Women
and the World War II
Comfort
Women: History and Testimony
It is estimated that between one
and two hundred thousand female sex slaves were forced to deliver sexual
services to Japanese soldiers, both before and during World War II. These women
were known as comfort women and the Imperial Conference, which was composed of
the emperor, representatives from the armed forces and the main Cabinet
ministers, approved their use by Japanese soldiers. The term "comfort
women" refers to the victims of a "premeditated systematic plan
originated and implemented by the government of Japan to enslave women
considered inferior and subject them to repeated mass rapes," said Michael
D. Hausefeld, one of over 35 lawyers in his firm representing the former sexual
prisoners in a class action lawsuit currently pending against the Japanese government.
The testimonies of former comfort women have changed the interpretive framework
for research on the issue and for what counts as truth. As a result, a much richer,
detailed, and more critical understanding of the events and processes that
defined the comfort women system becomes possible.
Since ancient times, prostitutes
in Japan chose to sell their bodies either for family, poverty, or for saving
her husband and her children. More or less, their sacrifices were seen as
positive. But, being forced to become comfort woman by Japanese is seen as
negative. The difference between the Japanese prostitutes and comfort women is
that the comfort women did not choose to be trapped as a sex slave and they
were not paid for what they did. However, The United States Office of War
Information report of interviews with 20 comfort women in Burma found that the
girls were induced by the offer of plenty of money, an opportunity to pay off
family debts, easy work, and the prospect of a new life in a new land,
Singapore. On the basis of these false representations many girls enlisted for
overseas duty and were rewarded with an advance of a few hundred yen. In 1931,
when the Japanese army invaded Manchuria, “comfort houses” made their first
appearances. These comfort houses were created to provide the Japanese soldiers
with outlets for their sexual needs. In the beginning, there were only a few
comfort houses but after the Nanjin Massacre occurred in 1937, many more were
added, basically to every place that the Japanese were stationed.
The testimony of the comfort
women, where it can be verified and reinforced, is among the most compelling
and important kinds of evidence available for documenting the women’s
experience and the interplay between official policies and the peoples of
colonized and occupied territories under wartime conditions. In 1984, a
Japanese journalist and feminist Matsui Yayori (1934-2003) published a short
article in Asahi Shinbun, which marked the first time for any major newspaper
to address the issue. Matsui’s interviewee, a former comfort woman whose name
was not disclosed, was a Korean living in Thailand. She spoke of her experience
this way:
“The
life of comfort women was this--during the day doing laundry of soldiers’
clothes, cleaning the barracks, and some heavy labour such as carrying
ammunition, and at night being the plaything for the soldiers. There were days
when I was made to serve scores of men beginning in the morning. When I
resisted--even just a little--I was beaten by the supervisor, pulled by my
hair, and dragged around half-naked. It was a subhuman life.”
In the fall of 1991, after the
Japanese government denied the involvement of the wartime state and its
military in the matter, Kim Hak-soon testified before the Japanese public. Her
testimony, translated, recorded, and later published, began with her half
century of silence and the decision eventually to break that silence:
“For
these fifty years, I have lived, by bearing and again bearing the unbearable.
For fifty years, I have had a heavy, painful feeling, but kept thinking in my
heart about telling my experience some day. . . As I try to speak now, my heart
pounds against my chest, because what happened in the past was something
extremely unconscionable . . . Why does the Japanese government tell such a lie
(to deny its knowledge of comfort women system)? Actually, I was made into a
comfort woman, and I’m here alive.”
How should historians and
educators use the voices and testimonies of comfort women, as well as those of
other marginalized groups? It seems to me that we should strive for a
sensitive, sensible, and critical approach to them. It is urgent to educate
students and the public about the complex issues involved in the relationship
between history and testimony, so that they can meet the intellectual and moral
challenges that the history of comfort women and other sensitive historical
issues pose for later generations. Postmodern debates can help to sensitize
students and the public to become informed listeners and readers of testimonies
and to effectively engage the controversies surrounding them. Those who hold
classic, notions of historical objectivity, and who emphasize teaching only
“the facts”, may remain vulnerable in contemporary debates over history and
testimony, if only because they are less equipped to deal with attacks
employing postmodern language as in the case of “history as story.” Today’s
effective citizenship requires understanding of the nature, power, and limits
of testimonies in constructing historical knowledge, as such knowledge is a
major source of national identity.
