Backstory: MOULTING No. 6
Friends, it’s been a while! I’ve been so busy with my show, WATER MEMORY, but now that the show is underway, I can dedicate time to my MOULTING series again.
For this month, I will be digging into the stories of Comfort Women. This was hard. Really hard. To read about the atrocities committed on the bodies of the women has been so painful. So, warning for you, my readers. I won’t go into too much detail about the violence here, but some of the links I will share contain information that’s hard to process.
After reading much of the material I could find on the internet (several listed at the end of this post), and after reading the beautiful, heart wrenching book, Grass, by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, I felt overwhelmed by how the stories of the comfort women have been politicized and how we as inheritors of their stories need to not forget the resilience of the women who survived and who continue to fight for their stories to be heard. In the politicizing of the issue of the comfort women, we can easily forget that each of the women were girls when they were taken from the safety of their homes and thrust into brutal situations no one could prepare themselves for. In the politicizing, we lose the women’s individual voices.
My youngest daughter is 11 years old. I wonder what her life would be like if we were living in a Korea under Japanese colonial rule. I wonder what our options would be if we were poor. Many girls who were “conscripted” were her age, or not much older. I say “conscripted” because that’s one of the debates historians raise. Some say the girls knew exactly what they were signing on for, they were volunteering for some service to the military. But most personal stories of comfort women tell of kidnapping or being lied to: they were told they would work at a factory overseas and make money for their family, when in fact, the reality of these comfort stations were prisons where the young girls were abused and raped daily.
In the politicizing of the comfort women, we can easily forget that people are vulnerable when they don’t have enough to eat. And that they can easily fall into traps set out by a system that doesn’t care about your humanity, that sees you as a disposable body.
The Japanese military purposely took women from Japan’s colonies. They purposely preyed on girls from poor families. They purposely took girls of a certain age, and especially from Korea and China, two Confucian cultures that valued virginity in women before marriage.
When I was a little girl in Korea, I never met 이모, my aunt on my dad’s side. 오빠, my older brother, on the other hand, got to go visit her and her family during his school breaks for long periods of time and when he returned from these trips, he’d regale me with stories of running around the countryside and of scary visits to the cemetery with his cousins. I finally met 이모 in my 20s, on one of two visits I’ve made to Korea. What struck me so much at the time was how young she looked in comparison to 이모부, her husband. 이모부 looked, in some ways, older than 할머니, 이모‘s mother, my grandmother. When I asked my parents about this, they told me that 이모 had to marry quickly because they were afraid she could get kidnapped by the Japanese and sent off as a comfort woman. All kinds of questions rose up in my mind. So 이모 had to marry a man as old, or older, than her mother? Did she have a choice in the matter? Was 이모부 a man with enough standing in society she found protection in the marriage? These were questions I couldn’t ask and even if I were to ask them, they would be irrelevant now, after all these years. Because what did it matter when the alternative was so awful and so painful that the women who suffered as comfort women are still suffering today? My 이모 had found protection, regardless of whether she had a happy marriage or not. After all, 이모 and 이모부 were still married and living together when I met them and 이모 must have been in her 70s by then. My memory of them is laced with the story my parents told me, a story that they don’t talk about. It’s a memory of a time many wish to forget because it is too painful to remember.
That pain is what so often makes people not want to talk about the comfort women. It’s what made the survivors hide their pains and their stories in shame. But many are realizing now that those pains, those stories, need to be told because if the survivors don’t tell their truth, the truth is in danger of being distorted by academics and historians, by politicians who want to present their own version of history.
I don’t remember the first time I learned about comfort women. Sadly, I seem to have known about them for a long time, their history coming up whenever Japanese colonial rule of Korea came up. In our family, the unspoken sentiment was, we were at least spared THAT.
Can there be enough compensation to make up for all that was taken from the comfort women survivors? The phrase “comfort women” feels harmful too. There has been so much back and forth between the Korean government and the Japanese government. The various decisions by both governments over the years on behalf of the comfort women have never been satisfactory to the women themselves. No one seems to be listening to them.
Very few survivors are still with us. And those who are still with us are nearing the end of their lives, but their goal is to make sure people remember, so that this never happens again. I am grateful to them for this.
I think about the reparations that’s due African Americans in our country. I think about the Indigenous People in our country. Their fates are similar to the small group of women still standing to be seen as human, still asking us to see the atrocities they endured, still reminding everyone the importance of remembering history and taking responsibility for all human lives.
I have chosen to focus on the Korean comfort women, but you will discover in the links below that Japan took women from many many different countries. The majority, though, seem to have come from Korea.
Story of Kim Bok Dong (video interview; Kim Bok Dong passed away shortly after this interview)
Who are the “comfort women” and why are the US based memorials so controversial?
Why These World War II Sex Slaves Are Still Demanding Justice