Virginia Review of Asian Studies: 19 (2017): 108-127
ISSN: 2169-6306
Park: Korean Comfort Women
KOREAN COMFORT WOMEN IN THE EYES OF THE MANGA AND NET GENERATION
Hye Ok Park[1] Claremont Graduate University, California
Abstract
Eighty-five years have passed since the so-called comfort women system of the Japanese Military was first implemented during the World War II.[2]Between 100,000 to 200,000 young Korean women, aged 14 to 25, were indentured and lured with false promises of factory jobs, transported, and deployed into sexual slaveryby the Japanese government to control its restless, battle-shocked soldiers from raping local women in occupied areas by providing state-controlled and hygienically-managed facilities in Asia and beyondfrom 1932 to 1945.[3] When the war ended overnight on August 15, 1945, these young womenfound themselves stranded far away from home, stateless and penniless, not knowing how to return home. Some never made their way home, dead or alive.
What happenedto these young women who were stripped of all human rights, incarcerated against their will, and subjected to continuous sexual abuse up to thirty times daily? What kept these atrocities hidden until 1991? Have these women been apologized to and redressed by the accused, i.e. the Japanese government? In this paper, I will present the historiography to seek answers to these questions and examine how they are represented in the eyes of the manga and Net generation of today. Although the Japanese deployed comfort women from several different Asian countries, my focus will be limited to the Korean comfort women.
The Comfort Women System of the Japanese Military during World War II
As the Japanese imperial military forces advanced into the far-reaching regions of Asia, their leaders found the battle-shocked and restless soldiers raping local women in occupied areas and contracting sexual diseases at an alarming rate. So, the Japanese government decided to operate state-controlled and hygienically-managed facilities to help their soldiers relieve their sexual tension by providing comfort women. About 80 percent of these womenwere young girls from lower-class, impoverished families in rural areas of Korea, which had been devastated by the Japanese colonial exploitation since 1910.[4]
The Japanese imperial government found Korea to be strategically located on its path to Manchuria’s rich natural resources for years. Determined to seize the Korean peninsula as its own colony, Japan launched a brief but intense war with China, the Sino-Japanese War, in 1894. Having won that war in 1895, which helped clear China from meddling in Korea’s political affairs, Japan started another war against Russia in 1904. The Russo-Japanese War ended in 1905 again in Japan’s victory—the “first time in modern history that an Asian or non-white nation had defeated a major Western power in a major conflict.”[5] The so-called Peace Agreement signed by Russia and Japan in Portsmouth in 1905, hosted by the U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt and for which Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel Peace Award later, led to the Japan-Korea Protectorate Treaty which legitimized the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910.
Historian David Andrew Schmidt wrote that the Japanese ruled the occupied Korea in the “hardest and most relentless form of Imperial administration” in “an attempt at ‘un-Koreanizing’ the Korean people” by taking away their own language and customs among others.[6] Over six million young Korean men and women were conscripted into serving in military service as imperialized subjects, mobilized into forced labor, or lured with promises of factory jobs which turned out to be sexual slavery for many young girls.[7]
As historian George Hicks called it, this “vast and dense network of sexual services pervading virtually all Japanese-occupied areas from the Siberian frontier in the north, to the Solomon Islands in the southeast, and Burma in the southwest” ran under the supervision of the Kempeitai or the Naval Police with daily oversight by local unit commanders.[8] Shimensu-Misaki, a topographic map of Mussau Island in the Bismarck Archipelago, part of Papua New Guinea, with a series of aerial photos taken in December 1943, was found to have been cataloged in 1944, including a set of 2 adjoining sheets of the military compounds. Marked as “Military secret – preliminary map” it was translated into English by a cataloguer who recorded:
Mussau Island served to house comfort women from Korea and China.... As the war turned against the Japanese, they were abandoned there. The women lived in horrible conditions that resulted in an outbreak of leprosy. The island was bombarded by USN Destroyers on March 23, 1944. After the liberation of nearby Emirau, missionaries brought the women food and medical supplies.[9]
The first confirmed military comfort station (ianjo=慰安所) was set up in Shanghai in March 1933, labeled as “Disease Prevention and Hygiene Facility” for the 14th Mixed Brigade with 35 Korean and three Japanese women.[10] The military comfort stations in general were set up in makeshift buildings, either procured off-site or built on the military compounds, and partitioned into cubicles of 6 square (2 x 3) yards by the hands of soldiers with carpentry skills. Each cubicle was furnished with a bed crudely made of wooden planks, blankets, and disinfectant liquid.[11]
Each comfort woman was expected to serve—or rather be raped by—20-30 soldiers each day on the average regardless of their physical conditions. The hours of services were from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. for soldiers and 7 to 11 p.m. for officers, seven days a week.[12] Tickets were issued by the commander’s office to soldiers at 1 yen for 30 minutes, sergeants at 1.20 yen for 30 minutes, and officers for 3 yen for one hour. The hourly charges differed by the ethnicity of the comfort women: 1 yen for Chinese, 1.50 yen for Korean, and 2 yen for Japanese women, which implied the existence of racial profiling and ethnic discrimination.[13] Few of these women, however, received any compensation for their sexual slavery, since the Japanese administrators of the comfort stations kept what was due to them until they were to be released but retreated overnight, leaving them penniless when the war ended.
This sexual servitude continued until the proclamation of an unconditional surrender by Emperor Hirohito at the drop of two atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Even then, these women’s troubles were not over, since they were abandoned by the fleeing Japanese army wherever they had been stationed from the jungles of the Pacific islands to remote mountain areas of China. And nobody knew how many perished, unable to make it out. “Many never attempted to return home, not knowing how to do so, or they remained hidden for fear of shame and humiliation back home,” lamented historian Bonnie B.C. Oh.[14]
Postwar Silence 1945-1970s
The comfort women issues remained silent for a half century for several reasons, wrote Hicks. The few former comfort womenwhocould return home remained silent in shame, because they felt, “They had everything to gain by keeping silent and everything to lose by making accusations.”[15] There was no vocal woman’s movement in Korea, Japan, or anywhere at the time to give support or speak on their behalf in domestic or international scene. The South Korean government under the President Park Jung Hee’s “ironfisted authoritarian rule” was not willing to antagonize the Japanese on human rights, let alone any women’s, issue.[16] China under Zhou Enlaiin “fear of blighting economic relations” with Japan put a ban on “campaigning on wartime issues” and kept the comfort women out of sight during Emperor Akihito’s visit to China in 1993.[17] And the comfort women issue was not even brought up or recognized as a war crime at the Tokyo Tribunal in 1946 due to “the Allied Forces’ deliberate oversight,” since they were exploiting women for almost the same reason as the Japanese did, wrote Toshiyuki Tanaka.[18]
The comfort women system was one of the least documented and remembered cases of the World War II for decades. As a result, although the facts were known at the time, claimed Nishino, Stetz and Oh, the comfort women issue was not included in the war settlement either in 1946 or 1965. Historians Yoshimi and Hicks also claimed, “One whole class of victims was totally ignored by everyone,” while other crimes against humanity were addressed at the Tokyo War Tribunal.[19]
The Quiet Discourse: 1970s to 1990
And the caseremained a secret through the post-Colonial period until the 1970s when some of the Japanese writers’ books on the war got published and became best-sellers in Japan. Three among these authors made pivotal contributions between 1973 and 1983 in starting to make people talk about what had happened—although quietly. They were SendaKakō, a journalist for Mainichi Shimbun, Yoshida Seiji, who confessed of his own role played as director of the Mobilization Department in Shimonoseki in “hunting down” thousands of Korean girls and shipping them off to Hainan, China, and Kim Il-Myon, a Korean-Japanese writer who wrote a book titled, The Emperor’s Forces and Korean Comfort Women, in which hedescribed the recruiters as “死の商人” which meant “the merchant of death.”[20]
In the meantime, teaching history in schools has been a topic of much debate in post-war Japan to the present day, since Japan’s Ministry of Education maintains a tight control in setting guidelines with the absolute “power to approve or reject texts” for all school textbooks.[21]A Textbook controversy on the comfort women issue took center stage when IenagaSaburō (1913-2002), a historian and former high school teacher who wrote a history textbook in 1952, was ordered by the Ministry of Education to remove certain facts about the Japanese wartime atrocities including the military sexual abuse of women. Frustrated at the Ministry’s repeated interferences, Ienaga sued the government in 1965 and broughtseveral court cases against the censorship between 1982 and 1997. His third lawsuit against the Ministry of Education’s total ban of any references to Unit 731, the Nanjing Massacre, was ruled by the Supreme Court in favor of the inclusion of the Nanjing Massacre, military comfort women and biological warfare in Unit 731 in 1997.[22]
The nationalists’ attempt to strip “the Japanese of their guilt complex” and “rekindle national confidence and pride” ignited further debates among Japanese scholars, such as UeyamaShumpei, through the 1960s and 1970s until the textbook controversy issue was raised in the early 1980s by the governments of China and Korea.[23]
Silence Finally Broken: The Lawsuit and the Politics, 1991-2000s
Japan’s comfort women issue remained, argues anthropologist Sarah Soh, “culturally muted, socially shunned, and academically unexamined” until the 1990s.[24]The event that finally brought the comfort women issue to the center stage and the Japanese government under the international scrutiny was the lawsuit filed by a former Korean comfort women Mrs. Kim Hak-Sun and two others on 6 December 1991, the day before the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. These women sued the Japanese government for their hardship endured as comfort women and demanded an official apology with reparation of twenty million yen, valued at US$152,000, each.[25]
The Japanese government denied their involvement and refused to pay or apologize officially despite the evidential documents uncovered in Japan’s Self Defense Agency’s Library by a historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki, who then created the Center for Research and Documentation on Japan’s War Responsibility (JWRD) in 1993.[26] The Japanese government continued its denial of involvement in the acts of violations of human rights and international law – more specifically, violation of women’s human rights, racial, ethnic, and economic class discrimination, rounding up and trafficking of minors across national borders, placing people into debt servitude, treating them as military supplies, and forcing them to serve in comfort stations against their will.[27]
The first acknowledgement by a Japanese government official came from then Chief Cabinet Secretary YōheiKōno in 1993, although the twice-elected current Prime Minister Abe Shinzō tried to rescind later.[28] Hashimoto Toru, the Mayor of Osaka, Japan, is another official who publicly stated that sexual slavery of comfort women had been a “military necessity” in May 2013, causing uproar in Japan.[29]
The Postwar Net Generation’s Reaction: 2000s-Present
Despite Ienaga’s persistence in keeping the textbook debate alive for twenty-seven years, as praised by Dutch historian Ian Buruma, the Ministry of Education issued a directive in 2005 to remove all mentions of “Japanese aggression and atrocities” including the comfort women issue from textbooks.[30] Historian Hayashi Hirofumi wrote that “the term comfort women can no longer be found” in textbooks since 2005. As a result, the post-war generations of Japan did not learn in school about the atrocities committed by their fathers, uncles, and grandfathers during the World War IIwhich is proudly referred to by Japanese nationalists as the Great Pacific War [大東亞戰爭].[31]
What our fathers did not tell us – is the phrase printed on the verso of the title page of Tanaka Yuki’s book, Japan’s Comfort Women, in2002.[32] A research professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute, Tanaka published extensively on Japanese war-time brutality, not simply to reconstruct the events but to understand “why, in an earlier generation, his countrymen performed such atrocious deeds.”[33] Tanaka’s critical viewpoints were echoed in the 1990s by other scholars of the second-(nisei) and third-(sansei) generation Japanese, whose elders had first-hand experiences but were fast disappearing without speaking.[34]
A remarkable phenomenon surfaced in the early-2000s among the net-generation in Japan and Korea,according to Teresa Morris-Suzuki and Peter Rimmer, Japanese historians at Australian National University. The “politics of memory” as expressed in popular media and manga (漫話=comic books) format was spreading across national boundaries and emerging as “right-wing populism” internationally.[35] A quick search for ‘comfort women’ on YouTube retrieves many sympathizing videos and animations, such as Herstory (少女이야기), Silence Broken, a book and documentary by Daisil Kim-Gibson,[36] an interview with Jan Ruth O’Herne, a former Dutch comfort women now ninety years old, as well as militant representations, such as “The Fake of Comfort Women” produced in three parts and posted on YouTube by GloriusJapanForum.[37]
Julian Stallabrass is another historian who alerted thescholarly communityof a new trend that was emerging “in a whole shadow world of conspirational literature” in his 1995 article.[38] One leading such trend is Shadowrun Japan Imperial State, a neo-nationalist computer game site at This site, currently with 3,268 associated pages and a huge following of the Japanese net generation, portrays the fictitious Japanese Imperial State (JIS, 日本制國, nihonteikoku) set in the mid-21st century post-nuclear and post-space-war Japan with a population of 141,000,000, governed by the Yasuhito imperial family based on the old Yamato ideal—“the Japanese people are a pure race” and “no race except the Japanese live on the Japanese Islands.”[39]
Cyberspace debates on globalization and nationalism have been taking place in China, Korea, Taiwan and beyond, serving as a public marketplace of ideas and political debate by the younger Net Generation. Kobayashi Yoshinori, a vocal member of the extreme revisionist group, with his own series of Kobayashi Comicsin “an irreverent, in-your-face, politically incorrect ‘arrogant-ist’ style is unmistakably appealing” to young readers and some radical intellectuals, cautioned Morris-Suzuki and Rimmer. Kobayashi, who emerged in his twenties as a “representative of counterculture” in 1997, is now in mid-forties but presents himself as “the voice of the rebellious young against the oyaji– the ‘old men’ of the Japanese establishment.”[40]
Through the medium of comic books which he authored, such as Sensōron [A Theory on War], Taiwanron [On Taiwan], and Okinawaron [On Okinawa], in late 1990s through 2013, Kobayashi launched a campaign to undermine and discredit the oral testimony of the comfort women by insisting “that historical evidence, to be credible, must come in the form of written official documents, preferably signed and sealed by the government.” Kobayashi with his terse comments on “military brothels” attempts to liken the victims to “naked tribes in Africa” and portray the sexual violence as nothing but a “pornographic spectator sport.”[41]
Another alarming discourse Kobayashi has launched since 1998, according to Mark Driscoll, a Japanese and international studies scholar, is the “appeal to return to the collectivism of a militarist 1930s Japan” and to urge “fashion-victimed and self-absorbed Japanese youths” to transcend U.S.-style alienation and participate in a “masculinized Japanese nationalism.”[42] In 2007, Kobayashi applauded a young ‘freeter’ named Akamatsu Tomohiro for publishing a shocking piece called “Kibōwasensō” (My only hope is war) in the Asahi Shinbun’s journal of ideas.[43]