Cultural Workshop: Comfort Women

Throughout orientation, and especially during Camp the Program, the Powers that Be have hosted mini-cultural workshops for us to expand our knowledge about Korea’s history and traditions. Unfortunately, I was too tired to attend any of them except for the one on Comfort Women, given by University of Chicago graduate Dr. Josh P.

Put delicately, comfort women were women collected from the East Asian populace by a variety of means (promises of work, money, or just plain conscription) for the purpose of entertaining the Japanese military in a variety of ways. But bluntly, the Japanese took female slaves and raped them, given that you take a broad view of both slavery (being held against one’s will, whether or not one is paid) and rape (forced intercourse). These were usually girls between the ages of 10 and 16.

Though, to be fair to the Japanese, not all of the conscripted women had to perform sexual acts. Some, perhaps the lucky ones, merely had to dance or sing or laugh at the officers’ jokes, but a good many of them were prostituted out. And, as I said, not all were conscripted. Often a family would not be able to support a daughter if they could not marry her off, so the promise of work from the Japanese army, no questions asked, was appealing to many destitute parents. There is some debate as to which country suffered the most from this conscription, as Japan controlled much of the East Asian sphere in the 1930s, but Koreans of course think that Korea was that country.

Many of the Comfort Women now abide as living testaments to the past at a place called Sharing House (www.nanum.org; www.comfortwomen.wordpress.com). Dr. Josh P. seems to have taken as his mantra “History ignored by books and politics soon will be forgotten if not shared.” True enough. What he has done is to record some of the Comfort Women’s stories and especially the songs that they would sing, which, though seemingly just drivel from popular 1930s melodies, have remarkable undertones when seen in the context of a life of forced sex and occupation by a foreign people.

These women have opened up their lives to him over time. One story was particularly painful. A young Korean girl was torn from her family and sent up to Manchuria. When the Soviets liberated that area, they let her free, but did not tell her where she could go. She could only speak Chinese, as she had lived in Manchuria almost her entire life. Eventually, she made it back to her family in Korea, only to find that she was a stranger to them and worse, a foreigner. She felt alienated, and eventually went back to her new home in Manchuria.

One woman at the Sharing House, however, talks about how she actually fell in love with a Japanese officer who was a regular customer of hers. He was a kamikaze pilot, and he taught her to sing a song in Japanese that poetically describes what he would have to do when he left her. She can still sing it to this day.

It was also strange, even slightly disturbing, to hear about how the Americans treated these women when we liberated Korea. The Americans understood the concept of a brothel, of course, and thus thought that the Japanese had just set up prostitution stations throughout their empire. Before the war was over, but as the Americans took different areas from the Japanese, the Americans would just leave the “brothels” running, never imagining that the Japanese had conscripted these women from their homes. Whenever Dr. P. would talk to one woman in particular, she would say that the Americans were always very nice to her. He later found out that the only reason she thought this was that the Americans would pay her for her services. The Japanese did not.

These days, the women mostly sit around Sharing House and watch television. They receive visits from media people and students and even just curious passersby. Once a week, they go to Seoul to protest at the Japanese embassy because the Japanese government refuses to apologize for the conscriptions. The Japanese view is that reparations paid in accordance with the 1945 treaty was supposed to cover all the atrocities the Japanese military took part in, both known and unknown. Many of the comfort women are still unknown today, in fact. They wait until their husbands die to avoid dishonoring them, and even then they risk being ostracized by the rest of their family if they come forward. Korea is a shame culture, and there is apparently much shame in being a comfort woman, even if you were a victim.

You can visit Sharing House if you ever travel in Korea, and I think I will visit someday this year. They have scheduled times when a translator can be there for those who only speak English. Maybe when I go, though, I will be able to talk a little with these living members of history myself.