The Opinion Pages | OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Why Is the Plight of
‘Comfort Women’ Still So Controversial?
By ILARIA MARIA SALA AUG. 14, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/opinion/comfort-women-japan-south-korea.html
HONG KONG — One recent night after dinner I was standing with friends near the
Henry Moore sculpture in Exchange Square. We were trying to prolong our
goodbyes, but a loudspeaker blasting behind us forced us to part hastily. “The
Japanese government has never apologized sincerely or compensated the hundreds
of thousands of women that the Imperial Army forced into sexual slavery,” a
recording of a high-pitched female voice was proclaiming on a loop in Mandarin,
Cantonese, Japanese and awkward English.
It was a small protest: two burly middle-aged men lounging around, a woman
resting her head on a table with flyers and a donation box, and two bronze statues
of young girls, seated and barefoot. One of the girls was Korean, judging by her
traditional dress; the other one wore a Chinese pajama tunic.
The bronze girls stared vacantly toward the Japanese consulate nearby,
clenched fists in their laps. Defaced images of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan
had been placed under their feet, as if they had stomped on his face.
The statues, and the protest, purported to pay homage to what are widely
known as “comfort women”: the 80,000 to 200,000 women — mostly from the
Korean Peninsula, but also from China, Taiwan, the Philippines and other
Southeast Asian countries — who were recruited to provide sex to Japanese
soldiers during World War II.
But the two men by the statues belonged to a Hong Kong group that calls itself
“Defend the Diaoyutai,” referring to a set of islands claimed by both China and
Japan. (Japan calls the islands the Senkaku.) Most of the banners hanging by the
bronze girls carried anti-Japanese slogans: “Oppose Abe remilitarization” and “The
Diaoyutai are Chinese soil.”
As comfort women have been dying off — only 37 South Korean victims were still
alive as of late last month — their cause has become both increasingly visible and
increasingly vulnerable to being appropriated in the service of other, often
nationalistic, agendas. The few remaining survivors are being cast in a heavily
symbolic role they never asked to play — yet another blow to their long-running
quest for recognition and the restoration of their dignity.
There are more than 20 statues like the pair in Hong Kong throughout East
Asia and beyond, most modeled after one representing a Korean girl that was
placed in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul in 2011. That original “Statue of
Peace,” as its creators call it, has become a rallying point for weekly anti-Japanese
protests, some of them belligerent, about islands contested by South Korea and
Japan or calling for the boycott of Japanese goods.
The cause of South Korea’s comfort women has fallen hostage not only to
nationalistic interest groups, but also to the country’s fractious domestic politics.
In 2015, the administration of President Park Geun-hye and the Japanese
government came to an agreement that was supposed to finally settle the two
countries’ dispute over the issue.
The Japanese government admitted wartime
Japan’s involvement in procuring women for its soldiers, and agreed to set up a
fund of one billion yen (about $9 million) to benefit the 46 South Korean comfort
women alive at the time. A government official said that Mr. Abe expressed “anew
sincere apologies and remorse from the bottom of his heart to all those who
suffered immeasurable pain and incurable physical and psychological wounds.”
But Mr. Abe’s wording hewed close to an official declaration from 1993, which
some comfort women had found lacking in sincerity. To some, Mr. Abe also later
seemed to backtrack from his own statement when he told the Diet that the 2015
deal did not require Japan to issue letters of apology to South Korean comfort
women. The deal itself, which was problematic from the start, became even more
so.
Last December, on the first anniversary of the agreement, opponents erected
another bronze statue near the Japanese consulate in Busan, South Korea’s
second-largest city. Japan asked for its removal, and when the South Korean
authorities refused, it recalled some of its diplomats.
The new government of Moon Jae-in, which was elected in May after Ms.
Park’s impeachment on corruption charges, has recently announced that it intends
to designate an official day of commemoration for comfort women starting next
year — most likely Aug. 14, the day of Japan’s surrender in 1945. The Moon
administration has also announced plans to build a dedicated museum and
research institute in Seoul.
One reason the government has given for considering these measures is that,
according to a recent poll, 75 percent of South Koreans think the 2015 agreement
did not, in fact, settle the comfort women dispute. Another reason — this one not
given — is that the issue has become the symbol of Korea’s humiliation at the
hands of imperial Japan, and by way of that most taboo of subjects: women and
sex.
In 1991, as more and more former comfort women began to speak up, the
Seoul authorities rejected a proposal to build a monument honoring them in the
city center, citing “impairment to the landscape.” But their refusal belied a deep
discomfort, a collective shame. Public discussion about the issue seemed to return,
again and again, to the notion that the purity of comfort women had been violated.
In early 1992, the daily newspaper Dong-a Ilbo published many reader letters
decrying the women’s soiling, including one claiming that “Korean women regard
chastity as more important than life itself.”
To this day, the only site in South Korea that chronicles the experience of
comfort women is the “House of Sharing,” a shelter and museum in the
countryside built by a private Buddhist foundation in 1992, where survivors live
and practice art therapy. Many of their paintings show women dragged by the arms
and legs, bloodied and visibly in despair. The images are nothing like the innocentlooking,
nearly ethereal girls of the bronze statues.
But any account that strays from exalting the purported purity of comfort
women remains controversial. Park Yu-ha, a professor of literature at Sejong
University, in Seoul, argued in her 2013 book “Comfort Women of the Empire” that
these women’s wartime experience should not be reduced to a story about “pure
innocent teen girls coerced by Japanese soldiers to be sex slaves.” A group of
survivors sued Ms. Park for defamation, and though they lost the case, she was
branded “a pro-Japanese traitor” by critics, including some historians.
In her book, Ms. Park argued that some of the women in military brothels
were paid sex workers, and others were servants. Pointing to archival documents
and firsthand accounts, she also claimed that while many comfort women were
indeed forced into sexual slavery, not all of them were young girls, and that much
blame for their suffering lay with the Korean men who had promised them paid
work by the front. Ms. Park, in other words, suggested that at least some Koreans
had collaborated with the Japanese.
This is why for some, comfort women must be represented as having been
young and pure, virginal, sex slaves: Anything else would mean wrestling with the
far more challenging notion that some of South Korea’s women did sleep with the
enemy, literally and metaphorically, and that the rest of the nation may have had
something to do with that.
The first known footage of comfort women surfaced last month, and it shows,
standing next to Chinese soldiers, a half-dozen cowering women, not girls. Yet as
the real, ravaged bodies of such women continue to disappear, a simplistic account
of their suffering — an exalted story about innocence violated — is replacing them
and obviating the need for a fuller reckoning of everyone’s, including Koreans’,
wartime actions. In East Asia and elsewhere, next to chaste bronze statues that
both do and do not represent the plight of comfort women, loudspeakers and
banners blare out a version of history that cannot contemplate its own complexity.
Ilaria Maria Sala is a writer based in Hong Kong.
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