hankyoreh

Notes of encouragement for former comfort women at the War and Women's Human Rights Museum in Seoul. (Lee Jong-keun, staff photographer)

The Hankyoreh ran the first installment of a series about the comfort women issue in its Jan. 4, 1990, edition. The articles were written by Yun Chung-ok, a professor at Ewha Womans University at the time, who traveled to Hokkaido, Okinawa, the Thai city of Hat Yai, and Papua New Guinea and reviewed related documents. That November, 37 women’s groups launched a council to tackle the Jeongsindae issue, called the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan. In August 1991, the late Kim Hak-sun bravely came forward to testify about her experience as a comfort woman, one of the women forced to work in brothels for the imperial Japanese army. Thus it was that the comfort women issue was brought to the attention of Korean society after having been kept under wraps for decades following the country’s liberation from Japanese rule.

On May 7, 30 years later, former comfort woman and women’s rights activist Lee Yong-su held a press conference that precipitated a scandal involving the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issue of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (Korean Council; the name was changed in 2018) and its former chair Yoon Mee-hyang, a scandal that has raised grave questions about the future of the comfort women movement. While some criticize the movement for having stopped focusing on the victims, others counter that the movement is too complex for such a cut-and-dry assessment.

Over its three decades, the movement has been affected by various factors, including ethnic nationalism and South Korea-Japan relations, and has spanned a range of domains, including women’s rights, history, and diplomacy. The claims by a few former diplomats that the Korean Council was solely responsible for the long-delayed solution of the comfort women dispute between South Korea and Japan (a dispute that the two states are supposed to resolve) has provoked fierce criticism as being unwarranted and inaccurate. When we regard Lee Yong-su’s statement as being a message not only for Yoon and the Korean Council but for “South Korea, citizens of the world, and all of us” (in the words of Kang Sung-hyun, a research professor at Sungkonghoe University), this controversy can help us to genuinely “carry on what [the comfort women movement] has achieved over the past 30 years” (as Lee Yong-su desires). Following Lee’s second press conference on May 25, the Hankyoreh spoke with a number of activists and researchers.

A mural depicting a Wednesday demonstration on a wall in front of the War and Women's Human Rights Museum in Seoul. (staff photographer)

“The top priority for the victims is being compensated and restoring their reputations, while the civic groups also want to work on the issues of education, institutionalization, and memory. That’s bound to create a disconnect. Another issue is that Japan hasn’t taken responsibility and the [South Korean] state hasn’t done what it ought to do, leaving the private sector to pick up the slack. That creates conflict inside the private sector, in a manner similar to bickering inside the labor movement,” said Lee Sin-cheol, director of the Asia Peace and History Institute.

“[The government] effectively scrapped the secret agreement reached on Dec. 28, 2015 without coming up with a meaningful alternative, and the victims and activists are still being neglected. This can’t be solved by simply having Yoon step down [from her seat in the National Assembly]; the government needs to put its diplomats to work,” said Lee Jae-seung, a professor at the Konkuk University Law School.

Yang Ching-ja, co-director of Japan Nationwide Network for Resolution of Japan’s Military “Comfort Women” Issue, has been an advocate for the comfort women in Japan since the 1990s. Her first response was to express regret: “The victims’ wounds are deeper than people often think.”

“But it’s ridiculous to claim, as some newspapers are doing, that the Korean Council has prevented the comfort women issue from being resolved. It was the Korean Council that felt the most pain about the failure to reach a solution,” Yang said.

After the international comfort women tribunal was held in 2000, the Korean Council drew up a plan to shut down and seriously considered changing its name on several occasions. But its name had already gained wide symbolic significance, and there seemed little point in changing the name of an organization that would soon be closing anyway. “I had no idea we’d keep going so long,” said Kim Bok-dong, a former comfort woman, in an interview before her death last year.

The former comfort women came forward to testify 45 years after Korea’s liberation, but 30 years have passed without the issue being resolved. Ultimately, some say, much of the blame rests on the South Korean government and society.

“The movement for justice and truth and the civic groups behind it have faced so many tasks and challenges that they’ve lost their energy and edge. We’ve placed the burden on too few people for too long. During that process, [the activists] have grown rigid and bureaucratic and have probably pushed the former comfort women and their past to the side. Lee Yong-su’s current complaint can be seen as the result of another kind of injustice that we’ve all committed,” said Lee Un-sunn, professor emeritus at Sejong University.

“One factor here is that the government has relied on the existing civic groups instead of tackling the issue itself, which has caused resources to concentrate in specific groups and has led to the monopolization of comfort women research,” one professor of women’s studies said. A bill was submitted to the National Assembly that would have launched a state-funded comfort women research institute, but that bill was thwarted by opposition from the United Future Party.

The former comfort women and the Korean Council have worked hard to persuade the world that the comfort women issue is one of human rights that transcends the diplomatic dispute between South Korea and Japan and is ultimately about wartime violence against women. But the fact is that the movement’s arguments have taken on an unduly nationalistic interpretation in South Korea.

“The unique status of this movement in Korean society is that the stories of the victims and survivors have transcended the level of the individual and combined with victimhood nationalism to produce a narrative that does not permit any gray areas,” wrote Cho Min-ah, a professor at Georgetown University, in a column published in a webzine called “Third Age.” But Cho also wondered whether “the movement could have achieved its current successes if the Korean Council had not played up victimhood nationalism.”

Some experts have taken a more critical stance. Lim Jie-hyun, director of the Critical Global Studies Institute (CGSI) at Sogang University, recognized the “immense importance” of the Korean Council’s “contribution to having wartime sexual violence defined as a crime against humanity.” But he wasn’t so positive about the movement’s methods, including the comfort women statues that have popped up around the world. “The customs surrounding the remembrance of past tragedies in Korean society have not been framed or taken shape through proper debate between historians; instead, they rely excessively on the binary opposition between support for and opposition to Japan,” Lim said.

“It’s undeniable that the movement has changed, moving away from the feminist approach and adopting nationalistic methods, and that there has been a tendency to regard the former comfort women as permanent victims,” said one scholar of women’s studies who declined to be identified.

The biggest concern for experts and activists is that the recent scandal will empower historical revisionists and the right wing to erase the comfort women.

“After the comfort women agreement on Dec. 28, 2015, the main point argued by historical revisionists is that the Korean Council — a group that they describe as being nationalist leftists and North Korean toadies — has blocked reconciliation between South Korea and Japan and has prevented the victims from being heard. This scandal is also connected to [their attempt to] rewrite the narrative. On the other hand, some members of the progressive establishment regard this as an extension of the Cho Kuk scandal and have come out in defense [of the Korean Council], which has obscured some of the important issues in the controversy,” said Kwon Myoung-a, a professor of Korean literature and director of Institute for Gender and Affect Studies at Dong-a University.

“Approaching this controversy as a battle for truth between the former comfort women and the activists or framing this as the former comfort women talking about peace and the Korean Council being anti-Japanese reflects ignorance about [the movement’s] three decades of history and a misunderstanding about the essence of the controversy,” said Kang Sung-hyun, the Sungkonghoe University professor.

Kang noted that there was an immense backlash in Japanese society to the inclusion of the comfort women issue in textbooks following the Murayama Statement and expressed his concern that the situation in Korea could develop along similar lines.

On Tuesday, Rhee Young-hoon, principal of the Syngman Rhee School, and others held a debate at a hotel in Seoul in which they promised to “reveal the truth” behind the Korean Council’s comfort women movement. During a press conference held at the same location, they once again argued that Korean society was suffering from “flawed research and a delusional impression” about the comfort women.

While the ideas of education and exchange between South Korean and Japanese young people that Lee Yong-su proposed may not be adequate, they in fact represent what the Korean Council and other researchers have called for and indeed carried out since the 1990s. The Korean Council and the National Movement for Resolving the Issue of the Military Comfort Women organize a yearly program called “seeds of hope” that brings Japanese students on field trips to Korea.

The fact that Lee made her tearful appeal and recounted painful memories despite the successes achieved over the past 30 years gives Korean society cause to reflect upon whether it has taken the individual victims’ pain and dishonor as seriously as its demand for Japan to take legal responsibility and make an official apology.

Early in the morning on May 26, the day after Lee held her second press conference, yet another former comfort woman residing at the House of Sharing, in Gwangju, Gyeonggi Province, passed away. All the funeral proceedings were conducted privately, according to the wishes of the deceased and her bereaved family members. This woman’s death brings the number of surviving comfort women registered with the South Korean government down to 17.

By Kim Young-hee and Ko Myung-sub, senior staff writers, and Park Da-hae and Kang Jae-gu, staff reporters

Please direct comments or questions to [english@hani.co.kr]