Problematizing Wartime Sexual Violence

 

The testimony of Haksoon Kim, a victim-survivor of the Japanese military’s “comfort women” system, was instrumental in unleashing the research on war and sexual violence internationally. With more research, it has been revealed that wartime sexual violence is not a single soldier’s deviant action but rather a systematic sexual crime done by violently controlling and supervising women’s sexuality as part of the “soldier-making” process. Furthermore, the “comfort station” issue, that was publicized only after half a century, revealed to us two things: 1) that history consists of a “selective memory,” and 2) that oppressive sexual norms have been forcing rape victims to stay silent for a long period of time. 

 

Translated and published in Korea in August this year, The Comparative History of War and Rape (translated by Jaekil Suh, Eo Literary Publishing, 2020) offers a historically comparative perspective on existing wartime sexual violence research by collecting various aspects of it including that on the Korean “comfort women” issue, the Japanese “comfort women” issue, Japanese soldiers’ perspective on “comfort” facilities, Japanese women who were left behind in Manchuria and their experiences of rape on their way back [to Japan], and brothel facilities that existed within the Nazi’s concentration camps.

 

▲ The Comparative History of War and Rape, written by Ueno Sizko et al. (Translated by Jaekil Suh, Eo Literary Publishing, 2020)

 

The book’s overall objective and methodology are shown well in Ueno Sizko’s introduction. The primary discussion that her previous book Nationalism and Gender (1999) dealt with—the criticism of the “victim model”—is extended in it. Ueno had criticized how a rape survivor’s testimony is often standardized to fit the society’s expectations and definitions of what a survivor should look like.

 

The Comparative History of War and Rape demands the problematization of various sexual crimes by applying the idea of ‘the continuum of sexual violence,’ which arranges rape, prostitution, dating, and marriage on a continuum to examine “what is and what is not problematized within that series” (page 29). In particular, it develops more complex conditions for “what can or cannot be problematized” by placing the relationship between an assailant and a victim of the continuum of sexual violence in a war setting within the context of ally/enemy and hostile/occupied/gray-zone territories.

 

Ueno Sizko’s “Female Agency”

 

Furthermore, Ueno introduces the female victim’s “agency” as an important factor of intervention in the method of problematizing sexual violence. According to Ueno, agency refers to “an free activeness that is exercised even under constrained conditions by someone who is neither a completely free primary agent without any burdens nor an entirely passive object” (page 40). The concept seems to originate from understanding women as active entities that can enact a survival strategy even under systematic oppression, which is a departure from the [existing] method of understanding women only as passive, subordinate beings in a [man-made] structure. Borrowing Ueno’s expression, we can say that it is to overcome “the difficulty of structure and primary agent.”

 

To put it roughly, there are two main questions to ask while tackling the issue of “comfort women.” The first question is “what is a ‘comfort station’?” and the second, “who are the ‘comfort women’?” Asking the first question reveals the face of the Japanese military, which managed and maintained the sexual exploitation system called “comfort stations.” However, this can leave out the other various agents that existed in the comfort stations. Asking the latter question clearly exposes the “daughters” who were driven out of their families due to poverty, the brokers who deceived them, and the lives lived in these “comfort stations”. This, however, can obscure the sexual violence system of “comfort stations” and the subject that is responsible for this system. This is the dilemma that Ueno suggests: “the difficulty of structure and primary agent.”

 

But Ueno points out that an irony occurs by introducing the concept of agency: “Women were not only the victims of history but also perpetrators as well as accomplices” (page 40). Women can formulate survival strategies under an oppressive structure, but these can lead to recreating that very structure. Ueno argues that due to this dilemma, women’s survival strategies can be a stumbling block in problematizing sexual crimes as well as having the potential to strengthen the ‘victim model.’

 

Why Call a Sexual Exploiter and a Victim “Partners”?

 

I agree with Ueno’s argument that women should not be regarded only as subordinate to the structure. However, the issue is whether ‘agency’ is functioning as it’s supposed to even in specific analytic situations. Let’s take a look at Ueno Sizko’s text below.

 

“A similar case can be said of the ‘comfort women.’  The Korean ‘comfort women’ who were forced to take Japanese citizenships under Japanese colonization, as Yuha Park (2014) points out, dressed themselves in a Japanese way, used Japanese names, and spoke Japanese. It is unquestionable that they—being the Japanese army’s ‘partners’—also were the subject of hatred and abhorrence to the people whose land was being occupied by the Japanese army. However, the defeat of the Japanese army meant liberation to Korea. It must have been a complicated situation in Korea, after the enemy had been defeated, for Korean ‘comfort women’ or Korean forced laborers and soldiers who were considered ‘partners’ of the Japanese military, even though they were mobilized forcefully.” (page 53)

 

By quoting Yuha Park, Ueno calls “comfort women” who “dressed themselves in a Japanese way, used Japanese names, and spoke Japanese language” the Japanese military’s “partners.” However, even if the survival strategies of the Korean “comfort women” actually took place as Ueno argues, can we see her prescription of calling them “partners” as an accurate analysis showing the “constrained conditions”?

 

To put it simply—whether they’re Korean, Japanese or Chinese, no “comfort women” can be called “partners” of the Japanese military because the “comfort stations” were a sexual exploitation system. If the women are defined as partners, the idea of the sexual exploitation system disappears. This is not an issue of decolonized nationalism but an agenda of feminism. In a “comfort station”, a soldier is the perpetrator and a comfort woman the victim of a sexual exploitation.

 

The Language of Yuha Park and Ueno Sizko and the Language of Japanese Soldiers and Nationalist [Korean] Men

 

Additionally, let’s take a look at the following scene.

 

[‘Korean ppi[old-fashioned slang for sex workers] are nice because they don’t get diseases. The superiors have Japanese prostitutes and we have Korean ppi. But the superior bastards have been secretly invading our areas.’

 

Just as it is written above, it is said that Korean comfort women were nice.

 

There were two reasons.

 

One was that some pompous Japanese ppi were cold to mere foot soldiers.

 

The second was that whatever they did, Korean ppi tried their best to prove that they were better than Japanese women.

 

Moreover, as young as they were, they were healthy, honest, and pure-hearted. (…)

 

On the front lines, a mere soldier and a Korean ppi shared some things in common and were like friendly partners.]

 

▲ Ilmyun Kim’s The Emperor’s Army and the Korean Comfort Women (三一書房, 1976) and Jongkuk Lim’s The Comfort Women Chronicles』 (Ilwolseogak, 1981)

 

The text above is an extract from the famous nationalist journalist Jongkuk Lim’s The Comfort Women Chronicles (Ilwolseogak, 1981). Though Jongkuk Lim is listed as the compiler of The Comfort Women Chronicles, this book actually is a translated version of Ilmyun Kim’s The Emperor’s Army and the Korean Comfort Women (天皇の軍隊と朝鮮人慰安婦)(三一書房, 1976). Ilmyun Kim’s writing was an effort to prove the ‘comfort women’ issue by extracting and collecting from the soldiers’ recollections and from literature before the actual research on comfort women took place. (For a translation of the discussion and analysis of the flow of texts of nationalist men on ‘comfort women’, see “Korean ‘comfort women,’ a floating emblem—with a focus on Ilmyun Kim and Jongkuk Lim’s ‘comfort women’ texts pre-1991” by Jieun Lee, Manchuria Research, Manchuria Conference, 2018.)

 

As it is pointed out in Hirai Gazko’s essay included in The Comparative History of War and Rape, the description of “comfort competition” as an attempt to guard the nation’s dignity is entirely from a soldier’s point of view. As it is shown in the scene above, in the midst of no distinction between the voices of a Japanese soldier and a nationalist man, it eroticizes Korean women as “comforting creatures” and calls them the “partners” of Japanese military.

 

What is problematic is that these nationalist men, Ilmyun Kim and Jongkuk Lim, translated the Japanese soldiers’ point of view without a critical mind. The linguistic and ethnic translation of the recollection of the Japanese soldier took place but the gender translation did not.

 

Then what does it mean when the language of Yuha Park and Ueno Sizko and the language of Japanese soldiers and nationalist men are identical? This can mean either the language of Yuha Park-Ueno Sizko has a perspective of empire-man that colonizes women or they failed in developing the language of explaining activeness that functions even under constrained conditions. In order to make a reason for a “gender beyond nationalism,” one must develop a language apart from nationalism. (To be continued in the next article.)

 

※ This article’s author, Jieun Lee, is a researcher concerned about the narratives lying in the nations’ borders, such as the Japanese military’s ‘comfort women,’ military town women, and North Korean defector women. Recently she published a book, Refugee, A Refugee-tized Life (Galmuri, 2020) with her colleagues and presented essays including “The Interpretative History of the Nation-state’s Vietnam War and the Stateless Women’s Battleground” (The Eastern Journal, 2020), and “Assigning Blame for Representations of Women”(Criter, 2020). This text is an edited extract from “Toward a ‘comparative-intersectional’ perspective on war and sexual crime issues”, Korean Literary History Research 73, 2020)

 

Published: November 6, 2020

Translated by: Seung-a Han

*Original article: http://ildaro.com/8886

 

◆ To see more English-language articles from Ilda, visit our English blog(https://ildaro.blogspot.com).

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