_____________________________________________________________________________‘STARE INTO MY FEAR’:Contemporary Japanese Narratives on the “Comfort Women”
Michiyo Miyake_____________________________________________________________________________
Translated by Polly Barton, Andrew Maerkle

Contents

Preface
Part 1

Stare Into My Fear

Part 2 Interview Transcriptions
Part 3 Project Journal
Bibliography

Suppose I feel a pain which on the evidence of the pain alone, e.g., with closed eyes, I should
call a pain in my left hand. Someone asks me to touch the painful spot with my right hand. I do
so and looking round perceive that I am touching my neighbour’s hand ( meaning the handconnected to my neighbour’s torso).
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Preliminary Studies for the “Philosophical Investigations”

Writing the rifts that can never be closed up, the traces of the events’ violence as scars into ourpresent stories—it is that which the possibility of sharing the memories of the events is stakedupon.
Oka Mari, Kioku/monogatari (Memories/Stories)

My hair is falling out. My teeth are falling out. I have rashes. After the amnesty deadline I
enter my house like a stranger. And barren. I sit around for days. Staring. [. . .]No poetry should come forth from this. May my hand fall off if I write this.
So I sit around. Naturally and unnaturally without words. Stunned by the knowledge of theprice people have paid for their words. If I write this, I exploit and betray. If I don’t, I die.
Suddenly my grandmother’s motto comes to mind: when in despair, bake a cake.
Antjie Krog, Country of My SkullI think it's less about the role of the person giving testimony and more about what attitude thelistener adopts toward him or her. How do they go about participating in the process ofrecollection, how do they remember “together” with the speaker a past that they themselves
have not experienced? Perhaps it is admissible to term this “mutual recollection”, even when
the two have no shared horizons, but what that means is creating a past that intervenes in “thenow”.
Yoneyama Risa, comment in a discussion featured in Tomiyama Ichirō ed. Kioku ga
katarihajimeru (The Memories are Starting to Speak)

A nation's literature must tell its citizens the truth, including that about its crimes, andliterature must voluntarily participate in confronting the past and the crimes it contains. I am
convinced of that.
Christa Wolf, “Nihon no dokusha e” (“To Japanese Readers”)

But this search for ways to turn memory into something that is neither toxic nor addictive must
begin by recognising the diversity of the dead and the complexity of the experience of war. It
must find ways of crossing the frontiers between ‘our dead’ and ‘theirs’, remembering both
together without denying the differences of their experiences.
Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Lest We Remember…The Future of the Past in Japan andAustralia”

Preface
As the testimonials of former “comfort women” from the 1930s and 40s publicly emerged in the
1990s, it became clear that public discourse about the Second World War as understood by the
postwar generation in Japan had to be put under critical reexamination. Up till now, the imageof the war most commonly shared was based on stories told by the survivors of the atombombs, Tokyo air-raid and the Battle of Okinawa, which created a narrative which highlighted
the cruelty of war and the importance of pacifism. The testimony of the so-called military“comfort women” has brought the Japanese face to face with the fact that there is a portion of
public memory that is deliberately not addressed when the Second World War comes up as a
discussion topic within schools, the mass media and various kinds of cultural forums in Japan.
This project is an attempt to examine the reception given within Japanese society to thetestimonials of former “comfort women” and to focus upon how accounts of the acts of cruelty
and war crimes committed by Japanese soldiers in the Imperial Army have been received after
the war. It is concerned with the question of how individuals have responded to these historicalfacts concerning the war crimes committed by the previous generation after they became
publically known from the 1990s onwards. It also demonstrates the variety of ways in whichpeople have confronted the past colonialism and its memories. The differing opinions between
generations on the topic, the confusion and embarrassment that results from knowing the facts,
the various reactions to the testimony, or else a failure to react and a lack of interest, thequestion of how coming into contact with the testimony altered people's view of the war or sent
it down a different track, and the question of what possibilities there are for meeting with thechildren and grandchildren of the victims or the perpetrators—by looking into all of theseissues, I hope to consider the way in which war memories are formed and passed on within
Japanese society.
On a personal note, it was having the opportunity to listen to the testimony of former “comfort
women” in 2010 which directly formed the impetus for me to conceive this project. Being
confronted by the physicality and the voices of women actually giving testimony is a very
different experience from that of reading their testimonials on paper, or learning about themthrough films or video clips. The shock that I received listening first-hand was overpowering,
and, as a listener, I didn't know how to take it in, or how I could put it into words. From theearnest pleas of those affiliated with the support movements to the fact-denying statements of1

the historical revisionists, there are countless commentaries about “comfort women” as apolitical issue—for the dominant discourse about the issue is political—but it seemed as
though the questions of the experiences that individuals had had in listening to the “comfort
women’s” testimony, or how this testimony can be accommodated within the body of other
war memories passed down via families or communities, had been neglected. It was with anawareness of this problem in mind I set out, voice recorder in hand, to visit those who werefamiliar with the testimonials of “comfort women.”
The interviewees include people of various age, profession, gender and nationality who had
come into contact with the testimony of “comfort women.” Honestly, eliciting people’s
reactions to the issue of military “comfort women” was no easy matter in present-day Japanesesociety where there is a strong tendency for even close friends to avoid political topics of
discussion—through fear of conflict, or political apathy, or else as a kind of defence
mechanism that makes people wary of engaging with troublesome topics. Many interviewees
were rather reluctant to talk about “comfort women,” which has now developed into aninternational political issue and is the subject of much media wrangling. Also, there wereinterviews that I could not include here for various reasons; some interviewees declined tocontinue after the first meeting, the others showed hesitation about their comments being
published. I realised from these experiences that some people who really had something to say
about this topic, understanding the pain of women as their own, preferred remain silent.
What follows is the scripts of these interviews, as well as a poetic essay concerning theexperience of listening to the live testimonials, and a journal. My initial plan was to keep myprivate thoughts to an absolute minimum throughout the project, but I later revised this idea,
owing in part to the guilt and discomfort I started to feel about placing myself in the position ofa reporter who simply threw out questions without being confronted by them. There was also
another reason for my decision, which was more personal. Through my dialogues with theinterviewees, I felt that this represented a chance for me to historicize my personalfamiliarisation with the issue that had taken place over several decades, and that I needed tonote these ideas down in some form. Therefore, the journal came to include personal entries
and autobiographical recollections amongst other notes documenting my work, excerpts fromnews reports, jottings about books I'd read, and so on.

2In carrying out this project, particularly in the process of creating the interview scripts, I tried
to create a communal workspace and share knowledge about the issue with others. This idea
was conceived because many of the interviewees told me that they experienced difficulty infinding reliable sources of information, which was understandable considering the current
political situation surrounding this issue. The Japanese government has been doing its best tocontrol the media, and the revisionists’ loud campaigns have flourished, particularly in cyber
space. So, building up a common ground of knowledge as to the historical facts, which may
seem indisputable to foreign readers, was extremely important in the process of interviews andcompiling the scripts. I often shared books, films and exhibition materials with theinterviewees, exchanged views about the contents, and discussed how the script should becompiled. After these experiences I naturally came to believe, if the act of writing could be
realised as a place of interaction and dialogue with others, then that would be the most fitting
way of dealing with this issue.
(14th August, 2014)

Note:
The title of the project comes from the words of Pak Yong-Sim, a former “comfort woman” living inNorth Korea: “I am speaking the truth. You must stare into my fear.” (Nishino Rumiko, Shōgen ni dōmukiauka (How Should We Approach Testimony? p.246.) I would like to express my gratitude to the
Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM), for whose help in the realization of thisproject I am much indebted.

3

4

Part 1
Stare Into My Fear

5

6

Stare Into My Fear
１
Speaking about the events, or else, the impossibility of doing so. Even those who have taken
the decision to speak cannot entirely own the ensuing narrative. The speaker plays a merely
passive role, their attempt at speech fated to be abortive. Those cries that spill out from thegnarled body. The loss of memory that is necessary for survival. Crouching down on the
shoreline of speech. Just when it appears that things are about to take shape, they are swept
away again by the counter-current, the memories of the events dragged back inside the body.
There they continue to torment the speaker relentlessly, and each time a wave hits, the supine
body cannot stop itself from being eaten away by the darkness.
These are the kinds of wounds where the only chance for survival is to not look at them
directly. Energy which has no other place to go attacks your body’s own cells. You are
overcome by the impulse to take someone by the shoulders and shake them, to scream with all
your might, but you know that actually, you cannot so much as whisper a plea for help. The
vast amount of energy used up by staying silent. This foreign entity that has remained lockedaway inside the body, not let out for a half a century, has distorted your internal organs, giving
rise to an untold amount of pain and discomfort which defies scientific explanation. It sets
about working upon every cell in your body—turns on you, the owner of that body, as anenemy. All the cells in your body bare their fangs. The unfathomably long span of time forwhich you endure that foreign entity buried inside your body.
２
When the words produced have a life staked upon them, when the words themselves are
bleeding, how can one accompany them? In particular: at the times when I am holding mybreath and straining my ears, and you are contorting your face in pain and wringing out thewords from your thin body to reproduce a picture of past violence, heedless of the tears thatare spilling down your face. At the times when I am to some extent responsible for those words
being required of you over and over again. You thrust your hands inside those memories thathave been lost to enable your survival, combat the attempts on the part of life itself to prevent
their vocalization, in order to gouge out the fleshy lumps of memory. The one giving testimony,and the one taking it in. In what relationship do you and I stand to one another at that time?

7Unlike the clumsy, uncomfortable language that is used to speak of the pain, your body isextremely eloquent. Talking of those things endangers your very existence, and just as the factof your standing there alongside the memory of those events sends emotion shaking its way
through your body, which then takes hold of me. The voice creeping up, crushing your organs.
Even someone like me who doesn’t speak your language can sense your rage, your despair,your desperation as it tears open the seal of your memory and tries to speak of the events. With
trembling hands, you hold out the lump of flesh you have ripped out. I take it in my two hands,
enraptured. What does staring into your fear really mean? Will I be able to see it?
３
When, after such a long time, the events hidden away deep inside the body are given a voice,you observe them shift across from one language to another. The interpreter must take those
bleeding words in straight away, chew them up, and then instantly spit them back out in adifferent language. I remember how one of the interpreters at the public hearings of South
Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Committee, said the following: “Because you use the first
person all the time. I have no distance when I say ‘I’ . . . it runs through me with I.”1 Silence,moans, sobs. When these are drawn into the body, recomposed in a different language, andgiven shape by the interpreter’s own voice, whose memory is that interpreter’s body reliving?
Interpreting: a task which requires accuracy and precision. The shock at what one’s own voice
is enunciating, the impulse to recoil from it. The emotional response, the contagiousness of it.
Such are the arduous conditions to which the body of the interpreter, too, is subject.
４
An auditorium: you are in the audience. People with passes strung from their necks flockaround the figures on stage, and no sooner have the cameras, held like weapons, given out
their first flash than the blood in your body begins to surge in the wrong direction, you sense
the ground wobbling beneath your feet, and you have to grab onto a nearby hand rail to catchyour breath. The flashes expose the bodies of the witness all at once. The hair tied up andslicked back, the oval face covered in deep wrinkles, the bony neck supporting it, the slim arms
sticking out of a man’s shirt—the cameras attempt to capture these as the marks of the “victim”.
With no place to hide herself on stage, she stays rooted to the spot. Her determined expression
vanishes, her shell snaps shut, and it seems to you that she has lost her face, though she still
has it. You find that the colour has drained from your vision, too.

8

The primitive violence inherent in the relationship between those who give testimony andthose who listen to it. You think of the distress of the speaker who has to face their memories ofthe events, again and again, aware all the time of the strangers’ gaze upon her. The camera
flash that rips open the space at that moment brands the figure on stage with a sign—a sign
which seems to you to rob her of all other traits. The cameras not only make visible the guilt of
the people staring at her on stage, but also unexpectedly reveal what lies inside of you. Your
field of vision loses its colour, and you struggle to make it through the confusion, to survive.
You witness the terror of all the nameless ones who chose to keep silent, even though theyknew that the responsibility for the events rested outside of themselves.
５
Staring into your fear: if that means also twisting back on myself so as to direct a fixed stare at
my own panic, my own horror.... Not a confusing of one event with another, and different again
to empathy or compassion, this is a field of experience hard to categorise. The violence of the
flash of light projected from me to you also shatters an airtight glass container buried deep
inside my body. It was my blood, my viscera that you saw lying in front of you through eyes
narrowed against the glare from the glass shards scattered all around. The memory of theevents that has made all your behaviour since seem strange. The seal on that memory has beenbroken, and now I hold it in my hand, as a fragment of the events that make up history.
To those who have given their testimony, and those who chose to remain silent—to all of those
who carry the events around with them.
“Stare into my fear,” you said.
Am I really ready to do that?

＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿
1 Krog, p.195.

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Part 2
Interview Transcriptions

10

11

Y.U. (University student)
The first time I encountered the word “comfort women” was in a history lesson in junior highschool. They weren’t mentioned in the textbook, but when we were learning about the
Nanking Massacre, the teacher explained about “comfort women”, and I remember it because I
found it shocking. After that, I didn't make any effort to find out about it off my own back, butthen, by coincidence, I ended up going to see an exhibition of photographs about comfort
women in Shinjuku2. After that, someone I know told me about the military “comfort women”
archive in Waseda3, and I went along and read all kinds of material about it.
Our history teacher in junior high school told us that, as well as everything that went on in the
Nanking Massacre, there were also some other victims called “comfort women”, who had been
abused sexually. I was surprised to hear that, but it wasn't beyond my imagining. I was quitetaken aback to know that there was actually a proper “name” given to those kinds of victims.
The word “comfort women” was new to me at that time, but I remember that just the fact thatthey had a name surprised me. The history teacher at that time was a young woman, in her
mid-twenties or so. She was a Japanese history teacher originally, though at that time she also
was teaching us world history. I went to an all girls' school, so it was only girls in the class.
Thinking about it now, I reckon that if it had been a male teacher, he probably wouldn't havesaid anything about “comfort women”.
I didn't talk with my friends about it... In fact, I've never talked about “comfort women” toanybody. When I went to the [WAM] archive in Waseda, I think the only person that I
mentioned it to was the person who'd told me about it. I didn't speak of it with my friends. I
went to the photograph exhibition alone, too. Why is that? Now that you ask me, I really
wonder why myself. I guess that there are all kinds of things that I find shocking when I
discover them, but then I work them through by myself and don't tell anybody else about them.

2

Exhibition of Ahn Sehong’s “comfort women” photograph series from 26th June – 9th July 2012,
held at the Nikon Salon in Shinjuku, Tokyo. The exhibition had been approved by the gallery’s
panel and plans made, and yet, before the exhibition began, Nikon announced its cancellation
without any discussion. The photographer launched a provisional injunction which was ratified by
the court, and the exhibition went ahead as planned, but included a ridiculous degree of security,with metal detection devices and huge numbers of security guards.
3
The Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM) is an archive museum in Nishi-Waseda,
Tokyo.

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I found out about the Ahn Sehong photography exhibition because I used to do photography
when I was at high school, and I'm into it. When you go to a photography show, there's usually
all kinds of flyers for other exhibitions, and I'm in the habit of picking them up. I think that
there was a poster or flyer for the Ahn Sehong show at another exhibition that I went to. I went
to see it by myself. I'd been to that gallery several times, but I'd never seen it that crowded
before. It's usually pretty deserted, in fact, but on the day I went, I could see from outside how
many people were inside, and wondered to myself what all the fuss was about. There werepolice there, not just in front of the gallery itself but outside the building too. We had our bags
checked, and had to go through a metal detector, like when you're getting on a plane. None ofthe people who were looking at the exhibition looked like the sort to be into photography,
either. They weren't looking at the pictures at all. It felt like a really strange situation.
I didn't know that there were former military “comfort women” who were still alive, but
looking at the photos in that exhibition I realized that there were, and that really took me bysurprise. I'd thought of the issue as something from the past, but when the people are still alive,
and you can see their faces in a photography exhibition, you realize that we're living in thesame age, and that came as a shock to me. Looking at the photos, I saw that they were living
really humble lives, and so I thought that maybe they weren’t getting any money from thegovernment. There was a brief explanation in the exhibition itself of how some of the women
can't go back to their native countries. They were taken out of Korea, and they're still in China,
and there are some of them who can't really speak either language well. They were taken out of
Korea at a young age, so their Korean isn't perfect, and then their Chinese isn't great either, andthey say that they're too ashamed to face their families, so they've remained in China. Learning
that, I felt incredibly sorry for them. It's not their fault that that stuff happened, and yet they
feel like they can't face their families…
[Looking at the photograph collection by Ahn Sehong, Over and Over: The Story of the Korean“Comfort Women” to the Japanese Military Who Were Left in China]4 I remember this one. I
wondered where she was looking… Oh, is the photographer a man? I thought it was a woman.
Wow, he was lucky that these old ladies agreed to talk to him about their experiences. You
know how, in the Rwandan genocide, the Hutu people were in the minority but they had
4

Ahn Sehong, Jūjū : chūgoku ni nokosareta chōsenjin nihongun ianfu no monogatari (Over and Over: The
Story of the Korean “Comfort Women” for the Japanese Military Who Were Left in China), Ōtsuki
Shoten, 2013.

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greater power?5 There were lots of rapes of the Tutsi people, and lots of people gave birth tobabies as a result. There's a photographer called Jonathan Torgovnik who made a series ofphotographs about the women who had given birth to children that were the products of thoserapes, and he’s a man as well.6 That surprised me, too. The idea that a man would interview
those women, and they'd answer his questions… I can't imagine what an interview like thatwould be like, and I wonder what it is that leads them to open themselves up to a man. Those
women are in a really pitiable situation too, some of them driven out of their homes by theirfamilies, and living with just their children where nobody knows of their existence, and they
say things like, “Sometimes I find myself wondering whether or not I really love this child.”
The women who have been raped start to feel like their own children are somehow part of thebrutality.
The first time I came into contact with the testimony of former “comfort women” was in the
Waseda archive. Reading all those painful stories, I had the illusion that my own body wasstarting to hurt for them. But I couldn't stop reading, and I read all the testimonies, and thenfelt intense nausea and depression. I don't think about [those women] during my everyday life.
But when I think about the antagonism between Japan and China, or Japan and Korea, I feel
uncomfortable at the way that people speak as though they didn't exist. And I felt like it's sucha sad thing that after those women have died, nobody will be able to conclude for certain that[“comfort women”] really existed.
The subject of “comfort women” doesn't come up at all in the course of my everyday life. My
mother owns a bar, which is marketed as a Chinese place, and all the girls who work there are
Chinese. Sometimes there's a problem that blows up between Japan and China over therightful ownership of islands, and the customers say things [to the Chinese girls working there]
like “You lot have been naughty,” as a joke. The girls know that they're just joking, so they say
things like, “That sort of talk isn't for here, it's got nothing to do with us,” and get out of it thatway. But even at times like that, the “comfort women” issue never comes up. I'm sure that
nobody knows about them, it’s all just kept hidden away in the dark. I wonder why that is. All
the political talk about it is so inorganic. It should be a discussion between people, a human5This is a mismemory on the part of the interviewee. It is, in fact, the Hutu who occupy the ethnic
majority in Rwanda, and the persecuted Tutsi who remain a minority people.
6
Jonathan Torgovnik, Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape, New York: Aperture,
2009.

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discussion. There are people who've been hurt, and I think that it's that kind of thing thatpeople should focus on. I think people hide from it because it's so raw. Everyone tries to turnaway from those kinds of things.
I've never spoken to my mother about “comfort women”. But I've been to Nanking, once, justby coincidence. I went with my father. My father had to go there for work, so I went along withhim. At that time, he said that people in Nanking didn't really like Japanese people, and weshould avoid speaking Japanese wherever possible because it was a bit dangerous. That was
before I knew about “comfort women”, but I wonder if I knew about the Nanking massacre
then? It was before I'd learnt about it in school, anyway. So in the lessons [on the Nanking
Massacre] in Junior High School, I was always thinking about how that had happened
there in Nanking, in the very place I’d visited.
(October 2013, Waseda)

K.O. (Literature Professor)
Whenever there was an article in the paper about the “comfort women” issue, I’d read it, but I
was never so concerned that I wanted to do something or take action. I guess I’d just readreports or introductory books and that was about it. It was never addressed in my school
education. For it to be taught in the elementary and middle schools of the time would have
been…well, I’m not sure they even teach it now. I’m a bit stuck when you ask me what kind ofawareness I had about it. I don’t think there was anybody who did it and enjoyed it of their own
volition. But even in Japan itself, there are stories about young girls being sold into the businessdown in Tokyo by their families whenever there was a famine in Tohoku and so on, so I think a
number of factors were involved. And of course I think there must have been people who
didn’t like it but had no other way to live and just gave in, and, as in the display today, there
must also have been people who were taken away without a clear idea of what it was about andthen only found out once they got there.7 So if you ask me what I think about it, I’m not sure
7

“Taiwan ‘Comfort Women’ Testimonies: How Ah-ma Were Made into Japanese,” the 11th Special
Exhibition at the Women’s Active Museum of War and Peace (WAM), Tokyo, held July 2013 – June
2014.

15

what to say.
It’s not like it was just about “comfort women”…Maizuru [in Kyoto Prefecture] was one of thedesignated ports for returnees arriving back from the Asian continent. There’s a museum there
about the evacuation experience, and in this case, it’s the Japanese prisoners of war who wereinterned in Siberia who are the victims. So even if you tour these places, in the end you still
don’t know what to say. In the flow of history, individuals are tossed about by someinsurmountable power, and the lucky ones were saved and able to return, but there were many
who died over there as well. I also thought this when I saw the Hiroshima Peace Memorial
Museum. In any case, there are people who get caught up in knotty situations and the only
thing you can say is that their lives were tragic. I remember the critic Kobayashi Hideo’s line,“History resembles the massive resentment of humanity.” I think what he said was right.
Today was my first time encountering testimonies by former “comfort women,” but when I saw
the display, I felt there were real people there. So from now on, whenever this topic comes up, I
think I’ll definitely remember what I saw today. Up to now, I’d basically understood it as a
general issue. In that sense, it was good to see this. I saw the photos of the survivors lined up at
the entrance of the Women’s Active Museum of War and Peace (wam). Everybody is so aged,
and some look a bit like my mother does now. I think they must have been beautiful when they
were young. When I went to the Chiran Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots, I think the photosof the young soldiers who flew off were also lined up that way. No, wait, maybe their names
were all written out together. I was also speechless then. Maybe all you can do is
look…Standing before someone who had that experience, anything you say would be empty.
That’s a powerful feeling. I feel sorry, but “sorry” is a flimsy word, isn’t it? But what else could
you say? “It was unfortunate” makes it sound like an abstract problem.
Whenever something terrible happens, and as long as they and their direct relations are not
involved, people will think, “I’m sorry. It’s such a pity.” But what they are thinking at the sametime is, “I’m glad it’s not me.” Nobody actually says so because it sounds egoistic, but I think
everybody feels it. Tolstoy wrote a story called The Death of Ivan Ilyich. The protagonist is a
man who dies at around the age of 45, but the first chapter is all about the reactions of hiscolleagues. They say things like, “He is dead, not I.” [On the surface] everybody says, “I’msorry,” or “It’s a pity,” but because it’s Tolstoy, you get deep down into human egoism.

16And then, although this is specifically a women’s issue, I wonder if I could really put myself intheir position. It’s something distorted by time and context. I mean, it's likely I’d have had tocarry a gun. When I was at university, I saw the film The Human Condition, and read the original
book by Gomikawa Junpei, and it was a really powerful work for me.8 I think Awashima
Chikage played the role of the brothel madam. The protagonist is a man named Kaji, and healone refuses to interact [with the soldiers who use the brothel]. Obviously, because it’s a film
he’s an idealized figure…and then there’s a scene where all these mean-looking soldiers troop
into the rooms of the brothel. To see it in the film is really ugly. And of course you’d look better
if you could act like Kaji. But that’s how movies are made. As I was watching, I was wondering
what it was like in reality. I think that situation must have existed. Maybe there were soldiers
who didn’t go, but I’m sure enough of them went. I’m not sure what I’d do if I were in thatsituation. I don’t really want to think about it.
I mean, my father was in Taiwan. Toward the end of the war, he was in an anti-aircraft unit in
Taipei, I think. His stories were relatively peaceful. He had two younger brothers, but the firstdied while he was still young and the other was killed in Burma. I think my father’s call-up
papers came later because he was the eldest son. I’m pretty sure I heard about him being
assigned to an anti-aircraft unit in Taipei. He was a private. And then my father’s younger sister
got married toward the end of the war. Her partner was younger than my father, but of ahigher rank, say, private first class. But because the guy was the fiancé of my father’s sister, myfather was the one acting superior. When they went out, the ranking soldier would have myfather sit on the bicycle behind him and peddle like mad so they wouldn’t be late – things likethat. The soldiers on watch were so surprised their eyes almost popped out. Those are thekinds of things I heard. Whenever they met up after the war they would bring up thesememories. But I never heard about “comfort stations”. I think my father was already marriedby then. I would ask him what it was like when the enemy planes appeared, and he told me
about it. He said they’d shoot off the guns, “Bang, bang, bang!” and never hit anything. If thesearchlights were left on too long, they’d end up getting targeted by the enemies, and thenthere’d be calls of “Take cover! Take cover!” because of the danger. That kind of thing. My
father was a cheerful guy, I guess. So I heard these humorous recollections, but I never heard
about “comfort women.”
8

Ningen no jyōken (directed by Kobayashi Masaki, starring Nakadai Tatsuya) is a six-part film thatwas produced over the period 1959-61. The film is based on Gomikawa Junpei’s novel of the same
name.

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In any case, since I was born after the war, there’s no way to know what it was really like…It
was around the time we got a television, so I must have been in middle school. The firstmemory I have is of a live-action documentary program about war. It was a 30-minute programwith a specific theme each time, covering things like the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Battle ofMidway, the Battle of Guadalcanal and so on, and I remember I used to watch it every week.
Even though I was a child, the primary interest for me was the fighting. Like, “I can’t believe welost here, dammit!” And then there were films. There was one called Storm Over the Pacific.9
Also, Emperor Meiji and the Great Russo-Japanese War.10 Things like that. It was interesting, likelearning about history. I think it must have been around elementary or middle school. I
stopped watching that kind of thing after I entered high school.
Also, there were several levels for thinking about Japan’s issues with the war. There was a kindof technical debate – had the Japanese won at Midway, the war would have unfolded
differently, and so on. Then, on a bigger scope, Japan’s actions can be considered within thecourse of world history. I’m no expert, so the interpretations change radically depending on
whose book you read. In some cases, I think, “We were reckless. Wasn’t there any way toachieve a compromise?” Other times I think, “In the end there was nothing to be done. That’s
what the situation dictated at the time.” So these big historical flows and then the concrete
tactical debates and then issues like the “comfort women” are all mixed up together. Thosemen who shot off their guns and intimidated the “comfort women” who were trying to escapewere not just doing it out of some sadistic perversion, but probably also had been given somekind of responsibility in the war. They resorted to control in order to protect that. If you’re in asituation where the “comfort women” don’t do as they’re told, and the supervisors know they’ll
get it from their superiors if nothing’s done about it, then they’ll try to maintain order even if it
requires a bit of violence. You get a sense these kinds of things went on. So even with this issue,
I get the feeling like, you can’t keep bringing it up as a single issue. Of course, I really do feel
sympathetic toward the people who were treated in such a cruel way.
And then, in these conditions, when I happen to catch some kind of history film or whatever, I
9Hawai Middouei daikai kūsen: Taiheiyō no arashi (directed by Matsubayashi Shūe) is a special-effects
war movie produced by Toho Co., Ltd. It was released in 1960.
10
Meiji tennō to nichi-ro dai sensō (directed by Watanabe Kunio) is a war movie produced by Shintoho
Co., Ltd. It received notoriety as the first film in which an actor (Arashi Kanjūrō) portrayed theemperor. It was released in 1957.

18

think our generation was really blessed. But it’s not because we were right…My parents’generation suffered so much during the war, and some of them died. As a result, the next
generation – though I’m 66 already – were in that sense able to live without any major events,
but now I feel like we don’t know what the future holds.
I’ve never spoken to anybody about the “comfort women” issue. Although I spoke with my wife
about it, like, “Now Miyake-san is bringing up this issue.” As far as taboos go, I’m generally not
one to worry about what people think are taboos. But if I did think this subject was taboo, I
wouldn’t be talking about it with you. I’m sure I would try to change the subject. But I don’t
worry about taboos so much. Sometimes, even when I’m talking with my wife I’ll mention
some indecent topic and end up getting scolded by her [laughs].
(February 2014, Shinjuku)

S.N. (Singer)
I’m not so clear about when I first heard about the “comfort women” issue, but somehow forme it was mixed up with the stories about the Japanese orphans left behind in China afterWorld War II. Those two issues are connected in my memory. I think it must have been when I
was in high school. Maybe in social studies class or something, one of the topics that came up
was about how some war orphans had come to Japan to meet their families, which had been
split apart by the war. And the existence of “comfort women” came up in that context. That was
the first time I think.
I never took a course on modern history so I never learned about the Pacific War or other wars
in class.11 It must have been a history class from an earlier part of my education, but I've
forgotten at which point it was. Maybe on the morning news that day, there was a report on
somebody who I think was a “war orphan” who had come from China, and there was this sceneof an elderly woman meeting her family. So the teacher brought up this story as a topic [in the11

In middle schools and high schools, Japanese history classes generally follow a chronologicalcurriculum that begins from antiquity and proceeds to the present, which often leaves relatively
little room for covering recent history.

19

class]. And then somebody must have asked a question or something. That was the first time I
ever heard the word “comfort woman.” I think the scene I saw in the morning news and thecontents of the discussion in the class became linked. Actually, I think the awareness that thiskind of thing happens was strangely real for me, like, I really felt that terror.
But there was no discussion [in the class] of what the word “comfort” signified. Just a brief
mention that there’s some issue to do with “comfort women.” I think the teacher was avoiding
explaining the meaning of “comfort” in “comfort women.” There was only a mention of theword itself. It was later that I learned on my own the facts about the “comfort women.” I guess I
went home and asked my mother about it or something. At the time, I still didn’t understand somuch about “comfort women,” but I remember I was really angry that Japan had allowed thiskind of thing to happen. And then I was thinking about how to process this news, and morethan seeing it as a major problem, it was more like, not like a “fire on the opposite shore,” but,even as you think, “Something horrible happened,” you end up getting detached from it.
I remember the scene [of the elderly war orphan reuniting with her family] because it was so
impressive. The idea of a family that was torn apart by war reuniting after all those decades
was shocking. I think it’s because even then I could imagine the experience of being torn apartfrom my family. Something that happened years ago was the reason behind the current news
and the woman finally getting to meet her family. I had a visceral sense of how the past isconnected to oneself.
When I heard this project’s theme is about “comfort women,” I realized I hadn’t taken it soseriously as a problem. Honestly, I was confused about how to think about it, how tounderstand it. I think that whether it’s the Japanese media or people’s understanding of thesituation, there’s been no maturation with regard to issues like the things that are actually
happening, the things that are allowed to happen, and I think this applies to me, too. I was
reminded that I have a low awareness of social issues. So, regarding the questions about the“comfort women” issue, like how much I had learned about it, and what kind of opinions I havebased on my knowledge of it, I thought I don’t really have any opinions.
For me, the experience of reading the script was bigger.12 As you read, you gradually become
12

At the request of the organizer, the respondent was asked to give a reading of a text on “comfort

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the person, like, that person’s experience becomes your own. As you read their voice, theirexperience becomes a part of you. There might be only the barest similarity with yourself, butsomething like an emotional experience emerges as your own memory. That’s really terrifying,or at least that kind of terror exists. But, also, their experiences of oppression are female
experiences. It’s like, how should I as a woman think about that oppression, or the pain of thatexperience [of being a woman]? I don’t have an answer, but in the end, with regard to what
happened, I guess I should think about it as a woman.
When I went to see the display at the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace (wam), thething that really stayed with me was reading the panels with the testimonies one by one.13 In
fact, more than a description in an article, seeing the raw words of each person gave me thefeeling that they were there, speaking in front of me. The same as when I read the script, I had
the sense the words were entering my body. Although I don’t have the same experience, when
I see the people talking I start to cry. I had a similar feeling, and felt I have some kind of anger
that wells up inside me, like, this cannot be allowed.
Beyond that, I can’t speak to the idea of actually having an opinion about the “comfort women”
issue. But this is something that’s actually happening, so maybe even now I can still dosomething to bring the women some kind of happiness. I don’t know what I can do. I’m notreally sure what I can do, but in any case, I realized there’s a part of me that’s angry about thesituation. It’s not something I can put into a statement like, “This is what has to be done.” It’s
something I can only express as a kind of physical opinion...
(February 2014, Harajuku)

women,” which was also recorded.
13“The Military Does Not Protect Women: Okinawa, Japan’s Military Comfort Stations and Sexual
Violence by the US Military,” the 10th Special Exhibition at the Women’s Active Museum on War
and Peace (WAM), Tokyo, held June 2012 – June 2013.

21

K.B. (University Adjunct Lecturer)
Unfortunately, I don’t remember the first time I came across the term “comfort woman,” but by
the time I really became aware of it, it was already an issue between Japan and Korea, or evensimply an international issue. The Japanese government’s denial of the issue is a negative
legacy for Japan, and I think, along with Nanjing, the fact is they want to make the whole thing
go away. I subscribe to the Asahi Shimbun and the weekly magazine Friday, so those are mymain sources of information, but needless to say I get much more information from Friday[which as a weekly can address stories newspapers do not]. But to be honest I can’t say I always
had the same deep interest in the issue that I’ve had since I saw the movie The Murmuring some
20 years ago. It’s one among a number of major issues including Minamata disease, Okinawa
and Nanjing, and I was aware that this is one of those things that the nation has been
constantly avoiding, trying to obscure the place of responsibility, and I think that was about it
for me.
The first testimonies by former “comfort women” that I ever encountered were in The
Murmuring.14 Along with being appalled, I thought that even if they don’t want to recognize
this organized, violent atrocity, the Japanese government (or military) must admit it happened.
I think I saw The Murmuring sometime between 1993 and 1995. I went to see it with my daughter,
who was between elementary and middle school at the time. There was a youth group in theunion for Kawasaki City employees. It was a very active group and my husband was a member,so we went to see the film because there were some other members who were tackling the issue
and had organized a screening. (My husband had already seen it, so he must have beenworking at reception, or something like that.) I don’t remember where the screening was held,
but it must’ve been some place like the civic center in Nakahara-ku. Both before and after thescreening there were discussions and appeals about the issue.
It’s just a shame that after we saw the movie, I don’t remember having any discussion with mydaughter about it, and I’m not even sure she remembers seeing the film. I have to ask her nexttime we speak. Probably, what I was thinking at the time is that this was a movie we should see,14

The Murmuring is a documentary film by Byun Young-Joo following the lives of the elderly
women who live in a residence for former “comfort women” known as the “House of Sharing.” It
was released in 1995. It was followed in 1997 by Habitual Sadness, and then in 1999 by My Own
Breathing, constituting an eventual trilogy of films about the women of the “House of Sharing.”

22and I wanted to show it to my children (in the end, my sons were busy with middle- andhigh-school club activities and couldn’t make it), but because it was a delicate issue and mydaughter was at a delicate age, it was hard to have a straightforward conversation. I don’t reallyremember the names of the women or their faces, but the atmosphere in that home and thepained way they spoke stays with me. Along with the pain in their hearts, these women who
escaped from hellish conditions had this strange brightness about them that was different fromresignation, and I thought that was maybe the piercing resilience they obtained throughexperiencing great hardship.
Until now, I thought about it relatively emotionally, but after seeing the display at the
Women’s Active Museum of War and Peace (WAM), I feel I have a pretty clear picture.15 For
example, what kind of women were taken by what route, by what means and at what time, howmany there were, and also, although there’s no end to it around the world, whether sexual
violence has ever been carried out at such a scope and by such means. I’d heard about the lies
and counterfeit solicitations, but got a concrete sense of it from the stories of the witnesses. I
felt it’s impossible to say, “There was no coercion,” about a situation in which women were
intimidated by soldiers with weapons when they were taken away, and violence was imminent
if they refused. I think the display is an important site for learning about the historical facts
because it deals with documents that are rooted in fact.
Until now, even though I didn’t have a precise grasp of all the facts, I just had this growing
sense of distrust that the country had to be concealing something again. Maybe this is my bad
habit? I don’t think there’s anything wrong with my “intuition” and “feelings,” but it’s an issueof having “all the facts,” so it’s important to know those facts. In that sense, I think that inseeing the display I was able to “harvest” the finer details of the history to date, and in
obtaining that kind of confirmation, I feel it’s become easier for me to speak to others.
Conversely, it’s the people who want to deny the facts who are invoking only their “feelings.”
It’s too bad that until now I haven’t had a chance to speak to people about the “comfort
women” issue outside of those who are already involved in related activities. Even in myimmediate community, I think there is a certain number of people who think we need to face it
15“Taiwan ‘Comfort Women’ Testimonies: How Ah-ma Were Made into Japanese,” the 11th Special
Exhibition at the Women’s Active Museum of War and Peace (WAM), Tokyo, held July 2013 – June
2014.

23

straight on because this is something that was done by the Imperial Japanese Army, but I get
the feeling that normal conversation is a really difficult situation for bringing it up. It’s not like
I’ve ever tried to broach the topic and failed or anything, but it’s weird how it never comes up.
When [Osaka Mayor] Hashimoto Tōru made his statement [in 2012 about “comfort women”
being a necessary evil], there were of course people who said it’s embarrassing or idiotic, butthat was it. Maybe if I had prompted those people to speak more, some different things might
have come out…But that’s one of my limitations. Now that I’ve learned all these precise facts, I
think I’ll have more opportunities to speak from now on.
The reason I feel that this issue is viewed as even more of a taboo than the Nanjing Massacre isthat in the end it’s related to sex. In Japanese society – and this includes myself – the culture
has never been one to talk directly about sex. On top of that, I think issues that connect to theunderside of society, like the way that licensed prostitution has long been normalized inJapanese society, are even more off limits. If that connects to the silence about such a major“crime,” then I think it’s inexcusable for the victims.
(March 2014, Saginuma)

M.M. (Language Instructor)
The first time I heard about military “comfort women,” I was either in middle school or highschool. The class on Japanese history was really boring, but it’s not like there was anything elseto do, so I was flipping through the pages of a textbook that had nothing to do with that day’s
lesson. I was interested in the Pacific War from when I was in elementary school, and readbooks and novels about the war, so I was curious to know how it would be treated in aschoolbook. That’s when I found a reference to Japanese military “comfort women.” It was the
1990s. It was 1991 when I advanced from elementary to middle school, the same year the first
former “comfort woman” in Korea went public with her story. At the time, there werereferences to military “comfort women” in the Japanese history textbooks, although I wasn’t
aware of the news about Kim Hak-Sun. I have no memories of hearing about “comfort women”
at home or school.

24

So my first encounter with the military “comfort women” issue was a purely linguistic one. I
got a powerful sense of discomfort from the sound and appearance of the word I’d found in the
textbook – “comfort women” – but without understanding precisely what it meant. I could
imagine that it had something to do with women, but because of the unnatural and stiff words
like “military” and “comfort,” I couldn’t grasp a concrete image. I couldn’t picture how theylooked or spoke. I felt it was the kind of word that turns living people into abstract concepts.
Also, because I had some idea that “comfort” had some kind of sexual connotation, I wasshocked by the gap produced by this oppressive language and the explicitness of the actions
associated with it. Like, what the hell is this? At the time I didn’t realize it was sexual violence,and part of a sexual slavery system carried out under colonial domination, but the premise of
the word – the idea that women at the frontline would give “comfort” to soldiers there – mademe want to throw up. That nausea was basically connected to the discomfort and frustration I
somehow regularly felt about the gaze society turns toward my sex, and the roles expected of
my sex, but at the time, instead of expressing it in words and thought, it manifested as animpulse to erase my physical sexual characteristics as something that should be denied.
There was a period after that when “comfort women” didn’t really come up in my awareness,but then at university, majoring in English Literature, I studied about the history of British
imperialism and the colonial independence movements, as well as issues related to historicalawareness. I had some interest in researching literature in the context of post-colonialism andimperialism studies, so I also learned about Japanese imperialism, and that was when I reallyencountered the “comfort women” issue.
From childhood I’d read testimonies and memoirs about the Pacific War, and also had acertain interest in how memories of war are passed on to future generations, but until I reallybecame aware of the “comfort women” issue, I didn’t have any perspective for thinking about
these issues in tandem with the offenses committed by the Imperial Japanese Army. I’d readrecords about the atomic explosions and the Battle of Okinawa, the firebombing of Tokyo, so I
knew how terrible war could be, but I think I understood it through an exceptionalization of
the damage Japan had suffered. Having the former “comfort women” go public with theirstories and getting to learn about the atrocities committed by the Japanese army allowed me torecognize the inappropriateness of the narrative that was built up around the war in postwar
Japan – a narrative that downplays critical views of the imperialism of the Japanese
government and the emperor system, while exceptionalizing Japan as the victim. War is about

25

killing, so there are two sides to every story, but compared to what we suffered, the facts about
the offenses we committed are easily forgotten. I realized how one-sided and fixated on ourown suffering the narrative of the war is in Japanese society, and also how deeply I had
internalized that narrative.
What shook me the most was the photo of the wooden plaques with the women’s names thatwere suspended in the “comfort station”. It was in some book – I think it was photo
documentation taken during the war – and there were these Japanese women’s names written
in black ink on the plaques. I don’t recall the names, aside from “Aiko,” but in the photo allthese common Japanese women’s names, names that many people have even today, were
written on the plaques and lined up in a big row. I knew that the women who were forced towork in the “comfort stations” were given Japanese names, and knew about the sōshi-kaimei
policy pressuring Koreans under Japanese rule to adopt Japanese names, but it was such ashock to see the photo of those wooden plaques all lined up and hanging together. I even foundthe names of family members and friends there. Although I didn’t see my own name in thephoto, I could imagine that among all the countless Japanese military “comfort stations”, there
must have been some place where someone was called by the same name as me. Who stole thenames from these women, and replaced them with “my” name? I was filled with doubts andanger. I was angry with the people who created and ran the “comfort women” system, angry
with the people who accepted that system as a matter of fact, angry at the fact that the sex ofthese women had been violated, their names stolen, and that they’d been reduced to the statusof sexual slaves. Since then, I always pay attention to the names when I read the testimonies.
Aiko, Mitsue, Kayoko, Namiko – through the names that were given to the women at the“comfort stations”, I feel I’m physically connected to this issue, and that I, too, am a part of thisissue.
The first time I heard the testimony of a former “comfort woman” was at an international
symposium commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Women’s International War Crimes
Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery.16 It was the kind of experience where something
16

The International Symposium to mark the 10th anniversary of the Women’s International War
Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery, “What Did the ‘Tribunal’ Bring to Justice, andWhat Has Changed—Sexual Violence, Racial Discrimination, and Colonialism,” was held at Tokyo
University of Foreign Studies on December 5, 2010. The witnesses in the second part of thesymposium, “Hearing Testimonies by Victims of Sexual Violence by the Japanese Military in Asia,”
were Wei Shaolan (Guilin, China), Luo Shanxue (Guilin, China), Narcisa Claveria (Luzon,

26

definitely changed for me from before that day and after. Before then, I’d come acrosstestimonies in books and such, and done some research on the issue, but never actively put
myself in a situation where I could hear the story directly from the original person. I’m not sure
why I decided to go to the symposium. I’d heard about the event from a friend, but I rememberthat morning I spent almost the whole time wondering whether I should go or not. Maybe I
couldn’t get my courage up. I think I anticipated that if I went, it would be a decisive
experience, and I was afraid.
I got to the venue just before the second part was about to begin. There were all these guards
standing outside the university lecture hall and it was a really weird atmosphere. Strictmeasures were in place to prohibit people without an ID card hanging around their necks fromentering, and I had to make my own card. It was my first time attending a symposium that
required this kind of procedure and I was surprised by the heavy vibe. I knew that these were
measures to prevent rightwing groups and racists from entering the venue, but I had no idea
their interference and harassment was so bad. In any case, the strict security around the venue
was impressive. It was like a preview of the intensity of the testimonies I would be hearing.
On that day there were four witnesses, from China, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea.
There were a mother and son from Guilin. The mother had been forced to work as a “comfort
woman” by the Japanese military, and the son was conceived while she was in the comfort
station. Their testimony was heart breaking. Derided as a “Japanese devil” by the people
around him, and having experienced daily abuse, the son said, “I’ve already given up on my life,
but at least I hope the Japanese government will admit its wrongs to my mother.” It was likeeven between mother and child (or precisely because they are mother and child?), there wassome kind of topic they couldn’t broach with each other (even if that itself is what connects
their pain). The son looked to be about the same age as my father, but in his bearing andmanner of speaking, it seemed his anguish was as long and deep as the years of his life.
This day was the first time I heard the testimonies directly, but I never thought that observing
the place where testimonies are presented would be so physically consuming. Of course it musthave been more draining for the speakers, but even just sitting in a chair and listening, I was in

Philippines), and Elizabeth Cox (Papua New Guinea).

27

a state of collapse by the end of the four witnesses’ statements, and after leaving the venue I
was in a daze for the rest of the day. I thought I was just listening, but maybe my body was
attempting to respond with some kind of emotional reaction. It was that physically consuming.
The venue was some kind of large lecture hall, and I was sitting in second-story seats quite
removed from the stage, but it felt like the witnesses were right there in front of me.
We were listening to the testimonies through translation, so it might have been due to the gap
in timing between hearing the voices and understanding the words. Because I was free fromtrying to keep up with the meaning as the witnesses were speaking, the tone of those muffledvoices, the tension in the space that was created by the testimonies, the depth of their despair,the tears streaming down their cheeks, the severity of their expressions just before theyreached the most painful parts of their stories, the anxiety, and the relief after the statements
concluded were impressive. At the same time, it was frustrating not being able toinstantaneously understand the words the women were saying. I wanted to find meaning in thesounds and sensibility of the words they were speaking, rather than as something translated
into Japanese. I felt if I could do that I would be just the slightest bit closer to understanding
their pain. Of course, it’s not just about understanding language, but I had some kind of urge todigest, to swallow into my body the voices and words of the women as they were.
What was shocking, aside from the testimony, was the surge of camera flashes from the press,
like a mountain of flame that rose up as the witnesses stepped into the center of the stage.
Maybe I was a bit naïve because it was my first time hearing testimonies. But when I imagined
the emotions of the witnesses who were speaking about things they would prefer not to speak
about, even though they acted courageously in front of everybody, it must have been acomplex feeling for these former “comfort women” to be turned into photographic objects. It
made me uneasy imagining that if I were standing on the stage, I could get injured by theviolence of the cameras.
After the symposium, I thought for many days about how to respond to the testimonies I’dheard. It was something I had sought out myself, but I didn’t know what to do with what I’dreceived from it. There was a period where I kept replaying the scene from that day and getting
hit by that weight, or imagining the torment of the women who kept these stories closed within
their hearts for so many years, or trying to connect the visceral parts of the stories with my own
pain. Of course, I was not only thinking of the women during that time, but also researching28

the history, and was able to think about what I could do about it.
(February 2013, Kagurazaka)

A.V.L.M. (Portuguese Teacher, originally from Brazil)
I knew about the Japanese army’s sex slave system when I was at university, but it was only asuperficial thing. One of the elective courses I took at university in Brazil was a class on WorldHistory, where we were shown a documentary about war, and specifically World War II. But
for the most part the documentary depicted war itself, and not sex slavery. Actually, in the
documentary the women were referred to as “war victims,” as opposed to “sex slaves.” I also
took a course in the Japanese Language Department, and the teacher taught us about cultural
things like tanka poems and enka ballads or calligraphy, but with almost no reference to thewar. In terms of Japanese history, we learned about domestic wars – wars from way long ago –but nothing really about recent wars with other countries or, specifically, World War II.
Since coming to Japan 11 years ago, I’ve had more opportunities to see news reports dealing
with the issues surrounding the war in Asia. That’s how I came to know more about the issue. I
saw the documentary My Heart is Not Broken Yet, and learned about how the former sex slaves
are seeking the Japanese government’s acknowledgment of its past mistakes.17 And then I
came across a book explaining the inner workings of the war.
The first thing I felt after watching My Heart is Not Broken Yet was anger that the war had
happened, and then a profound sadness. In war there are only two sides: those who dominate
and those who are dominated. The big dominating force is the government, which makes thesoldiers fight, and forces them to conquer those who don’t belong to their group.
Unfortunately, Song [Sin-Do] did not belong to any group, and so like all the victims was
humiliated and treated as an “object.” They were in a situation without any human rights, but
17

The movie Ore no kokoro wa maketenai (My Heart is Not Broken Yet) is a film by Ahn Hae-Ryongreleased in 2007. Produced by the “Association to Support the Trial of the Japan-Resident Comfort
Women,” it documents the Korean resident of Japan and former “comfort woman” Song Sin-Do’s
campaign in Japanese courts to receive an official apology to former “comfort women” from theJapanese government.

29

they had to take on such a burden. For the people with power, the victims were nothing, just“objects.” They could be abused until they broke down, and then thrown away. Because they
feel that way, they probably think there’s no need to seek forgiveness or to explain what
actually happened. For the people without power, those with power were part of a power game.
In this game there’s a fundamental, natural rule, which is, where there’s power, there’s
subjugation.
There are politicians who deny the historical facts and people who trivialize the atrocities thattook place in the former colonies, but that follows with what I’ve already said. Because they
can’t accept the errors of their past actions, it’s natural they [those on the side of power] should
think that way. As far as I know, there was an order from the authorities to attack the enemy, tocharge, win, kill everybody. The soldiers were brainwashed. There was a strategy of elevating
the military leaders and reinforcing the soldiers’ sense of mission in the war. The soldiers were
supplied with both weapons and hatred, and then, so they could feel a bit more human, they
were allowed to commit the worst of all atrocities. In other words, they were allowed to use
women, many of whom were still children, for their own “comfort.”
Women of all nationalities were randomly picked out from the streets. Like a hunt. For thosewith power, women were not people. They made no attempt to identify some aspect ofhumanity in their enemies, and in this case, the women can’t even be categorised as enemies.
They were simply “objects” to be used in war – essential goods, merchandise, even. For many
current politicians, the atrocities never happened. So there will probably never be any
explanation [from them]. I’ve never once met anybody who talks about the Imperial JapaneseArmy’s sex slave system. Maybe it’s because they’re ignorant of the subject, maybe it’s becauseof the gravity of the issue. We all know that women and children are the main victims of war.
But when we are confronted with that destiny, we unconsciously feel impotent. We say, “That’swar. There’s nothing to be done.”
In Brazil all kinds of members of criminal gangs are “imprisoned” in the jails. Often, when thefamily members of these criminals go to visit them, the wives and daughters, and mothers,
even, are forced to have sex with the leaders of rival gangs in exchange for the lives of theinmates. The news became public thanks to a lawyer who could not stand seeing this situation.
And it became clear that this issue has a long history, and has been tolerated by people in theknow. As far as society is concerned, anyone who is incarcerated is an enemy, but for30

competing gangs, the relatives are themselves enemies. So it’s almost natural that the leaders
would keep quiet about this issue. Because if there were no voiceless rape victims who could betreated as “objects,” they’d have no concern for anybody.
This is just one example of things that are taking place right now, and not something that took
place on the battlefield. While this is something that permeates society as “an obvious fact,”
there is always a stronger and a weaker side to every dispute. Silence: whether it’s the silence ofthe people, or the silence of politicians and authority figures, the fact that everyone keeps theirmouths shut about this issue conveys approval regarding the complicity of the group and the
dictates of society. But it’s also a painful weapon that pierces the souls of those who have tobear that silence.
(April 2014, Akabane)

R.N. (Contract Worker)
The first time I heard about military “comfort women” was probably in my world history classin high school. The teacher was a woman, although I don’t remember exactly why the topic
came up. It was a girls’ school. In the class it wasn’t like the teacher was elaborating from a text,
but more like she happened to mention these women existed. And that’s when I think I firstheard the term military “comfort women.” It must have been around my second year of highschool. Our school was a bit unusual, in that instead of starting the education from ancienthistory, we began from around the time of World War II. And then, instead of going into thepresent from there, we went back in history. So maybe it was actually in my first year of highschool. I remember that the teacher was super worked up when she talked about things likethe military “comfort women” and the Mukden Incident [of 1931, used as a pretext for theJapanese invasion of Manchuria].
At the time, I didn’t really have a clear picture of exactly what was meant by “comfort women.”
Just a vague understanding that the women experienced some kind of sexual suffering. But inhigh school I didn’t try to think further beyond that. I think I probably saw media reports about
the issue. I remember somehow the image of women sobbing and appealing for something. But

31

I never really considered why they were crying, and what they were appealing for. That was
during high school.
After that, I became more familiar with the military “comfort women” issue through a class atuniversity. The course was on the cultural history of Japan, and I took it as part of my liberalarts studies. It was around my first or second year of university. The class was a yearlong
credited course led by two teachers. Half the course was led by Fujime Yuki, and the other halfby another professor. I think the part led by Professor Fujime was about gender theory, and themilitary “comfort women” kept coming up. Professor Fujime would talk about reports in the
media, and we would watch video materials. But I don’t remember why I chose that course…I
would just sit by myself in the back of the lecture hall and listen.
There were a lot of shocking things in that course. Because war is an ugly thing to begin with, I
knew that kind of thing might come up. So it’s not like the topic itself was shocking in any way,
but Professor Fujime showed us articles and photographs from the time that verified it. There
was a photograph of the entrance to a comfort station with a hanging banner upon which was
written “Service by Japanese Beauties,” and that was a shock.18 Like, what is “Service byJapanese Beauties”? Seeing that kind of thing gradually drove home the reality that it actuallyexisted. One of my teachers from middle school, who taught us archery, had been in
Manchuria during the war, and it was like, “Wait, so that means he might have actually known
about this kind of thing?” We never heard anything about it, but thinking that way gave me a
bit of a shock.
The thing that stays with me most from the university course was Professor Fujime’s positionof not denouncing women in the sex trade. I think her attitude was that if there are women
who need to sell sex in order to survive, or even those who take pride in it as their vocation,then we shouldn’t denounce them. Of course, we tend to ignore the circumstances of thepeople who go into the sex trade, and impose moral judgments on their profession based on
18

A reference to a photograph of a “comfort station” that was established in Jiangwan Town inShanghai in 1938. The photograph shows a pair of banners set up before the entrance of the“comfort station”, with the words “Mi mo kokoro mo sasagu Yamato nadeshiko no sābuisu” (Service byJapanese beauties offering up both body and heart), and “Seisen taishō no yūshi daikangei” (Heroes of
the great victorious holy war are warmly welcomed), written upon them, respectively, in thick blackink. Reproduced in Ichioku nin no Shōwa shi, dai 10 kan: Fukyoka shashin (The 100-million People’s
Showa History, vol. 10: Unauthorized Photographs), Mainichi Newspaper Company, Tokyo, 1977, p.
62.

32

biased views – like, they just want to deceive men – and I think that mentality was stronger forme. But I have the impression that Professor Fujime’s course was a good opportunity forovercoming that feeling. I began to think that choosing to do that kind of work is not what isbad. Rather, thinking that the work is bad makes it harder to see the full situation, even withregard to current historical issues. Because I’d never really thought that way to that point, I
thought it opened up a new perspective, like, expanded my horizons.
Last year, when I went to the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM), I got thesense I’d heard about it at university, and the display made me recall what I’d learned.19 It’s
not that I had some new realization, but more like a reaffirmation that, yes, Professor Fujime
had discussed this topic. It was right when [Osaka Mayor] Hashimoto Tōru made his statement[about “comfort women” being a necessary evil], and the museum was packed with foreign
visitors.20 And then I saw one of these kids from the rightwing online message boards causing
a disturbance in the exhibition venue, and I thought his response was just like my mother. He
spoke really loudly and got really emotional. He asked them [the museum staff] insistently,“What’s your basis for saying those things?” I wanted to say to him, “You talk about a basis or
proof, but have you actually looked at the display?” I remember I thought the way heresponded to them with this kind of hysteric reaction was just like my mother. Because whenit’s someone else you can see it more objectively. So thinking about what I could do to be able
to speak with these kinds of people, I kept one ear open while viewing the rest of theexhibition.
And then on the bookshelves at WAM I found a book, published by the Mainichi Newspaper
Company, of photographs from the war period that had been caught by the military censors
and were never published.21 I remember I borrowed the same book from the library when I
19“The Military Does Not Protect Women: Okinawa, Japan’s Military Comfort Stations and Sexual
Violence by the US Military,” the 10th Special Exhibition at the Women’s Active Museum of War
and Peace (WAM), Tokyo, held June 2012 – June 2013.
20
On May 13, 2013, Hashimoto Tōru, the mayor of Osaka and then-joint-leader of the Japan
Innovation Society (now active as the Japan Innovation Party, Nihon ishin no tō), sparked
controversy when he stated that the “comfort women” system was “necessary.” In full, he stated,“When soldiers are risking their lives running through a storm of bullets, and you want to givethese warriors – these emotionally charged men – some kind of rest, then anybody can understandthe need for a ‘comfort woman’ system.”
21
Ichioku nin no Shōwa shi, dai 10 kan: Fukyoka shashin (The 100-million People’s Showa History, vol.
10: Unauthorized Photographs) focuses on photographs that were prohibited from publication
during World War II. During the war, all photographs taken by cameramen embedded with the33was at university, although I can’t remember why I borrowed it or what prompted me. So I
found it on the bookshelf at WAM and it brought back memories for me. I don’t know when it
was published, but I was impressed there was a time when newspaper companies would
actually work with this kind of material. It doesn’t really happen now. References in the media
to both military “comfort women” and the Mukden Incident have almost completely
disappeared.
I’ve never spoken to my friends about the military “comfort women” issue, and there was one
time I thought that if I were to bring it up I’d have to be pretty circumspect about it. There wasan older guy at my part-time job who would curse out Korean residents of Japan, and that was
the first time I heard derogatory terms like chon-kō [comparable to “gook” in American slang]and things like that, and I was amazed that there were people who actually use such words. I
was working at a cleaning service, and I’d have just regular, everyday conversations with theguy who came to pick things up, like, “How’s it been,” that kind of thing. I don’t remember how
we got onto the subject or what kind of things I said, or even why the guy suddenly got sparked
like that, but in any case his face transformed. I remember how strange his eyes looked. What
could have got him so worked up right then? He really lost it. I thought, “This guy’s really
worked up,” and without arguing back at him I just kept silent and listened. It was only the twoof us in the store, so the whole atmosphere was really unpleasant. And then I remember I sent
him on his way, feeling, like, wow, people actually think that way. Beyond that I myself neverraise the topic, or the word Chōsen [a Japanese term for Korea, referencing the former Joseon
kingdom], and I wasn’t able to talk about Korean residents of Japan. But that incident drove
home for me that whether it’s Korean residents of Japan, or the use of forced labor, or the
military “comfort women,” these are probably not the easiest topics to bring up with people.
Because military “comfort women” is a topic about which everybody’s outlook is really divided,
if some men openly stated something like, “There was never any such thing as military‘comfort women,’” I’d probably just keep quiet and not think of arguing with them. Because it’sa topic that can really set people off, I think even to voice your stance on the subject could beconsidered a challenge. Maybe it’s a trauma. I even butt heads with my mother when it comesto the military “comfort women” and the Mukden Incident. My mother’s mantra is, “It didn’t
happen, and Japanese people wouldn’t do that kind of thing.” When you bring up the topic she
Japanese military had to pass through military censors, who ranked and administered them basedon three categories: 1) Review Completed; 2) For Holding; and 3) Unauthorized.

34

gets hysterically angry, and even like the guy from the cleaning service, she goes crazy and hereyes fill with anger. So I physically feel like it’s a really tense topic for the relationships
between those people and me. I wish they could talk about it more reasonably, but when I feellike the other person might come out with a hysteric reaction, then I guess I think it’s better not
to say too much.
My mother gets really worked up. It’s not like I’m blaming her. I’m not trying to hurt her, andit’s not like I’m saying she’s the one that did it. But even in just talking about the fact that it
happened, it somehow gets personal for her and then she just loses it. For example, I thoughtmaybe my mother’s father – my grandfather – might have been involved with “comfort
women” or forced transports, but he had a weak constitution, so even though he was in China,
it doesn’t sound like he was actually fighting. I’m not sure what he was doing. It seems like myfather’s father also had a weak constitution and never went to the front. So I don’t think it hasanything to do with my family members. But she’s always saying, “The Japanese are great!”
Whenever there’s a TV program about Japan or that talks about Japanese technology, shealways says, “There’s no country as good as this.” My mother has never once set foot outside ofJapan. She’s never even been on a trip.
The first time the topic of military “comfort women” came up with my mother was last year,
when a bronze sculpture of a young “comfort woman” was erected in the United States.22 As
we watched the news report, my mother rejected the idea that “comfort women” ever existed,so I softly said, “Even in Japan there are people who met that fate,” and then she was like,“There isn’t a single person in Japan who says that kind of thing. They just say it because theywant the money!” I was really taken aback, like, “Can you hear what you’re saying?” And then I
mumbled, “I don’t think father would say that kind of thing,” and that was the end of theconversation. I don’t think my father has such extreme opinions as my mother, although if thesubject comes up he basically clams up. Probably because my mother has her stance, and hedoesn’t want us fighting, if he takes my side then my mother will get put out. Or, rather, heknows I’ll get angry if he supports my mother’s position. So I think because of that delicacy hedoesn’t really state his own opinions clearly. I’ve never asked him what he really thinks.
22

The “comfort woman” statue was erected in 2013 in a city park in Glendale, California. It is a
replica of the “Peace Memorial” representing a former military “comfort woman” that was installed
in 2011 in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, Korea. In the United States there are also similar
memorials at multiple sites in New York and New Jersey.

35

My mother is a wall that I just can’t scale. I think if I found the right approach she might beopen to listening, but more likely is she just won’t hear it. If I just open my mouth she
immediately starts in with denials: “That’s wrong!” “It never happened!” It’s this exasperationthat we’ll never have a dialogue. Just bringing up the subject makes things tense. I think, here
we go again with the same reaction, there’s no way to beat it, and I get deflated. It’s always thesame. We always end up fighting. I still don’t know what to do when the subject comes up.
Because my mother gets so emotional, I also get incensed. I hold my breath whenever we’reeating together and some news about Korea or China or the Senkaku Islands comes on TV.
Like, “Please don’t say anything. Please don’t let me have some opinion about this.” I just don’t
want to get caught up on the topic. My own and my mother’s responses just don’t line up. I’m
not sure how we ended up like this.
(May 2014, Shinjuku)

S.K. (Singer)
It must have been 2006. A person named Lee Yong-Soo came to the university to speak about
her experiences. I happened to go see it. The event was held in a lecture hall, and there musthave been more than 100 people there. The translator entered, materials were passed out, andwe listened to what Lee had to say, but in the end it was a shock. It was her voice. There was thetone of her voice, and the sound of her saying the words oma, oma [mother, mother] stays withme even now. That was, I think, when she was describing how the Japanese soldiers took her
away, and it was so painful to hear. Even the translator was crying…You’re just at a loss forwords. I think it must be pretty difficult to put that into language. She also spoke in Japanese,but even just by speaking a bit of Japanese, there are all kinds of historical circumstances
behind why a person like her is able to speak Japanese.
I remember it was such a shock that I couldn’t even speak. She was talking about how thesoldiers beat her legs so she couldn’t run away, and then when she was lying on her side there
was a single flower blooming there, and she asked the person next to her what kind of flower it
was, and the reply was that it was a Korean bellflower [doraji]. And then she also sang in front36

of us. And she said that even under such terrible circumstances, she fell in love with a Japanesesoldier, like a kamikaze pilot or something. I think she must have said his name was Hayakawa.
She fell in love, but as a kamikaze he went off to die. It must have been such an extreme
situation. Having to be with dozens of people every day and then by chance falling in love witha kind soldier. Even though he ended up dying.
I think what Lee sang was a Japanese song. The place was completely silent. She had finishedspeaking and then when she started singing everybody just listened quietly. I was sitting rightin front of her when suddenly she asked me whether I thought the song had reached him[Hayakawa], and I was surprised, but I said I thought it had [laughs]. After that there was asmaller gathering. It was about 10 people from the seminar or something. I happened to havean instrument with me, so we sang “Doraji” and “Arirang” together.23 And then we took aphoto holding hands together. She was kind, although from the distributed materials you got asevere impression of her. It was written that she planned to commit seppuku. I was shocked. I
remember I was really furious and angry about what the Japanese army had done. But [at thegathering] she was saying things like, “In the end, let’s work together to make peace.” Like,“From now on, how we go about making peace is the important thing.”
I think it was really important to hear her voice. You can read all kinds of information andwriting, but I think I decided to go because there aren’t so many opportunities to hear theactual person speak in their own words. The voice of that woman lingers somewhere inside meeven now, and I’ve never forgotten her name. It’s just that, regarding the issue of how to deal
with her testimony, maybe I’ll always…I get the sense that, including those parts that don’t sit
so well with me, it’ll probably always remain with me.
What I mean by parts that don’t sit well with me is that it’s not just about the “comfort women”
issue but also about the world situation, including Japan, where it seems like chaos is only
increasing every day. When I went to Okinawa, I heard the story of a woman who was asurvivor of the Himeyuri “Lily Corps” [a group of students who were mobilized as a nursing
unit during the Battle of Okinawa], and she talked about how some of her best friends were
killed by explosions, and how someone standing in the back was blown up by a grenade
thrown by a Japanese soldier. And when she was talking, she said, “There are many people
23“Doraji” and “Arirang” are well-known Korean folk songs.

37

who aren’t able to talk about this. There are people who’ve been hidden away in their homes
this whole time without saying anything.” I think these elderly ladies are constantly living with
their memories. So I think it must be really tough for them. I can’t fathom how painful it must
be to live like that. Even then, I think the people who do continue to testify must be driven bysome sense of mission to pass on their stories. I want to open my ears not to the people who are
speaking loudly on TV or through megaphones, but to those small voices that are full oftentativeness and hesitation, and maybe even confusion. Since I accept those voices, somehow
I have to get close to them.
[Before I had a chance to listen directly to a testimony], I thought I could separate myself fromit. But the moment I heard that voice, I think in some way it also became my own story. It’s
impossible to share everything, or even to completely understand the suffering of that person.
But – and this is not only about the former “comfort women” here – the moment I hear thetestimony from that kind of voice, I guess I feel I take something on myself. Otherwise I
wouldn’t be there. I’m not really sure why I go to hear it. But I think there’s some power inbeing there. Information that can’t be put into words (I guess it’s not quite information as
such…), like the tone of voice, the pitch, the resonance…whether it’s the former “comfort
woman,” or the Himeyuri survivor, or the old man from Ie [where there was intense fighting
during the Battle of Okinawa]. It’s something you just have to feel, like the slightest catch in thevoice. I don’t know what, but when you’re there, I think there’s something to those effects.
Because there was a translator, at the testimony gathering the words came through anotherperson. Because translation comes via another, there are things that you become aware of, but,also, maybe there are things that are different from the original. I ended up getting into theparts that precede verbalization. I think it’s because there’s something that calls out from thedepths of a voice. Meaning comes after that. It could be the way the story is told, the way of
speaking, the movement of the hands, the gaze, even the atmosphere in the venue. I think thesethings are deeply related, and that’s what’s important. Of course there was some frustration [tohearing it in translation], but there’s more to it than that.
I actually made a song about Lee’s love story, because I couldn’t process my experience of theevent. It was like I felt there was nothing I could do. I had to give it some kind of shape. It wasso shocking. Maybe the memories of that love are a little aestheticized. I think it was necessary
for survival, because it was such an awful experience. But it was pretty fun to sing songs like38

“Doraji” and “Arirang” with her. Because we were singing together. I think Lee was about 16 or
17. If it weren’t for the war, it would have been her time to shine. And it was in that very
moment that she was cast into a hellish experience.
With Okinawa, I first went with my seminar to Henoko. We went to Henoko and the Himeyuri
Monument and Ie. At Ie, we also went to see Ahagon Shōkō’s Nuchidotakara House Peace
Museum.24 Ahagon is no longer alive, but there’s this person called Jabana Etsuko there, andshe suddenly scolded us, like, “You have to work for peace!” [Laughs] I thought she was a realcharacter. But when we spoke, she said, “Japan today is turning back toward war. Having
experienced [war], I think we really have to put a stop to this.” She was a kind person,incredibly powerful. Because she’s carrying on Ahagon’s will. Also, what the old man said at
the place where we stayed in Ie was that when the fighting came to Okinawa, because he wasyoung, and the graves in Okinawa are big, he went to hide in the graveyard. But he recalled
how back then people were still buried in the ground and the place had a really strange smell.
That’s such a vivid memory. Even now in Ie the base is right there in the middle of everything
and the runway the Imperial Japanese Army used still exists. And not just in Ie. The place
where the Okinawan folk singer Kadekaru Rinshō was born is right in the middle of Kadena
Air Base. He pointed his finger, saying, “That’s where I was born,” and it’s the base runway.
This is an ongoing situation.
I think I have some kind of particularity about voices. It’s the thing that most fascinates me,
although I get really hooked on story telling as well. It’s not like I’m purposely trying to hear allthese stories about the Ainu or Okinawa, but there’s something that just draws me there. It
might not only be about the voice. It might be something that can’t be put into words; it might
be something in the land itself. But when I go to these places, I always feel something. I thinkit’s something that will always be there for me.
People talk about globalization, and how information travels so quickly even across impossible
distances, and maybe we’re losing some minority languages due to that, but precisely because
we’re living in such an age, it’s really important for me to listen to those sounds that come24

Ahagon Shōkō was a peace activist who led the movement against forced land seizures by the US
military. He opened the Nuchidotakara House Peace Museum in Ie. Jabana Etsuko is the museum’s
current director.

39

before language, that come before verbalization. We’re overflowing with words, whether it’ssocial networking sites or online information. But I think there’s absolutely something that gets
lost the moment it becomes words or print. I’m attracted to the idea of listening to andapproaching such things. I’m attracted to the voice before language. Also,

folk songs. I makemusic, but sometimes something changes the moment you put it into melody. I’m also reallyinterested in language, and I wish I could turn that kind of resonance, that afterimage thatcomes from language, into an atmosphere, but I guess it’s a pretty difficult thing to do.
(May 2014, Shinjuku)

K.M. (Housewife)
I first came across the term military “comfort woman” some time ago. Maybe when I was inhigh school. For my generation I think it was relatively early. Certainly, the Japanese history
teacher in my second year of high school was a bit different from others, and for half the year
had teams of students do group study on the theme of human rights. Instead of just teaching us
about Japanese history, he split us into teams, and then had us do group study on issues related
to discrimination and human rights like discrimination against the hisabetsu buraku25, Korean
residents of Japan and African-Americans. My team chose to study about discrimination
against the hisabetsu buraku, and we would go to the library to check out various books and do
research. I read all kinds of books during that time. And, as part of that, I think I also readbooks about the war. I don’t remember which one it was, but at the very end of one book about
the war, there must have been this tiny note about “comfort women.” That was the first time I
saw the word and processed it as information.
But my high school was an exam school, where that kind of teaching approach is unthinkable.
So at some point I began to feel antagonism toward the teacher. I wanted to take the university
exam for Japanese history, but I thought the way the class was going, it would be out of the25

Hisabetsu Buraku literally means “discriminated community.” The term is used to refer to groupsof people who were outcast under the feudal system due to their work in “unclean” occupations
such as butchery, tanning and undertaking. The descendents of these groups continue to suffer
discrimination and ostracization into the present. (Trans.)40

question. I had absolutely no memory of learning anything about Japanese history. All I had
was what I knew from studying for middle-school exams. Normally, in high school you’d study
the history in greater depth and then be prepared for the exam, right? But I didn’t even havethat base of knowledge. During the group-learning period, at first everybody brought books
and tried hard to tackle the project, but then it just got ridiculous. So I don’t have any memoryof what came after that. Probably we wrote something down and shared it with the rest of theclass or something. I had beautiful penmanship so I guess I was the one who wrote everything.
I have a vague memory of it, but as for the contents, I’m not even sure whether we presented it
or not. I’m not even sure what kind of books we referenced. I just remember that it was at thattime that I first learned about the term military “comfort woman.”
In high school when I learned about the term “comfort women,” all I thought was, “Oh, sothat’s how it was.” I read that the Japanese military took military “comfort women” with themto the front, but there were no more details in the book. I didn’t even understand the meaningof “comfort.” Like with the “volunteer corps” [teishin tai], I couldn’t really imagine what theterm entailed. So I probably just processed it without really understanding anything about it.
And I didn’t feel any drive to learn more after I read the book. Since then, it was only recently
that I’ve been able to hear and think about the term in a new way. Now, I think, “So theJapanese armed forces went to war with that kind of thing on their minds as well.” This kind ofthing is inconceivable in another country. I wonder what’s the right way to think about it?
But when it comes to war, soldiers from all countries end up raping women. I heard that theJapanese “comfort station” system was originally conceived as a preventative measure against
soldiers raping women. Well, the damage doesn’t stop there, but I’m just not sure what to think
about Japan as a country carrying out a war with that kind of policy. Terrible things happen
when any country gets involved in a war, but for the country itself to take the lead in creatingthat kind of structure is not normal. I’m partly dumbfounded about what on earth they could
have been thinking, and then, on the other hand, it’s like, well, it was meant to be apreventative measure.
I think [Osaka Mayor] Hashimoto Tōru’s statement from last year was stupid. It’s beyond thepale. But recently the president of Korea is also cutting off ties with Japan over the “comfort
women” issue, right? I think it’s kind of stupid as a politician to stop dialoging with Japan overthis one issue of the “comfort women.” Really, [in the movie My Heart is Not Broken Yet] this41person [Song Sin-Do] said it, right?26 “We cannot make war. I keep sharing my experiences,
but I am looking to the future.” I think that’s right on. History does not go away – because thethings we’ve done do not go away. But I think it’s hard because political complications always
come up. Issues between one country and the next…like, the victims, like Song-san, who
appeared in the movie, they’re not looking to solve the problem with money. Instead of “Giveus money,” they’re saying, “We want you to apologize.” Like, “You did something wrong, so wewant you to apologize as a nation.”
But when you talk about apologizing as a nation, someone like [Prime Minister] Shinzō Abe
wasn’t even around at the time, right? He’s about the same age as me. So I think even if you callit an apology, it’s not, really. That’s the difficult part. Besides, with all these prime ministers
constantly changing in Japan, and none of them having lived through that era, could you reallybe satisfied with someone going through the motions of an apology? So it’s difficult. I mean,
when you hurt someone.
[When I saw the movie] I thought Song [Sin-Do] is great, someone to respect. She’s exposing
her painful past to let the young people know that “war is unacceptable.” And she’s doing thiswith an outlook that says, “There is a future.” I think that’s pretty rare. I certainly couldn’t do it.
Of course, I’m sure support from the people around her has helped. Most people would try toseal off those memories as something shameful, right? Thinking about it from the opposite side,
there are the soldiers from the Japanese armies who went to war and harmed these women.
Some of them might still be alive. But you don’t hear any of them coming forward to testify, doyou?
Because my father was still a high-school student, he was press-ganged into the military factoryat Seta [Shiga Prefecture], and never went to the frontlines. My grandfather had previously
gone to war, but didn’t deploy in the Pacific War. So although I never heard tales about thefrontline from my direct family members, maybe among my relatives there was someone who
used the “comfort stations.” But nobody would ever say anything about that. People can’t reallytalk about what they did. I hate war. It’s horrible. It’s the worst kind of human behavior.

26

This interview was conducted following a screening of the documentary film Ore no kokoro wa
maketenai (My Heart is Not Broken Yet) (See note 17).

42

I speak with my husband about the “comfort women” issue. But because he’s a man, he has theidea “it happens in every country.” I don’t speak with anybody else. Probably for women myage it’s not such an interesting topic – maybe now that it’s become such a big deal, but I can’t
say for sure…You can’t talk about this issue if the other person lacks a certain knowledge abouthuman rights. I think that’s what it is. When it comes to human rights, you can’t talk tosomeone without that knowledge, even if it’s a good friend. In the end, you can’t talk tosomeone who’s going, “Huh? What’s that?” It’s like in Tokyo, there are lots of people who don’tknow about the hisabetsu buraku issue. It’s not that they don’t want to speak about those issues,
but more like they simply can’t. I’m concerned in my own way, and if something catches myeye then I’ll read it, but I have no idea how much time other people are spending thinking
about it.
I lived in New York for two years.27 The anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor camearound twice during that time. On Japanese TV the programs about Pearl Harbor talk about
how “Japan did it! We were triumphant!” But if you want to talk about how the same incident isappreciated in the US, it’s crazy. It’s like, “Japan was the worst country. As Americans, we were
humiliated.” This kind of thing is on the TV news, like, “Today is the anniversary of Pearl
Harbor.” And there are memorial observances that are held. It really brought home that I was
now in the country that was on the receiving end of the attack. Having experienced that twicein two years, it really left an impression on me. I began to feel as a Japanese person that we haddone something wrong that day. I have that kind of memory.
When it comes to Pearl Harbor, people point fingers, saying, “Japan was wrong. It was the
Japs!” But there’s no broadcast about how “Americans were wrong” about the atomic
bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. In the US, people say the atomic bombings of Nagasaki
and Hiroshima were about speeding up the conclusion of the war, and not about obliterating
Japan. In other words, their explanation is that the atomic bombs were justified. When I saw
that on the American TV news or somewhere, I thought, “Huh?” It really irritated me. I had no
idea until then. Maybe it’s because I was never really interested and hadn’t read any books
about it. But the first time I learned about it was a shock. When you live in a foreign country,
you get the news from that country’s perspective. Over there, they don’t do any kind ofcommemoration on the anniversaries of the atomic bombings. You’d think it would be normal
27

The respondent lived in New York from 2001 to 2003.

43

to have some kind of ceremony for the souls of the dead on the anniversaries of the bombings.
(June 2014, Iidabashi)

J.W. (Corporate Employee)
The first time I heard the term military “comfort woman” must have been around when I was
in 6th grade. I saw something one of my friends had written about it. Maybe it was a summer
vacation assignment, or an exhibition report…maybe some kind of presentation about history
done on craft paper. In any case, there was a reference to “comfort women,” and those words
leapt out at me. At the time, without knowing so much about it, I just wondered what it couldbe, but that was my first encounter with the term. Maybe it was the impact of seeing the
Chinese characters. It was a combination of characters I’d never really seen before. Like, what
is a “woman” who provides “comfort?” At the time all I could do was wonder about it.
Later [the expression] came up frequently in the news, but it never really stuck with me. It wasaround middle school and high school. It would pop up now and then on the television. There
would be coverage about the military “comfort women” issue, and then, along with that,
discussion about what happened to the people in China, and what happened to the people in
Korea, and so on. But it just didn’t interest me. And I never had a chance to talk about it withanybody. I just thought it’s impressive that it’s been such an issue from my teens until now. My
understanding was that instead of a specific incident that became a major problem, it was more
like a constantly ongoing issue. But I never had any idea why it was an issue.
So it must have been around middle school or high school. I somehow figured out that it was
specifically [a sexual] thing. I don’t think I had any awareness of things like rape or sexual
violence when I was in grade school. Like, in Japan knowledge about sex is considered taboo,right? And then nobody tries to teach about it. I think I must have figured it out relatively late,but once everybody started to get interested in sex, then when I saw something in the news
about “comfort women,” I would think, oh, maybe it’s about that. I never actually confirmed itwith anybody else, nor did I research about it, but I just knew that’s what it was.

44But even after I figured out that part, I never thought to read books and get the facts. I only had
the impression it was a term that came up whenever there were tensions with Korea, but I
didn’t know any details, nor did I try to learn the details. I thought of it as a thing of the past.
It’s like, you always hear about it, and it’s been viewed as a problem for a while now, but I had asense of distance from it, like, it happened in the past. People who were in their 20s then are in
their 80s now, so they’re getting on in years, but even then I just got stuck on the idea that it
was ancient history.
So this is really my first time thinking consciously [about the “comfort women” issue]. I never
had any prejudice about the theme. Some people might get suspicious about the intentions ofan interviewer, like, what are you asking me? But thinking is important. Even if it’s something
you don’t know about, once you know the facts, you necessarily have to have an opinion. That
was exactly the state of mind I was in when I first heard about this project. It was a time when I
wanted to elaborate my thinking by challenging myself to learn about something I didn’t know,
instead of remaining ignorant about it. So I think even if it had been a different theme I might
have accepted it.
This time I read a book about “comfort women” who came from Korea, and in the end they
were tricked and taken here.28 They were told they would be providing service as militarynurses, only to end up being forced to do those things. Korea was a Japanese colony at the time.
It’s like they were sex slaves. Of course the situation between the countries and the historicalcontext is different, but there are Japanese people who have been abducted to North Korea,
right? I thought it was similar. I don’t know what was said to lure them, but they took themaway, right? The North Korean abductions are such a major thing in the mass media, butwasn’t Japan doing the same thing? And they purposely sought out young people who werestill innocent, and took them, right? If they used women from brothels, then the soldiers might
get venereal diseases and get out of commission, so they specifically chose people who were
not like that for taking away. What was also shocking was this story about how girls as young as
6 or 7 were given to rural families as “brides” and then made to work as servants. I had no idea
about that. The destitution of Korea under Japanese colonial rule was really terrible.
28

Kawata Fumiko, Akagawara no ie: Chōsen kara kita jyūgun ianfu (The House with the Red-Tile Roof:The Military Comfort Woman from Korea) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1987). The book is a record of
the experiences of Pe Bon-Gi, who was take from Korea to Okinawa as a "comfort woman," andcontinued to live there following the war.

45

The thing that most interests me is sexual discrimination. Of course it's a problem that [thepeople who were made to be “comfort women”] were physically reduced to being slaves...but I
thought that at the time all women were treated about the same. I think the problem haschanged shape and form, but it’s still rooted in today’s world. That’s why cases of sexual
heckling occur.29 It’s the same. It’s like it’s in our DNA. So if you want to talk about the social
progress of women, or whether to have a child or not, or whatever, it’s probably not going tochange overnight. These are the links I made [with the knowledge I gained about the “comfort
women” issue]. If you link it to the present, I think you can consider it as all part of an attitude
toward women that says, “Why don’t you have a baby,” or, “Population decline is happening
because women aren’t having children,” or even the way that women receive lower salaries
than men in the workplace. In that sense, I lived all this time in complete ignorance about the“comfort women” issue, and nothing about my life would have changed if I had remained
ignorant, but once I know about it, it’s no longer someone else’s problem.
As I just said, at the very least it relates to issues of gender discrimination in our own
contemporary lives. Or maybe something similar might arise as part of the Abeadministration’s machinations regarding Japan’s right to collective self-defense.30 If the same
situation repeats itself, and men are sent away as soldiers while women remain to take care ofeverybody else, then I could see something like it happening again in Japan.
From kindergarten to high school I went to a private school near Yasukuni Shrine. Walking toschool from Kudanshita station, it was a matter of course that I had to pass through thegrounds of the shrine. So, without really understanding what Yasukuni Shrine was all about, I
simply considered it part of my school route. My mother and grandmother both went to thesame school, and by the time my mother went there it was already located near the shrine. I’m

29

On June 18, 2014, while addressing questions to the metropolitan government regarding its
support measures for pregnancy and birth during a session of the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly,
the assemblywoman Shiomura Ayaka (Your Party) was heckled with sexually discriminatory
remarks by a representative of the Liberal Democratic Party, with other assembly members
echoing his derision through their voices and laughter.
30
On July 1, 2014, the Japanese government held an extraordinary meeting of the Cabinet, where it
was decided to revise the customary interpretation of the constitution to approve the right toexercise collective self-defense. Numerous citizens gathered before the Prime Minister's Residencein opposition to the Cabinet decision, protesting late into the night.

46

pretty sure that in my grandmother’s time it was somewhere else. When was it that it moved
next to the shrine? Probably after the Great Kanto Earthquake [of 1923]. Since it was part of mymother’s school route, I don’t think she had any problem with having her daughter follow thesame route.
But somehow I did feel something strange about the route. All these rightwing loudspeakertrucks were always there. When Emperor Showa died, it was decided we should go home thatmorning, and we were quickly sent off. The teachers were really anxious about sending thestudents home as soon as possible. I put a note into the shoe cubby of my friend, writing, “I’llbe waiting at Kudanshita station. Let’s go home together.” And although I’m certain I put thenote into the shoe, for some reason the teacher had it, and the next day I got a big scolding. It
was that tense. Most likely they wanted to get the children as far away from Yasukuni Shrine aspossible. On the administration side, because they were all adults, they had a sense thatsomething might happen, but we children had no idea. It was like, “Do we have to go home soearly? What's going on?” That was in January 1989, so I was in my fourth year of elementary
school.
When I was in first grade, my younger brother was in kindergarten. At his kindergarten, there
was this project where the children covered bottles in clay and then decorated the bottles bysticking beads and marbles into the clay, which they then painted after it dried. My motherasked me to do her a favor and pick up some stones from Yasukuni Shrine. I was like, “Huh?
What’s she asking me?” When I asked why, she explained that she wanted some nice stones for
my brother’s project. But I was like, “Why stones from Yasukuni Shrine?” So I don’t think mymother really understood what Yasukuni Shrine is about. I thought it’s really bad that she’s so
innocent about it. I knew what the purpose of the shrine was. I must have heard it fromsomebody. And then every year when August comes around the politicians all go, right?
There’s always controversy about whether the prime minister will go or not. So I had someidea about what was being venerated there. Even though I was just seven years old, I wasappalled at being told to pick up stones from there. And then thinking about why my motherwould tell me to pick up the stones, I refused, telling her, “Absolutely not!”I don’t talk about the “comfort women” issue with anybody, not even my family. Discussions
about sex are considered taboo in education, right? So necessarily the “comfort women” issue
is also wrapped up in that, and even now I’m an adult I feel it’s a little difficult to bring up.

47

Even if we each have our own thinking, it’s not something you can broach with anybody. I havea really strong sense of taboo about sexual issues. My grandmother was the kind of person who
thought, “Girls and boys should not be in the same room. Girls should be raised with girls
only.” In a sense that’s also discriminatory, right? So I was raised with the idea that boys are notclean. I really thought they were dirty. Even my father said that. So I thought I shouldn’t speakwith boys. I started going to the private kindergarten from my second year, and before that I’dbeen at a co-educational kindergarten in our neighborhood. And even then, my grandmotherwas angry about it. Like, “You can’t send her to a place where there are boys!” And it was basedon her idea that I was sent to a private school.
And then, around fifth grade, I was going to the summer course for cram school. I got to befriends with the public-school girls and boys there, and when I told my parents I wanted toinvite them over to play, we got into a big family discussion. Like, there will be boys
coming…and I said, “If it’s going to be such a big deal, then I won’t invite anybody over again,
and that’ll be that!” They always changed the channel whenever some kind of sexual scene
came up on TV dramas – that kind of thing. I was raised in a home with a strong sense of taboo.
So the “comfort women” issue never comes up with my family, and I guess I don’t really talkabout it with other people either.
(July 2014, Kagurazaka)

M.K. (Housewife)
I was aware [of the “comfort women” issue]. I was aware, but because I’m originally from
Hiroshima, there’s also the atomic bombing. Of course, as I child I’d visited places like theHiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, and the shock it gave me made me feel that I had toknow about what happened, but knowing is also painful, and I wanted to avoid that. Once I
became an adult I somehow decided I could never go back to the museum. Even just seeing thebuilding, I feel I can’t go back inside. I have two children, and my mother is in Hiroshima, sothey’ve been going there since they were small. I would always tell the children, “Go [to themuseum] with your grandmother. I’ll be waiting here.”48

For me the “comfort women” issue is similar to the atomic bombing. It’s something you need toproperly understand, but I did my best to avoid it. There was an NHK documentary about thepeople who were in Hiroshima when the bombing happened, with survivors drawing picturesof the scenes they saw that day, and it was a really good program.31 I happened to catch it on
TV some years ago, and I thought, I have to see the whole thing. It’s a bit embarrassing to say
so, but that was really the first time I thought I had to know what happened. Because this issomething that actually happened, and my life is connected to it. It’s impossible for me tounderstand the bombing from the same point of view as the survivors, but I feel a need to know
the facts. You can’t go on covering things up. Even if I can’t see it exactly from their position,
knowing is the one thing I can do.
I always felt the same way about the “comfort women” issue as well, but then one day I
borrowed a book from a friend, and I thought, OK, this is something that I really have to know
about. The first time I actively [tried to learn about the “comfort women” issue] was when I
read that book [Fumiko Kawata’s The Women of the Imperial Army’s Comfort Stations]. Until thatpoint, maybe I had seen bits and pieces about it on the news or that kind of thing. But this was
the first time I properly read about it in the form of a book, and I had no idea about the Waseda
museum [The Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM)]. I never had an
opportunity. And then suddenly I got interested, and thought I would go check out themuseum once the weather cooled a bit.
[About the reports on the “comfort women” issue], I never thought I had any particular
prejudice against the Korean people, but, you know, it’s a really intense scene. The former“comfort women” are all crying and screaming. Because I wasn’t really listening to the content[of the women’s claims], and just took it in visually, and because the Korean people were soemotional in their expressions, it put me off a bit. But if you really understand the content ofwhat they’re saying, then it’s actually the kind of thing you need to listen to. It’s embarrassing
to admit that because of my ignorance I was a bit put off. But after reading the book, I felt I had
to know more, I had to understand it.
After reading some of the testimonies, I felt that each person had their own experiences and31“NHK supeshyaru: Genbaku no e – shimin ga nokosu Hiroshima no kiroku” (NHK Special: Picturesof the Atomic Bombing – Documents of Hiroshima Left by the People), 2002.

49

feelings, and I can’t say any one [was more affecting than the rest], but there was one woman[Pe Bon-Gi] who was living in Okinawa [after the war], staying in this kind of shack with all thewindows shut up. Of course, it would be impossible for anybody who had her experiences toremain normal. You have to live with it for the rest of your life. Ultimately, as a woman I canimagine everything about their experiences. I can imagine myself being in that position. On theother hand, I’m amazed that they didn't die, that they kept on living, although I’m sure somecommitted suicide. I was able to empathise with the experiences of all the survivors.
[After reading the book] I went to the library to look for other books on “comfort women,” but I
didn’t know what was out there, so I looked for whatever I could find. In Shanghai there was a[“comfort station”] called Umi-no-ie [Beach House], which was set up by a Japanese proprietor,
and there’s a book that was written by the proprietor’s son, who was raised in the brothel. He
wrote the stories of the “comfort women” [based on his childhood memories]. The book iscalled Messages from the Military Comfort Station “Umi-no-ie”: The Comfort Women Designated by
the Japanese Special Naval Landing Forces.32 But the book is written from a man’s point of view,
and I had doubts about what this man wanted to achieve by writing in such a carefree way. In
the end, men and women have completely different perspectives. The author was there. He
saw and heard what was going on. He knew about the suffering of the women. But the utter
casualness [of his tone] was what was really shocking for me.
Men are the perpetrators. I think that’s the real point. One hundred years ago, no matter thecountry, women were treated as objects. So men’s understanding of women starts from thatpoint, and they don’t even take something like [the “comfort women” issue] seriously. It’s likethey have no idea at all. As far as men were concerned, women and children were the same as
objects. Like slaves. I really feel that was the case. For the generation of my father, and that of
my grandfather, I think the people who went to war are the perpetrators, but even for them,war is a really extreme situation where everyone’s out of their senses, everyone’s a little crazy.
It’s like, the Japanese idea is “government knows best” [oyakata hinomaru], right? So ordinary
people don’t think. Everyone says there’s “no need to think.” Like, “You don’t have to think,just let the higher-ups deal with everything.” My father was a total grunt. I’m sure he had some
32

Hana, Kōhei, Jyūgun ianjo “Umi no ie” no dengon – Kaigun tokubetsu rikusentai shitei no ianfu tachi(Messages from the Military Comfort Station “Umi-no-ie”: The Comfort Women Designated by theJapanese Special Naval Landing Forces) (Osaka: Japan Democratic Press Center, 1992).

50

feelings, but he never thought so deeply, and was educated to believe he didn’t have to think.
My father fought in China and in Okinawa, but he’s dead now. That’s a big regret. I shouldhave asked him about it. The people who went to war don’t talk about it. Maybe just a mention
here and there. They say only a few people survived the bloodbath at Okinawa, like a band of
survivors. So they don’t talk too much. The only thing my father always said was, “I have no
excuse for living.” But after I read the book [Women of the Imperial Army’s Comfort Stations], I
realized I really should have asked about it. I thought if my father left any documents about theunit he was assigned to in Okinawa, then I could ask my brother to show them to me. So in theend knowing is the one thing I can do. Then I start to get going, want to learn more, and thenthrough knowing, maybe a different action might be possible. If I had read this book [when myfather was still alive], I would’ve been able to carry on his experiences of the war.
I never [talked with anybody about the “comfort women” issue]. At minimum, if it’s not
someone who’s actually read the survivors’ testimonies, then there’s no common ground. So I
can’t speak, or maybe there’s nothing to talk about. So, no. It’s impossible to talk without acertain level of knowledge. [When I tried speaking with my husband], there was no comment.
Silence. [He] knows way more than I do about history, and usually I’m the one who can’t keep
up with him, because I don’t know so much. Maybe he just doesn’t know so much about it. It’s
like he doesn’t want to know about it.
Japan is so into covering-up. My daughter is in Germany. She sees news about Japan from aEuropean perspective, and she always comments about how Japan tends to hide things. It’s likethe Japanese media only ever pick up news about violent events and bizarre killings. My
daughter says that in Europe that kind of thing rarely makes the news. The main topics arepolitics and world affairs. Even then, there’s so much information doctoring in Japan. If we
don’t investigate ourselves, and there’s only what’s in the media, then it’s completely
unreliable.
Recently I happened to see an article in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun in which Yoshizawa Hisako– who of course lived through the war herself – said, “Ignorance is the biggest terror,” and I
thought that was spot on. I’m sure there are tons of people who could form their own opinions
and statements if they just had the information. But nobody lets them know, so instead the
media picks up news about some weird killing and all people ever talk about is how “Japan is a51

horrible country where girls can’t walk around alone.” The important information is getting
lost. People aren’t informed. Ignorance is unacceptable, but if you leave things the way they arethen people will be ignorant. Passively swept along. Really, if you don’t have your own interestor concern and try to stick with it, then you just get more and more confused. Especially for
women, when they read [the survivors’ testimonies], I’m sure they’d think of it as their own
experience. But there’s no chance for them to learn. That’s the biggest problem. So I absolutely
think that it should be in the textbooks and all the facts should be stated.
(August 2014, Saginuma)

Y. Y. (University lecturer)
I'd come into contact with various reports [about the “comfort women” issue] through thepapers and on TV and so on, but it was from 2007 onwards that I began to have a direct
involvement with it through my academic research, and to think about it deeply. After I started
doing my Ph.D, that is. It wasn't the main theme of my doctorate, but it was spoken about at theseminars that I attended, and friends of mine organized events where former “comfort women”
came and spoke to which I was asked along, and so on. There were people around me who
were involved with the issue, and it was generally just taken for granted that it was something
everyone would know about. The most continuous form of contact that I have with the issue isreading books about it, I suppose, like Lee Chong-Hwa's The Political Philosophy of Whispers.33
In about 2008 or 2009, Lee Chong-Hwa came to participate in one of the seminars I was
attending. I think the first time she came, I hadn't read the book, but I started reading it during
the course. I didn't pursue the issue that thoroughly, but I guess it was around that time that I
became aware of it as a current, ongoing problem. That was when I was in my mid-twenties, so
I suppose it was relatively late. I guess I'd come into contact with it before then, too, but I don't
remember so well.

33

Lee Chong-Hwa, Tsubuyaki no seiji shisō: motomerareru manazashi/kanashimi e no soshite himerareta
mono e no (The Political Philosophy of Whispers; The Sought-After Gaze—At Sadness, and At That
Which Has Been Hidden) (Seidosha, 1998).

52

I have the feeling that military “comfort women” were mentioned in our textbooks at school,
but the schools that I attended weren't really the kind to put much energy into teachingmodern history. I don't remember making an effort to learn about history in university either.
In fact, I feel like I chose my courses in a way that meant I avoided that kind of stuff. It wasn't a
conscious decision or anything, it was just that it was the inward-looking subjects like literatureand psychology that I was really interested in. I have no memory of speaking about those
things at home, either, though it seems like a real shame. I think [my parents] are interested inthat sort of thing, but when you speak of “comfort women”, the question of the colonial
territories naturally arises. My maternal grandmother lived for a while on the Korean
peninsula. So I guess they must be interested in it, but they didn't talk about it, I got the feelingthat perhaps they were avoiding it, or else, acting as if it didn't exist. My maternal grandmotherwas the eldest child, and she was already in her mid- to late teens when the war ended, so I'msure that she knew that it was going on around her. I guess that, because she knew at the time,
it was even harder for her to talk about, that there were bits she found impossible to speak of.
I'm sure it was in part our fault for not asking, but it’s still not clear what happened. I nevertried deliberately asking her about the issue of military “comfort women” or anything like that.
I guess it was in about 2010 that I went to an event where [former “comfort women” came tospeak]. I can't remember how it was that I ended up going, I guess someone must have told me
about it? There were people in the same study group as me whose research was directly
involved with that stuff. I remember that event well. Members of the university teaching staff
who I knew were standing outside the venue where it was being held to serve as kind of
security in case the right-wingers came along, and I remember saying hi to them. The security
was pretty strict, although once we were inside, it was basically just listening to people talking
in a normal way…
[Listening to the first woman’s testimony], I didn't understand the language she was speaking,so I had to rely on the interpreter. I think she was Filipino. I remember that her way of
speaking, the way her emotion was put across whenever she spoke felt like something that
couldn't be expressed [through language]. Of course, the same went for the content, too… To
give a different example, there was someone else there who could only speak a kind of Chinesethat wasn't Mandarin, and someone who seemed to be her son was on stage with her,interpreting what she was saying. The interpreter, too, was talking in this incredibly excited
fashion, as if the woman's words had rubbed off on him, and what he said was then translated53

again, into Japanese. Translation is such an incredibly delicate, difficult task. The
informational content of what people are saying gets conveyed, but [the unified whole of theperson speaking] separates out into strata, and you get only a misty understanding of things.
On the other side of that mist, everything is clear, but I remember feeling as if it was something
I couldn't understand with the linguistic experience I'd had up to then, with my vocabulary at
the time.
Something I remember now is how in 2007, before I went to that meeting, I was working as ateaching assistant for a lecture series for undergraduates entitled 'Peace and Culture', which
had a different speaker every week. There's a woman called Kaori Sakagami, now teaching at
Tsuda College, who was previously employed by a production company that was working incooperation with NHK to produce documentaries for NHK Educational TV. It was thatcompany which made the programme on The Women's International War Crimes Tribunal on
Japan's Military Sexual Slavery which caused a scandal.34 We invited her in to speak at thelecture series, so I had a chance to listen to what she had to say. She told us how theintervention happened when Shinzō Abe [the current Japanese Prime Minister] was Chief
Cabinet Secretary, and explained the process by which people from that subsidiary company
and the people involved with producing that programme, including top figures from NHK,
[were pressured], resulting in it being aired with skewed content. I think that was the first timethat I'd heard about that. Rather than being about the actual content of the testimonies
themselves, my interest tends more toward the “comfort women” issue in the context ofpolitical intervention in programme production and that kind of thing. I found out [fromSakagami’s speech] about how there is a kind of taboo in the broadcasting world surrounding“comfort women”, in particular the Women's International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan's
Military Sexual Slavery, which explicitly made clear the Emperor's responsibility in the Second
World War, an issue which is still a taboo today. I said that I started to think about it seriously
after changing university to start my PhD, but I guess that was the first major trigger.
I haven't read all that many testimonies [of former “comfort women”], and rather than thetestimonies themselves, I'd say that I'm more interested in aspects of the issue like Japan's war
34

The NHK Education Television programme Towareru senji seibōryoku (Accusations of Wartime
Sexual Violence) broadcast on 30th January 2001, second in the “ETV2001 How to Deal With the
War Series” “, caused an outcry when it emerged that Abe Shinzō, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary
at the time, and other politicians had exerted pressure on the programme makers, and the contents
were falsified.

54

responsibility, or the treatment of gender within the periods of Japan's colonialist expansion
and curtailment. There's a collection of essays called History and Responsibility edited by Kim
Puja and Nakano Toshio, which I have skimmed through.35 Even before going to study abroad,I had an interest in the nature of the connection between literature and the political andhistorical contexts within the colonised territories, both during and post occupation, and I now
write papers about the subject. I do feel that there are limits to what I can do whenapproaching it from within the confines of an English-language literature perspective, andthere was also a part of me which wasn't sure, as a man, how to go about approaching the topic,
with the sexual violence it entails... When thinking about issues surrounding colonialism,
about the vestiges of that, the scars and the memories left over from it, then an important issue
to be addressed is how women's bodies have been effaced. Back at that time I wasn't able totake that kind of language apart, rephrase it, think about it properly.
That doesn't just apply to the “comfort women” issue, but also for example the question ofJapanese-American relations on Okinawa, which is something I came to be interested inaround the same time, and how that is spoken about now. The way that Japan thinks about
Okinawa, the way that Okinawa represents itself can't be thought about without considering,for example, the question of creating masculinity or femininity. Even if the issue could beneatly sorted out on a philosophical or theoretical level—which it actually can't—when you getto the level which is closer to people's feelings and emotions about the matter, it's not just[material] for a paper or so on, it takes time to take it all in properly, and think about it. In mycase, I don't think I'd be able to understand the issue if I didn't take lots of diversions, reading or
finding out or thinking about things that at first sight seem totally unrelated, not just the“comfort women” issue itself but many other things.
I'm also interested in the question of giving testimony, of becoming a witness, and havethought about it a fair deal, so I think there are things that I can say [on that subject]. Regarding
literature and testimony, the thing I immediately think of is Holocaust literature, as well as thecriticism of that and the research that's been done about it. In terms of Japanese-language stuff,
the first thing that come to mind is something that [the Okinawan author] Medoroma Shunsaid. While he's writing his novels, he reads all kinds of testimony. He says that people trying to35

Kim Puja and Nakano Toshio (eds.), Rekishi to sekinin——“ianfu” mondai to 1990 nendai (History andResponsibility; The “Comfort Women” Issue in the 1990s), Seikyūsha, 2008.

55

write literature should read as much testimony as they can. Rather than asking what testimony
is, or what is the impact that it has on the writer and the reader, find out what it is that
happened through reading the testimony, he says. He speaks of it as the basis of the writer's
creative stance. In his case, of course, he's speaking about the testimony from the Battle of
Okinawa in mind.
Another thing is something they say about the Battle of Okinawa, [which I think also applies tothe surviving “comfort women”], is that by the year 2030 there will be nobody left alive who has
experienced it. So inevitably, there's this sense of crisis that, when all the people who give
testimony have died, there will be nobody who can pass the truth about the past down to othergenerations. This issue of how that stuff should be passed on is a common theme of the artist
Yamashiro Chikako. It's the idea that maybe the process of listening to people giving testimony
makes you yourself a witness, that it leads to a change in the meaning of giving testimony (notin a revisionist direction). In the words of the academic Yakabi Osamu, who talks about theidea of “becoming an Okinawan” and “relearning the memories of the Battle of Okinawa”36,
even people who are surrounded by that kinds of testimony should make an effort to learn
about it once again.4 People who live far away, for example in Tokyo, have to put in an evengreater effort. He calls the way in which we listen [to testimony] into question.
The third thing I want to mention is closely related to my own research, and it concerns what I
was speaking about in the lecture series I was in charge of at university. In colonised territory,or else in places where fierce racial discrimination is a part of everyday life, people mostly
focus on the binary relationship between the perpetrators and the victims. Of course it stands
to reason that that binary relationship would be key but, on the other hand, there is also atertiary category, which is that of the observer. There's the issue of how we should think about
this observer figure. One of the attitudes of the observer, which is in fact the one assumed by
the majority, is to pretend that this victim-perpetrator dichotomy doesn't exist. I think that's anattitude that enables one to go about one's daily life without any trouble. It's an attitude of
rejection, denial—to assert that those things are not going on, or have no relation to you. This
is not just an attitude taken by individuals, it can also be an attitude taken by whole groups orcommunities. The question is how you [move that toward the direction] of what is really going36

Yakabi Osamu, Okinawasen beigun senryōshi o manabinaosu (Relearning The Battle of Okinawa andthe History of American Military Occupation) Seorishobō, 2009.

56

on, how you convert denial into recognition. I'm constantly thinking about how that should
best be done.
That three-way perpetrator-victim-observer relationship [came into play] at the South African
Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for example, where the issue of testimony was also
placed under the spotlight. The idea is that, if the focus is placed solely on the binary
relationship between perpetrator and victim then testimony itself becomes a form of spectacle,and so there's been a lot of people, including academics and writers, who have thought about
an alternative way for the majority, who are the observers, to take in this testimony—a way
which isn't just mere consumption, which doesn't deny its relationship with oneself.37 [Mythoughts about the “comfort women” issue have] also been largely influenced by that way of
thinking.
How does one bring about recognition of those facts that have been denied? Thinking in termsof the areas that I've been involved with through my work, I think that works of literature, or
else literature understood in a broad sense to include films, poetry, plays, music, novels,
criticism etc., can still play a pivotal role. Even if it doesn't affect all of the observers, I thinkliterature is crucial in helping at least some of them to reach the point where they can give
testimony, admit that what happened happened, even if they don't launch press charges orvoice criticisms about it. In this sense, the word testimony has a different meaning from theway in which we mean it when we speak of the victims' testimony, a slightly broader meaning.
I'm really interested in the issue of testimony in that sense. [I'm fascinated by] those works ofliterature which have served to give testimony [in the broad sense]—like Jean Genet and his
commitment to the Palestinian cause. 38 Edward Said called Joseph Conrad “the mostinteresting witness to European imperialism,”39 but in fact, as well as being a witness [i.e.
someone who gave testimony], he was also a collaborator. So there's all different levels to it, I
think. You can be a witness and observer, or you can be a witness and a collaborator, and so on.
Their words are not the testimony of the direct victims—not of the victims of the slave systemor the exploitation in Africa in Conrad's case, or of the Palestinians in Genet's case—but rather
37

Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull, London: Vintage Books, 1999.
Jean Genet, Un Captif Amoureux, Paris: Gallimard, 1986; “Quatre heures à Chatila,” Revue d’études
palestiniennes, 1st January, 1983.
39
Edward W. Said, The Pen and The Sword: Conversations with David Barsamian, Monroe, Maine:
Common Courage Press, 1994.
3857

as testimony that brings to light the relationship between perpetrators and observers, thathelps pass it on to successive generations.
(August 2014, Takadanobaba)

K.O. (Works at an organization; lives in the USA)I don't honestly remember the first time I heard the term “military comfort women” used. It's
the recent usage of it on the news and so on that's left the strongest impression on me, the way
you hear it all the time but its meaning still feels somehow vague. From the scraps I gleaned
through hearing the news or reading the papers, it had a pretty heavy feeling to it, tied up with
politics, the war, crimes and so on, and I feel like I ended up sort of avoiding it, turning my eyesaway from it, not ever making the effort to find out the facts properly.
This was the first time that I'd encountered the testimony of former comfort women. Of thelinks I was given, I first watched the video of Jan Ruff-O’Herne40, and then all of the witness
testimony videos on the Fight for Justice website41. I'm embarrassed to admit it, but I had no
idea that the Japanese Army had set up “comfort stations” in so many different places, and that,through a variety of different ways, women from all different countries and regions came tofind themselves placed in that situation. It's usually Korea and China that appear on the news
in connection with “comfort women”, so my association with those countries was definitely thestronger one, although I was sort of vaguely aware that those weren't the only two nations inwhich it had happened. In any case, it made me realize again that I'd never given much thought
to the situation or the background to it in any great detail.

40

A video of Jan Ruff O’Herne, a Dutch woman who served as a “comfort woman” in Indonesia,
appearing on the Australian television programme “Talking Heads” in February 2009, produced byAustralian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).
41
Fight for Justice: the Japanese Military “Comfort Women” –– Resistance to Forgetting & Responsibility for
the Future is a website run principally by the Centre for Research and Documentation on Japan's
War Responsibility and the Violence Against Women in War Research Action Centre. It includes
documents and testimony videos related to the military “comfort women” issue.
http://fightforjustice.info	
 58

I was a bit surprised to find out that there were Dutch women in Indonesia [serving as “comfort
women”], especially since the video of Jan Ruff-O’Herne was the first that I watched, but then,after that, I started to feel like I might have read that fact before or learned it somewhere, like it
was buried somewhere deep in my memory. Hearing or reading in the news about “comfort
women” together with talk of “compensation” and “trials”, I thought of it pretty much as apolitical issue, and I guess I tended to group the women all together. I don't think I'd everthought about [the former military “comfort women”] as individuals, even though in reality,
everyone obviously had a totally different experience of it—of the time leading up to it, of what
they went through at the time, and what happened to them afterwards.
After that, I read various testimonies, and a good few of the people said how they believed the
new generations were different, or that they were receiving support from Japanese citizen
support groups, or that they wanted the Japanese and Korean governments to get their act
together and sort things out so that Korean and Japanese children could get along with eachanother, and those kinds of sentiments had a big effect on me. I think that listening to justsnippets from the radio, I'd heard things that suggested [the former “comfort women”] hated
the whole of Japan [as a result of their experiences], and also heard about Japanese people who
were hostile to those women, but what I felt this time was that what the women wanted was for
the Japanese nation to admit responsibility for those inhumane unacceptable acts that were
inflicted on individuals during the abnormal circumstances of war, and to compensate themaccordingly. In thinking about that, I sensed once again the kind of abnormal character of war,
the unforgivable nature of what happens as part of it, and the indignation that has no place togo.
Watching that stuff, I felt ashamed for having never made the effort to find out more about it
before, never reading those websites before, even though would have only taken thirty minutes
or so. It seemed like maybe it was some kind of sense of guilt that had prevented me. It's as if I
somehow wanted to turn my eyes away from the acts carried out by Japanese people—ofwhom I am one. About the Kōno Statement42, too, my knowledge on the subject was prettymuch just that he had admitted that such things had gone on, my understanding wasincomplete, I didn't know that individuals are not being compensated in a way faithful to that

42

A statement made by Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Kōno Yōhei in 1993, admitting for the firsttime that “comfort women” had been coerced by the Japanese army. (Trans.)

59statement. But reading the words of the women on the page with all the testimony, or thestatements of ex-soldiers, I felt like they were making a very calm and very fair request: forJapan to give compensation as a way of fully acknowledging what happened in the past, fully
admitting the effect their actions had on what came after, and the hardship that they caused.
I also wondered why it seems to be so difficult for Japan's younger generations to face thisincredibly reasonable request head on. It even started to seem bizarre to me, how difficult theJapanese government finds it just to acknowledge this stuff properly. I'm sure that there arehidden complexities to the situation that I don't understand, but I feel like there is so much thatthe new generations could do by just thinking calmly and reasonably about these things—for
example, finding out about it and thinking about it for ourselves (of course, using unbiased
information sources is important here) and then forming our own opinion on the matter. Thatmeans not being swayed by news that doesn't tell the whole story, or letting ourselves form
preconceptions based upon biased reports of the situation.
And then, this is a slightly different topic, but listening to that testimony, I wondered to myself
where those former “comfort women” got their strength from, to be able to stand up and bear
witness to what happened. I guess there's lots of different reasons for their strength. There aresome who have built a family who loves them for who they are and accepts them in their
entirety, including all that happened in their past, and then there are others who, now they are
old, feel they have to speak out, for the sake of those [with similar experiences] who havealready passed away. Of course, I don't want to just talk about that element of it, to try andmake it all into some kind of redemptive tale, but thinking about the courage to come forward
like that, and then, reading the testimony of the people in the army and their thoughts aboutpacifism left me speechless. Also, I feel like it's not right that we, the Japanese post-war
generations, let our lives pass without reading or hearing these people's courageous words,
these words steeped in blood and tears. Because as far they aren't listened to, they are mute,voiceless. We have to make the effort to know more [about those kinds of things].
Have I ever spoken with anyone about the “comfort women” issue while living in America?
Hmm, a Korean friend of mine and I once tried to explain to a mutual Vietnamese friend about
the discussion between our governments over the “comfort women” issue. This was before I
watched the testimony videos, or saw the Fight for Justice website. But that Korean friend iseven less knowledgeable about the issue than I am (uninterested, maybe, or just prefers to live60

in a forward-thinking way, rather than brooding over the past or talking politics) so we didn't
give a very deep explanation or discussion. In fact, neither of us could give proper answers to
our Vietnamese friends' questions, and at that time, I thought to myself that I'd research it at alater date, but never really did. Honestly, I don't remember any other times that the topic hascome up in conversation. This time, in listening to the experiences of the former “comfort
women” through a different medium to usual, it struck me as a real shame the way that, when
you say that word “comfort women”, it comes with this political image attached, and thanks tothat, there are far fewer people willing to listen to the experiences of the women who actuallyexperienced that stuff. Apart from that, there haven't been any other colleagues and friends
from other countries who have asked me about it, perhaps because they have the perceptionthat it's a sensitive topic, or else they just don't know much about it.
(September 2014, Washington D.C.)

K.S.

(Company employee)

I've known about “comfort women” for a long time. I first heard about it when I was very young,probably when I was a primary school or junior high school student. I was watching a TV
programme and there was a scene depicting it, though it only lasted for a second. It was awartime drama, the sort that they often have on TV in August [to coincide with the anniversaryof the end of the war]. At least I think that's what it was. I'd heard the word “comfort women”
even before that, in another TV drama, where they'd shown young girls being forcibly taken
away. Then, in this one, there was a scene showing a huge room with all the “comfort women”
lying there, with just partitions separating them, then all these Japanese soldiers lining up
clutching their money, and then going and doing their thing. It left a really strong impression
on me. [The scene seemed to suggest that the “comfort women”] had been taken away against
their wills to this place. The women were lying there staring at the ceiling with expressionlessfaces, and the Japanese soldiers with notes in their hands just kept coming and coming, one
after another.
[Watching that] I felt really sorry for those women, and thought what a horrible thing war was.
But then I'd also seen scenes on TV of the women in villages attacked by foot-soldiers in the61Sengoku period, or Japanese women being violated by Chinese and Russians when returning
to Japan from Manchuria or Sakhalin after the war, so I kind of thought that those things
happened regardless of the era or country, and I didn't have the impression that the Japanese
troops were doing anything especially evil. I don't mean to say that what they did was OK
because other people were doing the same thing, but rather that everyone who commits thosekinds of acts is terrible. I also felt angry towards those in command who didn't enforce the rules.
I guess I thought, that's what war is like, and that's why it's so terrible.
I suppose it was some time in the nineties [that I saw that drama]. Maybe they'd made it in lightof the first former “comfort women” who came out and gave their testimony around that time.
[In regards to the “comfort women” issue as you see it reported in the media,] well, I don't trust
the media as it is anyway. They change the way they report things depending on the way thatsomeone or other feels about it. I don't trust what they say an inch. I think I was probably able
to accept [the depiction of “comfort women” as I saw it in that drama as a child] pretty
unquestioningly because it didn't come with the question of people's interests attached, had
none of the usual commotion surrounding it. I guess at that time I didn't think the media wasbad, either.
[I've been interested in history since I was really young.] I really liked war-related things, andmade plastic models of battleships and tanks, and so, from quite a young age I would
sometimes watch historical documentaries and dramas. I wondered about why the Japanesearmy had attacked China, why and how they'd lost, and read Japanese History manga43 in order
to find out the answers. That was when I was in primary school. You know, boys are into thosekinds of things, and I was also influenced by my friends. A friend I had had from when I wastiny was also into that stuff. As kids we made battleships and tanks together, and talked about
all kinds of things. When we were at university, or maybe it was before that, anyway, very
occasionally we'd talk about what the war must have been like.
I was pretty interested in modern history, but there was almost no one else at my school who
was. I guess my parents might have had an influence on me in that regard, too. It wasn't likethey came out and said much about it, but they watched a lot of historical dramas on television
43

Nihon no rekishi (Japanese History) is the generic name for educational manga series about
Japanese history, published by major Japanese publishing companies such as Shueisha,
Shōgakukan and Gakken.

62and so on. [In our history classes at school,] we spent no time [on modern history] at all. We
really just whizzed through it. It was about the same depth of understanding I'd picked up fromreading the Japanese History manga, because that included a bit of modern history, too. But,
come to think of it now, apart from that one old friend of mine, there wasn't anyone else who
was interested in history like I was.
[I like visiting Korean history museums.] As far as the main ones go, I've been to the National
Museum of Korea, the Seoul Museum of History and the National Museum of Korean
Contemporary History. Of course, there are all different types of history museums, and some ofthem have old earthenware vessels from ancient times or Buddhist statues from the middle
ages, but it's the museums of contemporary history that I'm interested in. For example, theperiod post-1900, when the West started making its way into Asia, and the whole region
became modernized. I'm also interested in wartime history, and the post-war regeneration of
the country. Really, I'm interested in all history, regardless of the country, but I have a special
interest in Korea because I like Korean pop music, and it's through that that I've come to know
a lot about the country's history. It didn't start out as a desire to know about Korean history inparticular...
[In the Korean history museums,] there were displays about various kinds of anti-Japaneseactivity, like how, during the war, there was a provisional Korean government in China set up
by Korean political leaders who’d escaped the country, which coordinated resistance activities
within Korea against the Japanese colonial government. There was also a part depicting thekind of room the average Korean citizen lived in during the war, the general living situation.
But it wasn't like the exhibitions discussed the terrible treatment Koreans received at the handsof the Japanese or anything intended to stir up anti-Japanese sentiment. It just explained, inquite a factual way, that this was the way that most Koreans lived at the time. I don't think that
“comfort women” were discussed. In fact the thing that most stuck in my memory from myvisits to those exhibitions wasn't the section about Korean-Japanese relations, but that about
the political struggles in Korea – the postwar struggle for presidential power and so on. It mademe realize that there was a lot of conflict that took place. Maybe it was just me who didn't feel it
was anti-Japanese, though. Something that struck me is how the perceived contents of an
exhibition change according to the viewer. The way people feel about things changes
depending on their particular perspective, their beliefs about things. For example, if a Korean
person was looking at that exhibition [I'm sure they'd think very different things to me.] I guess63they get taught about all that history at a young age, and although they probably don't think
about it much during their everyday life, when they're looking at an exhibition like that it
seems likely that all that stuff they've forgotten about would be roused, and they might findtheir anti-Japanese sentiment getting stirred up by looking at something like that. But for me,
as a Japanese person, that didn't really happen.
In May this year, there was a special exhibition at the National Museum of Korean
Contemporary History about “comfort women”, but I didn't see it. I was more interested in the
exhibition about modern Korean history in the same museum, which covered the period
spanning from 1900s right through to the K-pop sensation of recent years. In fact, thatexhibition was about all the stuff I'm most into, so I went to see that. At the entrance to themuseum, they have all these LED panels showing all sorts of video clips. It's a really advanced,
modern kind of museum. The maps and so on inside the museum are all 3D, and you can touchthem [and move them about]. So in this exhibition there were displays showing what life waslike in the fifties and sixties, the Prime Minister's chair, stuff about the K-Pop boom and themost recent TV programmes, and so on. When I found out about that I decided I really wanted
to go and see it.
The exhibition about modern Korean history is a permanent exhibition, but when I came tothe end of that, there was a special exhibition room at the end, that was just there for a limited
time. I glanced at it, wondering what it was, and saw that there were all kinds of manga and pop
art-style pictures there. There were lots of kids there to see it, lots of parents with children, so I
thought that maybe it was a special manga or animation event or something, but when I looked
closely I saw that it was an exhibition about “comfort women”. At that point I sort of lost
courage and decided not to go in. I found out later they were displaying the exhibition that had
appeared before at the Angoulême International Comics Festival44, but I didn't know that at
the time, and I thought maybe that they were trying to portray the issue in a way that was easy
for even kids to grasp. The reason I didn't go inside at that time was that I knew what “comfort
women” were after seeing that drama all that time ago, and because I knew, I felt like goinginside would only make me feel bad. Also, I'm easily recognizable in Korea as a Japanese, and I
felt like people there who were feeling emotional might start having a go at me, and I didn't

44

At the 41st Angoulême International Comics Festival in 2014, there was an exhibition aboutmanga dealing with the issue of military “comfort women”.

64want that to happen.
I don't mean that the exhibition had a [menacing] feeling to it or anything like that, it's just that
I myself was scared... You never know what people who use those kinds of things as an outlet
for their rage are going to do. I think the media probably has a share in the blame for [that wayof thinking]. Before I became interested in Korea, I studied a bit of Chinese. At that time, I had
to visit China for my work sometimes, so it made sense. Some Chinese people are reallypatriotic in their way of thinking, they really believe that China is without fault, and I think myfear of not knowing what people are going to do stems from that time. It's not like anyone has
actually ever said anything bad to me. But I was over in Hong Kong when Japanese company
workers were arrested, during the time when the Senkaku Islands dispute was erupting, andthere was an anti-Japanese rally.
In fact, though, there were only about 20 or 30 people at the rally. They just met up in this hugepark and started making a lot of noise, and that was it. The people around them were totallyuninterested, and were just napping and so on. It was really only a small proportion of the
population who got worked up about the issue, but when I got back to Japan and saw the news,
I found that they were making out like it was a really big deal. I guess that if you have it planted
in your mind that there are people who feel that way, then [deciding not to go inside theexhibition like I did] is the kind of decision you end up making. You start to feel scared. That
event is one of the reasons I lost my trust in the media. Our company has an office in China,
and some of my colleagues are living out there. There have been times when I heard about ademo going on over there, [but when you speak to them about it, they say that] most people
don't take part, and the people who do aren't especially dangerous. But when you watch it on
television it seems like everyone is furious.
[My grandparents] lived in Manchuria during the war, but they came back before the war
ended, so they didn't have terrible memories of the final period or anything like that. [When I
was a child,] I didn't ask those around me [about the war], and they didn't speak about it either,so I haven't heard anything about it. My grandma never spoke of it. Just the fact that she was in
Manchuria, that was it. I don't know if she doesn't speak of it because it was a hard time, or
what. I somehow developed this feeling that I shouldn't talk about it. So I guess I deliberately
avoided asking her about it.

65

In that sense, I was interested in the way people lived in Manchuria back then, and so on. Thatmight have been why I was so interested in the [wartime] dramas. I didn't ask my father much[about my grandparents' experience] either, and he didn't speak about it to me of his own
accord. I don't know if it's true or not, but my father once told me [that the Chinese adored mygrandfather]. He said they loved him because he was so kind, although I really don't know ifthat's true. My grandfather wasn't in the army. I don't know if that was owing to some kind ofphysical problem or not.
When it comes to the question of whether or not “comfort women” really existed, I don't know
the facts at all, so it ends up just being a matter of intuition, but it seems to me that if you think
about it rationally, reasonably, then it's obvious that that sort of thing would be necessary. If
you have tens of thousands of men, then some kind of thing of that kind would be necessary inorder to satisfy their desires. Also, I think it takes a considerable amount of bravery to come out
and reveal that you had those kinds of things done to you. I find it impossible to believe thatthose people would gain anything from [speaking about those] kinds of things, though that's
just a feeling. I think of it as an issue that needs addressing.
When it comes to this issue, I wish someone would produce some kind of scientific proof, or atleast a scientific way of looking at it. This is getting away from “comfort women” for a minute,but there is a job in our world which is prostitution, right? And we can ask, for example, howmany prostitutes are needed in order to satisfy the sexual desires of 1000 men. There's supply
and demand, and there's the question of how many people you need in order to fulfill thatdemand. And then you can work out, given how many troops there were stationed in Korea atthat time, and how many people would be needed to fulfill those demands. Suppose you needa hundred people, then how many people would there be actively seeking that job? If ahundred were needed and only fifty came forward, then I guess it stands to reason that theother fifty would be taken away against their will. I guess that's one way of looking at the issue.
(September 2014, Waseda)

A. S.（Member of regional organization）

66

On 13 August, 1996, at the initiative of the youth group of the Kawasaki Workers' Union [ofwhich I was part], we showed the film The Murmuring. That was eighteen years ago. We
screened it at a place called the Nakahara Meeting Hall, in front of Musashi Nakahara stationon the Nanbu line, which is now known as Epoch Nakahara. I guess there were about two or
three hundred people there, and I think it started at six in the evening. It was just a one-off
screening. News of it got passed on by word of mouth, and we gave out flyers and so on. I think
one of the people responsible for hosting the event gave an introduction to it. I was there on theday, working on the reception desk. But that was eighteen years ago, so I don't really remember
the content of the film. My family came to see it too, but I don't remember asking my daughteror wife what they thought or anything like that.
There was a reason why we ended up showing that film, which is linked to the history andclimate of Kawasaki45. As you probably know, there is a company originally called the Nihon
Kōkan (now the JFE Engineering Corporation) based in Kawasaki, which is an ironworks.
Before, throughout, and after the Second World War, that ironworks employed a lot of
Koreans living in Japan. There were some Koreans who were brought over here to work thereby force, and some who came seeking a job after the Japan-Korea treaty of 1910, and remained
here after the war. I don't know the exact figures, but there were about 20,000 Koreans living in
Kawasaki. There's a region of Kawasaki by the coast where a lot of Koreans live, and the people
living there set up a welfare organization called Seikyu-sha, which runs local crèches and soon.
In terms of what has happened in this particular area, I think about the Hitachi Employee
Discrimination case, where a young Korean living in Japan, called Pak Chong-Sok, took the
Hitachi company entrance examination, but wasn't employed because he was Korean. So there
was a discrimination dispute that he won, which was very rare for cases like that at the time.
Also in Kawasaki, there was another dispute over the issue of Koreans refusing to befingerprinted46, and at the heart of that was Seikyu-sha, the welfare organization I mentioned
before. The main figure in that was Yi In-Ha, a first-generation Japanese Korean priest.

45

Kawasaki is a city located in Kanagawa Prefecture, positioned between Tokyo and Yokohama.
(Trans.)46
In the 1980s, there was a wave of Koreans who refused to be fingerprinted, as was required by theJapanese law at the time for non-Japanese citizens. This requirement was eventually dropped by
the Japanese government. (Trans.)

67

In terms of anti-discrimination disputes and so on, the Japanese left wing protested pretty hardagainst the Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea of 1965. It was
obviously unfair, the treaty, and they claimed that that unfairness was based upon prejudice. It
was mainly the new left wing, rather than the communist party, that fought on that score.
Before that, there had been the 1960 demos over the Anpo Treaty, and then again in 1970, andin between those two demos there was the student movement protesting against the Treaty on
Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea. When you look at the content of
those protests, it's pretty clear they didn't really have a firm grounding, but the sort of protests
that Kawasaki's Seikyu-sha was involved in—focusing on discrimination through a single
individual’s case, or opposing the fingerprinting law—[had a concrete aim].
Also in Kawasaki, and I think this was the first time this happened anywhere in Japan, there
were protests against the municipal government, because [Korean] people were paying taxes
but weren't allowed to enter state housing. The city mayor back then was Itō Saburō, who'dbeen voted in as the socialist and communist candidate. At the time, Tokyo had Minobe[Ryōkichi] as its governor, Yokohama had Asukata [Ichio] as its mayor, Kawasaki had Itō,
Kyoto had Ninagawa [Torazō], and Osaka had Kuroda [Ryōichi]: it was a full set of reformist
politicians in government all around the country. That lasted until the early 1970s. It seems
unthinkable now, but in those days, the socialist and communist candidates were the ones who
got elected as governors and mayors. That was what it was like then. [The Kawasaki mayor] Itō
said that “law and regulations cannot override humanity”, and didn't press charges against
those who refused to be fingerprinted. That was how things were in Kawasaki.
So those sorts of disputes were going on in the area, and the youth group of the union, of which
I was a member, took part too, participating in various activities and so on, and it was then thatsomeone mentioned this film The Murmuring to me. Who was it, I wonder? I guess it must havebeen one of the people from the Seikyu-sha. I suppose one of the Seikyu-sha employees asked
us if we'd show the film. And with how things were at that time, we just agreed to do it, in avery natural way. We hadn't been involved with the military “comfort women” issue directly,
and it wasn't like we were instructed [to show the film] by the main body of the union, we justdecided to do it, voluntarily, because we were interested. Up until that point, I hadn't known
much about military “comfort women”, and I didn't know about the film either, but we decided
to screen it, and so we did, in August 1996. That was how it happened.

68Kawasaki's sister city is in Korea. It's a place called Puchon, which is about 20 minutes fromSeoul on the underground. One of the activity leaders [in the youth group of the union]
organises a kind of study tour there every year, so I've visited about four times. One of thosetimes, there was a trip to visit the “House of Sharing” which the film is based on, although it
just so happened that I couldn't make it on that particular occasion. That tour is still running,and [the person who organizes it] is around the same age as me, and retired a long time ago. He
really takes Japan-Korean relations as his life’s work. Now he works as a part-time lecturer atsome university or other. There's a place in [the Sakuramoto district of Kawasaki] called
Cement Street, with many Korean barbeque restaurants and so on, and for a while he talked
about trying to make it into a major Korean town, of a similar sort of scale to Chinatown in
Yokohama. The idea never quite took off, but he's a pretty passionate person, and has lived inthat area from when he first went to university, putting his roots down in the community,
teaming up with the Seikyu-sha people and involving himself in all kinds of projects. He’s stillrunning those study tours.
Apart from the screening of The Murmuring, I haven't been personally involved in any support
activities related to the “comfort women” issue. At some point, a former “comfort women” inIndonesia came over to Japan, and I went to a lecture she gave. That was over ten years ago, too.
I didn't organize the event or anything, so I can't even remember exactly how many years ago it
was. I have a feeling that it was in Yokohama. That was after the film screening. It's pretty long
ago, so I don't remember what she said. In any case, I just went along, I wasn't involved in any
support activities. In the film I watched recently, My Heart is Not Broken Yet, there was a society
offering support to Korean former “comfort women” now living in Japan. I didn't know that
support organizations like that existed. That's true, though, right—there really are groups ofJapanese activists offering support [to former “comfort women”]? Nowadays, it seems likeeverybody just bashes the Asahi Shimbun—you don't see people offering support to others,
people don't really show much interest. Public opinion has changed, so now it's the Asahi thatgets bashed. Personally, I'd like to do away with all the [right-wing] publications: Shukan
Shinchō, Shūkan Bunshun, Shūkan Gendai, Shūkan Post, not to mention the Sankei Shimbun andthe Yomiuri Shimbun…
In regards the Pacific War, my father went over and fought in China. I was born after he cameback to Japan, but he never said a thing about the war. Just the fact that he fought in China, andalso I saw a photo. I think he was just standing there holding a gun. Of course it wasn't while he69was fighting. The only thing my father would say [about that stuff] was that he had been to
China during the war. I don't even know how long he was there for, or where. He's been backseveral times after the war ended. Maybe he went with war friends or something. I don't know
why he went back, and I didn't ask.
I guess talking about the war is a kind of taboo. War means killing people. It stands to reason
that you wouldn't want to talk about it. Even if it's just talking about how you were a victim,
with bullets coming flying at you, there's no way that remembering those sorts of things isgoing to be pleasant. All the soldiers who went to war want to forget about it but they can't, andso they become traumatized and so on. The Self-Defense Forces troops who went to Iraq wereattacked by mortars and so on, but they didn't exactly take part in the war. And yet still, 28 of
those who went have killed themselves. That stuff can traumatize you even if you're notdirectly participating in it, so just think about what it must be like if you're actually fighting andkilling people, almost getting killed yourself. It must mess you up mentally, and even if it
doesn't, you wouldn't want to speak about it decades after it happened. I guess that's just how it
is with war. So many things happen that you don't want to speak about, both things done by
you and things done to you.
Basically, in Japan, people complain about the ways in which we suffered [during the war], butthey [won't admit responsibility] for the harm they caused. It's like that with “comfort women”,
and also with the Nanking Massacre. It's a taboo to talk about the things that we did during thewar. Of course, through the atomic bombs or the air raid on Tokyo on the 10th March where ahundred thousand people were killed, we lost lots and lots of people including civilians, andI'm not denying that these are serious issues, but when it comes to what Japanese did [toothers] during the war, people won't speak about it. I don't think it's just Japan that's like that.
In general, people don't want to speak about the harm they caused in other countries. Germany
is the only nation to have actively pursued taking responsibility for all the things they did.
[Speaking about topics like “comfort women” or war-related issues outside of the damage that
we endured] is basically not something that people do. Even within the union youth group, I
never really spoke with anybody about “comfort women”. It's only recently that I have. I wasout drinking with some other guys, and we were talking about the Asahi Shimbun, so I tried[bringing it up]. I wanted to see what people would say and they all came out with opinions like
Hashimoto [Tōru, the Osaka mayor]—you know, the idea that it's not just Japan who did those70

kinds of things, everybody was doing it, that kind of thing. [The people I was out drinking with]
were all apolitical types, and came out with things like, “Well, I'm sure 'comfort women'
probably existed, but it wasn't just Japan doing that kind of stuff. If there's a war, every country
needs a system like that, right? So isn't weird to go around lumping all the blame on Japan?”
The idea that someone would be let off for stealing something because other people also steal
is totally unthinkable. And yet, even though it won't get them off the hook, people still seek
redemption in those kinds of attitudes.
[War is taboo as it is,] but when you get into the territory of “comfort women” and the Nanking
Massacre, things to do with war and sex, then that’s really the taboo within the taboo. I guess if
we were [on the side of] the victims we might be able to talk about it a bit, but we're [on the sideof] the perpetrators, so it's extra hard. In addition, I think there's lots of people who have afeeling, I don't know if you'd call it nationalist or not, but a feeling that they don't want Japan tobe the sort of nation that does those sorts of things. That's really the sort of pettiness that lies
behind nationalism. When Japan got totally thrashed in the World Cup, the news reports were
all talking about how the Japanese fans were, going around picking up litter—saying how great
Japanese people were, what a great country it is to be part of. I was watching it all with a criticaleye, but that's what people turn to make them feel better. To feel some sense of superiority overother nations. That's what nationalism is about.
(September 2014, Shibuya)

M. S.（Traveller）
I have a feeling that I saw [the words military “comfort women”] in some textbook, but I haveno memory of studying the issue in any detail. I didn't like class much anyway, so I didn't reallylisten properly. I don't know when it was [that I saw that textbook], but it was just mentioned
there as an issue that existed. You know how when you're young, people don't really talk about
those kinds of [“sexual”] topics anyway. I feel like at school, they just said the word, “comfort
women”, and gave a vague explanation, like “they were people who served men”, and then left
it at that. But after I got old enough to understand that stuff, I found out that during the war
there were people who were forced to become kind of sexual slaves. I don't know when it was71that I found that out. I guess it was before high school.
It's pretty recently [that I became aware of “comfort women” as a social issue]. You know how
when relations with Korea turned sour, the Koreans started making bronze statues of “comfort
women” and things? After that, it appeared on the news even more than ever. [I feel like themedia coverage of the “comfort women” issue] tends to do a lot of covering up of the unsavoury
parts. It seems like the Japanese government refuses to bring the truth out into the open, taking
the stance of, “well, what happened happened, but there's nothing that can be done about itnow”. I sense that there's pressure being put on them from somewhere not to admit that it waswrong. And when it comes to what the Koreans say on the matter, well, I guess they're
probably right... But then I look at the way that the [South Korean] President, Park Geun-Hye
speaks about it and I feel like it's a little bit over the top, you start to suspect that she's might beusing the “comfort women” issue as a trigger to try and exert pressure on Japan. Even if what
she's speaking about is historical fact, I feel like she's doing so in order to try and claim politicaladvantage. I find myself wondering why she gets quite so emotional about it.
This was the first time [that I'd seen the videos showing the testimony of former “comfort
women”].47 But I'd always imagined that those were the kinds of things that went on, and what
they said was pretty much as I'd expected it would be. But the fact that there were so many
“comfort stations” means that there were really a huge number of people taken as sexual slaves.
If there were that many, then isn't it still only a really small proportion who have comeforward? I guess [a lot of people] still want to hide the fact that it happened? Probably even thepeople it happened to would rather not speak about it, if they can help it. [The former “comfort
women”] don't want to speak about it, and Japanese society wants to hide away from it, so it
never gets brought out into the open…
Even if you tried to compensate the victims for the experience of being forced to live in those“comfort stations”, too scared to run away for fear they'd be killed, there's no way you could. I
really hate the idea that you can solve all problems with money. I often think about if, forexample, your child was killed because of bullying or something, and you asked for47

The materials watched by the interviewee were as follows: a video clip of Jan Ruff-O’Herneappearing on the Australian television programme produced by ABC (See note 40); the programme“‘comfort women’ One Last Cry”, depicting the remains of “comfort stations” around the world andformer “comfort women”, produced by the USA's Korean broadcasting corporation Arirang TV,
and broadcast in March 2013.

72

compensation for your loss, how, when you get given this sum of 50 million yen, you must feelso empty. You've got [this great sum of money], and won the court case, but your dead childwill never come back. I'm sure the government would like to sort everything out with money.
But however much compensation and allowances these people are given now, they'll never get
their youths back. They're all elderly already, anyway. You can't give compensation for that.
I used to live in Yokosuka, which is near an American military base. I was really young at thetime so I don't remember it very clearly. After my parents sold our house, we went to live withmy grandma there for a while. I remember how one time, when we were near the base, I've
forgotten exactly what exactly it was that we were doing there, my grandma and parents told
me that I shouldn't go wandering around there by myself. When I asked why, they told me that
there were Yanks living around here, and they'd have their way with me. At the time I didn't
understand what they meant by “have their way”. But then, when I got a bit older, it was seen
as a kind of status symbol to be going out with one of the American soldiers among the girls
who went to school in the area.
[Now, remembering my family's words back then,] I think about how America has the powerover Japan now. I feel like my grandma knew from the war of cases where women were madeto sexually serve those in power, and that was passed down to me, via my mother. Throughthat experience and others, I came to realize that, when a certain group of people are in aweaker position, either in war or in military matters, that's what happens to their women. I
don't know whether I'll experience the situation of being at war in the future or not, but at thattime it was hard for me to imagine, and I didn't take it very seriously. But now that I have to go
in and out of the base as part of my job, I know that there are [American soldiers] who fall inlove and get married and so on, so I don't think you can say anything so general as “you need towatch out for American soldiers”. Although there definitely are cases of sexual assault, as there
are on the American army base in Okinawa, too.
I've searched on the internet before [about military “comfort women”], but there was just somuch information there, I had no idea what was true and what wasn't. There were somewebsites which said that the women were just doing a job, like prostitutes today do, andreceived a proper wage, and there were others that said people from poor households weresent to the stations by their families in order to make money. Then there were others that said
that the women were taken to the “comfort stations” by force and made to serve as sexual73slaves. Which version is the truth, I wonder? I've looked at so much stuff on the internet that I
feel even less sure about it than I was before. I think that some of the stuff in the media isdeliberately written so that people who see it will spread false information. If that's how it iswith NHK and [the major news providers] too, then there's really no information sources thatyou can trust.
[Thinking about my own thought processes when it comes to the “comfort women” issue,] I
guess generally speaking, and I think this is true of everyone, I sympathise most with things
that I or people close to me have also experienced. In the narrow sense, “the people close tome” would be my family, and I guess in the wide sense, it would be people of the samenationality as me. But I think that if we ourselves have caused other people harm, then we can't
sympathise with the pain that we've caused them. If, for example, someone in my family
murdered somebody, and that person's family was furious about it, I don't think I would bereally able to understand that person's sadness. I'd be trying to find a reason why my family
had done what they'd done. I think all humans [would be the same in that respect]. I think thesolidarity instinct overrides the sympathy instinct.
So if I saw someone crying because of something my grandfather or some other member of myfamily did in the war, I would really sorry about it, but I think the sentiment that, well, my
grandfather could hardly have gone against his nation's orders, he had no choice in the matter,would be stronger. I know it's shocking to say this, but I guess the one thing that gives people aray of hope in these matters is just to think, well the Japanese had no choice in the matter. I've
read too much on the subject and I don't know what to believe any more, but I guess I tend to
end up gravitating to the articles saying things like how other nations did similar things in thewar, or how the “comfort women” weren't brought to the stations against their will but came
there in order to earn money, and I guess [those articles] have a stronger impact on me. I thinkthat rather than the statements of the victims, it's the kind of articles excusing the acts of theJapanese that I tend to absorb, somehow, unconsciously.
That's not something that I have any control over, it's just human instinct. It's a kind of defence
mechanism that comes into play I think, where you seek to protect your loved ones and those
close to you, rather than sympathising with the other, the victim. What I'd really want to dowould be to accept the wrongness of my actions, understand it, apologise for what I'd done,
while still keeping a strong hold on to my pride and sense of identity. But when I look at how

74my mind actually works, I see how I end up thinking about how my country had
such-and-such a reason for acting as it did, and so on. Imagine, for example, if I got into a fightand injured someone. Of course, I think that kind of violence is inexcusable, but in thatsituation I'd start thinking up excuses, think that of course I had a reason for punching that
person, that the person really insulted me, and so on. But then the parents of the other party
will be angry, crying, saying that I hurt their child. And of course I'd feel bad about that, but I'dstill look for excuses for my action.
I sometimes go abroad, and recently, it seems like everybody's realised that talking about the
war is some kind of taboo, so suddenly nobody does it any more. But once or twice in the past,
people have asked me whether I knew about a certain thing that happened in the war, and I've
thought, no, I had no idea about that. Those experiences made me think that I needed to study
more history, although I never actually did. I wonder when that was? Maybe it was when I
went to America when I was in high school. Or maybe it was when I went to Saipan by myself
to get my diving license.
On the subject of war, I just remembered something, from when I was living in Sydney.48
When I was in my third year of primary school, I went with my family to visit Canberra. Do
you know the place called Orange, in the suburbs of Canberra? There are all these white graves
there. Anyway, we went there. Talking about the war always made me feel really depressed,
and I always hated it when they showed war programmes on TV, or Grave of the Fireflies49 andso on. But my father liked that kind of stuff, and he took me along. And then this old Australian
guy came up to us, and started ranting at my dad. I had no idea what he was saying at all so I
was just standing there staring into space. Neither my mother nor my brother spoke English,
and I don't think my father really understood most of it, but this guy was standing there talking
away for about an hour. He seemed angry. He was really worked up, anyway. When I asked myfather afterwards what he'd been saying, he said that he hadn't really understood much, butthat it was just talk about what the Japanese had done when they'd come here in the war.
I'd never studied about what the Japanese Army did when they went to Australia during thewar. I asked my dad if the Japanese had come here and attacked, and he said that actually, yes
48

The interviewee lived in Sydney, Australia from 1987 to 1992.
Grave of the Fireflies is a Studio Ghibli animated film released in 1988. Set in Kobe, it depicts the
struggle of two siblings to survive during the final months of the Second World War. (Trans.)
49

75

they had. But I wasn't all that interested in history, so I just thought, wow, really, that was neverin the textbooks, and then it kind of ended there. I never looked up anything about it. [Though
I did wonder what he could’ve had to speak about] for a whole hour…
I guess that old man probably had all this anger and he didn't know where to release it, butfrom our perspective, the people who had been alive during the war were already becoming
fewer. In terms of the Japanese education about the war, we only learn about the atomic bombs
at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this country, we like to cover up uncomfortable truths, so wetalk about the unfortunate things that happened to us, but we mostly cover up all the harm that
we did to other nations.
(September 2014, Hakodate)

S. A. J. (Instructor, originally from the USA)
American public schools usually teach children about World War II at around the age of ten or
eleven; however most schools focus predominately on the Holocaust and the war efforts on theEuropean front. The curriculum usually includes a variety of school excursions to Holocaust
museums and other places like this. (These museums are rather graphic and haunting to many
children at this age).
At my school, students first learned about WWII in the 5th grade, but they learned about ourparticipation in Europe as well as our involvement in the war in the Pacific Theatre. By middle
school students in my school system were already familiar with most of the “obvious” war
crimes committed by Japan, such as their treatment of POWs, the Japanese invasion of China
and Indonesia, etc. However, the sex slaves were not a large part of the discussion due to thestudents’ relative ages and the nature of the topic. Students usually learned about the sex
slaves at a later date (I believe it was 8th grade for me).
The discussion on sexual slavery during WWII was grouped with slavery in America as part ofa unit in our course curriculum, so many students (who come from mixed and/or
African-American backgrounds) could easily understand and relate to both subjects. We76

watched a number of videos, and read quite a bit of literature about slavery, and much of thismedia was quite graphic (which was necessary to convey to the students the horrors of all
forms of slavery).
I don't remember the subjects [of sexual slavery and slavery in America] being woven together
into a tightly-knit lesson plan. Instead, they seemed to be used as examples to teachhumanitarian ideals. We have a few days in the US, as well as an entire month (February)
where multiculturalism and civil rights are often the subject of many in-class topics. For thesemonths, we revisit topics that we've learned in the past (Holocaust, slavery, US western
expansion, etc.) and talk about the repercussions from those events. We also talked about new
topics, or topics that weren't discussed as much. For our school, one of these lessons focused on
sex slaves and prostitution (which also happened quite often in American history as well, with
the African slave trade).
I felt the lesson plan was effective in teaching the students about the events that occurred inother countries. A lot of the time primary and secondary school history teachers can beaccused of having "tunnel-vision," where they focus on only one-perspective/worldview, anddon't evaluate things from the perspectives of others. I was lucky enough to have teachers who
were a bit more conscious of this. The only thing I didn't like about these sorts of lesson plans
were that they could be a bit "scatter shot;" that is to say, not enough time was spent on any
given subtopic, and there was very little scaffolding in the teaching pedagogy to allow thestudents to grow accustomed to the cultures being evaluated. For example, sometimes wewould talk about a country that many of the students had very little knowledge of, so it wasdifficult to get students to empathize with that country's plight (though, comparing it to things
the students 'are' familiar with and 'do' empathize with already, such as the American slave
trade, did help with this a bit).
It’s difficult to recall what my response to the content [concerning sexual slavery] was. I assume
it was equal parts intrigue and disgust. Most students, including myself didn’t find it entirely“unreal” or “unprecedented” for something like this to have occurred in world history (sincemost Americans are not sheltered from the violent world around them) but students were far
from apathetic toward it. Most of us were confused as to how something so horrible could
happen to begin with.

77

In my high school history classes, students were given an overwhelming amount of
information about WWII from various sides/perspectives, and many of us had to do research
papers about various aspects of the war. My high school offered a separate course that only
dealt with our wars in the Pacific (WWII with the Japanese, the Korean War, the Vietnamese
War, etc.). I didn’t take this course, but there was plenty of discussion of these wars in othermore generalized history courses.
I haven’t watched too many testimonials about the subject [sexual slavery]. During high school
we had an individual come to our school and speak about her experience though (Holocaust
survivors spoke at this event too). It was interesting to hear what she had to say about her
experiences during her enslavement. And she was very willing to answer all of the questions
we had about the event. That was a lot better than any of the testimonial videos we watched
before. I always felt like the testimonial videos were either 1) missing crucial information due toediting, or 2) impersonal, despite the personal nature of the topic to those victims.
My father’s side is African-American, and as such my great grandparents were slaves. My
grandmother used to talk to me about her mother’s experiences and the stories her
grandmother and mother told her. It was quite haunting to hear those things, and it is surreal
to think of slavery (or similar atrocities) happening in modern times. For instance, 5 years
before my parents met, it would have been illegal (in some states) for a black man and a white
woman to get married.
To be honest, I cannot remember all the details of this survivor's testimony event. As I said,
there was more than one, and the event wasn't dedicated to sex slavery. I believe we had an
American POW, a nurse from Pearl Harbor, the woman who was a sex slave (I cannot
remember, but I do not think she was Korean), and I believe a Holocaust survivor.
I remember that I and the rest of the student body were quite supportive of all thepresenters. No one showed any disrespect, and everyone believed their stories for the mostpart. With American culture at the time (having been post 9-11... I think less than a year after),we were rather supportive of soldiers and survivors of war crimes. So most of the students
wanted to join the military afterward and expressed their intent while some of the people werestill speaking (especially for the POW, sex slave victim, and holocaust survivor). There areusually military recruiters at our high schools maybe for about two months out of the year, just78sitting at the entrance or near the lunchroom. So I can remember some students speaking
about talking to, “that military recruiter” while we were leaving the auditorium. I rememberthat the only person who met a bit of difficulty was the Holocaust survivor, because we hadsome neo-Nazis at our high school; they either didn't believe his story, or felt he deserved what
happened to him. It was sad to see that.
No, I have not [spoken about the topic with my Japanese friends]. I am quite willing to discuss
the topic, but that sort of thing never came up. I’ve spoken with Japanese co-workers about
WWII before, but even then the conversation never moved in that direction. It steered towards
other things, such as the atomic bomb museum and the loss of the northern islands to Russia(since I am working in Hokkaido I hear about this latter topic a lot). Some people seem likethey feel victimised (though they don’t readily admit it), but others either do not feel that way,or are careful not to express those sentiments with me, seeing as America would have to beviewed as one of the antagonists for the “victim” argument to exist.
Americans (non-politicians at least) are not very keen on the Japanese revisionists andHolocaust deniers. It is a rather strange position for an individual to take, especially whenconfronted with so much evidence to the contrary. There is a definite agenda behind thepeople making these claims, and I feel as if something needs to change in Japanese school
systems. If someone in America decided that “American schools shouldn’t teach kids aboutslavery in America” everyone would think they were crazy.
(October 2014, Hakodate)

H. S. (Lawyer)
I do not recall when [I first learned about Japan’s wartime sexual enslavement]. It was probably
from some TV news or newspaper when the Japanese PM issued the official statement of
apology. I was still young, so I did not really understand. Probably I only thought it was justpart of bad things Japan did during the war partly because the term “comfort woman,” whichsugar-coats the real meaning, was too vague. The media or school classes did not explain indetail.

79

These videos that I got from you were the first ones [testimonies by sex slave survivors], I
think.50 I may have watched some on TV, but I have no recollection. Although I hadn’t
heard/read any testimony itself, I knew about sex slavery. So my feeling was not so emotional.
It may be partly because I watched too many movies or studied international politics at college,
making me immune. I was more surprised by the quite vivid testimony by the Japanese soldiers
who raped these women.
No [, I have never spoken about the sex slave issue with my friends]. I talked with my Korean
friends in general about the war, but did not specifically discuss the sexual slaves. It is notabout awkwardness, but just never happened in retrospect. Maybe subconsciously, I wasavoiding the topic, I don’t know.
These were not serious discussions, but rather casual conversations regarding what Japan did
during WWII. For example, when I visited one of my Korean friends’ home, her grandmom
spoke Japanese well because she was there when Japan occupied [Korean peninsula] andforced them to have Japanese education. But we didn’t make it a big deal.
[Answering the question about the tendency in Japanese war memory and narrative toemphasize its victimhood,] I think it is because only a limited number of people had first-handexperience on the battlefield. On the other hand, regular people were the ones who suffered inJapan and experienced the bombs. It seems also that the media usually focuses on the latter.
I am not sure if they [soldiers] have chosen to be silent [about the atrocious aspects of war]. But
theoretically, people do not want to tell anything bad they did, especially to their loved ones,
who might start looking at them in a different way.
(October 2014)50

The video clip of Jan Ruff-O’Herne appearing on “Talking Heads” in February 2009 (see note 40);
testimony videos of the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual
Slavery (2000) from the website Fight for Justice (see note 41).

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R.S. (Medical specialist)
It's hard for me to remember the first time I heard the term military “comfort women”. Whenthe debate was going on, over whether or not the Japanese government would apologise for it, I
saw some former “comfort women” on the TV news dressed in chima jeogori. I guess that waswhen I was in junior or senior high school. My memory about it isn't fixed, but I remember
those old Korean women dressed in traditional Korean dress, crying. They looked very old, andit amazed me to think that they had been young once too. They were a long way away from theimage in my mind that went with the words “comfort women”.
In Japanese, we use the word ian [that means “comfort” in the term ianfu (“comfort women”)] inother terms like ian-ryokō [“comfort holiday”]. It doesn't have a specifically sexual meaning.51
So when I heard about the so-called '“comfort women” problem', I wondered what was so
problematic about these women. But I was already a high school student at that time, so I sortof guessed what the term was being used to denote. I somehow sensed that it wasn't the sort ofthing that I could go asking my mum about. So I never asked anybody, and so it was throughwatching the news that I came to understand that these “comfort women” were people placedin a really pitiable position of being forced into prostitution during the war. Even if they
introduce people on TV as “comfort women”, they never explain what the term “comfort
women” really means. When relations with Korea took a turn for the worse and that sort ofnews was on all the time, I gradually came to understand what it was about.
I'm pretty sure that I never learned about it at school. I feel like it's not the sort of thing thatthey'd teach you about at junior high school. I mean, there's the tricky issue of what exactly thisword ian means. I feel like it would be okay to teach senior high school students about it. But
then, I took the science course at senior high school rather than the humanities one, so I didn't
really study history at all. While the humanities students were studying history, we were doing
science and maths and things, so my knowledge of history is pretty poor, even those bits which
51

Slightly different to the English word “comfort”, the Japanese word ian implies also recreation andfun. As indicated by the interviewee, it is also commonly used in the term ian-ryokō, or “comfort
holiday”, which means a trip put on by company or a group for its members to boost their morale.
(Trans.)81

are taken to be just general knowledge. So I'm pretty sure that I didn't ever learn about“comfort women” at school.
I didn't know about the Kōno or Murayama Statements52 at that time. It's only in the last few
years that I found out about them. I heard people on the news mentioning how the issue hadalready been sorted out, and that was how I came to find out about the Kōno and Murayama
Statements. I think Murayama was Prime Minister when I was a senior high school student, so
it might have been then that I first heard about “comfort women”. I guess it must have beenthen. I don't know if that's when I saw the women on TV in chima jeogori or not.
In terms of what I've seen outside of the news, this was the first time that I'd heard [thetestimonies of former “comfort women”]. I knew about the Korean “comfort women”, but I
hadn't been aware that there were also Europeans forced to become “comfort women” for theJapanese army. In the programme about Jan Ruff-O'Herne 53 , they were using the word
“comfort lady”, in English, and at first I had no idea what they meant by that. It was only when
I tried to put it back into Japanese that I realized what they were referring to. I think Japanese isreally good at finding these euphemistic expressions that cover up the truth, to skillfully hide
the real situation from view.
Ms Ruff-O'Herne was saying that it was a question of weighing the shame against the truth,and in the end, the urge to speak the truth won out, and she decided to testify. But that tookfifty years to happen. She was talking about her upbringing, and listening to that, I understoodthat she was just a girl from a really ordinary family. She hadn't done anything bad at all, but
one day she was suddenly taken away, and put in that situation. It's beyond imagining, really,
but if you try and think about it in normal terms, it's just so awful.
I didn't know any details about the Korean “comfort women” either, and so I don't know whatkinds of households they came from, or in what way they'd been brought up, but when I saw
them coming forward [to give their testimony] and crying and so on, I always kind of imaginedthat maybe they came from households that were short of money, or there were some kind of
52

The Murayama Statement was a speech made in 1994 on the 50th anniversary of the end of thewar by Murayama Tomiichi, Japanese Prime Minister at the time, recognizing and apologizing forthe suffering and damage caused by Japan through its colonial policy. (Trans.)
53
The video clip of Jan Ruff-O’Herne appearing on “Talking Heads” in February 2009 (see note 40).

82

social factors in play that would result in them ending up as “comfort women”. That might be a
prejudiced view to take. In any case, I vaguely thought it was girls from poor households who
hadn't been given much of an education who ended up as “comfort women”. But when I heard
what Ms Ruff-O'Herne had to say, it seemed like her household situation had no factor to play,
it wasn't a question of wealth at all. I had this biased view of “comfort women” as those fromunderprivileged backgrounds, but seeing the testimony given by the Dutch lady, I realized that
there are probably all kinds of different situations amongst the Korean “comfort women” also.
The thing about Ms Ruff-O'Herne's testimony that made the strongest impression on me was
the fact that she was smiling all the time she was talking. Sometimes she laughed, and shesmiled the whole time she was talking. I can't really imagine how you can talk about thosekinds of things with a smile on your face. I guess it wasn't just her upbringing and the “comfort
stations” that she was talking about. But I'm sure she'll never be able to forget what she went
through then, and there must be all kinds of different triggers that remind her of it.
When I was a child, I often used to read books about the war. There was Fly, Thousand Paper
Cranes, Fly! 54, a story about the atomic bomb. Then there was another one from Four Bunko[publisher] whose title I've forgotten, which was a collection of memoirs written by kids about
their experiences of the atomic bombs. There was The Girl with the White Flag, and The
Morning-Star Lily Girls too.55 I guess it was largely books about the atomic bombs and the Battleof Okinawa. Then there was a book about some elephants in the zoo that got killed during thewar, and The Life of Maya by Muku Hatojū.56 During the war, people were supposed to forgo
any kind of luxury, and people with dogs were told to hand them over, and in the end Muku
Hatojū wasn't able to hide his dog any more, and it was handed over to the authorities to be
killed. In the end he manages to save its life and it comes home, though in the end it dies,anyway. I feel like I read quite a lot of stories about animals that were harmed in the war.
Of course, those kinds of kids' books don't tackle the subject of “comfort women”. But when54

Tejima Yūsuke, Tobe! senbazuru; Hiroshima no shōjo, Sasaki Sadako san no kiroku (Fly, Thousand
Paper Cranes, Fly! A Record of Sasaki Sadako, the Girl from Hiroshima) (Kōdansha, 1986).
55
Higa Tomiko, Shirohata no shōjo (The Girl With the White Flag) (Kōdansha, 1989); Nasuda Minoru,
Himeyuri no Shōjotachi (The Morning-Star Lily Girls) (Kaiseisha, 1977). Both are stories aboutchildren in the Battle of Okinawa.
56
Tsuchiya Yukio, Kawaisōna zō (The Poor Elephants) (Kin-no-hoshi-sha, 1970); Muku Hatojū, Maya
no isshō (The Life of Maya) (Dainippon-tosho, 1970).

83

you think about that stuff, you wonder about the female students who were working as war
nurses. Were they okay, I wonder? I wonder if they were subjected to sexual assault? Quite
possibly, people made up stories of romance and love, so people that didn't interpret what wasgoing on as sexual assault.
My grandfather was in China for eight years. He's already passed away, so I can't ask him about
it directly now. But for example, even if I knew my grandfather had visited one of those“comfort stations”, I don't think that I'd feel any kind of hatred toward him. He's mygrandfather, after all. I think I'd try to understand it, to think that he was in an abnormal
situation. But that's not to say that I think the “comfort women” issue is just something that has
to be accepted. The two things are different. I just mean that I wouldn't think “there's no way
I'll ever forgive him for what he did”, because he's my own flesh and blood. I think that, as an
issue that affects society, it really is a problem. That's just my personal opinion.
I think that soldiers in the war fall under this illusion that they're incredible, all-powerful. I
mean, they’re being judged by how many people they kill. But however you think about thatsituation, it's abnormal. Killing people was those soldiers' job. Generations who haven't
experienced war can't understand what that means at all, being put in that sort of extreme
situation. I don't think there were that many people who went to war because they wanted tokill people. There were some who chose to enlist, but most of the soldiers were conscripted.
They'd get sent the red [conscription] paper and people would say they'd “made it”, eventhough it was clear that wasn't the case, cheered “Banzai”, and off they went to fight. I readsomewhere that killing your first person takes a whole lot of courage, but after you've killed
one or two, your senses become numb, and you stop feeling anything at all.
War is something that defies our regular ways of thinking about things. I think it would be
impossible to do it in a regular mental state. Especially at the end of the war, when people
didn't have enough food, they were starving, and lacking the proper weapons, I don't think they
were in a position to make normal judgements about things. Not that I think that you can solve
everything by blaming it all on the war. But I think that rather than talking it as the fault of theJapanese government, or about which country was worse, or saying that other countries were
doing it so Japan wasn't that bad, what we should be directing our hatred towards is war itself,
and that doesn't just apply to the “comfort women” issue either. Rather than saying Japan did
this, did that, and that's wrong, it's better to focus on objecting to war, and taking steps to make84

sure that it doesn't happen again.
(October 2014, Iidabashi)

E. T. (Housewife)
I started to take an interest in the issue of “comfort women” after the Korean Prime Minister
Park Geun-Hye began [criticising the Japanese] about it, and began reading the Kōno
Statement and things from around that time. But I haven't made any effort to pursue the matter
any further by myself. I just made sure that every time it was in the news, I read the articles
about it that were featured in all the papers. [Park Geun-Hye's response to the issue] misses thepoint. There are plenty of other political problems between Japan and Korea to choose from, so
I think that it's odd that she puts such focus on that particular issue at this point in time, as away of getting at Japan.
I mean, the whole issue was sorted out between the two countries at the time, right? Of course,
war is a bad thing. But to be dragging it along behind you decades later? When you think about
it like that, the “comfort women” issue is not the only thing. I'm sure there's plenty of otherthings [that could be brought up]. Japan has paid the Korean government a sum of money tocompensate for the problem. They didn't pay it to the individual “comfort women”. They paid
it to the Korean government, and that was supposed to solve the issue. Is it called the Asian
Women's Fund? Anyway, that was created, and the two countries agreed at the time that theissue was solved, so I don't understand why [the South Koreans are] going about now
demanding compensation for individuals.
I guess if it was the 1990s [when the “comfort women” trials started], I would have been in myfifties still. When I was bringing up my children, I didn't really have much interest in thisissue—I guess a part of it was that I didn't have the time to watch much news back then. So
when I watched the film My Heart is Not Broken Yet, I was amazed to find out that there werepeople who had been involved in those kinds of activities. But in that film they miss out thequestion of why Song Sin-Do became a “comfort women”—what kind of background she camefrom, and how it was that she ended up in the “comfort station.” At that time, Japanese people
were poor too, and there were people here [also who sold themselves]. When Japan was reallypoor, there were some parents who sold their children. When you consider that, then however85

it was that these people became “comfort women”, then the government can't go compensatingthem now, just because they say that they must. I know this sounds like a cold attitude to take,but I just think [the “comfort women”] got unlucky in being born into those kinds ofcircumstances at the time that they did. I guess that young people don't remember this, but inJapan we had Karayuki-san57, the Yoshiwara pleasure courters58, Oshin59, and Obasute-yama.60
If you start delving into all of those things one by one, you’ll never get anywhere.
Those are the bad bits, but they're only one part of history. I think that must be what people
mean when they talk about “necessary evil.” They're bad but they're necessary. Thinking about
it in that way doesn't shake the fact that war is wrong. But if there is war, one way or another,
then I guess those kinds of things end up happening.
I'm one of them of course, but you know how the Japanese make a big fuss about how bad athing war is once it’s finished? Like how they could have done something about the 54 nuclear
power stations before they were built, but no, they go and make a fuss about it now. The
Japanese like making a fuss about things after they've happened, but there's nobody who'll
stand up and give their opinion before it actually takes place. That's how it was with the war
too, plenty of people said afterwards about how wrong it was, but it was the citizens themselves
who didn't stop it at the time, and the citizens who let 54 nuclear power stations be built.
There's people who've done well for themselves out of those things and got away scot-free. If
you think in that way, you see that it's always after the fact that people talk about how bad
things were.
[The first time I heard the term military “comfort women” was] probably in conversation withmy mother. My mother lived in Kobe, and there was a part of the town where lots of Korean
57

Karayuki-san, literally 'China-goers', were Japanese women who went across to East andSoutheast Asia to become prostitutes in the latter half of the 19th and former half of the 20th
centuries. (Trans.)
58
Yoshiwara was a famous pleasure district in Tokyo during the Edo period, established in 1617.
(Trans.)59
Oshin was a very popular NHK television drama screened from 1983-1984, which depicted the lifeof a single woman, from childhood through to her death. Surviving the Second World War andvarious personal trials, she became a symbol within Japanese for perseverance through all kinds ofhardship. (Trans.)
60
The mountain commonly known as Mount Ubasute in Nagano Prefecture takes its name fromthe old Japanese custom of abandoning one's aged relatives on a mountain to die of starvation or
dehydration. (Trans.)86

people lived. She told me that she'd been advised from a young age to keep away from that part.
She hated garlic, and she used to tell me about how whenever she went near there she could
always smell it, and I have a feeling that during one of those conversations [she mentioned thephrase]. She didn't like Koreans. That must have been when I was in junior high school. WhenI got old enough to cook meals for myself, and started using garlic, my mother would always
mention the Koreans. So maybe my mother has influenced me to look down on Koreans insome way too. I know that racism is bad, but my mother was born in the Meiji era, and she was
the type of person to say what she thought. At that time I didn't understand [what theexpression “comfort women” meant], and thinking about it now, I don't feel it's a very
appropriate expression. You'd have thought they'd have come up with something else a bit
more suitable.
I haven't spoken to anybody about the “comfort women” issue recently, no. That's what theJapanese are like, though. You know how the Americans and the British read a book, then go toa reading club and give their opinions about it? I had tea with some British people, there was awoman in her seventies or eighties amongst them, who had such well-formed opinions about
things. I'm sure that working people are different, but still. Most Japanese housewives in theirseventies or eighties just talk about what they're going to have for dinner and that kind of thing.
I occasionally talk to my son [about “comfort women”]. But my son thinks of it as something
that's already been solved, too, and hearing him say that, I feel like I agree with him, but theconversation doesn't go any further than that. I guess it's a bit of a tricky thing for men andwomen to speak about? What with it’s being sexual.
[When it comes to talk about the war in general,] I've heard lots and lots about it. I do
volunteer work as what's called a “listening volunteer”. When you go to [old people's] homes
and talk to the elderly, the thing that they remember the most clearly is the war. Even the ones
who are going a bit senile. This is my fourth year doing it, and while I was listening to them talkabout those things, I realized that, in a way, the war isn't really over. The people of thatgeneration who suffered are still living, they're still only ninety or so, and their memories are
all of the war. I've heard people talking about all sorts of things, the trauma that they went
through when leaving China and so on. I guess the same is true now, but at that time there
were lots of Japanese people in China. There were Japanese companies over there, like The
South Manchuria Railway Company, and Oki Electric Industry Company had a branch out
there, and so on. Of course there are some people with good memories, too, but there are also

87

lots of stories of hardship. Listening to the talk of people who returned to Japan after the war, I
really felt the reality of the terrible things they went through. And then there's talk aboutbuying groceries and things. People would have rice that they'd been to buy especially, taken
off them at the station, and so on.
I suppose that I have my own experience of war. I was born in 1943, after all. I remember that
we didn't have much to eat. For lunch there'd be just potatoes or pumpkin, that's what
everyone in my family ate. In our case, my mother had lots of kimonos, and she often talked
about how she'd traded them for food. In that respect, we were lucky, I guess. I think otherpeople at that time had it even harder than us. That's about the extent of what I remember.
Also, the company that my father was working for at the time evacuated out of the city, so wewere living in Maebashi [in Gunma Prefecture]. Some Americans from a nearby base came up
in their Jeep while I was playing outside and gave me canned chocolate and pineapple, andbrown sugar and chewing gum. They were so good! I still really like chocolate and pineapple
and brown sugar, to this day. I think [at that time] I was so shocked by how good they tasted, it
was such an affecting experience, that it's remained with me to this day. I've only rememberedthat since becoming a listening volunteer, and hearing war stories from many different people.
The basic principle when being a listening volunteer is to just listen in silence to what people
have to say. You are the listener. There's an NPO called Whole Family Care Organization, run
by a person called Suzuki Kinue, and I went to a workshop that she put on. I started doing thevolunteering along with the other people who attended that workshop. You start off by talking
to people about the weather, then ask them about their physical condition, where they wereborn, how it was for them in their childhood and so on. Even when the topic of conversation ispeople's current interests, and you ask them whether they've done it for a long time, theyusually end up talking about the war.
[The reason I began the volunteering is that] basically, I've always thought that I want to die
without being a nuisance to my children. I nursed my mother, and it was such hard work.
When I talk to my friends about it, they said to me that I should do some kind of volunteering
now; that everybody ends up relying on other people some day, so I should help others while I
still can. So I started thinking about the sort of things I could do. While I was living in Tokyo, I
gave out meals. Then, when I moved out of Tokyo, I started doing transliteration work. I likereading, so I thought it would be a good job for me. I liked the activity itself, but I couldn't

88really get used to the atmosphere in the place, so I gave up. So then I thought I should findsomething else, and the next thing that I found was a course training you up to be a voluntary
psychiatric carer. I went to that every week for about a month, and then there was a practicaltraining session that took place at a mental health facility with schizophrenic people and so on.
I attended all the lectures, but when I went and actually saw the people I'd be dealing with, I
realized I just couldn't do it, and I quit. And then, when I was wondering if there wassomething else I could do, I stumbled across this listening volunteer thing.
Suzuki Kinue learned about [this listening technique] in America, and [when I heard about it],I thought it sounded like something new and a bit different, and decided to give it a go. I
basically enjoy being around people, and talking to them. But then when I went I discoveredthat it's no good to enjoy speaking, because it's all about listening to what people say. Even now,
unless I put myself into listening mode before I go, I end up wanting to speak myself. I have todeliberately shift over from speaking mode into listening mode. For example, people at thehome sometimes say negative things, like “I want to die,” and so on, but you have to notsidestep those kinds of statements, you have to accept them, and go along for the moment withhow that person is feeling, that wish to die. When that person starts to trust you, then they
speak about their home life, and all other kinds of things. I've learned a great deal from it.
(October 2014, Iidabashi)

Y. I.

(PhD student; originally from South Korea)

It's difficult for me to remember exactly when I first learned about the Japanese military’s sex
slaves, but I was about 14 or 15 when I began to form an awareness about it inside myself,
through our study of it in history lessons in junior high school. Just learning the fact that Korea
had been colonised by Japan, and that young Korean girls had been taken away unfairly andmade into sex slaves was enough for me to feel anger toward Japan and Japanese people, toform a negative perception of them. My first perception of Japan as a country was formed fromthe fact of its having colonised Korea.
After that, I went on to senior high school, and learnt in more detail about Korea's period as a

89

Japanese colony, as part of my study for my university entrance exams. We could choose three
topics as part of our social studies curriculum, and I chose Modern and Contemporary History,
Law and Society, and Politics. In the Modern History section, we mostly studied about Korea
under Japanese rule, and in the Contemporary History section, we learned about politics in
Korea after its liberation. The sexual slavery system wasn't a major topic of study, but welooked at it as a part of the issue of Japanese-Korean relations. In studying the history of theJapanese colonial period, we looked at the policies adopted by the Japanese in governing the
Korean people, in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. For example, in the 1930s, there was a politicalstrategy implemented by the colonial government to eradicate the Korean nationality. Koreans
were taught Japanese mentality, Japanese culture.
Education took place in Japanese, and it was forbidden to speak Korean. People were renamedwith Japanese-style names. If the Korean people refused to follow this policy, they were denied
permission to go to school, and had their supplies of food or everyday items cut off. In ourexam, there were questions like: “Which of the following wasn't part of the ethical expunction
policy imposed by the Japanese in the 1930s?” Then one of the options would be one of thepolicies implemented in the 1920s, and that was the correct answer. Unlike Japanese students,
Korean students study about the colonial period in detail. Modern history was my favourite
subject in senior high school, and so I probably was more sensitive to what we learned than myother classmates. To give an example, when I was studying for my exam, I remember reading adescription in a textbook of how the Japanese army had locked a group of regular Korean
citizens in a church and set fire to it so that all the people in there were burned alive, andcrying at how terrible it was. Knowing these kinds of historical facts, as a Korean, it makes it
hard to take a positive attitude towards Japanese people. Even now in South Korea, if a public
figure or celebrity comes out with a pro-Japanese statement, it often gets picked up as an issue
in the media, and they are publically criticized.
I've had the opportunity to listen to [the testimony of former “comfort women”] several times.
It was in around 1997 that the “comfort women” issue became a problem in South Koreansociety, and I think that was after the testimony of Lee Nam-Yi, a former Korean “comfort
woman” who was put into a “comfort station” in Cambodia, was made public. At that time,
great shock and rage spread through South Korean society. I feel like recently, there’s much
more opportunity to encounter the testimony of “comfort women” through all kinds of media.

90

The most memorable of those for me is an animation made in 2011, entitled Herstory.61 As I
watched that short film, which is based on one woman's true story, I was consumed by sadness.
Whenever I hear about the fact that so many young women were taken away, not knowing
where they were going, and sexually abused several times a day by the military, it always
makes me filled me with sadness and anger. I think that the Japanese government's attitude of
denial towards those facts makes the future prospects for Japanese-Korean relations even more
grim.
Incidentally, on a personal level, it was the “comfort women” issue that roused my interest inJapan—as well as my anger, obviously. It was the reason that I studied Japanese so hard.
There's a Chinese proverb that says “know your enemy, know yourself, and you will emerge
unscathed from a hundred battles”. I wanted to know more about Japan, so I studied Japanesevery hard, from my time as a senior high school student. Thanks to that study, I was able totake part in a foreign exchange programme during university, and spent one year in Japan.
Spending time hanging out with my Japanese friends, I felt the big gap that exists between
Japanese and Korean people.
That was the first time I ever spoke to Japanese friends about “comfort women”, when I was inFukuoka as a foreign exchange student. I was walking along the street with my friend, chatting
about various things, and I brought it up with her, quite naturally. I asked if she'd ever heard
about “comfort women” in Japan, whether they'd learned about the history of the colonial
period. She gave me just a short answer, telling me that she didn't really know about it, thatthey didn't really study that stuff in Japan, but it still gave me a real shock. I wanted to ask her a
bit more about it, but it seemed like she wanted to change the subject. In the end, we moved on
to talk about something else, but that was the first time that I made the important discovery
that Japanese senior high school students don’t really learn about the period of colonial ruleover Korea.
Then, I came back to Japan to do my Master’s. Things like the “comfort women” issue and the
Yasukuni Shrine visits quite frequently cause a stir between Korea and Japan and are talked
about on the news, so I’ve had a few chances to discuss those kinds of issues with my university
friends. The opinion that stuck in my head the most clearly is, “It's unfair to criticize us for it,
61

Herstory, directed by Kim Jun-Ki, 2011.

91

because it wasn't our generation that did those things.” People say things like 'Why do we haveto apologize? At that time, there were lots of countries colonizing other countries, it wasn't only
Japan. Why are Korean people constantly seeking an apology from the Japanese?” They
seemed to find the whole thing displeasing.
There are lots of problems that arose in Korea through Japanese rule that still haven't beensolved, and that's why our gaze is directed at Japan. But I felt like Japan's gaze is directed less at
Korea and more at Asia as a whole, and the Western nations who also had colonies at that time.
I don't believe that you can justify unethical acts by looking to particular circumstances of theage, or the fact that other countries did similar things. What's more, the Japanese still maintaina perception of themselves as “victims” for the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. I
find it really bizarre how people turn their eyes away from the question of why an atomic
bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in the first place, and just speak purely about the damage
done by the bomb.
Then one day, I was eating with a Japanese member of the research staff at the university. At
that time, [the Osaka mayor] Hashimoto Tōru’s statement about “comfort women” was making
big news, and we began speaking about it. When I heard what he had to say about it, I felt
totally at a loss. He said, “There's no proof that the Japanese government made Korean women
work by force. Do you have any grounds for thinking that, any proof? If so, then tell me. If thegovernment took young girls away forcibly, why didn't their families try and save them? Moreto the point, Japan has already paid compensation money to Korea. If what the “comfort
women” are looking for is an apology, why are they demanding compensation, why are they
demanding money? Several of the testimonies that have been made are not true.” He saw“comfort women” as prostitutes, and thought of them as people who had gone to the war zones
in order to make a living. He also said, “At that time, Korea was lacking in power. They were aweak nation. If Japan hadn't colonized them, Russia would have come along and done thesame.” It was the first time that I'd ever met anybody who said those sorts of things. He reallydenied the facts that the system of sexual slavery existed. He simply thought that it hadn't
happened. He also told me, “Don't react so emotionally.” He thought my reaction was anemotional one. Apparently, he wanted to have a “logical” discussion about the issue.
At the end of the day, his opinion was that, whether it be the question of Japan's colonial ruleor the “comfort women” issue, there are lots of perspectives and examples that could be given,92so it is difficult to isolate “one part” and judge it as wrong. What I said was consistent, but in theend that is just one of many possible accounts that could be given of the situation, so it is
impossible to verify it as the truth, or so he said. I honestly wanted to try and understand theJapanese perspective on the matter, not just see things from a Korean perspective, but at thatmoment, I realized that I still wasn't ready to comprehend things from a Japanese perspective.
It was totally incomprehensible to me why people started talking about prostitution when thesubject of “comfort women” came up. I felt like it was his perspective that was really only
looking at “one part”, a really small part of the picture. The “comfort women” system was agovernment policy that was applied strategically and on a huge scale, and as such it is a serious
crime. I think that the feelings that people want to evade make them come up with all kinds of
excuses. I feel doubtful that that approach is really a “logical” way of going about things. I
know that there are many different perspectives that you can take on these matters, but I think
you have to be ready to discriminate between them, separate out the true from the false.
I felt like that on the subject of Japanese-Korean relations, I should know not just the Korean
perspective, but also that of the Japanese. I was also concerned about how the “comfort
women” issue could be resolved, so that our two nations could go about building a constructive
relationship. However, the more I come to know about the difference in perception between
Japan and Korea, the more I come to feel skeptical about whether that's really possible. I feellike that's probably the reason for the move to appeal instead to the international community,
instead of just looking to the Japanese, why it is currently growing within South Korean society.
I really hope that this issue can be resolved quickly, through continued effort within thepolitical and non-political spheres, for the sake of the generations to come. I don't want thenext generation to inherit this problem. If we can't sort this out in our generation, it's only
going to become more difficult. I want to do anything that I can in order to aid that process.
(August 2014, Hiyoshi)

93Part 3
Project Journal

94

95

2012
26th December
9am–12pm: collecting reference material

27th December
9am–12pm: collecting material

29th December
9am–12pm: collecting and sorting material
Meeting in Shinjuku in the evening

31st December
9am–12pm: collecting and sorting material

2013
5th January
From a memo I left on 8th December 2010. I feel like this contains the main point that I need tokeep re-visiting, as the point of departure for the whole project.
The experience of hearing live testimony. The shock that it brings, which far surpasses myexpectations. A primeval clamouring that shakes the very core of one’s existence. Whensleep has turned against me, and I am lying there, the blinding flash of the cameras appears
before my eyes. The bizarre sensation that the testimony I have gone and heard is now
gnawing away at my flesh, attempting to change the makeup of my body. Something that isneither empathy nor compassion. Speaking about the events. The impetus toward speech.
The struggle with that which frustrates the will to speak out. The stigmata branded upon96

those who do give their testimony. The sediment of memory that has built up inside. That
which cannot be swallowed, which sticks in the back of your throat, a foreign substance.
Memory as something whose location you have to constantly check with your fingertips.

6th January
9am–12pm, 3pm–8pm: collecting and sorting material.

7th January
From Jūgun ianfu (Military Comfort Women) by Yoshimi Yoshiaki:
Leaving aside that which is misremembered or covering up the facts, the testimony isincredibly important. Precisely because they [the women] don't exist in the world of thewritten word, those intense experiences have become incredibly vivid memories of the times
in question, and with repeated questioning, facts surface that couldn't be spoken of byanyone other than people who had actually been there. These raw facts, which you willdefinitely not find in any military or government documents or records, can only be known
through these women's testimony. (87)

8th January
From Kioku/monogatari (Memories/Stories) by Oka Mari:
If I was to encounter testimony revealing the facts about the events, I too would find myself
wanting to thrust it under the noses of those historical revisionists who deny those facts,
deny the events, and say, “Do you still contest this?” But if it is the nature of that sort oftestimony, whereby the speaker rips open their body, scarred from past wounds, and gouges
out its interior in order to produce it, that means it proves the facts of the events, then what agrotesque thing it is. If, even after seeing this, the thick–skinned, shameless deniers would
still deny the events—and I'm sure that they would—then would we surely make further
demands of the women to gouge out more and more, to speak of pain that only those whohave experienced such things could know? Yet how far would they need to rip open theirbody, how much would they need to writhe in pain as they told of what had happened
before they were deemed to have spoken the facts?

97［. . .］
We must not forget that it is the historical forgetting of the events which we see in post-war
Japanese society, and Japanese people's powerlessness in the face of the pronouncements of
those historical revisionists who deny the events, which is now forcing these women to givethis testimony that seems like it will wrench them in two. And because that is the case, there
is no doubt that we bear the responsibility for the violence they are suffering now. We could
say that we are participating in their torture. At this time, is the attempt to contest thehistorical revisionists using the testimony we have gained, not a way of getting by without
facing the fact of own powerlessness, our own participation in these women's torture—astance that represents an unconscious denial of that powerlessness? (31-2)
Mother and grandmother are chatting over tea. According to their conversation the war
conducted by the nation was undeniably wrong; however, there is no mention of thosepeople who suffered incomprehensible deaths -- those who have been forced to live with theviolence of the event that is war as a continuing narrative. The two women recall only theirown suffering. In this sense, their conversation repeats the post war Japanese national
experience, that is, a deliberate denial of the other, which is an expression of nationalism
itself. (74)There are those who, because they experienced the events, because they were on the inside ofthe events, because they still have to live the violence of the events in the present, cannot speak
about them now. Then there are those who experienced that violence to the full with theirown bodies, as with the event that is massacre, in other words, the dead, who, being dead,cannot give testimony about the violence they experienced. For that reason, other people
must speak for them. Others—third parties, those who were on the outside of theevents—have to give testimony. But they cannot just stand in for those who cannot speak andrepresent the events in whichever way they choose. If, when we try to speak of those events
which spoken of in words should be impossible, we act like “those who can speak of them”;
then, in that instant, we are betraying the events. ︎ The act of representing those
unrepresentable events, of speaking about unspeakable events—surely, what needs to bedone before anything else in this is to testify to the very fact of their unspeakableness. (77)

9th January981pm–5pm: interview preparation.
Evening: meeting in Shinjuku.

11th January
9am–12pm: interview preparation.
The presence of the interpreter at the meetings where testimony is given. The delay inunderstanding the meaning until the interpreter speaks. Above all, for those who don't
understand the language of those giving testimony, the separation of the process ofunderstanding that comes about through the delay between taking in the speaker’s voice,expressions and gestures, and cognitively grasping her meaning, has the effect of strengthening
the emotional reaction to the testimony. The impetus to listen to the testimony directly,
without an interpreter. But whose testimony? Which language?

12th January
1pm–3pm: interview
8pm–10pm: writing up interview script

14th January
9am–12pm, 3pm–5pm: writing up interview script

15th January
From Yaburareta chinmoku: ajia no jūgun ianfutachi shashin kiroku (Silence Ripped Apart: A
Collection of Photographs of Asia’s “Comfort Women”), edited by Itō Takashi.
An episode where one of the witnesses spoke of her anger toward Japan in “such a violent
way that it flummoxed the young Korean interpreter”(15). Witness/interpreter/listener. What
does the interpreter feel at that time?

19th January99

9am–12pm, 3pm–5pm: collecting and sorting material.

20th January
9am–12pm: collecting and sorting material.

26th January
9am–12pm: collecting and sorting material.

30th January
I read Veena Das’ essay, “Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain”. The
violence that occurred during the Partition of India—how the women received and spoke
about “the events” afterwards.
When asking women to narrate their experiences of the Partition I found a zone of silence
around the event. This silence was achieved either by the use of language that was generaland metaphoric but that evaded specific description of any events so as to capture theparticularity of their experience, or by describing the surrounding events but leaving theactual experience of abduction and rape unstated. It was common to describe the violence of
the Partition in such terms as rivers of blood flowing and the earth covered with white
shrouds right unto the horizon. Sometimes a woman would remember images of fleeing, but
as one woman warned me, it was dangerous to remember. These memories were sometimes
compared to poison that makes the inside of the woman dissolve, as a solid is dissolved in a
powerful liquid (andar hi andar ghul ja rahi hai).
[. . .]
This code of silence protected women who had been brought back to their families
through the efforts of the military evacuation authorities after they were recovered from thehomes of their abductors, or who had been married by stretching norms of kinship andaffinity since the violation of their bodies was never made public. Rather than bearing
witness to the disorder that they had been subjected to, the metaphor that they used was of awoman drinking the poison and keeping it within her [. . .]. (84-85)

100

4th February
9am–12pm: collecting and sorting material.

5th February
9am–12pm: collecting and sorting material.

17th February
From Arthur W. Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller:
Listening is hard, but it is also a fundamental moral act; to realize the best potential inpostmodern times requires an ethics of listening. I hope to show that in listening for theother, we listen for ourselves. The moment of witness in the story crystalizes a mutuality ofneed, when each is for the other. (25)The story traces the edges of a wound that can only be told around. Words suggest its
rawnesss, but that wound is so much of the body, its insults, agonies, and losses, that words
necessarily fail. (98)20th February
The memory of a certain event. The event of failing to comprehend its meaning. Unrelated tothat person's will, a fragment of history that gets passed over into the hands of an individual.

25th February
9am–12pm: interview preparation.

26th February
9am–12pm: interview preparation.

101

27th February
I signed up to take Korean language lessons.

28th February
Interview from 1pm, then from 4.30pm.

1st March
From Ikeda Eriko, Sensō no “kioku” to “kiroku” (“Memories” and “Records” of War):The act of listening to the experiences of the victims of sexual violence takes significant
courage and mental preparation on the parts of both the speaker and the listener, andcannot come about without mutual trust and a strong sense of necessity. It is just listening,one might say, and yet I wonder which questions to ask. I want to know about that person's
way of life at the time of the incident, what kind of a girl she was. In what way was her
everyday life torn apart, who arrived to put an end to it? But if she starts to speak about those
sorts of particulars, then won't she be reliving the raw fear she felt, the hardship–won't I
therefore be adding to her suffering? If she suddenly falls silent, can I bear to sit and wait insilence for the next words?
I ask myself if I have the right, the qualifications, to listen to these terrible experiences.
Will I be able to gain the person's trust? What will I do if it becomes too painful for me tocarry on listening? After I have finished listening, will I be able to give the kind of help, to act
in the kind of way that she is hoping for? I am dizzy with all these fears.
The majority of the members of Video Juku [a women's group that creates
documentaries aimed at creating a society free of violence and discrimination against
women] were born in Japan, the perpetrating nation that refuses to accept responsibility for
the war or what happened after it, and which has therefore been confronted by victims fromall across Asia confessing their experiences. As I film with my camera, the sadness andindignation of these women laid out right before my eyes, I am tortured by guilt andpowerless. (49)

2nd March1021pm–5pm: writing up interview script.
The strange task of writing the interviews up, making them into “text”. In the process ofrewinding the tape and listening to it over and over, I trace the speaker’s breathing, their
physical sensations. The sense that other people's words are flowing through my body.

16th March
9am–12pm, 3pm–5pm: writing up interview script.

30th March
9am–12pm: writing up interview script.

3rd April
9am–12pm, 2pm–5pm: collecting and sorting material.

16th April
I found a video of Jan Ruff-O'Herne appearing on a talkshow made by Australia's ABC in 2009
on YouTube. Ruff-O'Herne is Dutch, and became a “comfort woman” in Indonesia. She now
has Australian citizenship, and lives in Adelaide. Her testimony and her writing about her
experience is in English, so for me, this offers a rare and precious experience of being able tohear testimony that I can understand without an interpreter. Of course, there must be a big
difference for her between speaking in English and in her native language.

17th April
1pm–5pm: interview preparation.

8th May103

1pm–5pm: collecting and sorting material.

9th May
1pm–5pm: collecting and sorting material.
Meeting in the evening.

11th May
9am–12pm: interview preparation.

13th MayInterview at 4pm.
My reservations about being in the position of interviewer, the hatred I feel toward myself forjust hurling one question after another. I want to take my time with my responses, speak about
myself too, but I have to use the time I have in drawing out the interviewee's own words. The
result of this is that I say little, drink in the unspoken words, and when I get home am driven by
the impulse to fill this diary with all the things I didn't say.
In the evening, I find out that Hashimoto Tōru, the Osaka mayor, has made a statement sayingthat “comfort women were necessary” and “every country had them.” Astonishment.

14th May
from Osaka Mayor, Hashimoto Tōru's announcement (from SYNODOS):
I admit the parts that need to be admitted, but the parts that are untrue remain untrue.
When you study modern history a little more, so that you understand what the world waslike then–see, if you hear off the bit about comfort women, it might sound like a terrible
thing, but if you find out a bit about the history of that time, you see that it wasn't just theJapanese army, but lots of armies that utilized the comfort women system.
It stands to reason, that if you have a group of people risking their lives, running through104

places where bullets are flying about like rain and therefore under great mental duress, andyou want to give them some kind of–well, it’s not really rest, but if you want to give themthat kind of thing, then everybody understands that a comfort women system is necessary. If
you ask how Japan is being viewed by the Western nations for this, well, then, you have to
say that the word of Korea and the other countries' word carries weight, and we get viewed
as a nation of rapists. This is the most problematic element of the whole issue, and if what
they say is untrue, then we have to come out and say so.

18th May
9am–12pm: writing up interview script

19th May
9am–12pm, 5pm–7pm: writing up interview script

22nd May
An interview I had scheduled gets postponed. The impact of Hashimoto's statement. Instead, I
participate in an “Emergency Parliamentary Convention to Challenge Hashimoto's Statement.”
The high voltage of the rage in the venue is palpable.

5th June
1pm–5pm: interview.

1st June
9am–12pm: writing up interview script.

7th June
1pm–3pm: writing up interview script.
Meeting in Shinjuku in the evening.

105

8th June
9am–12pm: writing up interview script.

9th June
9am–12pm: collecting and sorting material.

10th June
Books to read this month: Archive Fever by Jacques Derrida; The War by Marguerite Duras.

11th June
Books to read this month: Lee Chong-Hwa, Tsubuyaki no seiji shisō (The Political Philosophy ofWhispers); The Generation of Postmemory by Marianne Hirsch; Family Secrets by Annette Kuhn.

15th June
9am–12pm: collecting and sorting material.

23rd June
2pm–6pm: collecting and sorting material.

24th June
From Annette Kuhn’s Family Secrets:
Telling stories about the past, our past, is a key moment in the making of our selves. To theextent that memory provides their raw material, such narratives of identity are shaped asmuch by what is left out of the account – whether forgotten or repressed – as by what is
actually told. Secrets haunt our memory-stories, giving them pattern and shape. (2)106The past is gone for ever. We cannot return to it, nor can we reclaim it now as it was. But that
does not mean it is lost to us. The past is like the scene of a crime: if the deed itself is
irrecoverable, its traces may still remain. From these traces, markers that point towards apast presence, to something that has happened in this place, a (re)construction, if not asimulacrum, of the event can be pieced together. Memory work has a great deal in common
with forms of inquiry which – like detective work and archaeology, say – involve working
backwards – searching for clues, deciphering signs and traces, making deductions, patching
together reconstructions out of fragments of evidence. (4)29th June
At 1pm, I went to see an exhibition at the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace(WAM) with some friends. There were lots of people there. Must be the influence of theHashimoto statement. A young man saying he was an “Emperor-worshipper” was disagreeing
with the content of the exhibition.

30th June
The sort of historical events which you need to study in order to understand others’
experiences of those events. The memories of those events. The clues reside in the fragment ofhistory that has already been handed to you. What kind of history will those fragments makewhen they are all put together? The incredibly long time until you can get to it. That is what
this project is about.

1st July
9am–12pm: collecting and sorting material.
Meeting at 4pm

5th July
1pm–5pm: collecting and sorting material.

107

22nd July
The words of someone who lived as a child in the town in the USA where they have erected a“comfort woman” statue. Asks, “If I still lived there, how would I receive that news, as part ofthat community?' Then says “It's not a crime that I myself committed, but maybe I would havefelt guilty, as a Japanese person.” The moment when a place or past period of time with special
meanings attached, an extremely personal time and place that they can feel great longing or
fondness for, is suddenly connected to history with a capital “H.” The fragment of history that
person suddenly holds in their hand. The act of inspecting that.

30th July
3pm – 5pm: interview preparation.

31st July
Interview at 1pm.

1st August
9am – 12pm: writing up interview script

2nd August
9am–12pm: writing up interview script

3rd AugustInterviewing someone may well be about going along with their feelings and their distress,
even if it's only for a moment. Something lingers on heavily in my chest. The feeling that I havetaken on something substantial.

4th August
9am–12pm: writing up interview script108

5th August
9am–12pm: collecting and sorting material.

7th August
The violence inherent in the task of typing up the interviews, arranging them, is suddenly
driven home to me. I can only hope to dissolve the gap between the speaker and my own
interpretation…

10th August
I still feel down about what I wrote in the previous entry. Someone recommended to me
Intabyū no shakaigaku: raifu sutōrī no kikikata (The Sociology of the Interview; Listening to Life
Stories) by Sakurai Atsushi and I've started reading it. It outlines the fundamentals ofinterviewing. Very necessary for me at the moment.

11th August
I attend an international symposium entitled “From Victims of Wartime Sexual Violence toAgents of Social Change”. Estelita Dy (from the Philippines) speaks to the audience of her
experiences.

13th AugustTomorrow marks the anniversary of the day that Kim Hak–Sun came out and spoke publicallyof her experience, the first Korean victim to do so. It's also my birthday. I was aware of thiscoincidence even before I started to imagine carrying out this project.

14th August
Today it is 22 years since Kim Hak–Sun first went public about her experiences as a former“comfort woman.” I was twelve at the time and living in Australia. In the Southern Hemisphere,109

it's winter in August. I was oblivious to the former “comfort woman” coming out and speaking
about her experiences in Korea; back then, I was interested in memories of the war, but all I
knew about the Second World War was the atomic bombs, the Battle of Okinawa, and theBombing of Tokyo. I didn't know about the Japanese colonized territories, the Bombing of
Darwin, the Japanese torture of prisoners of war, or the women forced to become “comfort
women”.
At 6pm, I take part in a demo in Shinjuku. The historical revisionists and those belonging to
the anti–foreign movement line the roadside, showering us with abuse. A leaden sensation
creeps across the lining of my stomach. Their agitation and the sort of things they are saying
makes them stand out from their surroundings—summer vacation Kabukichō—but the people
walking along the street wear fixed expressions like Noh masks which say clearly that they
don't want anything to do with this bother. There are some people taking photographs on theirmobile phones, presumably thinking that they’ve stumbled across something out of theordinary. I guess that to their eyes, the people campaigning for a solution to the “comfort
women” issue and the jeering rightists seem like one and the same.

15th August
At 10am, I get off the subway at Kudanshita Station, and decide to walk my old route to school.
I had doubts about going, but I want to see the crowds with my own eyes. The high school that
I went to is close to Yasukuni Shrine, which figures in the news each time politicians visit it.
Several times on my way to school, I saw members of the Diet heading to the shrine on foot. I
know from the news and so on that it is the anniversary of the end of the war, but still, seeingthat scene with my own eyes dismays me unutterably. There are lots more young people than I
had imagined. Just looking at it from a distance makes me feel despondent, and then I don't
feel like walking to my old school any more.

17th August
I'm collecting newspaper articles from August 1991. I want to see how the events of the 14th
were covered.

110

18th August
I try transcribing the newspaper articles that I found in the library. It would be great if I could
look for articles from the Korean papers, translate them into Japanese and include them here
too, but my linguistic ability isn’t up to that yet.
From “A Comfort Woman's Pain, From the Heart: A Hearing in South Korea,” Asahi Shimbun,(12th August, 1991):[Seoul, 10th August, Uemura Takashi]
It has emerged that one of the “Korean military comfort women”, those women taken to thewar zones during the Second World War and forced to serve as prostitutes to the Japanesemilitary, is living in Seoul, and The Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military
Sexual Slavery by Japan (group representative: Yung Chung–Ok; composed of 16organizations with a total of around 300,000 members) has begun to listen to her testimony.
On the 10th, this council shared a tape recording of this woman’s testimony with Asahi
Shimbun journalists. The leaden mouths of these women, who have done their best to keep
their experiences hidden, have finally begun to open.
According to the Council, the woman is 68 years old, and lives alone in Seoul. She says she
was born in northeastern China, and at the age of 17, was taken away to a comfort station inSouthern China where a troop of two or three hundred soldiers was stationed. The comfort
station was based in a regular citizens' house. There were five Korean women there, andeach was given their own room. She was given the false name “Haruko”, and was made to gowith three or four men a day.
“We were kept inside there, and all I thought about was escaping. I kept on hoping that no
more [men] would come in.” Several months later, she managed to escape, and settled inSeoul after the war. She was married, but has since lost her husband and children, and now
lives on welfare benefits from the government.

From “Pleas for Japanese Responsibility: Former Korean Military Comfort Woman Comes
Forward,” Hokkaido Shimbun (15th August, 1991):
Forced into Servitude Without Understanding What is Going On
Every Day a Living Hell
Requests for Compensation

111

[Seoul, 14th August]On the 14th, a Korean woman living in Seoul who was violated as a “comfort woman” by theJapanese military in the warzone, under the pretext of serving as a member of the Women’s
Volunteer Corps, came before The Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military
Sexual Slavery by Japan (based in the Jung District of Seoul, Group Representative Yung
Chung–Ok), and agreed to an independent interview with the Hokkaidō Shimbun. She saysthat “because the Japanese nation refuses to take responsibility for the Women’s Volunteer
Corps issue, I hid my shame away,” and made clear that she was not afraid to appeal forcompensation from the Japanese government. Today marks the 46th anniversary of the endof the war. For our Asian friends trampled upon by the “Imperial Troops”, the war still
continues.
The woman is Kim Hak–Sun (67) from Chungsin-dong, Jongno District, Seoul (born in Jilin,
China).
Kim Hak–Sun explains that in 1940, when she was 16 years old, she was placed by force in a
comfort station for the Japanese military in a place known to the Japanese as Teppekichin incentral China, together with three other Korean women.
“I was called out by the Japanese troops, with my adopted father and another of his foster
daughters. My father got down on his knees and begged them to let him go, and they turned
him back, and so, without having a clue what was going on, my days as a comfort woman
began.” (Kim Hak–Sun)
Unable to bear the terrible lifestyle that meant serving on average three or four soldiers aday, she escaped from the comfort station three months later, with the help of a Korean
peddler who had visited the station. She then married him, and after living in China for awhile, returned to Korea in 1945.
According to the group representative for the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for
Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, Yung Chung–Ok (formerly a lecturer at Ewha Womans
University), the exact number of women who were taken by force from Korea to former
Manchuria (currently northeastern China) or the Southern frontline is unknown, but theCouncil estimates 100,000 to 120,000. It is reckoned that the majority of the survivors live
within Korea or in the surrounding area, but they have left their old towns, and so far this is
the first person within Korea to come out and identify herself, although two Koreans living
abroad, one in Japan and one in Thailand, have done so previously.
Kim Hak–Sun tells of the pain she carries around inside her, saying, “both my husband andmy two children died, and now it's just me alone in this world, so although I'm ashamed, I112

felt like I had to speak of it before I die. Whenever I hear the words ‘Japan’ or ‘hinomaru (theJapanese flag)’, I get a crushing pain in my chest.”
In October last year, various Korean organizations, including the Korean Council for the
Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan and the Korean Women’s Association
United submitted an open letter to Japanese Prime Minister Kaifu appealing for a publicapology from the Japanese government, but so far the only response has been an indirectannouncement from the Japanese Embassy that they are “investigating the situation.”
The Council, who say they will offer Kim Hak–Sun their full support if she decides to launch
an appeal for compensation, says that “Following the brave appearance of Ms. Kim, we can
expect to see the second and third waves of people coming forward to give their testimony
soon. I want this movement to keep on gathering pace until both Japan and Korea haveachieved a perception of history as it actually happened.” (Yung Chung–Ok)

19th August
From “Australian Describes Ordeal As 'Comfort Girl': Women Tell Hearing of War-Time Sex
Slavery,” The Canberra Times (Associated Press, 11 December 1992):
TOKYO：An Australian woman cried as she told a public hearing on Wednesday how she
had been a sex slave for Japanese soldiers during World War II.
And Jeanne O’Herne, 69, said visits to her daughter in Sydney were punctuated by painful
memories: “Every time when I’m with my daughter and I take my little granddaughter for awalk in the pram and busloads of Japanese tourists in Bondi Beach get off the bus and I see
the middle-aged men coming off the bus I think one of these might have raped me.
“We were enslaved into enforced prostitution,” said Mrs O’Herne, who was a Dutch
national during World War II. “It has taken almost 50 years for me to break the silence.”[. . .]Mrs O’Herne said she decided to tell her story after reading the accounts given by forced
Asian prostitutes.
“All of us women, we have all kept quiet for 50 years. This is the bond that has been
between us, the silence for almost 50 years. Now all of a sudden we have decided to speakout. This silence has been forced upon us. We were told by the Japanese after the . . .[sic]brothels were finished they told us that if we were to tell anybody what the Japanese haddone to us we would be killed.”113

20th AugustPlace names filled with nostalgia. Proper nouns that haven't been brought to mind for so long.
“Bondi” is said to be an Aboriginal word meaning the sound of waves hitting the rocks. I try
and say it in an Australian accent. Back at that time, there were lots of Japanese tourists coming
over to Sydney. Not just to Bondi Beach, but everywhere.

22nd August
In her book 50 Years of Silence, Ms. Ruff-O'Herne relates an episode about Bondi Beach:
We were pushing the pram along the promenade when the usual busload of elderly
Japanese tourists climbed down from their coach, armed with their expensive cameras andvideos. Looking at them, I realized that many of the men were old enough to have beensoldiers during the war.
One of them approached me, gesturing that he would like to hold Ruby for a
photograph. My overwhelming instinct was to grab her and flee but instead, I found myself
smiling politely and obliging him. Carol noticed something wrong.
‘Anything the matter Mum?’I smiled, shaking my head. Here again was another lost opportunity. (O'Herne 135）

23rd August
I wonder where I was and what I was doing when the news about the press conference withKim Hak–Sun was first broadcast. How did I manage to miss the fact it had happened?
My father's Sydney office was in Ultimo, south of Haymarket. It was inside a building owned
by Fairfax Media, who publish The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian Financial Review,
and if I remember rightly, the printing press was on the ground floor. Sometimes, when myfather went into work on weekends I went along with him to the office, where I would readJapanese books, or explore the building, which was deserted at weekends, with my sister. I
wonder how many of those people working in that building in 1991, involved with all kinds ofworld news, paid attention to the story of the first Korean former “comfort woman” to come114

out and give her testimony? Several Japanese newspapers were delivered every day to myfather's office from Tokyo, just half a day late. My father, who was in the habit of passing hiseyes over the major ones, says that he didn't notice any articles about the conference, probably
in part because the Oceania-related news that came through on the news ticker was more
important to him. He sometimes brought Japanese newspapers back home with him, so it's
possible that there was an article about it in the bundle of newspapers in our living room.

25th August
From “Murdered nurses were probably raped by Japanese officers says academic,” by Norman
Abjorensen, The Canberra Times (22 September 1993) :A group of 21 Australian army nurses, massacred by Japanese troops on Banka Island inWorld War II, almost certainly were raped by soldiers before being killed, but the rape wascovered up to protect their memory, according to a Japanese researcher.
Only one nurse survived the ordeal, Sister Vivian Bullwinkel, and she made no mention ofrape in her account to Australian authorities.
Reports of the mass killing horrified and enraged a stunned Australia at the time.
In a paper to be delivered today to an international conference on Japan at the Australian
National University, Yuki Tanaka, now teaching at Melbourne University, says evidence
suggests that Sister Bullwinkel “did not tell the truth at the investigation in order to save herdead colleagues from the disgrace as being known as victims of rape.”

26th August
I read War Nurse “B”'s testimony in a document about the request made of the Australian
Military nurses in September 1945 to become “comfort women” (Yoshimi 1992, 565–80).
According to the explanatory notes, this document was put together by the Australia War
Crimes Board of Inquiry in September 1945 (Ibid. 598–99)

27th August
Historian Tanaka Yoshiyuki talks about how, having returned from the war, his father and115

uncle said nothing about the “comfort women” issue, and, touches upon how he was totally
ignorant about it until the 1970s, saying:
It is difficult to judge whether or not the fact that my father and uncles were silent aboutcertain subjects, including the comfort women issue, means that they lied about their lives
during the war. Was this a case of selective memory in which they suppressed entirely theissue of the comfort women and sexual slavery of the Japanese military? Or was it rather thateven critics of the war long after Japan’s defeat could not bring themselves to be frank about
this and other sordid dimensions of Japanese colonialism and war? (Tanaka 3)

8th September
From Yakabi Osamu, Okinawasen beigun senryōshi o manabinaosu (The Battle of Okinawa:
Relearning the History of American Military Occupation):Starting not with the “big story” but with the “little stories,” the perspectives that reflect thehistory of families, or individuals (v).
It’s a way of thinking that begins with the “little stories” that are one’s own, personal
memories, and joining these up to the “big story” that is the Battle of Okinawa and theincidents that took place under American Military occupation, bringing up these memories
and layering them up on top of one another … As well as enabling a recognition of theobjective facts to be passed down to successive generations, it connects with a position oftrying to capture and broaden the experience of what it was like to have been there through theimaginative power generated by asking “what would I have done in that situation?”, while
keeping a hold on those fragments of memories of those post–war generations mentioned
previously who did not have such experiences. (xi)

13th October
From “Japan Refused to Investigate Southeastern Asia in a Bid to Stop The Spread of the
Comfort Woman Issue—Contradiction of Their Public Stance of 1992–3,” Asahi Shimbun (13thOctober, 2013):
It has emerged from diplomatic correspondence and interviews with government–related

116

figures that have been made public that, when the issue of comfort women for the former
Japanese Army first became a political issue between Japan and Korea in 1992–3, theJapanese government avoided conducting interviews of the kind that had taken place in
Korea, in other Southeast Asian nations, in order to contain the issue from spreading toother nations. This contradicts the government’s public stance at the time, where they
declared that they would pursue their investigation in countries outside of Korea.

14th October
Meeting at noon.
8pm–10pm: collecting and organising material

19th OctoberNotes on Korean language learning:
All my attention is focused on your mouth, the sounds it gives out. From those sounds I
imagine the configuration of your lips, the position of your tongue, the volume of air that isreleased with your plosives, and I mimic this with my own. I pronounce your words over andover, imitating your intonation and rhythm. Doing this, I feel the “mood” inherent in thelanguage sinking through into my body. Even in conveying the same meaning, the uniquequalities of the sounds and rhythm and the cultural disparities that prop up in different
languages mean that I can live distinct kinds of sensations, alternative thought paths.

26th October
9am–12pm: organising material

2nd November
9am–12pm: organising material

9th November
9am–12pm: organising material117

13th November
1pm–2pm: meeting

30th November
From a conversation with a friend I meet up with for the first time in ages:
The first time I heard the words “military comfort women,” I remember feeling really
uncomfortable with the sound, the way it looked on the page. I didn’t know what “comfort”
meant, concretely speaking. But I sensed that it was probably something sexual. I couldn’t
imagine at all what kind of people it was referring to, it’s a dehumanising form of namingthat deliberately prevents people from imagining, that blurs the facts…

14th December
9am–12pm: organising material

21st December
9am–12pm: organising material

26th December
Newspaper reports of the Japanese Prime Minister's visit to Yasukuni Shrine.

2014
6th January
Meeting at 6.30pm

118

11th January
When I tell people about my project, most say things like “I'm totally ignorant about 'comfort
women,'” or “I don’t have much to say on the subject.” But when I ask them if they canremember the first time they heard the word “comfort women,” people give all different kindsof responses.

13th January
I watch the Ōshima Nagisa TV documentary, Wasurerareta kōgun (The Forgotten Imperial
Army, originallybroadcast in August 1963). The documentary about the activities of the Former
Japanese Military Disabled Korean Veterans and Civilian Personnel demanding compensationfrom the Japanese government. It leaves me with a lump like lead in the pit of my stomach.

15th January
1pm–5pm: organising material

19th January
1pm–5pm: organising material

25th January
I hear that, with the comfort women issue becoming more and more of an international
political problem, there are people who are concerned about the influence it will have on
Japanese children living abroad. Adults argue about whether or not it will lead to “bullying,”
but I feel like it's a meaningless debate to have. In their own way, children perceive what isgoing on in the adult world. For children, what is more terrifying than being “bullied” is not
being given sufficient knowledge to understand what they have experienced. Rather thanholding on to the truth that you have earned by placing yourself in danger—facing theindignation and violence of the other, and seeing that there is ample reason for it—there isnothing more hurtful for children than not being given a rational explanation by the adults
they trust. Isn't the real problem that the parents' failure to grasp the fact that it is the denial of
history occurring in the adult world that is making their children vulnerable?

1196th February
9am–12pm: interview preparation

7th February
4.30pm: go to see the Taiwan exhibition at WAM
6pm–8pm: interview

9th February
9am–12pm, 5pm–8pm: writing up interview script

11th February
9am–12pm: writing up interview script
Meeting at 5pm

12th February
The task of writing up the recording I’ve made. Making another's words, thoughts traverse mybody. There are words I don't understand, those I can't process physiologically, those I can't
digest and which stick in me like sediment. Every word, every perception, I try passing it
through the filter of my body once to see what happens.

13th February
9am–12pm, 3pm–6pm: writing up interview script

14th February
1pm–5pm: collecting material120

15th February
1pm–5pm: collecting material

19th February
Today 71 years ago, the planes of the Japanese military bombed Darwin, in northern Australia.
They say that there were a total of 64 air raids in just less than two years. The wartime relations
between Japan and Australia are mostly not known in Japan. If I had known just a little about it,
the memory of that day would not still be with me now. The start of the 1990s, when my family
lived in Sydney, was the time when those who lost their lives in the Bombing of Darwin werebeing incorporated into Australia’s national history as heroes who were sacrificed in the war(Kamada 91).

22nd February
Meeting at 6.30pm

25th February
1pm–3pm: interview preparation
7pm–9pm: interview

1st March
9am–12pm: writing up interview

8th March
An autobiographical sketch. My first encounter with memories from the Other of Japaneseimperialism. The scene took place at a nursing home in the Sydney suburbs. Did she refer to
air-raids in Darwin, or was it POWs? Anyway she talked about the death of her son and refused
to receive the flowers I brought from school. Being reluctant to confront it, I have suppressed
the memory of that day for more than 20 years:

121

A bed. A body covered with a blanket, the side of a face inscribed with wrinkles. Short
grey–blonde hair, pulled back tight. On top of the pile of pillows, only the neck moves, theclouded-over fish-eyes glaring out. That empty space covered in faded rose–patterned
wallpaper, and then, beyond, the small, scrawny body of a young girl. Her skin is tannedbrown, and she wears a turquoise checked dress. She is looking at the floor and it is
impossible to make out her expression. Her hair is black. In her hand, she holds a bouquet ofbrightly coloured flowers. Under the hem of her dress, her brown legs like sticks hesitate tomove towards the other person. The fierce expression of the old woman floats up on the
opposite side of the room. That room, which contains just the two of them. A menacing
space. The flowers didn’t leave the girl’s hand that day.

15th March
9am–12pm: organising material

18th March
9am–12pm: organising material

19th March
Meeting at 7pm

7th April
8pm–10pm: interview preparation

8th April
8pm–10pm: interview preparation

9th AprilInterview at 6.30pm

122

10th April
Translating all day.

12th April
9am–12pm: translating

19th April
9am–12pm: interview preparation

26th April
9am–12pm: interview preparation

30th April
Meeting at 11am

10th MayInterview at 6.30pm

11th May
9am–12pm, 8pm–10pm: writing up interview script

17th May
9am–12pm: writing up interview script123

22nd MayInterview at 6.30pm

23rd May
Article entitled “Screening of Korean Film Depicting ‘Japanese Barbarism’ in Lecture” appears
in the Sankei Shimbun (21st May). The article is about a university lecturer who was discussing
the “comfort women” issue, and problematizes the showing of a film on the subject to students.
The article reports that there has been constant abuse and criticism of the lecturer and threats
to the university since.

24th May
9am–12pm, 1pm–3.30pm: writing up interview script

4th June
2pm–4pm: interview

6th June
1pm–5pm: writing up interview script

7th June
9am–12pm: writing up interview script

14th June
9am–12pm: writing up interview script

21st JuneI need to be careful when people are answering my questions in a language that is not their

124

native one. Getting things wrong, hesitating, the time taken to search for the right words. The
difficulty of reflecting these things in the text.

5th JulyInterview at noon

12th July
9am–12pm: writing up interview script

13th July
2pm–6pm: writing up interview script

5th August
The Asahi Shimbun publishes a special feature looking back at its first report of the “comfort
women” issue, and correcting some erroneous content. In response to this, there is an outbreakof people saying that the “comfort women” issue is a fabrication caused by the Asahi Shimbun's
false reports.

7th August
9am–12pm: interview preparation
From Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook, Japan at War: An Oral History:
In fact, perhaps the most common feeling we encountered while studying the Japanese war
experience was a sense among those we interviewed that the war, like some natural
cataclysm, had “happened” to them, not in any way been “done” by them.（3）8th August
9am–12pm: interview preparation1253pm: interview

9th August
3pm–4pm: writing up interview script

11th August
9am–12pm, 3pm–6pm: writing up interview script

13th AugustInterview at 4pm
From a conversation with a friend:Did you read the special feature in the Asahi Shimbun? I wonder if the people who are goingaround saying that it's the fault of the Asahi's lies that other countries are blaming Japan, thatthe paper needs to take responsibility and should be summoned to appear before theJapanese National Diet, have actually read the whole article. I read it and thought, right, sothat happened, but it doesn't change the facts [that “comfort women” existed]. When you
read the whole article, your perception of the overall picture doesn't change at all. But thepeople who are coming out and saying in public that the entire thing is the Asahi Shimbun,
that we should summon them to the Diet—have they actually read it? Are they deliberately
making a mountain out of a molehill? Or is it a question of poor reading comprehension? I
mean, they're politicians, right? Surely they'd read the whole thing?

14th August
9am–12pm, 5pm–6pm: writing up interview script
15th August
8pm–10pm: writing up interview script126

17th August
4pm–7pm: writing up interview script
Interview at 8.30pm

18th August
Meeting at 1pm

19th August
1pm–4pm: writing up interview script

20th August
10am–12pm: writing up interview text
In the afternoon, I go and watch the film Japanese Devils: Confessions of Imperial Army Soldiersfrom Japan's War Against China. When a Japanese man is giving testimony about the crimes hecarried out, there is a shot showing a glimpse of his wife from the dark of the kitchen. Had sheheard him speak of those things before? If she had, did it worry her? If not, did she want toknow?

23rd August
Thinking about the difference between the speech of the victims and that of the perpetrators.
The reception of the testimony of former soldiers in post–war society. Testifying that you havecaused harm to someone. Their fear that came from having to survive life within an immoral
military organization. The soldiers were so highly controlled, fettered in so many ways,
including sexually. Soldiers' human rights? Amid all the memories concerning the Second
World War, how should we place their testimony so that we are able to listen to it?

26th August
2pm–5pm: writing up interview script127

27th August
10am–1pm: collecting and organising material

28th August
From Suzuki Seijun, “Sensō eiga to onna no kao” (War Films and Women's Faces) in Suzuki seijun
essei korekushon (Suzuki Seijun Essay Collection):
I feel as though talk of the wartime experiences is something that should be done to children
by their parents, not by other people. However, it seems as though parents don't much wantto speak to their children about their wartime experiences. I suppose that they are trying topreserve their reputation and so on, but it's those people who don't want to speak about the
war who are the ones who know what war was truly like. Keeping the truth locked up as justone’s own personal experience is avoiding the responsibility for the defeat. The things that
one did (not that you saw) in the war should be told without fear to one's children, even if itcauses them astonishment. (145)30th August
From Nishino Rumiko, Motoheishi-tachi no shōgen: jūgun ianfu (Testimony of Former Soldiers:
Military Comfort Women):
The words of a former soldier: “Saying that we had no choice is shifting the blame for thewar, and that way of thinking is what has kept the issue of war responsibility from being
resolved.” (176)31st August
At the South African Truth and Reconciliation Committee. The public hearing of Jeffrey
Benzien, a police officer in South Africa during the apartheid regime. Benzien's counseller,
psychologist Ria Kotze, was summoned to appear in court. The poet Krog, covering thehearings, wrote the following after listening to her public statement:128

To reconstruct your memory, to beautify it, is an ordinary human trait, says the psychologist.
Most people do it. But there are probably three kinds of memory loss. The first is voluntary –you change your memory because you are under threat, because you cannot bear to livewith the reality. The second kind is involuntary – something is so traumatic that it rips a holein your memory, and you cannot remember the incident or what happened just before andafter it. But there is also a third kind of memory loss and that occurs when you testify inpublic. Kotze says Benzien‘s stress level were so compounded by having to testify and hisanxiety about how this might affect the last bits of life he has with his wife and children, that
it is quite possible he remembered even less than usual. (Krog 117)

2nd September
9am–2pm, 5pm–11pm: writing Part One

3rd September
9am–1pm, 8pm–12am: writing Part One

4th September
9am–1pm: polishing Part One

5th September
10am–2pm: interview preparation

6th September
Interview at 2pm

8th September
1pm–3pm: writing up interview script
Interview at 4pm.

129

12th September
10am–1pm: writing up interview script

14th September
10am–1.30pm: writing up interview script
Meeting at 3pm.
From a conversation with a friend:
In the film Japanese Devils, the people speaking about the war crimes they carried out in
China speak so factually, in such a removed, expressionless way, like they’re reading aloudfrom a book. At first, I thought that was really weird. If it was the people on the side of those
who'd been killed, people from the victims' side who were speaking about those things,
they'd be really emotional in their delivery, right? I thought that the same would be true [ofthe perpetrators] as well. But then, when I thought about it afterwards, when you're speaking
from the perpetrator's perspective, rather than speaking about it as your own experience,
you'd have to speak about it [as something done] by someone else. If you didn’t speak about
it first as something separate from yourself then you'd never be able speak about it at all.
When you think about it like that, I guess that those old men’s calmness was actually a very
human reaction.

15th September
Thinking about the difference between the speech of the perpetrators and the victims. Jean
Hatzfeld, who covered the Rwandan Genocide, says the following about the comparison
between the survivors and the killers:
It was harrowing to see the risks these survivors took in telling their stories. They did nothesitate to let themselves be overwhelmed by their memories, their uneasiness, their pain.
They dared to revisit forbidden places and to bring nightmares back to life. Quite often
they spoke of memories and thoughts they had never revealed before, and seemedastonished at what they or others had said. They whispered, flared up, became harsh or130

tender. The tone of their voices was never the same from one day to the next. Even if theirstories changed in the telling, you had to listen to them with all your heart.
But the killers never allow themselves to be overwhelmed by anything. Their memories
may fool them because of normal deformation over time, but that is nothing like thetraumas and psychological blocks their victims have described.
Each killer controls what he says in his own way. Élie, for example, tries touchingly to
express his feelings as precisely as possible, while Ignace automatically answers at first witha lie that he can then carefully refine. All of them gradually speak more sincerely as theinterviews progress, making more of an effort to open up. Nevertheless, there is a
cautionary line that they almost always refuse to cross. Although they speak in a monotonethat increases our uneasiness, there is something more, something equivocal in their voicesthat makes us think these men are not so indifferent as they appear. Their guardedness isdictated probably by prudence or perplexity, often by a strange insensitivity, but also
perhaps by a sense of propriety. (Hatzfeld 143–44)

16th September
2pm–5.30pm: writing up interview script, translating

17th September
1pm–5pm: translating Korean newspaper articles
I'm not making much headway with the translation because of my linguistic incompetence.
With the content being what it is, as I read the Korean, looking up words in the dictionary andtrying to grasp the nuance and the feel of the individual words and phrases, my insides growheavier and heavier. And yet the text in Japanese reads pretty flatly and expressionlessly,
showing no trace of my struggles with the bitter nuances of the source language.

19th September
4pm–6pm, 9pm–11pm: translating Korean newspaper articles
I'm surprised by the totally obvious truth of how different the experience of translating into
Japanese from Korean is from translating from English. Where the Korean words used are131those which have their origin in Chinese characters, I first try and replacing with their
Japanese Kanji equivalents in my translation. Suddenly, the temperature of the pallid Japanese
sentences shoots up, grows feverish. Words like disclose (), horror(), rage ().

27th September
8.30pm–9.30pm: interview
From “Hyperbole over Asahi Affair Tarnishes Brand Japan,” by Jeff Kingston, The Japan Times(27th September, 2014):
But why do these detractors think that coming clean about Japan’s past hurts the nation’s
image? Surely Japan’s reputation is sullied far more by the deniers and minimizers who can’t
accept responsibility over wartime atrocities, particularly when it comes to the comfort
women system. Problematically, the shabby treatment of the comfort women, compoundedby ongoing denials, stymies their efforts to rehabilitate and glorify the nation’s wartime past.

28th September
10am–1pm: writing up interview script

30th September
10am–11am: writing up interview script
11.30am–12.30pm: collecting and organising material

1st October
3pm–5pm: translating

2nd October
8.30pm–9.30pm: collecting and organising material132

4th October
10am–12pm: collecting and organising material
From “Investigation into Policy for Transmitting News Overseas Following Erroneous ‘Military
Comfort Women’ Reports,” NHK (4th October, 2014):
In the light of the Asahi Shimbun's retraction of some of their articles concerning the issue of
military comfort women, the Liberal Democratic Party has voiced the need to reclaim
Japan's honour, and is hurriedly investigating their policy for transmitting information
about the issue overseas.
In August this year, the Asahi Shimbun published a special feature investigating its reports on
the issue of military comfort women, retracting an article based upon the testimony of aJapanese man claiming that “he had led comfort women away by force”, declaring that they
had “judged the testimony to be erroneous.”
In response to this, the Liberal Democratic Party announced their intention to create a
special committee within the party to deal with the issue, claiming that “based upon the false
testimony of this man, the demand from members of the UN for Japan to take national
responsibility and apologize has been spreading, and as a party, we need to concern
ourselves with restoring Japan's honour.”
In connection with the issue, Prime Minister Abe indicated that “groundless libel that theentire Japanese nation made sexual slaves of women is circulating around the world. It isthrough these false reports that this situation has come about.” As well as investigating
policy for the transmission of information to other countries, international organizations
such as the UN, and foreign news agencies, the special committee will also investigate theeffect brought about in international society by the news reports based upon the man's
testimony, and make suggestions to the government accordingly.

19th October
11am–1pm: translating
The difficulty of switching between Korean and Japanese. My inadequate language abilities…
A draft translation.
From “Military Comfort Woman Reveals Horror” The Hankyoreh (15th August, 1991):

133

Military Comfort Woman Reveals Horror
Ms Kim Hak–Sun is First Korean resident to Disclose Truth About Past
Historical Facts Have to Emerge Eventually
Rage Still Rises Up When She Sees the Japanese Flag
On the afternoon of the 14th in the Korean Women’s Association United offices, Kim
Hak–Sun (67, lives in Chungsin-dong, Jongno District, Seoul, Picture 1), gave a press
conference where she exposed the horror she went through when, at age of 17 and in theflower of her youth, she served as a comfort woman to the Japanese Army for a period ofover five months. Of the Koreans who were forced to live as military comfort women under
the imposed colonial rule of the Japanese Empire, she is the first of those living in the
country to disclose her painful past since Korea's liberation from Japanese rule.
“I've wanted to speak about it for so long, but I didn't have the courage, and couldn't say
anything. I decided to tell the truth because these are the ‘historical facts’ that have toemerge eventually. I feel better for having finally got it off my chest.”
Ms Kim, now an old woman and her face etched with lines, began to speak about the time 50
years ago that she would rather not have remembered, her eyes constantly welling up withtears, in a way that was painful to watch.
“When I see the hinomaru (Japanese flag), I feel such bitterness, and a sense of revulsion in
my chest. Now, when I hear the Japanese are saying on the TV and in the papers that it isuntrue that the Japanese led military comfort women away forcibly, I get so sad I feel like mychest will cave in. I feel prepared to take the Japanese government to court.”
Currently living off social benefits, through which she receives ten kilograms of rice and30,000 won a month, Ms Kim has led a dramatic life.
Born in Jilin, Manchuria, in 1924, Ms Kim's father died a few months after her birth.
Struggling to get by, her mother sold her to a kisaeng [courtesans who entertained
high-ranking officials] training school in Pyongyang when she was 14. Having finished her
three years of school, Ms Kim was planning to get her first job, and went with her foster
father from the school to Teppekichin in Northern China, where a company of over 300
Japanese soldiers was stationed.
“My foster father who took me away at the time couldn't get any money from the Japanesemilitary for me, and was powerless to prevent them from taking me away. For five months
after that, my whole life was based around serving four or five Japanese soldiers practicallyevery day.”
The place where Ms Kim was based was a temporary building erected in front of the platoon

134base, and housed five teenage Korean girls. The military provided them with rice andside–dishes, and they were placed under 24-hour surveillance. Ms Kim confessed that she
had tried to escape on numerous occasions, but was found each time by the soldiers andbeaten.
At that time, Cho Won-Chan (31), a Korean salesman who went between Korea and China
selling silver coins, just so happened to come by the comfort station, and, securing his help,
Ms Kim finally managed to escape. She subsequently went to Manchuria with Mr Cho,travelling around from place to place in Shanghai and other parts of China. After the end ofJapan's rule of Korea, she came to Seoul with Mr Cho, where the pair settled. Ms Kim gavebirth to a son and a daughter, but lost both of them immediately after the Korean War, andin 1953, her husband also passed away. She spoke in a tearful voice of the hardship she had
endured throughout the course of her life, working as a housekeeper and a street vendor inorder to make a living.
Ms Kim says she decided to reveal the truth about her past at the invitation of an atom bomb
victim, Lee Maeng-Hee, who she came to know after leaving the job placement centre, and
The Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan. She
stated passionately, “The Korean government must seek a public apology and compensationfrom the Japanese in relation to the military comfort women issue.”Meanwhile, the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by
Japan stated that “through the testimony of the survivors and their relatives, starting withMs Kim, we must reveal the truth about the women drafted into the volunteer corps which
has been pushed to the underside of history.”

25th October10pm–11pm: interview

26th October
1pm–3pm: interview preparation
9pm–11pm: translating

27th October135(by Kim Mi-Kyung)10am–1pm: translating
3pm–7pm: writing up interview script

28th October
I read an interesting paper by Takei Ayaka, specialist in modern German and Jewish history.
She states, “After the Second World War, when Germany and the other Western nations were
facing the evils of Nazism and the Holocaust, false testimony was a conspicuous problem,” and,drawing on examples of false testimony occurring in Germany after the war, speaks about theJapanese problems of the bashing of the Asahi Shimbun and the increase in historicalrevisionism in Japanese public opinion. In particular, the examples she cites of false evidence
from those who were “neither perpetrators nor victims but third parties (as with Yoshida's
testimony)”—“the cases of those who invent experiences of the Holocaust and publish them as
autobiographical accounts”—are particularly interesting. Why do people create these accounts
and pose as victims? As reasons, Takei cites the “wish to place themselves in a worthierposition than that given to the victims”, and “the trend in contemporary society to always thinkof oneself as a victim in some way.” In Yoshida Seiji’s case, he gave false testimony as aperpetrator rather than a witness, but his reasons for doing so are still very intriguing.
From “Gishō tono mukiaikata, shūseishugi no uketomekata; horokōsuto to hikaku shite”(“How To Approach False Testimony and How to Deal With Historical Revisionism: A
Comparison With the Holocaust”) by Takei Ayaka:
Historical interpretation is something that is established through the accumulation of longyears of research, and cannot possibly be annulled by one person's false testimony. If
someone tried to deny the entirety of history on the basis of specific false testimony, it would
be academic blasphemy. What we need to be most wary of is the intellectual poverty, what
we could call the anti-intellectualism of contemporary Japan that allows knowledge gained
through decades spent engaging with a mountain of historical resources to do battle in thesame arena as the personal opinions of those who have never touched such a resource.

30th October
5pm–8pm: translating136

3rd November
8am–10am: organising bibliography

6th November
Meeting at 6pm

17th November
3pm–5pm: interview

18th November
9am–11am: organising material

28th November
There are reports of how the Yomiuri Shimbun has apologized for using “inappropriate”
expressions in its English edition by referring to “comfort women” as “sexual slaves” andsimilar.
From “Inappropriate Phrases in English Edition—Apology For Comfort Women Reportage”(28th November, 2014):
Internal investigations have revealed that, in its coverage of the so–called military comfort
women issue, the English edition of this newspaper, The Daily Yomiuri (now The Japan News),
used inappropriate expressions such as “sex slave,” “sexual servitude” and so on, in a total of
97 articles between February 1992 and January 2013.
The Yomiuri Shimbun apologises for its use of expressions that may have invited
misunderstanding, and will be creating addenda for all of the offending articles in its
database stating that the articles used inappropriate expressions. An apology is also being137

published in today’s edition of The Japan News, and a list of the articles has been publishedon its website (http://the–japan–news.com/).
There were found to be 85 translations of Yomiuri Shimbun articles and original English
articles featured in The Daily Yomiuri concerning the comfort women issue that
inappropriately used the word “sex slave” or similar expressions.
Because it was believed that the word “comfort women” would be difficult to understand for
those for those English readers lacking the necessary background knowledge, explanations
based on erroneous information which did not appear in the Japanese edition of the paper,
such as “comfort women were women forced into sexual servitude,” were added to thearticles.
For example, in the 30th August, 1997 edition, in the first page editorial column Henshū Techo,
where the Japanese edition of the paper used the phrase “about 'military comfort women'
and so on,” the English article in The Daily Yomiuri adopted the expression “theissue of‘comfort women,’ who were forced into sexual servitude by the Imperial JapaneseArmy.”

There were also 12 articles which did not use the expression “sex slave,” but which spoke ofthe coercion by the government or the army as though it was objective fact, defining comfort
women as “women forced into prostitution by the Japanese army” and so on. As regards the1993 Kōno Statement, at first its contents were translated correctly as “there were times when
the authorities directly participated in this (recruiting of comfort women),” but later this was
simplified and expressions liable to invite misunderstanding, such as that Kōno
“acknowledged coercion by the military,” were used instead.

From “Japanese newspaper retracts term ‘sex slaves’ from wartime coverage: Attempts toportray women who were forced to work in brothels as willing prostitutes at odds withmainstream historical opinion” by Justin McCurry, The Guardian (28 November 2014):
Japan’s biggest-selling newspaper has apologised for its past use of the term “sex slaves” todescribe tens of thousands of women who were forced to work in Japanese military brothels
before and during the second world war.
The move by the Yomiuri Shimbun, a conservative broadsheet with a daily circulation of
more than 10 million, has fuelled concern that sections of the country’s media have signed
up to a government-led campaign to rewrite Japan’s wartime history and portray its actions
on the Asian mainland in a more favourable light.

138

Revisionist attempts to portray the women as willing prostitutes hired by private brokers has
soured Tokyo’s relations with South Korea, where many of the victims came from. The
Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has yet to hold a bilateral summit with his counterpart
in Seoul, Park Geun-hye, since he took office in December 2012.
In a statement carried in its Japanese and English-language editions, the Yomiuri said it
would continue to use the phrase “so-called comfort women,” a more ambiguous wording
critics say downplays the women’s plight.
Many mainstream historians and overseas media use “sex slaves” to describe as many as
200,000 women – mostly from the Korean peninsula – who were forced to work in frontline
brothels until Japan’s defeat in 1945.
The Yomiuri said the “inappropriate” descriptions had appeared on numerous occasions in
its English-language edition the Daily Yomiuri, now known as the Japan News, for morethan a decade up to 2013. The paper said it had not come under pressure from outside toalter its editorial policy.
In September, Japan’s historical revisionists received a boost when the liberal Asahi
Shimbun Shimbun retracted several articles it ran in the 1990s about wartime sex slaves.
The coverage was based on the falsified testimony of Seiji Yoshida, a former soldier who
claimed he had witnessed women from the South Korean island of Jeju being abducted towork in military brothels. Yoshida, who died in 2000, has been discredited by independent
investigations by academics and other newspapers.
Senior Asahi staff resigned and the paper became the target of sustained attacks on its
editorial credibility from conservative rivals, including the Yomiuri.
In line with claims made by leading conservative politicians that there is no evidence thatthe military coerced the women, the Yomiuri said the previous wording had created themistaken impression that sexual enslavement was official wartime policy.
“The Yomiuri Shimbun apologises for having used these misleading expressions and will
add a note stating that they were inappropriate to all the articles in question in our
database,” the paper said in a statement printed in the Japan News on Friday.

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The paper cited 97 articles published between 1992 and 2013 that used “sex slave” or “otherinappropriate expressions.”
The Yomiuri, a staunch supporter of the governing Liberal Democratic party, said “sexslaves” had never been used in its Japanese edition.
“The expression ‘comfort women” was difficult to understand for non-Japanese who did nothave knowledge of the subject. Therefore the Daily Yomiuri, based on an inaccurate
perception and using foreign news agencies’ reports as reference, added such explanations
as ‘women who were forced into sexual slavery’ that did not appear in The Yomiuri
Shimbun’s original stories,” the paper said.
Abe is one of several conservative politicians who have blamed the Asahi – and overseas
media coverage of the sex slave issue they claim was based on the newspaper’s falsified
stories – for damaging Japan’s international reputation. But he has stopped short of revisinga 1993 government statement apologising to the women.
Mainstream historians point out, however, that the Asahi’s recent retraction does notinvalidate their contention that Japan’s wartime government and military were involved incoercing the women.

1st December
8am–11am: writing up interview script

3rd December
Meeting at 8pm

11th December
Meeting at 6pm

30th December
5pm–10pm: organising bibliography

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Sadness, and At That Which Has Been Hidden) Seidosha, 1998.
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Nishino, Rumiko. Motoheishi-tachi no shōgen: jūgun ianfu (Testimony of Former Soldiers:
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Yoshiaki, Yoshimi. Ed. Jūgun ianfu shiryosyu (Military Comfort Women Documents). Ōtsuki
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＊ For the references mentioned in part 2, see footnotes. These should contain enoughinformation to source the original materials.
＊ The bibliography above does not include newspaper articles quoted in part 3.

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