Park Yuha Author's preface to the English translation

 Author's preface to the English translation

 

I am delighted that my book, Comfort Women of the Japanese Empire, is being introduced to English language readers. This book was first published in the summer of 2013 in Seoul, followed by the Japanese edition the next year. With a Chinese version having become available soon afterwards, publication of this English edition means that Comfort Women of the Japanese Empire is now avail¬able in four different languages.

The impetus for the book was the placement, in the winter of 2011, of the so-called "comfort woman statue" across the street from the Japanese embassy in Seoul. In some ways that moment symbolized a schism within comfort women support groups and the subsequent deterioration of the Korea—Japan relation-ship. I had already discussed many of these issues in a previous book, Toward Reconciliation: Textbooks, comfort Women, Yasukuni, and Dokdo Island (2005). At the risk of repeating myself, I decided to publish a book solely devoted to the issue of comfort women because, in my view, rather than heading toward a certain "reconciliation," the comfort women issue appeared to be on a collision course, the discourse becoming dominated by extremists on both sides.

My main thesis in Comfort Women of the Japanese Empire is that the comfort women issue, which had been analyzed and discussed within the framework of being a "war crime," should at least with respect to those comfort women from the Korean peninsula, be considered within a different context of imperialism/colo-nialism. The approach that comfort women should be considered an element of a war crime is problematic. However, more importantly, my stance is that this legal setting is one of the main reasons why resolution of the comfort women issue has not been forthcoming. Interestingly, soon after the publication of the book, many in both Korea and Japan seemed to accept my arguments. In fact, despite several lawsuits - the rulings of which are still pending - at the time of publication, many local media also spoke favorably of my book. Lawsuits began almost a year after publication, a few months prior to the publication of the Japanese edition. To my pleasant surprise, Comfort Women of the Japanese Empire, a work which holds Japan accountable for the sins of its imperialist policies, won numerous accolades as well as two prestigious literary awards in Japan.

Holding Japan's colonial rule responsible, however, also necessitated point-ing out the uncomfortable truth that comfort women from Korea were not, as is now generally accepted, always forcibly recruited by the Japanese imperial army.

 

Author preface to the English translation xiii

Of course, this does not mean that there were not instances where such women were forcibly recruited. My understanding, however, is that the official policy of the Japanese government and the imperial military was not centered on the forci¬ble recruitment of the comfort women from Korea. There were instances of rape and violent treatment of such women, indeed. Painful as such experiences were, we should not ignore that these were aberrations on a personal level, and that the Japanese imperial army official policy was to prohibit such crimes. I describe this state of affairs as "structural enforcement." Comfort women from Korea were placed alongside Japanese soldiers as a sort of "camaraderie in the form of being a military provision."

It is also my contention that Korea's patriarchal family system must also be held accountable as another component in the tragedy that was the comfort women. In both Japan and Korea, it was common for girls to be sold off from poor fami¬lies to reduce the number of mouths to feed. In this structure, there were many young women who thought such a sacrifice for the family was only natural and left their households of their own volition. Such a context is clearly different from the Japanese army's indiscriminate  rounding up of enemy women in occupied territo-ries. Ultimately, laying the blame squarely on Japanese imperialism alone, while ignoring the patriarchal family system, fails to address the pain that the women lived through (or, in many cases, failed to live through). In addition, by pointing out that most women in these circumstances came from impoverished backgrounds and that, in many instances, the middlemen/brokers who recruited the women were the main perpetrators of violence, I make it clear that the comfort women issue was also an issue of class.

Such views invited a powerful backlash from some comfort women support groups who have come to dominate the narratives around the comfort women issue. On June 16, 2014, "The House of Sharing," a facility established for the benefit of former comfort women, brought on behalf of some of these residents a civil law¬suit against me for damages against several comfort women. A separate criminal case, for defamation, was also filed on behalf of these women and two additional former comfort women living outside the home. Part of their anger, it appears, was based on the misunderstanding that - despite my pointing out that many brokers were in fact Japanese - I had denied Japan's responsibility as a state. However, the reason my book received critical acclaim in Japan was not because I denied Japan's responsibility toward the comfort women. Importantly, my view is that support emerged due to my careful observation of how (and how much) responsibility must be borne by the Japanese state, rather than wholesale condemnation of Japan (and exculpation of all other factors in the making of the comfort women) as the be-all and end-all of the making of the tragedy that was the comfort women.

I also highlighted in Comfort Women of the Japanese Empire that, while there were instances of girls having worked as comfort women, the depiction of comfort women from Korea as "chaste girls," as symbolized by the comfort woman statue, is not entirely correct. In other words, I objected to the notion, widely accepted even in academia, that the Japanese comfort women were voluntarily recruited whereas those from Korea were recruited forcibly. This position also invited a

 

xiv Author 's preface to the English translation

violent response, leading many to accuse my book of spreading malicious lies. It should be noted, however, that such a viewpoint is fundamentally no different from that of the far right, who hold that comfort women were "mere" prostitutes, and that there was no difference between the two. Both are manifestations of discrimi¬nation against sex workers.

To be sure, there were variations among Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. The legal age at which a young woman could become a prostitute was lower in the colonies and occupied territories vis-à-vis Japan proper. This was not necessarily due to discrimination between Japan and its colonies/occupied territories per se, but due in large part to the fact that as Japanese men were conscripted to service abroad, including in the occupied territories as well as the colonies, more women were required to service men in such territories. Of course, this does not mean there was no discrimination; comfort women and others were discriminated against as colo¬nial subjects, including with wage discrimination.

The question of whether these women were prostitutes or not sidesteps a more fundamental truth that the Japanese government actively recruited these women and, as a result of such action, the women were led to great tragedy. This is what I describe in Comfort Women of the Japanese Empire. Condemnation against my book by certain Korean, Japanese, as well as zainichi Koreans spread to America. In this regard, it gives me immense relief to know English-speaking readers will now have the chance to render their own judgements of Comfort Women of the Japanese Empire. Needless to say, I back any movement that advances women's rights. However, I find it difficult to support a movement or an activist group whose understanding of the issue at hand is based on misconceptions. It should be noted that the last surviving comfort women's view of themselves are also not uniform. And there is, for example, the case of a former comfort woman who expressed deep anger at being labeled a "sex slave."

Even though these events occurred in the past, the understanding and history of the comfort women issue has been viewed through, and deeply influenced by, the politics, as well as prism, of the present. In fact, during the important North Korea—Japan treaty talks in the early 1990s, comfort women of Korea were not only lumped together with the Dutch comfort women in Indonesia during World War II, but also with the victims of mass rape that occurred in the 1990s in Africa and Europe. Of course, there are some connections between these events, but we also need to consider their histories separately when analyzing the past. To seri¬ously consider the issue surrounding the comfort women the first step is to gain a precise understanding of who these people were. At the same time, it is critical to understand how the comfort women movement, nominally for the benefit of the women who suffered, unfolded in Korea as well as globally. Only by grappling with these two complex issues, can one attempt to make sense of the tragedy that were the comfort women.

Unfortunately, Comfort Women of the Japanese Empire is still to this day a subject of a legal tribunal. Resolution of that trial, as well as that of the surviving comfort women's healing, is forthcoming. I hope the publication of the English

 

Author preface to the English translation xv

language version of Comfort Women of the Japanese Empire will be helpful for both endeavors.

Finally, I want to express my sincere gratitude to the Cambridge Translation Team for their work on Comfort Women of the Japanese Empire. During the sum-mers of 2017 and 2018, I had the chance to meet and interact with researchers from the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia. I also received much support and encouragement from my friends in Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and the United States - Funabashi Yöichi, Asano Toyomi, Amae Yoshihisa, Joshua D'Andrea, Kim Chee-Kwan, and Kwon Daesung - in publishing this English edition. My sincere thanks to them. If Comfort Women of the Japanese Empire contributes in any way to a deeper understanding of the comfort women issue, it is thanks to the supporters and readers of this book.

25 November, 2022

Seoul

Park Yuha

Postscript: On October 26, 2023, South Korea's Supreme Court acquitted me of criminal defamation charges. The final verdict stated that Comfort Women of the Empire did not defame comfort women and that the accusations directed at me were baseless.

 

Prologue from Volker Stanzel, Former German Ambassador to China and Japan

Researching a painful past

 

Collective memory is part of the human condition. The elements of memory that feed a community - or a nation - are shaped by past events which are collec-tively experienced. They are also shaped by present modes of thinking. Memory may thus be a cause as well as a tool of politics at different times and locales. Memory may mediate the identities of communities and at the same time it may positively or negatively impact reconciliation between communities.

In the midst of geopolitically volatile East Asia where four competing nuclear powers sit side by side, two democratic, affluent nations should, by all logic, be islands of stability, bound by similar values, interests, and the need to protect them-selves against not too friendly neighbors. But that is not quite the case. Japan and South Korea - two seemingly obvious candidates for friendly cohabitation - main¬tain continuously tense relations that only these days, in 2023, are subject to new attempts by both sides to find a sense of stability and create cooperative structures for a relationship that has been fraught for most of the 70 years since both countries regained their sovereignty. The reason for this volatility lies in the conflicting col-lective memories of both peoples.

In a very general way, one might say that in South Korea historical pride is an element of the collective memory of Korea's relationship with Japan, with Korea standing closely at the side of the Chinese Empire for centuries. Then there are the instances of victimization at the hands of the Japanese: a devastating invasion in the 16th century, the year 1876 when Japan forced Korea to open to the outside world, and lastly the colonization of Korea from 1910 to 1945. On the Japanese side there is a sense of measuring itself against China rather than China-dependent Korea; maybe Japan's economic rise during the second half of the 20th century, so much earlier than South Korea, had ambiguous effects on the feelings on both sides of the Korea Strait. These collective memories made for a more complicated relationship than that of Japan with the other countries its troops had ravaged dur¬ing the Pacific War.

Violent conflicts between human communities cause collective suffering; they also leave lasting scars in the minds of both victims and aggressors. These may transcend the lifetime of the generation who experienced or caused the suffering. To enable societies to build a peaceful future for themselves, such wounds need to be healed. For that purpose, reconciliation with former enemies may be neces¬sary - or not, if that seems the politically more advantageous option. The history

 

of conflicts between societies throughout the world shows that reconciliation is as possible as is the reawakening of dormant conflicts. In such cases, politics selects relevant elements of collective memories as instruments to overcome the residue of conflict, or to deepen it. The case of Japan and South Korea offers examples of both options.

In 1965, both countries established diplomatic relations, obliging Japan to make available a series of loans and grants for economic cooperation and compensation for the colonial period. From then on up to the present time, Japanese politicians, its parliament, and emperor repeatedly expressed "remorse" and issued apologies for Japan's crimes during the colonial era. By the early 2000s, the civil societies of both countries developed in similar ways: affluence built on economic growth allowed modern cosmopolitan pop culture to thrive. Music, movies, manga, hi-tech gadgets exploded onto the scene. Japanese singers became popular in Korea; Korean soap operas found enthusiastic viewers in Japan. And in 2002, both coun¬tries jointly staged the Football World Cup. In a more serious vein, historians of both countries produced a joint history book: A History of Interaction between Korea and Japan: From Pre-historic to Modern Times!

That happy period ended in 2007. Official Japanese statements concerning the suffering Japan had inflicted on Korea had occasionally been countered by a coterie of public figures in Japan who denied the war crimes or waxed nostalgic about the colonial era. South Korea had often accused high school history textbooks in Japan of glossing over Japanese wartime aggression. The joint history book on which work had begun in 1997 was presented to the public a decade later in 2007, but it never came to be adopted as a textbook for schools in either country. However, the trigger of the deterioration of relations between the two countries turned out to be the issue of forced prostitution on the Korean peninsula during World War II. This was the system of the so-called "comfort women," which re-emerged in 2007 when a Korean group representing survivors demanded a new apology and compensation from Japan, supported by a similar demand by the American Congress .2 The ensu¬ing dispute gradually exacerbated other areas of conflict between the two countries, such as a persistent territorial dispute, and the question of individual compensation for forced labor employed by Japanese companies during the colonial period.

In an effort to overcome the process of mutual poisoning of the relations, in 2015 Japanese prime minister Abe Shinzö and South Korean president Park Geun-hye reached an agreement to establish a fund to pay compensation to surviving forced prostitutes, accompanied by a renewed Japanese apology. In turn, the South Korean government declared the matter as "finally and irreversibly resolved" and promised to remove a statue of a "comfort woman" that an NGO had placed oppo¬site to the Japanese embassy in Seoul. However, the statue was left standing due to strong domestic opposition; another statue was erected in front of the Japanese consulate in Pusan in 2016, and in 2018 the new South Korean president Moon Jae-in even went as far as apologizing to the surviving women for the agreement his predecessor had concluded. Moreover, in 2018, the Korean Supreme Court per¬mitted South Korean former wartime forced laborers to claim compensation from Japan, and permitted the Korean government to impound Japanese company assets of those guilty of employing forced labor during the colonial period. In retaliation, Japan restricted exports of hi-tech materials to South Korea. There were unfriendly encounters between Japanese and Korean warships and planes, and cooperation in military intelligence was terminated by South Korea. It was only in March 2023 that the leaders of both countries ended a 12-year-long period of nonconimunica-tion and had their first meeting with the objective of returning to a more construc¬tive relationship.

Memory is never frozen. Only at the very moment something occurs is the past imminent. The stronger that moment is emotionally charged, the longer it will remain in an individual's or a community's memory - but, not unchanged. The process of remembering is constructive. Thus, the accuracy of a particular memory is the exception. This is even more true if no one, or not many, of the original victims or perpetrators are alive anymore. Consequently, what the next genera-tions perceive as the authentic narrative will be created from disjointed elements of past events that may gain retrospective significance as an element of politics that belongs very much to today. Political leaders may find it more important to cater to parts of their public than to promote reconciliation with a former enemy. The public may be generationally so far removed from the actual experience of the violence of the past that reconciliation and peace do not seem to be of vital impor-tance. There is no shortage of instances in the world where the recreation of old memories has acquired a new and dangerous salience: the conflict between Serbs and Kosovars over battles fought as long ago as the 14th century is a case in point.

War crimes, including forced prostitution and forced labor, occurred wherever the Japanese armed forces went during the Pacific War. Yet nowhere, not even in China which regularly accuses Japan of not owning up sufficiently to its war crime history, have collective memories become tools of today's politics to the degree that exists between South Korea and Japan. As much as the memory of the pain endured or inflicted must be kept alive, most of all to prevent another slide into outbursts of violence, it must not hinder reconciliation but must promote it. There were perpetrators, and there were victims, and there were those who were both at the same time. Their descendants should not be defined by the deeds and suffer¬ings of their ancestors. Particularly in today's world of shifting alliances, it would seem essential that two countries that have much in common aside from their past of violence and suffering should find ways for their societies to move on toward a durable and peaceful future.

And yet, even the most dedicated efforts, guided by common sense and good will on all sides, may still encounter almost insurmountable obstacles in the minds of the people concerned. Germans and French, Germans and Poles, all of them well known for seemingly successful reconciliation work, provide striking cases in point. Historians of both countries cooperated over three years in the German—French case, eight years in the German—Polish one, to author joint schoolbooks on history, in a work similar to that of the Japanese and Korean historians. Both groups were successful; or so they thought. In 2006, the first of three volumes of the German—French book, Europe and the World Since 1945, was presented to the public; the first volume of the German—Polish one, Europe - Our History, in 2016.

In both cases the academics involved had come a long way in establishing  a joint view of the fractious history of their countries. Longer than the civil societies of the three countries had, it turned out. To date, in all three countries the books are not regularly used in schools, or if so in singular cases, perhaps in the context of an "experimental phase." Even in these European cases, often seen as models for reconciliation, it seems as if the past still has an irresistible claim on the present.

That is why it is essential to research the facts of even the most painful matters of the past painstakingly, and conscientious of the pitfalls waiting. Meticulous and circumspect exploration of the facts is necessary, if the obstacles in the way are to be surmounted. Dr Park Yuha has tried to do that with this volume.

그럼에도 불구하고 모든 면에서 상식과 선의에 이끌려 가장 헌신적인 노력조차도 여전히 관련 사람들의 마음속에 극복할 수 없는 장애물에 직면할 수 있습니다. 성공적인 화해 작업으로 잘 알려진 독일과 프랑스, 독일, 폴란드인이 대표적인 사례를 제시합니다. 양국 역사학자들은 독일-프랑스 사건에서 3년, 폴란드 사건에서 8년에 걸쳐 협력하여 일본과 한국 역사학자들과 비슷한 작업을 통해 역사에 관한 공동 교과서를 집필했습니다. 두 단체 모두 성공했거나 그렇게 생각했습니다. 2006년에는 독일-프랑스어, 1945년 이후 유럽과 세계 3권 중 첫 번째 권이, 2016년에는 독일-폴란드어, 유럽-우리 역사 1권이 일반에 공개되었습니다.

두 경우 모두 관련 학자들은 자국의 분열된 역사에 대한 공동의 관점을 확립하는 데 큰 진전을 이루었습니다. 세 나라의 시민사회보다 더 오래 지속되었습니다. 현재까지 세 나라 모두 학교에서 이 책이 정기적으로 사용되지 않거나, 그렇지 않다면 "실험 단계"의 맥락에서 사용될 수 있습니다. 화해의 모델로 여겨지는 이러한 유럽 사례에서도 과거는 여전히 현재에 대해 거부할 수 없는 주장을 하고 있는 것처럼 보입니다.

그렇기 때문에 과거의 가장 고통스러운 문제조차도 진실을 연구하는 것이 중요합니다. 장애물을 극복하려면 사실에 대한 세심하고 신중한 탐구가 필요합니다. 박유하 박사는 이 책을 가지고 그렇게 하려고 노력했습니다.

Notes

1 History Textbook Research Association (Korea) and History Education Research Association (Japan), eds., A History of Korean-Japanese Interaction: From Prehistory to Modern Times (Seoul: Northeast Asian History Foundation, 2014).

2 "Comfort women" (in Japanese ianfu, in Korean wianbu) was the euphemism for forced prostitution created in the wartime Japanese empire. It was an obviously cynical term that - strangely - remains in use worldwide.

3 Histoire/Geschichte - Europa und die Welt seit 1945; Histoire = Geschichte: l'Europe et le monde depuis 1945 (Klett Verlag/Editions Nathan, 2006); and Europa - nasza his-toria, Podrçcznik dia Poiski i Niemiec; Europa - Unsere Geschichte, Ein Lehrbuchflir Deutschland undPolen (WSIP/ Eduversum, 2016).