[Interview] Asian-American judges work to build international solidarity on comfort women issue : International : News : The Hankyoreh
[Interview] Asian-American judges work to build international solidarity on comfort women issue
Posted on : Nov.19,2017 18:37 KSTModified on : Nov.19,2017 18:37 KST
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Lillian Sing and Julie Tang, who founded the multi-ethnic Comfort Women Justice Coalition, pose for a photo outside the Hankyoreh headquarters in the Mapo District of Seoul on Nov. 13. The comfort women issue “has been so demonstrably proven by scholars that there is no further need for evidence,” said Sing. (by Shin So-young, staff photographer)
“Japan is actively denying its history” by refusing to address the subjectLillian Sing and Julie Tang are judges in the American state of California. They retired from their positions after serving for 30 and 26 years, respectively. Tang submitted her resignation in 2014, and Sing in 2015. Sing is also the first Asian-American female judge in Northern California. “I didn’t want to leave my position as judge. I love working as a judge. [Quitting my job] was a big sacrifice for me,” Sing said. In the US, federal judges are appointed for life, but state judges serve on renewable six-year contracts.
Sing quit her job one day before a public hearing at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. The hearing was being held to adopt a resolution to set up a memorial statue to the comfort women. After the hearing, which featured testimony by former comfort woman Lee Yong-su, among others, the resolution passed the city council unanimously in Sept. 2015. “I thought it wouldn’t be appropriate for a sitting judge to make public remarks at the hearing,” Sing said.
In Aug. 2015, the two women established an umbrella group bringing together organizations representing different races called the Comfort Women Justice Coalition (CWJC), of which they are now the co-presidents. The comfort women memorial that this group helped erect in the middle of San Francisco in September is the first comfort women statue in a major city in the US. It was also the first time that not Korean-Americans, but Chinese-Americans, played an instrumental role in establishing one of these memorials. The two women were interviewed at the Hankyoreh headquarters in the Gongdeok neighborhood of Seoul’s Mapo District on Nov. 13. They had arrived in Seoul the day before in search of international solidarity for the comfort women movement.
A memorial statue for comfort women memorial in San Francisco was unveiled in September. It was the first major US city to display such a memorial.
■ Two older sisters lost to germs dispersed by Unit 731
The first question posed to the women, who said this was their third visit to South Korea, was when they would return to their jobs as judges. Their answer was identical, as if they had arranged it in advance: “We might go back, and then again we might not. If we do, it will be when we no longer need to express our views on politics.”
The issue to which the two women have long dedicated themselves is the Nanjing Massacre. In 1997, while they were working as judges, they established a group called the Rape of Nanjing Redress Coalition (RNRC), which has been campaigning to bring awareness of the truth of the massacre. Even today, they are serving as co-presidents of that group. After the Japanese forces captured Nanjing, then the capital of China, on Dec. 13, 1937, they spent six weeks indiscriminately slaughtering Chinese soldiers and civilians alike. While exact figures are unavailable, it’s estimated that between 200,000 and 300,000 people were massacred and that between 20,000 and 80,000 women were raped.
The RNRC’s launch ceremony was held at Sing’s house. The two women were also active in popular education and lectures on the topic of Nanjing with Iris Chang (1968-2004), the Chinese-American historian. After publishing “The Rape of Nanjing,” a bestseller that dived into the truth of the Nanjing Massacre, Chang was tormented by threats from Japanese far-right groups and eventually committed suicide by shooting herself with a handgun. Shortly before Chang ended her life, the three of them also held a mock trial bringing charges against Japanese Emperor Hirohito.
“Until 1997, the Nanjing Massacre was something that Chinese-Americans all knew about, but it was mostly unknown outside the Chinese community. The RNRC was focused on attracting international attention [to this massacre] just like the Holocaust. The goal of a judge is bringing about justice, and that’s the approach we took with our Nanjing activities, too,” Sing said.
“We dedicated ourselves to raising wider awareness of the crimes that Japan committed against China, such as the biological experiments of Unit 731, so that Japan would be held accountable for its war crimes. (Unit 731 was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army which carried out human experimentation, often with lethal consequences, during World War II.) We also worked hard to educate the younger generation. We even paid a large sum of money to take out an advertisement in the New York Times. In 2015, the Chinese government designated Dec. 13 as a national memorial day,” Tang said.
The two women were next asked why they had shifted their focus from Nanjing to the comfort women issue. “It was when we saw that the former comfort women were dying off. In 2015, UNESCO decided to add records from Nanjing to its Memory of the World. A registration conference was held in New York, and the RNRC submitted a petition that had been signed by more than 400,000 people. But a request to register the comfort women records was rejected because of persistent lobbying by the Japanese government. It’s not that Nanjing is less important, but that we realized the comfort women issue is a bigger fight. We were watching Japan actively denying its history,” Tang said.
The two women describe the comfort women issue as “the biggest incident that shows how women are sacrificed in wartime.” They say that’s also why the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed the resolution unanimously despite energetic lobbying by the Japanese government.
The comfort women constitute a “global issue,” Sing said. “It’s a matter of global rights for women. At first, I thought that the most women had been taken from Korea. But research by Chinese scholars shows that 200,000 Chinese women were taken as comfort women. There were 160,000 women from South Korea. The women of Shanghai, where I was born, suffered the most. There were a lot of comfort stations in Shanghai, too.”
Sing immigrated to the US when she was about to enter high school. During World War II, she and her family escaped from Shanghai to a neighboring city. “My mother told me that, when Japanese troops passed by, the people of Shanghai had to bow to them as a greeting. The idea was that the Chinese were slaves of Japan,” she said.
For her part, Tang lost two older sisters during the war. “During the war, my family fled to a village in Guangdong Province. Japan’s Unit 731 was apparently based in the area. Two of my older sisters died after being infected by pathogens released by this unit,” she said.
■ “The members of the Osaka City Council and its citizens have different opinions”
The two women were furious that the Japanese government had never made an official apology endorsed by the Japanese Diet for the Nanjing Massacre and other war crimes.
“What the Nanjing Massacre, the comfort women and the biological experimentation have in common is that they were war crimes perpetrated by Japan during World War II. Japanese Prime Ministers have said various things [about apologies], but they lack legal force. There has never been an apology that was ratified by the Japanese Diet,” Sing said.
Many women were also victimized by brutal sexual assaults during the Nanjing Massacre.
“Nanjing Jinling Girls’ High School, which was established by Western missionaries, protected around 10,000 citizens,” Tang said. “Every night, the Japanese military would demand that they send women out, and they would apparently send out 20 a day. Later on, even young students would go out. Not one of them came back.”
But the abuses at Nanjing were of a different nature from the comfort women system, they explained. While the Nanjing Massacre was a situation of indiscriminate rape, the comfort women’s drafting was a crime taking place within an institutionalized system.
“The comfort women system was something pre-planned and systematically created by the Japanese government and military,” Sing said. “The top military leadership institutionalized the system after considering the benefits it would bring. They operated it for 13 years from 1932 and 1945. It was also the largest in scale. There’s no other example like it in the world.”
Sing recalled an incident that happened two years ago while she was on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. “There was one attendee who had been actively taking part in Abe’s historical revisionism and talked about how [wartime rapes of women] had been committed in Congo and by [Nigerian Islamic extremist group] Boko Haram, and why were we talking as though this was only something experienced by Korean or Chinese women,” she said.
“He was asking why people keep separating the comfort women issue from that. But people need to know that the comfort women system was created ahead of time by the Japanese government so it would be able to wage war effectively.”
On Nov. 14, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution designating the comfort women monument as city property. The decision was something previously agreed upon when the memorial’s resolution was passed two years ago.
But after the memorial’s unveiling in September, Mayor Hirofumi Yoshimura of Osaka – a sister city of San Francisco’s for 60 years – threatened to end the sisterhood relationship if its designation as city property was made official. Tang previously visited Osaka in the 1980s as a citizen delegation member.
“The Mayor of Osaka needs to take responsibly for his remarks about ending the relationship,” she said.
“A lot of Osaka city council members and citizens view things differently from the Mayor,” Sing added. “I’ve gotten many letters from citizens [expressing support for the memorial].”
One of the reasons for Sing and Tang’s trip was to attend an international conference on UNESCO registration of comfort women archival materials, scheduled to take place on Nov. 17 at Seoul’s Sejong Hotel. Both stressed that the registration was a matter of great importance and urgency.
“When a Chinese scholar applied two years ago for UNESCO registration of archival materials, they rejected it on the grounds that many different countries were victimized by the comfort women system, and they all needed to submit it together,” Tang said. “So this time eight countries got together to submit it. They met all the conditions demanded by UNESCO, including spoken testimony from the victims. But then they rejected it again, saying the victimized countries and Japan needed to talk it out.”
Sing said the comfort women issue “has been so demonstrably proven by scholars that there is no further need for evidence.”
“The more important thing now is applying political pressure through demonstrations and other activities. Is Japan really going to agree to negotiations [on registration] when we’re fighting a history war?” she continued. “The important thing now is calling out the situation UNESCO is currently facing so that it passes [the registration] two years from now.”
Sing and Tang maintain that UNESCO, which is facing financial difficulties in the wake of the US withdrawal from the organization, refused to register the materials under pressure from Japan, which is now its largest individual financial contributor. The two judges also said they plan to work for the San Francisco memorial’s establishment as a major tourist destination in the city.
“We’re planning to see to it that the memorial is included in city tourism guides,” Sing said.
“We’re also cooperating with tourism companies, hotels, and restaurants, and if they need information for group viewings of the memorial, I’ll write it myself. We also publish educational materials for high school and college students.”
Lillian Sing and Julie Tang are the co-presidents of the Comfort Women Justice Coalition. (by Shin So-young, staff photographer)
■ “An issue people around the world can agree on”
We were curious about trends of public opinion on the comfort women issue in the US. In interviews with US media, Sing and Tang have both maintained that the US public would have paid greater attention to the issue if the women victimized had been white.
“Interest is growing. There’s a growing ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement right now in the US, but Asian women’s lives also matter,” Tang said.
“There is an ethnic component [to the comfort women issue]. Nanjing didn’t receive attention for a long time either,” she added. “But after years of getting the information out there, a lot of people know about it today. In the case of the comfort women, there’s a ‘double handicap’ in that the victims were both women and Asian. The San Francisco memorial is the first statue in the US for Asian women. [The statue shows girls from China, the Philippines, and South Korea holding hands.] Its raising was made possible by the survivors who broke their silence and shared their accounts.”
Sing agreed that the racism issue is “undeniable.”
“But everyone has a mother and sisters. The comfort women issue is something people around the world can all agree on,” she said.
Tang also commented on the 2015 negotiations on the comfort women issue between the South Korean and Japanese governments. “To President Moon Jae-in and the members of the South Korean National Assembly, I would recommend holding new negotiations including survivors from other countries besides South Korea,” she said. “That way, the victims can achieve a sense of emotional closure that they can view as a legitimate resolution.”
The interview ended with a question on whether Sing or Tang thought the brutal history of the comfort women system could ever be repeated.
“That’s why we started doing that in the first place,” Tang said. “We wanted to prevent it from happening again by teaching young people how many terrible things happened in the past. History repeats itself when it isn’t remembered.”
Sing added, “We’re also scared. Abe wants to change the Peace Constitution and re-arm Japan.”
“The Japanese public doesn’t really know about history, because they don’t teach it. The mistakes of the past can be repeated. We’re working to stop that from happening. What we are saying is that war is unacceptable. All wars bring terrible outcomes – especially to women.”
By Kang Seung-min, senior staff writer
Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]
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Thekla Lit · Co-Founder/Co-Chair at Canada ALPHA
Thanks to Lillian and Julie for their tireless effort in seeking truth and reconciliation around the Asian Holocaust issues.
Like · Reply · 2 · Nov 20, 2017 1:00pm
Vic Mason
The Asian Holocaust took place during Mao's reign, when he systematically slaughtered tens of millions of his own people for the sake of the great social experiment called the 'Cultural Revolution'.
The Comfort Women redress movement was launched in early 1990s by the int'l Leftist groups headed by Chong Dae Hyup that literally owns the women survivor-activists such as Lee Yong-su (http://bit.ly/2gjijQV).
A judge should have asked which account is actually closest to the truth.
Now, PRC has joined the club, and the number of the victims increased from 200,000 to 400,000, after the 200,000 figure was repeated for over twenty years. This is an example of how flimsy and ridiculous this entire movement has become, and if anything, the activists are the ones engaging in revisionist history. But the other angle is concealing what is taking place in PRC today: Bachelor Villages involve hundreds of thousands of abducted women from parts of Asia to satiate the needs of millions of Chinese men who, by the way, are victims of Mao's One Child Policy. PRC and their agents are simply not qualified to lecture anyone about human rights.
Like · Reply · 2 · Nov 30, 2017 3:21am
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