Comfort Women

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.