally Japanese women. It was the colonisation that led to the recruitment of the Korean women. Therefore, the relationship between the comfort women and the soldiers in the system of the Empire where the role of the comfort women was to “comfort” the soldiers of the same country, strictly speaking, was not the same as that of the victims of rape in the context of wartime violence in the “conquered” area.

I saw the reason why the issue of the comfort women had not been resolved over 20 years as being due to the lack of clear understanding of this structure. And it was for this reason that I wrote the book, “the Comfort Women of the Empire: the Colonial Domination and the Battle for Memory”. This book was favourably received in both Korea and Japan when it first came out. However, some Koreans and Japanese reacted negatively. (Ironically) those who reacted most negatively were the activists and researcher of the comfort women issue who have worked long toward the resolution of the problem.
To them, my presentation of the problem seemed as dilution of the responsibility of Japan. Under this situation, one of the movement groups to support the comfort women conveyed their distorted interpretation of my book to the still remaining comfort women. They suggested incorrectly that my book defamed the comfort women and sued me for it, demanding a very large amount of compensation.

However, the issue of the comfort women is one in which sexual discrimination is mixed with class discrimination as well as ethnic one. Among these, the focus so far was only on the state responsibility. What I attempted to bring out (in my book) was the responsibility of those actors hidden behind the proper name “Japan”, i.e., the responsibility of the middle agents and the reminder of the responsibility of men who under the patriarchal system pushed the women out as sacrificial lamb and also treated them as means to release male (sexual) desire.

However, this way of seeing the comfort women issue is still not sufficiently understood in Korea. And as a result my book being incorrectly known as criticising the comfort women, I am being criticised nationwide after I was legally accused. Not only Korean nationalism, but also the Cold War framework that solidified after the collapse of the Empire also played a role in shaping the researchers and activists of the comfort women issue.

The reason why this issue was regarded for long as Japan’s problem was that the period for which Japan was engaged in war was long and the area covered was wide, and most of all, Japan had systematised the system of the comfort stations.

Because when the comfort women issue first surfaced, it was known only as being an issue of the “innocent girls forcefully taken”, the main steam researchers and activists just insisted on the forceful nature of the comfort women. However, the obsession with forcefulness or young girl excludes those women who “voluntarily” went to sacrifice themselves in the context of parental persuasion, or the those who were already involved in prostitution before they became comfort women. The effect of this position, by discriminating and excluding those who had the experience of prostitution is to join those who have argued that comfort women were simply prostitutes, thus there is no comfort women problem. However, the responsibility for the terrible experience can be pursued without emphasising the forcefulness of recruitment.

In spite of this, the fact they find my academic approach foreign is the reason also for my hardship. They have reacted negatively to the point that the main agent that did not protect the Korean women was the community that was Korea, also to the fact that someone raised an objection to the (their) mainstream approach to research and activism.

These negative reactions have led to strong personal criticism toward me. Their “academic” criticism moved on to “criminalisation” of my writing activity. At a time when my academic view was regarded as a “crime”, even the academics joined the accusation.

Nevertheless, rather than denigrating the comfort women, my book was written on their side. My book tried to stand on the side of the comfort women by guarding against the instrumentalization of women which continues even today. With the resolve that their honour must be kept, it tried to recreate the voice of the comfort women who had been ignored. However, neither the prosecutor nor the court in Korea was willing to listen to my counter argument.

In 2015, there was a court order to remove certain part of the book. To follow the court order, in the new edition of the book, the designated section removed. But there was an objection to the republication of the book even in the censured form. There was also a ruling of a civil case to pay compensation (to a number of the comfort women) to which I made an appeal. The criminal court case has also been in progress already fifth time.

The power block consisting of the activists and researchers who inherit the Korean nationalist movement blocked the sides of class-based and gender-based discriminations to be seen. For this reason, the extremists from both Korea and Japan stand in confrontation, and even other people from both countries stand in disharmony due to the exposure to partial information from two opposite sides.

Not only does this kind of attitude that buries the fact that the comfort women issue is in reality also very much that of social class and gender sustains the conflict in East Asia. The conflict is also acute enough realistically to lead to a crisis.
Therefore, there is a need for more people to be interested in this issue. I hope to see expression of interest especially from people who are interested in gender and colonialism issues. That is because only this kind of approach will lead the comfort women issue as well as other issue of conflict to harmony and reconciliation – and make the friendship and peace in East Asia possible.

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I would like to thank Professor Chakrabati for allowing me this opportunity to offer my message. I hope our conversation continues in another opportunity.
Thank you.

 

• Original transcript was written and sent to Professor Chakrabati in April 7th, 2016.
• English translation by Sejin Park, September 24th, 2016

New York Times, December 18, 2015: Disputing Korean Narrative on ‘Comfort Women,’ a Professor Draws Fierce Backlash