Thursday, April 28, 2016

"The Comfort Women of the Empire"

     I regret, once again, that there has been a considerable interval since my last blog in these columns.  This is due to my two-week visit to India in February to March, 2016 and other works.

     Here I am going to introduce to the readers a book entitled "The Comfort Women of the (Japanese) Empire", written by Park Yuha.  She is a Korean in her late 50's, a Professor at a University in Korea, but has a complete mastery over the Japanese language, and has written this book in both Korean and Japanese.  The Korean version came out first in 2013, followed by the Japanese edition, with some supplements, in 2014.  The book contradicts both of the major streams of existing thinking on the Korean comfort women, the view that they had been young girls, in many cases infants, abducted by force by the Japanese military, and the view that they were simply prostitutes who accompanied the Japanese military on their own will.  She says both are far from the truth.

       She says that those Korean women were the followers of the Japanese women, who went wherever Japan's colonial empire or the sphere of influence expanded, to give anchorage to the Japanese men, military or otherwise.  They were prostitutes, but were not there on their free will but were under the supervision by the consular police.  In that sense they were the collaborators of the Japanese overseas empire.  So were the Korean comfort women in later ages, irrespective of how they themselves intended to.

     There is no doubt that those Korean women were under the overall supervision of the Japanese military.  It was the military who wanted those women to be with them.  But it is wrong to say that they were collected by the military by force from wherever they lived or worked.  In most cases it was the Japanese or Korean agents who collected them, often by advertising in the newspapers.  In that limited sense they were voluntary, although it is true that many had been cheated as to the type and place of work and pay.

     Even after those women were placed with the military, their relationship was not always oppressive.  The Japanese in a way trusted the Koreans, viewing them as their fellow-Japanese, although of a second rank, speaking Japanese, and distinguished them from other comfort women who were from the hostile nations not to be trusted.  Here the Taiwanese women were in the same category as the Koreans.  Their conditions were of course horrendous.  Even then, a feeling of love sometimes developed between the soldiers and the women, and in the extreme cases they got married.  Some of the women came to feel that they and the soldiers had been both called upon by the Emperor to dedicate their lives to the country, and were therefore in the same boat.  What the author wants to say is that the existing stereotype does not apply to many cases.  But all these were dropped from the public memory in Korea, which consisted only of resistance against the Japanese, and there is little room to accept and examine the different varieties of the women's experiences.  Similarly, the common notion is that the Japanese military slaughtered or abandoned most of the women when Japan surrendered, but the fact is that most of them somehow returned home.

     She goes on to say that the major supporting body in Korea, 'teitaikyo' in abbreviated Japanese, had played a great role in establishing and maintaining for the past two decades and more the above stereotype.  They built a small girl's statue in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul on the occasion of 1,000th Wednesday protest meeting in December 2011. Judging from her age, clothes, and expression, the statue, however, is that of a resistance fighter and not that of a comfort woman.  The teitaikyo on the other hand refused to commemorate those Korean soldiers who were drafted by the Japanese toward the end of the war.  They stuck to a single kind of memory, so that they were not able to arrive at a common understanding with the Japanese.  They have succeeded in internationalizing the movement, but it was only by incorporating a feminist element into it, and in the process heavily depending on the Western countries, which were former colonial empires themselves and are still in control of overseas military bases, with their own comfort women.

     Prof. Park says that on the Japanese sympathizers, too, a great mistake has been committed by not accepting the idea of distributing compensation to the comfort women under the initiative of the 'Asian Peace National Fund for Women' during the decade from the mid-1990's.  They have criticized it too harshly, which has stimulated the sympathizers in Korea, on one hand, and the right-wing in Japan, on the other, thus helping to consolidate the two diametrically opposing camps mentioned in the beginning.

     She concludes with those warm words.  'It is necessary to tell the ex-comfort women that you have done nothing wrong'.