6 page analysis and response paper
subaru93
Kang_ConjuringComfortWomen.pdf
Conjuring "Comfort Women": Mediated Affiliations and Disciplined Subjects in Korean/American Transnationality
Hyun Yi Kang
Journal of Asian American Studies, Volume 6, Number 1, February 2003, pp. 25-55 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI:
For additional information about this article
Access provided at 26 May 2019 06:11 GMT from University of California @ Santa Cruz
https://doi.org/10.1353/jaas.2003.0027
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/49217
25CONJURING “COMFORT WOMEN” • KANG •
CONJURING “COMFORT WOMEN”:
Mediated Affiliations and Disciplined Subjects in
Korean/American Transnationality
laura hyun yi kang
JAAS FEBRUARY 2003 • 25–55 © THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
C OMFORT ME, THE TITLE OF MULTIMEDIA ARTIST Soo Jin Kim’s evocative1993 video work, has long struck me as an apt distillation of the vexing dynamics of representing “comfort women” by Korean/Americans.
The oddly subject-less phrase, which can be read as an egocentric com-
mand or a plaintive, anxious request, begs the identity of both the “me”
and the implicit “you.” The short ten-minute video features extreme close-
ups of two bodies, one male and one female, in various poses of contact.
The female figure, recognizable as Korean through the repetitive action
of putting on a white slip dress and then a red overskirt of the traditional
hanbok dress, is more prominent and sometimes shown alone as she at-
tempts to scrub her body clean while alternately covering her exposed
crotch with one hand. A sound track of hurried breathing suggests both
the sex act and the frantic effort of cleansing. After a brief first-person
account of being raped that seems to be spoken by the pictured woman,
the voice-over shifts to a third-person female narrator who discloses cer-
tain details about young Korean women recruited by the Japanese Impe-
rial Army for its “comfort girl battalion.” Considering this shift in speak-
ing positions, we might apply the title phrase, “Comfort Me,” not to the
visible Korean “comfort woman” or the Japanese soldier, but rather to
two other invisible subjects of this cultural production: the artist-narra-
tor and the viewer-audience. Who is comforted and by whom through
such representations? The question of differently implicated and com-
26 • JAAS • 6:1
forted subjects of such Korean/American cultural productions becomes
more important to ask with each new staging of “comfort women,” espe-
cially now more than a decade after the initial shocking international
publicity around this historical episode.1
The matter of Korean “comfort women” poses multiple problems—
of nomination, of identification, of representation, and of knowledge-
production. Who can know and then, in turn, account adequately for
both the historical event and its multiple subjects? Before that question
can be posed, who are and should be the “we” who must remember and
represent this subject? Is it an Asian American issue? Do Korean Ameri-
cans bear a particular responsibility for and authority in telling this his-
tory? Do Korean American women have an even greater connection to
the subject? But why should “we” have any special claim to the produc-
tion of that knowledge in the United States? Furthermore, how can “we”
find out about what happened and who are “we” to inform and educate,
in turn? What claims can “we” make for “their” attention? Finally, how
should such claims be made and for whom?
As a partial response to these questions, this essay considers the pos-
sible implications of various efforts by Korean/Americans to recall and
represent Korean “comfort women.” At first glance, it makes sense that
those Americans of Korean descent would feel compelled to take up the
task of representing their ethnically kindred Korean “comfort women” in
U.S. culture, scholarship, and politics. Indeed, several of these artists have
described their representational undertaking as motivated by a strong
ethnic affinity with the Korean “comfort women.” In addition to this align-
ment of a shared identity between the subject and object of representa-
tion, the visceral and often spectacular focus on the violated bodies and
psyches of the “comfort women” can function as powerful referential an-
chors, thereby eclipsing how each text or artifact is itself a particular and
even peculiar cultural and epistemological construction. In her essay in
this issue, Kandice Chuh usefully proposes an “articulation of ‘comfort
woman’ as a term of analysis and history rather than personhood.”2 Else-
where, I have agitated for the consideration of “Asian/American women”
as both a vexing object of knowledge and a productive figure for destabi-
lizing, on the one hand, the authority of academic disciplines and, on the
27CONJURING “COMFORT WOMEN” • KANG •
other, the stability of identity categories.3 On a more local scale and in
conversation with the insightful work of my fellow authors in this special
issue, I want to frame the various Korean/American conjurings of “com-
fort women” as distinctly mediated gestures that, in their specific force-
fulness and collective diversity, interrogate the prevailing terms of both
identification and representation as well as any assumption that one or-
ganically flows into and secures the other. Lisa Yoneyama astutely reads
Nora Okja Keller’s novel, Comfort Woman, as “beckoning the possibility
of a collective subject of historical justice even in the absence of the sta-
bility of experiential truth and the apriority of identity.”4 Yoneyama is
referring to the insurmountable alienation of Beccah from her Korean
immigrant mother’s past experiences as a sex slave for the Japanese army
and the consequent inaccessibility of that history for this “Korean Ameri-
can” daughter, but I would extend this observation to a critical framing of
the representational endeavors by Korean/American women artists and
scholars as instantiating, not their sameness, but their distance and dif-
ference from the Korean “comfort women.” Rather than attributing a
shared ethnic and/or gender identity as the secure origin or compelling
cause of their representational impulse, they bring “Korean Americans”
and “Korean American women” into legibility as distinctly American sub-
jects of representation and knowledge production, consequently trou-
bling rather than affirming any neat alignment of identity-knowledge-
justice. Put differently, they dispel the wishful trajectory in which a more
intimate identification with the Korean “comfort women” leads to better
representations of the “comfort women,” which in turn secures greater jus-
tice for these women. This argument may appear to divert both critical
attention and political energies from the actual “comfort women” and
especially the on-going struggles to secure an official apology and com-
pensation for the surviving women. However, by disentangling identifi-
cation from representation and reparation, I seek to open up new critical
imaginings of how the three processes can be interrelated beyond the or-
ganic telos from a particular subject of injury in the past and to a kindred
subject of remembrance and justice in the present and future.
As Chungmoo Choi and others have insightfully pointed out, “com-
fort women” has not been immune to metaphorical displacement or stra-
28 • JAAS • 6:1
tegic accenting: “The troping of comfort women as raped nation is a pow-
erful point. It strikes a deep chord of shame in the colonized and invokes
nationalistic sentiments that inevitably narrativize an account of com-
fort women as untainted virgins.” Choi further points out how some sur-
viving women themselves are conscious of the conventional and tactical
edges of their own discursive production:
The recording of testimonials is itself not at all innocent, but instead is
always deeply political. With the widespread publicity of this issue, the
sum total of a comfort woman’s life has unwittingly been reduced to
nightmarish experiences of slavery for public consumption. “You want
me to begin from the beginning. You mean when I was taken, don’t
you?” asks one former comfort woman of Dai Sil Kim-Gibson’s request
to tell her her life story. Thus the testimonies have become highly
formulaic, with an intense focus on the repetitive sexual acts and abuses,
which may be in danger of serving voyeuristic curiosity.5
Keeping in mind the strategically constructed aspects of even the most
direct and intimate accounts by and about these women then, this essay
begins by discussing a range of different modes and methods of re-pre-
senting “comfort women” as distinctly mediated by their American loca-
tion. I then consider the implications of these Korean/American
rememberings of “comfort women” for the panethnic identification of
“Asian American.” Here, the intervening slash between the “Korean” and
the “American” is explicated as marking the differences and slippages
amongst a “Korean” postcoloniality, an “American” nationality, and an
“Asian American” racial formation. In recalling a different history of the
tenuous positioning of the “Korean” in relation to the “American” within
the triangulated vectors of transnationality amongst Korea, Japan and
the United States during World War II, I move towards a more skeptical
framing of these Korean/American efforts in terms of a contemporary
transnational dynamic of (re)positioning the United States as the central
and enabling locus of representation and adjudication on the subject of
“comfort women.” To that end, I track the process by which the contro-
versial term, “comfort women,” has become the most legible English nomi-
nation over and against variously contested renamings in Japanese and
Korean. My critical insistence upon such multiple mediations and
disciplinizations is intended to highlight the limits and the dangers of
29CONJURING “COMFORT WOMEN” • KANG •
what Lisa Yoneyama calls the “Americanization” of the “comfort women”
issue.
Since its emergence into international spotlight in the early 1990s,
the history of Korean “comfort women” under Japanese imperialism and
their current struggles for redress and reparations have captured wide-
spread sympathies and fueled a range of creative, scholarly, and activist
gestures by Korean/Americans in the United States. The kinds of engage-
ment have ranged from hosting direct testimonies by surviving women
through organizing art exhibits and community forums6 to academic
conferences7 and creating websites8 to more individual modes of cultural
production in novels, poetry, a play, paintings and sculptural installations,
documentary film and experimental video.9 In the arena of scholarship,
Korean/American feminists in anthropology, history, sociology, and po-
litical science have produced new knowledges and analyses that can be
situated in and across these disciplines as well as the interdisciplinary fields
of Asian studies, women and gender studies, and Asian American studies.
It seems safe to say that no other topic unifies the work of Korean/Ameri-
cans across the different and even divergent arenas of scholarship, cul-
ture, and activism.
The persistent conjuring of the visceral pain and continued suffering
of the Korean women who were forced into sexual servitude for the Japa-
nese army attempts to spotlight both the atrocities of the historical past
as well as its continuing vestiges in the bodies and psyches of the survi-
vors. Several of these Korean/American cultural producers have claimed
a strong sense of connection with the Korean “comfort women,” which
was borne of a range of different first encounters with the topic. Nora
Okja Keller and Dai Sil Kim-Gibson both recall their initial inspiration to
address the subject after attending one of the first-person testimonies given
by a surviving “comfort woman” in Hawaii and Washington D.C., respec-
tively.10 The playwright, Chungmi Kim, became interested in the topic
after attending a lecture by the Korean scholar, Yun Chung Ok, in Los
Angeles.11 Therese Park first learned of this history through viewing a
documentary film. Subsequently, Park claims, there was a more spectral
inspiration and influence: “The heroine of my novel, Soon-ah, came to
30 • JAAS • 6:1
me during a long walk. It seemed that she found me, rather than that I
created her. ‘I was one of them,’ she told me. ‘I’ll tell you how it happened,
if you’ll trust my voice.’ Not only did I trust her voice, but I embraced her
with compassion as well.”12
These diverse modes of entry into the issue are all buttressed by the
claims of a shared ethnic and female identity with the “comfort women,”
which has been cast in one stance as a familial connection. In an essay
titled, “They Are Our Grandmas,” Dai Sil Kim-Gibson explains: “I call
these women grandmas simply because it is the Korean custom to ad-
dress all women old enough to have grandchildren by that title. I call
them grandmas, too, because I feel like they are my own grandmas.”13
According to Kim-Gibson, her actual experiences of interviewing several
surviving “comfort women” for both a documentary film and an oral his-
tory book further solidified this bond with her subjects.
This sense of an intimate connection has been amplified by a persis-
tent accenting of the representational gesture as a matter of “breaking the
silence” about and/or “giving voice” to the Korean “comfort women.” For
example, Dai Sil Kim-Gibson’s 1999 documentary film is called Silence
Broken: Korean Comfort Women. A book of black-and-white photographs
and testimonials published in 2000 by the Washington Coalition for Com-
fort Women Issues, Inc. is titled Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex
Slaves of the Japanese Military. A 1996 thesis is titled, “An Unsung Lament:
The Suffering of Korean Women Taken for Military Sexual Slavery Dur-
ing World War II.”14 In an essay titled, “To Give a Voice,” Therese Park
explains her desire to write about this subject: “I wanted to become a
channel between them and the Western world, so that their voices could
be heard loud and clear and would echo in every corner of the globe. I
wanted to demolish the thick walls supporting the Confucian belief that
women were supposed to be quiet about their ‘shameful’ pasts—although
they were victims—and that it was their fate that brought tragedies on
them.”15
This compulsion to testify for the “comfort women” is also evident in
a 1999 Los Angeles Times article on the play Hanako with the headline:
“Baring the Scars of Shame; In ‘Hanako,’ playwright Chungmi Kim gives
voice to the plight of Korean ‘comfort women’ who still cannot talk about
31CONJURING “COMFORT WOMEN” • KANG •
their World War II ordeal.”16 The article also describes Kim as “dedicated
to her role as the voice of the silent comfort women.” I want to point out
two implications of this repeated emphasis on silence and suppression.
First, the unquestioned claim of “giving voice” works to produce the prob-
lem of silence, or, in other words, to produce silence as a problem to be
remedied. This is done in large part by figuring the “comfort women” as
voiceless and as needing to be given a voice. However, this is belied by the
preexisting accounts of this topic in the various forums and texts, espe-
cially those, as noted above, that gave rise to the initial discovery by the
Korean/American artists, including the surviving women’s direct public
testimonials. Secondly, the focus on “their” silence and voicelessness works
to necessitate and to authorize the Korean/American writer/artist/scholar
to assert her own voice or vision in the act of “giving voice” to the “com-
fort women.” This second dynamic of “coming to voice” is crucially de-
pendent upon yet distinguished from the “breaking the silence” and “com-
ing to voice” by the Korean “comfort women.”
Feminist scholars on both sides of the United States-Korea divide
have observed this strong investment in the “comfort women” issue on
the part of Korean/American women. In a 1997 essay, Korean feminist
scholar Cho Hae-joang notes that while contemporary sexual harassment
of young college women in South Korea “seems to be much more signifi-
cant to me personally, . . . Korean-American women seem to have great
interest in the problem of comfort women.” She continues, “When I asked
some of them why this was so, they explained that it was because they
were living in a racist society as Korean descendants and this problem is
really close to their hearts.”17 On the other side, exploring the causes of
what she describes as “Korean American feminist fascination with Ko-
rean military prostitution,” Elaine H. Kim argues: “Korean American
women may be interested in comfort women and sex workers because as
Asian women living in the U.S., they too are marginalized and suspect as
possible traitors to the Korean nation, and because they too feel subject
to the processes of racialization and sexual objectification.”18 Indeed,
Therese Park confirms this when she declares: “Wittingly or unwittingly,
a writer also portrays herself in her ‘characters.’ Soon-ah’s determination
to survive through her daily torture came from my own struggle as an
32 • JAAS • 6:1
Asian woman transplanted to American soil, which is harsh to nonwhites.”
Considered in this light, these gestures of recall and re-presentation serve
as the occasion of a double-voicing in which certain Korean/Americans
achieve a voice against the repressive processes of “racialization and sexual
objectification” in the United States.19 Consequently, I would emphasize
the differently inflected situatedness of the Korean/American represent-
ing subjects in two ways. First, a particularly American grammar and re-
gime of representation and knowledge-production constrains the terms
of their legibility and legitimation as part of U.S. culture, scholarship,
and politics. A novelization of “comfort women” is as much, if not more,
bound by the techniques and protocols of producing a “good novel” in
English as it may be about publicizing the subject of “comfort women”
for American readers. This is also the case for representation in other
forms, genres, and media. Secondly, the very diversity of formal and sty-
listic eccentricities across these works brings into critical relief that these
are actively mediated affiliations and thereby resists the neat alignment
of identity between the subjects and objects of these representations.
One way to discern the forcefulness and awkwardness of these ges-
tures is to track the differing methods for transporting the “comfort
women” figures to the United States in literary fiction. I’m especially in-
trigued by the contrasting narrative strategies in the three novelizations.
In Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman, Akiko’s life from her days in the
camp to her marriage to an American missionary, her immigration to the
United States, and a subsequent career as a much sought-after shaman is
narrated in the first-person. Her story alternates with the first-person-
narration of her daughter, Beccah. In contrast, Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture
Life filters the figure of its “comfort woman” named K. through the first-
person narration of a Korean/Japanese soldier who guards over and falls
in love with her and later immigrates to the United States, from where he
recalls her in his old age. Lee’s construction of the character of the half-
Black, half-Korean adopted daughter is an especially forced attempt to
conjoin the histories of Japanese military sexual slavery and U.S. mili-
tary-related prostitution in Korea. Finally, Therese Park’s A Gift of the
Emperor is narrated from the first-person point-of-view of Soon-ah, who
is forcibly taken to the Pacific by the Japanese army. She falls in love with
33CONJURING “COMFORT WOMEN” • KANG •
a Japanese war correspondent, and together they flee to an island from
where they are eventually rescued by the U.S. Navy, which transports her
to Hawaii. At the book’s end, Soon-ah returns to Korea at the end of the
war. What is striking about all of these instances is that the “comfort
women” figure is located as ex-centric to the national borders of the United
States. In A Gesture Life, K. can only be recalled from a geographical and
temporal distance by the immigrant Doc Hata. Even in the case of Com-
fort Woman, where Akiko/Soon Hyo is an immigrant and permanent resi-
dent, I would argue her “American” presence is tenuous, made more so by
her physical isolation and seeming madness. Here, I think Kandice Chuh
is quite right in reading the enfiguration of the “comfort woman” in both
Lee’s and Keller’s texts as standing in for “the legacies of Japanese colonial
occupation of and U.S. neo-colonial presence in Korea,” which the two
“Korean American” figures of Doc Hata and Beccah “must find a way of
not only confronting but relating to . . . in order to move from a state of
selflessness to selfhood.”20 I would modify this illuminating insight in two
ways. First, the selfhood that is achieved through this remembrance must
be distinguished as a particularly American one, one that is allowed and
enabled to remember these pasts not in spite of but as a consequence of
their national location in the United States. Second, I would extend that
observation to the various Korean/American gestures of recall and repre-
sentation as enunciating not only a diasporic Korean identification with
the “comfort women” but also the producers’ cultural and national loca-
tion in the United States, a place that allows and enables its variously
ethnicized subjects into such rememberings and representations.
In addition to the previously discussed video piece, Comfort Me, the
problems of representing “comfort women” through an audio-visual
medium for an American audience is interestingly enacted in Dai Sil Kim-
Gibson’s documentary film, Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women. This
piece features the conventional interviews with several former “comfort
women” alongside former Japanese soldiers and scholars such as Yoshimi
Yoshiaki and Yun Chung Ok. Silence Broken also includes dramatized re-
enactments of certain scenes of the women’s physical and sexual abuse
in the camps, which are staged in reconstructed period setting and cos-
tume but acted out in spoken English, creating an odd sense of temporal,
34 • JAAS • 6:1
spatial, and cultural vertigo. Kim-Gibson has explained this dramatic
animation as necessitated by the lack of archival photographs of film foot-
age to accompany visually the voice-over recollections of the women. In
the film, the dramatic re-enactments are accompanied by the voice-over
recollection of a surviving “comfort woman,” but they do not necessarily
correspond to the experiences of that one woman. Kim-Gibson explains,
“By the time I moved to the dramatized scenes, it no longer became im-
portant for me to keep track of who said what. . . . The women’s voices
narrating the stories actually belong to individuals—Yun, Chung, Song,
Hwang, and Kim—but they are also telling their stories for all other women
who suffered the same. The individual grandmas in the first part of my
film are, in a way, sitting together, remembering their common past in
composite characters.”21 Rather than fault the filmmaker for not “sticking
to the facts,” I would frame these awkward stagings and composite char-
acterizations as indicative of the particular mediations of documentary
production, which in this case is compounded since the film was funded
by PBS for later broadcast in the United States. In addition to complying
with the usual one-hour length of these telecasts, there is the problem of
extended talking-head sequences, especially when they are spoken in a
foreign language and subtitled, which are considered as alienating to many
American television viewers. As Kim-Gibson explains, the creation of
composite characters and the staged scenes help produce “dramatic struc-
ture and stronger impact,” and I would add, it does so for a particular
kind of visually literate and habituated viewer.
While the examples discussed above grapple with the challenge of
producing a palpable presence of the “comfort women” in the terrain of
U.S. culture, a different set of Korean/American cultural productions ap-
proach the matter of representation largely through evoking the absence
of the bodies of “comfort women.” The visual artist, Yong Soon Min, for
example, conjures the “comfort women” through overt reproductions of
the unworn hanbok dress. In Mother Load, “a four-part sequential sculp-
ture,” Min created a hybrid hanbok and pojagi, “a square piece of cloth
used for wrapping and carrying various objects by Korean women,”22 with
military camouflage fabric. This enmeshing of militarization and femi-
ninity through the portable pojagi also suggests the physical displacement
35CONJURING “COMFORT WOMEN” • KANG •
of the Korean “comfort women.” While Mother Load could be a reference
to Japanese colonial violence, the postwar military dictatorship, as well as
the continued imperialist presence of U.S. troops in South Korea, an ear-
lier piece titled Remembering Jungshindae (1992) deals more directly with
the subject of Korean “comfort women.” Elaine H. Kim provides a nicely
detailed description:
[T]he body of the military prostitute is recalled by the empty dress Min
has fashioned by stretching starch-stiffened fabric over a wooden
armature and then laying on paint, modeling paste, gravel, dirt, and
charcoal bits to give the rigid structure a textured surface, all expressing
the severity of the comfort woman’s history. The dress is elegiac black,
not a traditional color for a Korean dress, and wire mesh screen is placed
at the opening of the neck so that the red light of the acetate seems to
glow from inside. Also, the gashes in the skirt emit red light like fire or
bloody wounds. The Korean script translates: “Your story will not be
forgotten.”23
The literal bodies of “comfort women” are most strikingly absent in
Mona Higuchi’s 1996 sculptural installation, Bamboo Echoes: Dedicated
to the Comfort Women, at the Isabella Stewert Gardner museum in Bos-
ton. An artist from Hawaii of both Japanese and Korean descent, this piece
marked, according to critic Jill Medvedow, “a departure from [Higuchi’s]
previous focus on Japanese-American issues and represents new inquir-
ies into the artist’s Korean heritage.” As Medvedow describes the piece:
Bamboo poles are tied together to form a three-dimensional grid that
delineates both an external boundary and a private space. The bamboo
symbolizes a living tree, a time-honored and cross-cultural metaphor
for growth and regeneration. At the same time, the bamboo structure’s
severe geometry and architectural construction is associated with
torture, imprisonment, and a rigid social order. Hanging from the
bamboo cubicles are hundreds of small, gold squares, gently dangling
inside the cubes, gold-leafed on both sides to catch and reflect the light.
The intensity of the shimmering gold punctuates the deep shadows cast
by the cubes.24
Medvedow later points out, “Compassion for the Comfort Women was
explicitly represented only through the inclusion of a late eleventh- or
early twelfth-century sculpture of Kuan Yin, the bodhisattva of compas-
36 • JAAS • 6:1
sion, which is evocatively placed outside the bamboo structure.” Such
anonymous, non-corporeal stagings of the topic are effective in drawing
more attention to the producer of the cultural production and the limits
of the will to knowledge and representation. Furthermore, they challenge
the audience to recognize how our own inclinations for a particular de-
coding are historically and culturally constrained.
Even when a female body is made hypervisible, as in Sasha Y. Lee’s
Cover-up and Denial/Playboy, a computer-generated mock cover of Play-
boy magazine, it need not literally reference a “comfort woman.”25 In-
stead, Lee poses herself in a backless halter top staring defiantly over her
shoulder at the viewer. In lieu of the conventionally titillating tag lines,
the bottom center here blares: “Comfort Women: More than sex objects.”
Chungmoo Choi points out that Lee’s work “unveils the linguistic mask-
ing of military sexual slavery with the very capitalistic notion of purchas-
ing comfort.”26 In the upper left corner, the text reads: “The Cover-Up
and Denial: Over 200,000 Korean, Chinese, Filipina and Taiwanese women
were forced to serve as sex slaves for the Japanese military. When will the
healing begin?” I am especially intrigued by how the artist interposes her-
self between the American viewer-reader and the “comfort women.” In
the middle right of the cover, the text reads: “YUNGJU BEARS ALL. She
speaks out against the greatest atrocities committed against women dur-
ing WWII.”
In thus critically highlighting the difference and distance between
the Korean/American representing subject and the Korean “comfort
women,” I do not mean to dismiss or to discount the claims of identifica-
tion by some of these Korean/American women artists. Rather, I wish to
argue that those representations and knowledge productions proceeding
from such claims should not be politically or epistemologically privileged.
To put it differently, a seemingly shared identity or experience is a par-
ticularly interested and constrained—that is, mediated—affiliation be-
tween a subject and an object of representation/knowledge production.
Keeping that in mind, we can interrogate the presumed intimacies and
seeming transparencies that identification enables, but also the critical
knowledges that it can eclipse. What is gained, in turn, by giving up the
epistemological authority of (shared) identity? How might we make critical
sense of these endeavors in Asian American studies?
37CONJURING “COMFORT WOMEN” • KANG •
The prevailing mode for a specifically Korean/American legibility and
recognition in American public culture has been as one constituent part
of the broader category of “Asian American.” However, these re-
memberings of “comfort women” are profoundly troubling to the cat-
egorical boundaries of that pan-ethnic identification. If Korean/Ameri-
cans would claim this history and these women as part of “our” history,
how could it be reconciled as also belonging to the “Asian American” as a
shared racial formation in the United States, especially alongside the con-
temporaneous history of Japanese American internment during World
War II? This question is implicated in a larger conversation that has been
waged in the past decade about the risks and the possibilities of diasporic
and transnational framings of Asian American cultural productions. Many
of these arguments have been premised upon and constrained by very
particular spatio-temporal mappings: 1) a cleaving of the two terms of
“Asian American” into Asia and America as two distinct sites of physical
habitation, affective investment, and cultural production; and 2) a stag-
gered narration of the historical making of the “Asian American” in an
earlier moment bound to the United States, which is clearly set off from a
more recent transnational era of strewn diasporic attachments to multiple
elsewheres. In some more alarmist narrations, the geographical fragmenta-
tion of and dispersed political energies posed by “new” Asian immigrant
groups and their diasporic attachments are figured as threatening the once
coherent and productive political force of “Asian American” identification.27
On the other hand, other cultural critics have hailed the
“transnational” as a more timely or liberatory alternative to the problems
of the “Asian American.” In her mapping of the “five different historical
patterns of ethnicity formation,” Susan Koshy discerns the most recent
fifth pattern within what she calls “a transnational context” of the past
decade. She continues:
During this period, relations between the U.S. and Asia have
undergone dramatic change and we have entered a transnational era
that is remaking economic, political, and cultural relations in the Pacific.
As a result, ethnicity can no longer be contextualized within the
problematic of whether and how Asian Americans will be incorporated
into the American body politic, but must also be read through the
deterritorialization of ethnic identity.28
38 • JAAS • 6:1
Later in the essay, Koshy announces more confidently, “Asian Ameri-
cans who have historically disavowed their connections to Asia in order
to challenge racist stereotypes as perpetual foreigners, will be able to ne-
gotiate their links to Asia.”29 Such assured periodization does not ad-
equately account for the fact that even before technological advances in
travel and communication and the late twentieth century economic de-
velopments of certain Asian nation-states, transnational diasporic link-
ages were constructed and actively sustained, which fissure the U.S.-based
pan-ethnic coalition of Asian Americans.
Koshy borrows her figuration of deterritorialized ethnicities from
Arjun Appadurai’s essay, “Patriotism and its Futures,” which also delin-
eates a more recent era of transnational mobility and belonging. Taking
off from Lauren Berlant’s insight that “America” is not so much a delim-
ited locale of nativity and habitation but a more expansive and contra-
dictory “National Symbolic” of certain legible forms and meaningful af-
fects that constitute its citizen-subjects, Appadurai underscores its certain
“seductiveness of a plural belonging, of becoming American while stay-
ing somehow diasporic.”30 These plural transnational attachments to an
elsewhere can be domesticated as ultimately affirming the uniqueness of
“America” as an ever growing, ever accommodating One nation of immi-
grants from all over the world. In this sense, the diasporic or transnational
does not so much exert its pull against and away from the American but
supplements and enriches the mythic expansiveness of “America.” In con-
tradistinction, Appadurai would cast these “new nationalisms” as par-
ticularizing the United States as “one node in a postnational network of
diasporas”:31
For every nation-state that has exported significant numbers of its
populations to the United States as refugees, tourists, or students, there
is now a delocalized transnation, which retains a special ideological link
to a putative place of origin but is otherwise a thoroughly diasporic
collectivity. No existing conception of Americanness can contain this
large variety of transnations.32
In thus countering the dominant national mythos of the American
melting pot, Appadurai overstates his temporally staggering pronounce-
ment of a post-national era, going so far as to suggest that the United
39CONJURING “COMFORT WOMEN” • KANG •
States is now “just another diasporic switching point, to which people
come to seek their fortunes but are no longer content to leave their home-
lands behind.”33
In a cogent critical response titled, “Transnationalism and its Pasts,”
Kandice Chuh seizes upon Appadurai’s problematic blurring of
“transnational” and “postnational” through remembering a quite differ-
ent manifestation of a “transnation” in the forced removal and incarcera-
tion of Japanese Americans by the U.S. government during World War II.
Chuh convincingly argues that the racist figuration of Japanese Ameri-
cans as occupying not “America” but a transpacific extension of Japan in
the United States served to justify the dispossession and displacement of
these American citizen-subjects.34 Taken together, Appadurai and Chuh
usefully propose two different transnations in the United States: 1) a
diasporic transnation where immigrants might desire and sustain a be-
longing to a distant homeland; and 2) a xenophobic and racist transnation
where a state can imprint its own citizen-subjects with foreign member-
ship as the proof of their inexorable un-belonging in “America.”
The peculiar contours of Korean/American history in the past cen-
tury highlight the co-existence of these differential transnations and
thereby problematize any neat spatio-temporal separation of “Asian
American.” In Strangers From a Different Shore, Ronald Takaki begins a
section on early Korean immigrants with this narration of diasporic, anti-
colonial passions:
On the morning of December 7, 1941, several Koreans in Los
Angeles were rehearsing for a play to be presented in the evening at a
program sponsored by the Society for Aid to the Korean Volunteer Corps
in China. The event was organized to raise funds for the relief of 200,000
refugee Korean families living in China and for the support of Korean
volunteers engaged in armed struggle against the Japanese in China.
When those assembled heard the news of the Japanese bombing of Pearl
Harbor, “everyone on stage exploded: . . . Long Live Korean
Independence!” At a meeting that same night, a group known as the
Korean National Association passed a three point resolution that
prescribed that “Koreans shall work for the defense of the country where
they reside,” and that “Koreans shall wear a badge, identifying them as
Koreans, for security purposes.”35
40 • JAAS • 6:1
Again, I quote at length from historian Ronald Takaki’s accounting
of the crisis of ethnicity and nationality elicited by this collision of colo-
nialism and racism:
In 1940, the Alien Registration Act classified Korean immigrants
as subjects of Japan; after the United States declared war against Japan,
the government identified Koreans here as “enemy aliens.” In February
1942, the Korean National Herald-Pacific Weekly insisted the
government reclassify Koreans as Koreans. “The Korean is an enemy of
Japan,” the editorial declared, underscoring the torturous irony of the
situation. “Since December 7, the Korean here is between the devil and
the deep sea for the reason that the United States considers him a subject
of Japan, which the Korean resents as an injustice to his true status . . .
What is the status of a Korean in the United States? Is he an enemy
alien? Has any Korean ever been in Japanese espionage or in subversive
activities against the land where he makes his home and rears his children
as true Americans?”36
Indeed, as Takaki also points out on the following page, many Kore-
ans were able to aid the U.S. military efforts against Japan in the Pacific
since, as former colonial subjects, many were proficient if not fluent in
the Japanese language. Here, then, we see the vexing convergence of the
diasporic transnation constructed and sustained by these Korean immi-
grants, the racist transnation coercively imposed upon Japanese Ameri-
cans, and an emergent imperialist military American transnational ex-
tension into Japan and later Korea.
Rather than invoking this historical episode as a way of reanimating
ethnonational antagonisms between Japanese and Koreans,37 I recall it
here in order to question how these Korean/American rememberings can
work to buttress the border and contours of the “Asian American” as an
uncritically “American” identification. A Los Angeles Times feature article
on Chungmi Kim’s play Hanako discusses these implications. Noting that
the play was produced at the East West Players, which “has many Japa-
nese American board members and the majority of its subscribers are of
Japanese and Chinese descent,” Kim is quoted as saying:
“I was nervous about it, but I was surprised to find that these Japanese
Americans were more than willing to work with this play, because they
know it’s an important issue. They are Americans—they are Japanese
41CONJURING “COMFORT WOMEN” • KANG •
Americans—and they look at this as a human rights issue. I love America,
because it is still the freest country, especially for women. Also, this is a
humanitarian society. That is why this play is getting attention from the
mainstream.”38
Against such affirmations of “America,” I want to recall the tangled
U.S. history of racism against both Koreans and Japanese and the state’s
tacit acknowledgement of Japanese imperialism in order to resist the in-
duction of these Korean/American representations of “comfort women”
in terms of what Lisa Yoneyama, in her essay in this issue, has warned as
the “Americanization of Japanese War Crimes.”39 On Tuesday, December
3, 1996, the United States Department of Justice issued a press release
announcing that sixteen Japanese citizens suspected of involvement in
the Japanese Imperial Army’s “inhumane and frequently fatal experiments
on humans” or “the operation of so-called ‘comfort stations’,” were being
placed on a U.S. Government “watchlist” of persons to be barred entry
into this country. While this ban was made possible by invoking the
“Holtzman Amendment,” which was enacted in 1979 to bar “individuals
implicated in the acts of persecution committed under the auspices of
Nazi Germany or its wartime allies from travel to the United States,” it is
important to note, as the press release does, that this marked “the first
time that individuals not involved in European atrocities were placed on the
watchlist.” Such action itself was admittedly facilitated by the documentation
produced by activists and concerned scholars so that Eli M. Rosenblaum,
the Director of the Office of Special Investigations, is cited thus:
A veritable explosion in interest in these crimes on the part of
scholars and the international human rights community made it possible
to conclusively identify suspects. By barring from the United States those
suspected of persecution in Unit 731 or in forced sex centers, the U.S.
government is demonstrating that it remembers the victims and their
suffering, and that it wants to deter others from committing such
heinous acts.40
Given this self-congratulatory appointment of the “U.S. government”
as the inclusive repository of “the victims and their sufferings” in the past
and as the guarantor of a just future for all, I want to ask how the Korean/
American effort to represent the “comfort women” might also implicate
us as American subjects who may or may not contribute to this Ameri-
42 • JAAS • 6:1
canization. The Korean/American subject who wishes to claim the his-
tory of “comfort women” as her own needs to negotiate amongst the pos-
sible but also strained affiliations with “Korean female victim,” “racialized
Asian American,” or the “American judge and protector.”
Taking these Korean/American representations as particularly “Ameri-
can” gestures allows for a domestic critique of the endisciplinization of
“comfort women” as the object of a distinctly American regime of knowl-
edge. In important ways, the subject of “comfort women” has come to unify
multiple fragmentations of knowledge and identity in our historical mo-
ment. Consider this proposal that appears in the editorial introduction
to a volume entitled, Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War II:
We propose, in this volume, to trace the legacy of the victims of
military sexual slavery through three channels, by presenting a selection
of the work it has inspired among scholars, political activists, and creative
artists. The essays offered here demonstrate, moreover, that the worlds
that the former “comfort women” and their stories have influenced are
not discrete, but rather overlapping and intersecting ones. Indeed, the
challenges raised by these war victims are so wide-ranging—challenges
not only to the concepts of imperialism, militarism, sexism, classism
and racism, but also to the ways in which history itself has traditionally
been recorded and written—that they can only be addressed through
multifaceted approaches. Thus, in confronting, exploring,
understanding, and taking up these challenges, academics are finding
themselves moved to political activism, activists are turning to mediums
of artistic representation, and artists are performing the duties of
scholarly researchers and analysts.
The legacies of the “comfort women” have encouraged, if not
required, such acts of fusion and of crossing over, in style as well as in
substance.41
From this description, “comfort women” emerges as an especially and
even perhaps ideally interdisciplinary and even transdisciplinary subject.
However, such representational and epistemological mobility of “com-
fort women” must alert us to the hidden discursive and ideological work
for which this newly visible subject is enlisted. Consequently, we would
need to be vigilant to how these different efforts become disciplined
through their categorization and slotting within specifically American
regimes of knowledge production.
43CONJURING “COMFORT WOMEN” • KANG •
Recently, Margaret Stetz has noted, “The body of material . . . around
‘comfort women’ issues has grown so rapidly, over just the last decade,
that we can now speak of there being a ‘‘comfort women’s’ literature,’ in
the same way that we refer to a ‘Holocaust literature.’” Stetz continues:
“Its size and scope suggest that the day is not far off when we may also be
able to talk of ‘Comfort Women’ Studies as an academic subject. This
would institute a formal means to acknowledge the continuing impor-
tance of the women themselves and the significance of their experiences;
it would also mirror the development of Holocaust Studies programs at
many universities.”42 This prognosis presumes that formalization as “an
academic subject” is both a desired goal and a neutral process. In con-
trast, I want to consider how the institutionalization of “comfort women”
is a specifically American process, one that (re)positions the U.S. acad-
emy as the simultaneously objective and expansive repository of knowl-
edge of such multiply disenfranchised subjects.
Another way in which the subject of “comfort women” has been
Americanized can be seen in how the proliferation of knowledge produc-
tion around the subject has been marshaled to affirm a range of other
“American” identity categories besides the “Korean American.” Stetz notes
the importance of feminism and “feminist perspectives” in this emerging
“‘Comfort Women’ Studies”: “The majority of these activist-artists so far
have been Asian or Asian-American, including a number of Japanese
women, giving lie to the myth of feminism as a white Western phenom-
enon, interested only in middle-class concerns.”43 For Stetz, the subject
functions as a means to redeem feminism from the charges of racism,
imperialism, and class bias. Pamela Thoma confirms this emphasis on
the prominent participation of Asian American feminists through her
reading of the 1996 conference as an “autobiographical text of Asian
American transnational feminism.”44 Thoma’s reading is quite right, but
her accent on “transnational feminism” risks forgetting that there is a dis-
tinct “Americanization” of the subject that occurs both through the con-
ference and its later incarnation as an edited collection, and through
Thoma’s own critical rendering of that event and specifically of the testi-
mony given by Kim Yoon-Shim as an “Asian American transnational femi-
nist cultural autobiography.” Pointing to how the event was free and open
44 • JAAS • 6:1
to a diverse audience and that the interpreter was seated next to Kim,
Thoma applauds how “the voice of the speaker was no longer disembod-
ied, aestheticized, and commercialized”45 in contrast to other modes of
retrieving and representing these women’s voices. She ends the essay, “Asian
American feminist politics is arguably part of a vanguard of transnational
feminist coalition, so building on this work is a promising project to which
feminists committed to antiracism and anti-imperialism may look for
instruction and inspiration.”46 Thoma begins the essay by noting, “In con-
trast to other women of color feminisms in the United States, Asian Ameri-
can feminisms—whether locally, nationally, or internationally organized—
have sometimes gone unrecognized and have been undertheorized by
activists and scholars in the fields of Asian American studies and feminist
studies.” She then asserts that, “the conference offers an opportunity to
recognize and analyze Asian American transnational feminist cultural
activism.”47 The repeatedly touted transnational reach of the conference
could be alternately domesticated as affirming the United States as the
enabling locus of such re-memberings by various American subjects, in-
cluding those previously marginalized and now empowered and duly ac-
credited Asian American women.
One possible way to contest the discursive Americanization of “com-
fort women” is through tracking the contested range of possible names
and terms that have been deployed under the hegemony of English as the
language of international activism, adjudication, and knowledge-produc-
tion, in which Korean/American cultural and scholarly productions are
also partially implicated. The problem of translation into English from
not one but two different languages is exacerbated by different ideologi-
cal valences of a range of terms in Japanese and Korean. The predomi-
nantly used English term “comfort women” refers to the Japanese ianfu
and the Korean wianbu. According to Chunghee Sarah Soh, “the Japanese
officialese jugun ianfu seems to have originated with Senda Kako, a jour-
nalist who published a book titled Jugun Ianfu.” She continues: “The phrase
is translated into English as ‘military comfort women.’ Yet the term jugun
(chonggun in Korean) has the connotation of ‘following’ (ju in Japanese,
chong in Korean) the military (gun) due to the nature of one’s occupa-
tion—such as nurse, journalist, or photographer—and thus gives the
45CONJURING “COMFORT WOMEN” • KANG •
mistaken impression of the ‘comfort women’ as voluntary camp follow-
ers.”48 Soh continues by explaining that “the South Korean official term
for the ‘comfort women’ as used in the Government Interim Report of
July 1992, is ilchae kunde wianbu (‘military ‘comfort women’ under Ja-
pan’),” and clarifies that kundae “simply refers to the military without the
connotation of following.”49 Soh further points out that the modifier of
ilche (under Japanese colonialism) is intended to distinguish these women
from the Korean women sex workers for the U.S. military who are also
referred to as wianbu. In contrast, the South Korean organization formed
in 1990 bears the name, Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Sexual
Slavery (Chongshindae Munje Taech’aek Hyopuihoe). The Korean term
chongshindae (“corps volunteering their bodies”), also transliterated into
English as jungshindae, is often deployed by Korean/Americans. Pointing
out how “some members of the Chongshindae performed only manual
labor and no sexual labor,” Soh explains, “One might suggest that the
Korean practice of using the term Chongshindae to refer to ‘comfort
women’ is a considerate euphemism to avoid the negative symbolism
evoked by the word wianbu. One might also suggest that it is a political
strategy to highlight the deceptive and/or coercive methods that had been
used in the recruitment of ‘comfort women’ in colonial Korea.”50 At the
First Asian Women’s Solidarity Forum on Military Sexual Slavery by Ja-
pan, which was held in Seoul in 1992, the preferred term changed from
“forced war comfort women” to “military sexual slavery by Japan,” which
has been consequently adopted by the United Nations.51 Another strategy
has been to refer to them as “former comfort women,” thereby tempo-
rally marking off the category as a past experience or position rather than
as an ontological or even an enduring social identity. Alice Yun Chai uses
what she calls “the combined term “Chongshindae/military sex slaves” and
also “Chongshindae/sexual slavery survivors.”52
Despite this complex web of differentially motivated and nuanced
naming, un-naming, and renaming, it is noteworthy that “comfort women”
has become the most common term in English usage. While activists,
scholars and commentators note the “euphemistic” or unrepresentative
quality of the term, “comfort women,” many still opt for its usage but
often enveloped by the diacritical disavowal of scare quotes. Noting that
46 • JAAS • 6:1
“the use of the term ‘comfort women’ is obviously itself a travesty, and it
would certainly be more accurate to refer to women who did this work as
‘enforced military sex laborers or slaves,’” Kazuko Watanabe elects to re-
tain it as “this remains the way they are most commonly referred to.” She
adds, “I would prefer to at least encase the term in quotes to register my
disapproval of it, but I have not done so because that would be cumber-
some if it were done throughout the article.”53 In her “Translator’s Intro-
duction,” to the English edition of Yoshimi Yoshiaki’s Comfort Women:
Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II, Suzanne
O’Brien explains: “I place the terms ‘comfort women’ and ‘comfort sta-
tion’ in quotation marks on first use to emphasize the fact that these terms
themselves played a role in concealing and normalizing the violence used
against these women. . . . Many survivors explicitly reject the term ‘com-
fort woman.’”54 However, she also notes that the original Japanese title
Jugun ianfu or Military Comfort Women has been “changed to Comfort
Women, as more commonly known in English.” The predominant leg-
ibility of the term “comfort women” in the U.S. context is most clearly
indicated in its adoption as a Library of Congress sub-heading.55
Now that I have detailed the pitfalls of both identification and knowl-
edge-production in the various conjurings of “comfort women,” I would
like to close by considering possibilities for alternative Korean/American
cultural and political work that may be opened up through a measured
dis-identification with this compelling figure of Korean female victim-
ization. The unfolding story of U.S. adjudication on the matter of forced
sexual slavery calls for a sober accenting of the “American” in “Korean
American.” On July 27, 1999 Governor Gray Davis signed into law Cali-
fornia Senate Bill 1245, which refers to “any person who was a member of
the civilian population conquered by the Nazi regime, its allies or sympa-
thizers to perform labor without pay for any period of time between 1929
and 1945, by the Nazi regime, its allies or sympathizers, or enterprises
transacting business in any of these areas under the control of the Nazi
regime or its allies and sympathizers.” Two crucial features of the law are
that “successors in interest to World War II corporations” who profited
from slave or forced labor could be named as defendants and that the
statute of limitations could not be invoked as a defense to any suit filed
47CONJURING “COMFORT WOMEN” • KANG •
before December 31, 2010. This California law complements other provi-
sions in American law that allow foreign nationals to sue a defendant if
that defendant has a presence in the United States as many of these Japa-
nese corporations do. The Department of Justice has repeatedly tried to
block these efforts by arguing, alongside the Japanese companies, that all
claims were settled in the 1951 U.S.-Japan peace treaty. The decision by
the Department of Justice to intervene actively in this case implicates the
U.S. federal government as the protector of Japanese corporate interests.
This begs the question of what U.S. citizenship might mean not only for
differently racialized and gendered but also differently capitalized sub-
jects.56
As amply illustrated in these state actions, these are strange times for
thinking about what being “American” means. The aftermath of Septem-
ber 11th has bestowed on the United States a subject-position that it has
not had to assume since its founding: that of violated and violable victim.
Rather than enable a sympathetic identification with the “losers of His-
tory,” a vengeful and newly emboldened yet selectively vigilant “Ameri-
can” militarized subject threatens to merge with and then to displace the
mostly symbolic “American” judge and protector. The Bush
administration’s recent conjuring of North Korea as part of an “axis of
evil” has brought to fore the peculiarly tripled splitting of Korean/Ameri-
can subjects as it both calls for and yet also discounts the maddening
abstractions and disavowals demanded of “American” identification.57
In closing, I want to recall that the verb “to conjure” holds two linked
meanings: 1) to call upon or order a supposed supernatural force or be-
ing by reciting a spell; and 2) a more active sense meaning to change or
influence something by reciting a spell or invocation. The Korean/Ameri-
can conjurings of comfort women must resist the drawing of our intense
investments towards the “back then” and “over there” if that would make
us forget the possibilities and pitfalls of our vexed and incomplete en-
tanglements in the here and now.58
Notes
1. The task of marking the beginning of the international awareness of and activism around the Korean “comfort women” issue is difficult due to the multi-sited, relational dimension of the processes of remembering and
48 • JAAS • 6:1
forgetting across the different yet linked public spheres of Japan, Korea, and the United States. For example, in Japan, as Yoshimi Yoshiaki claims,
Any military personnel with wartime experience knew of the existence of
comfort women. In 1947, the writer Tamura Taijiro took up the issue of
Korean comfort women in his novel Shunpuden (A Prostitute’s Story),
which was later made into a movie. But did we really recognize the system
then as a violation of women’s human rights, as a national or war crime?
In 1973, Senda Kako published Military Comfort Women (Jugun ianfu),
taking up the challenge to investigate the actual conditions comfort women
endured. Thus it can’t be said that people were completely unaware of the
issue until recently. Rather, social concern about its gravity was never
widespread. Korean women’s movements, centering on the Korean Council
for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, were
responsible for raising public awareness of the issue.
Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II, tr. Suzanne O’Brien (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 33. This account highlights a key difference between knowing about and knowing as since what appears crucial is the qualitative recognition of the historical episode in terms of certain prevailing categories such as women’s human rights or war crimes. While many have pointed to the lack of public awareness as an active suppression, especially of the surviving women’s voices, this account suggests that broader historical and discursive conditions shape the “emergence” of the “comfort women” as an international subject of cultural production, scholarship, activism and adjudication. In terms of a specifically Korean awareness and activism, many accounts attribute the beginning to a 1988 conference on sex tourism and specifically to a presentation by Korean scholar, Yun Chung Oak. Then, in May 1990, a coalition of Korean women’s groups took the occasion of then President Roh Tae Woo’s visit to Japan to demand an official apology and financial compensation for the surviving women. These groups joined to form in November of 1990 the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Sexual Slavery (Chongshindae Munje Taech’aek Hyopuihoe). Another important point of beginning occurred in 1991 when Kim Hak Soon became the first woman to testify publicly about her experience of military sexual slavery. Then in December of 1991, Kim Hak Soon, along with two other former “comfort women,” filed a suit against the Japanese government in Tokyo District Court. The Korean Council’s submission of a report on the “comfort women” case to the United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) in 1992 is often cited as a pivotal moment in the international publicizing of this issue. Hyunah Yang has incisively interrogated the centering of Japanese and especially Japanese male authority—she specifically targets the over-reliance on Senda Kako’s claims and interpretations in a Korean television documentary—on producing knowledge about the “comfort women” issue, which is scored by a positivist epistemology: “When the truth is believed to
49CONJURING “COMFORT WOMEN” • KANG •
exist in fixed time and space, the discursive hegemony of Japan, which has controlled the historical sources for this truth, cannot be contested.” See her “Revisiting the Issue of Korean ‘Military Comfort Women’: The Question of Truth and Positionality,” positions: east asia cultures critique 5.1 (1997): 57. Pointing to how the submission of the report to the UNHRC made “comfort women” into “the subject of international news,” Yang adds, “The possible danger in this move is that it may freeze the identity of the former comfort women as international victims, ‘existential’ comfort women” (66).
2. “Discomforting Knowledge, or, ‘Comfort Women’ and Asian American Critical Practice.”
3. Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).
4. “Traveling Memories: Americanization of Japanese War Crimes at the End of the Post-Cold War.”
5. “Guest Editor’s Introduction,” positions: east asia cultures critique 5,1 (1997): x. 6. In the Fall of 2000, an exhibit called “Quest for Justice: The Story of Korean
‘Comfort Women’ as Told Through Their Art” traveled throughout the United States and appeared in Toronto, Canada. The sponsors of the tour included a diverse regional and international coalition of Japanese, Korean, and U.S.- based cultural, political, and educational organizations. Alongside the traveling artwork, some stops included a locally specific “community forum” that featured first-person testimony by a former “comfort woman.” In the San Francisco Bay area, a community forum was sponsored by: Korean Exposure and Education Program, Asians and Pacific Islanders for Community Empowerment (API Force), Arab Women’s Solidarity Association (N. America), Asian Immigrant Women Advocates, Asian Women United, Center for Political Education, Center for Third World Organizing, Channing and Popai Liem Education Foundation, Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines, GABRIELA Network, Jamaesori, Kearney Street Workshop, Korean Community Center of the East Bay, Korean Youth Cultural Center, Shimtuh: A Korean American Domestic Violence Program, Women of Color Resource Center. The Los Angeles part of the tour was organized by Young Koreans United of Los Angeles, and sponsored by the House of Sharing and the Historical Museum on Sexual Slavery by the Japanese Military, both based in South Korea. The exhibition is also endorsed by the Korean Resource Center (KRC), National Korean American Service & Education Consortium (NAKASEC), UCLA Asian American Studies Center, Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, AFL- CIO, Okinawan Peace Network, Asian Pacific Islanders for Reproductive Health (APIRH), Korean Students Association of UCLA, Asian Pacific Coalition of UCLA, Korean Immigrant Worker Advocates, Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, Gabriela, NIKKEI for Civil Rights and Redress, State Senator Tom Hayden, and Korea Exposure & Education Program (KEEP). This lengthy list attests to how the issue has served to bring
50 • JAAS • 6:1
together diverse local and transnational organizations and political agents in the United States.
7. An international conference entitled “The ‘Comfort Women’ of World War II: Legacy and Lessons” was held at Georgetown University from September 30 to October 2, 1996. This conference, in turn, “inspired” the collection, Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War II, ed. Margaret Stetz and Bonnie B.C. Oh (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2001). For a program of the conference, see: HtmlResAnchor http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/stetzm/women.html.
8. See “Comfort Women: A Web Reference” at: HtmlResAnchor http:// online.sfsu.edu/~soh/cw-links.htm. See also the website for the Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues, Inc. at: HtmlResAnchor http:// www.comfort-women.org. This site includes a “Chronology and Map” page that lists significant events beginning with the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–5 and ending with an exhibit organized by the group in Washington D.C. titled, “Comfort Women of WWII: An Indisputable Tragedy” as well as a map detailing the location of “Major Military Brothels” published in the August 5, 1992 edition of Japan Times. In addition, a “Photo Gallery” section features twenty-one black-and-white archival photographs of mostly “comfort women,” Japanese soldiers and one recent photo of a demonstration.
9. See Nora Okja Keller, Comfort Woman (New York: Viking Penguin, 1997), Therese Park, A Gift of the Emperor (Duluth, MN: Spinsters Ink, 1997), and Chang-rae Lee, A Gesture Life (New York: Riverhead, 1999). Chungmi Kim’s play, Hanako, was produced at the East West Players in 2000. In the visual arts, see Miran Kim’s paintings, the sculpture and installation works by Yong Soon Min and Mona Higuchi, and the photo-based work of Sasha Y. Lee.
10. In a 1997 Time review article of Comfort Woman, Keller recalls attending a symposium at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, in 1993 where “she heard an elderly Korean woman tell her true story of being a ‘comfort woman’ during World War II.” The article reports that “The story haunted Keller. Who would pass it on? Who would write it down? The old woman came to her in nightmares. ‘Finally, I got up in the middle of the night and started to write down my dreams,’ say Keller. Those notes became a book. And she became a writer.” Christopher Farley, Time, May 5, 1997, v.149, n.18, p.101.
11. Diane Haithman, “Baring the Scars of Shame; In ‘Hanako,’ playwright Chungmi Kim gives voice to the plight of Korean ‘comfort women’ who still cannot talk about their World War II ordeal.” The Los Angeles Times (April 4, 1999), 8.
12. Therese Park, “To Give a Voice.” This haunting experience of the subject is also described by Keller, cited above in note 10.
13. Dai-Sil Kim Gibson, “They Are Our Grandmas,” positions: east asia cultures critique 5.1 (1997), 274.
14. Sandra Lee Winter, “An Unsung Lament: The Suffering of Korean Women Taken for Military Sexual Slavery During World War II” (Thesis D. Min., San Francisco Theological Seminary, 1996).
51CONJURING “COMFORT WOMEN” • KANG •
15. Therese Park, “To Give a Voice” in Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War II, ed. Margaret Stetz and Bonnie B.C. Oh. (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2001), 220.
16. Haithman, 8. Indeed the article begins with a long anecdote about how the playwright had tried to interview a former “comfort woman” in Korea: “The woman, a survivor of multiple suicide attempts could not talk, even alone in her room, to a tape recorder . . . ”
17. Cho Hae-joang, “Feminist Intervention in the Rise of ‘Asian’ Discourse,” AJWS: Asian Journal of Women’s Studies 3.3 (1997): 127
18. Elaine H. Kim, “Dangerous Affinities: Korean American Feminisms (En)counter Gendered Korean and Racialized U.S. Nationalist Narratives,” Hitting CRITICAL MASS, 6:1 (Fall 1999): 7–8. Kim also suggests, “Korean American and Korean women’s identities may overlap in many places, making it difficult to place one as the sovereign and opportunistic viewer and the other as idealized or victimized and completely without agency” (7). While I agree that such clear dichotomies are impossible and also unproductive, my reading of these works focuses upon the non-overlapping, non-equivalent spaces between these identities.
19. This double-voicing aspect of these articulations—of the silenced Korean “comfort women” and the minoritized Korean/American female artist—runs the risk of an autobiographical fixation of these representations, which some of the artists have been quite emphatic about disavowing. As a review article for Comfort Woman clarifies, “Keller says that her own mother was not a comfort woman, but served as an inspiration.” Farley, 101. Mona Higuchi has also pointed out that “the particular issues that I’m dealing with in the installation are not based in any personal experience.” She adds, “Neither my mother nor any members of my family, especially on the Korean side, were among the Comfort Women, the women that this piece is dedicated to.” Tom Kiley and Junior Senat, “Interview with Mona Higuchi” in Bamboo Echoes: A New Work by Mona Higuchi- Dedicated to the Comfort Women (Boston, MA: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1996), 25.
20. Chuh, “Discomforting Knowledge.” 21. Kim-Gibson acknowledges the “controversy” surrounding her use of these
dramatized re-enactments in her essay, “Making a Documentary about Korean ‘Comfort Women’” in Legacies of Comfort Women of World War II, ed. Margaret Stetz and Bonnie B.C. Oh (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2001), 191. Despite this crucial admission, her very partial reconstruction and indeed reconstitution of the women’s experiences and voices as cinematically manageable “characters” is re-authenticated through an extra-textual reference to her conversation with “Grandma Chung Seo Woon” who expressed her approval of the final film product:
“‘You did a good job. It is a wonderful film.’” I sat still, waiting for more.
‘Everything was pretty accurate, but one thing. You know, I went by boat,
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but in the film my character rides a train.’ Sighing with relief, but still
nervous, I explained how I combined her story with that of Grandma
Hwang Keum Ju. ‘You know, for dramatic structure and stronger impact,
in some cases I made composite characters, but I would still say it is a
documentary based on facts. Do you think the dramatic license distorted
facts in a fundamental way?’ ‘No, not if you look at all those stories as our
stories—you know, the common experience of so many young girls and
women.’”
22. This description accompanies the black-and-white photographs of Mother Load, which are published in the “The Comfort Women: Colonialism, War, and Sex” special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique 5.1 (1997).
23. Elaine H. Kim, “Dangerous Affinities,” 11–12, n10. 24. Jill Medvedow, “Comfort and Compassion” in Bamboo Echoes: A New Work
by Mona Higuchi- Dedicated to the Comfort Women (Boston, MA: Isabella Stewert Gardner Museum, 1996), 10–11. This exhibition catalogue also includes an essay by Alice Yun Chai, “Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery During the Pacific War.” Medvedow argues,“The dedication of Bamboo Echoes finds its most direct expression in the gold square pendants that hang from the interstices of the bamboo panels. Subtly irregular, Higuchi cut the approximately 1,800 paper squares by hand, applying a thin layer of composition gold leaf to each surface. The repetitive, laborious, and slow process provided the framework, structure, and time for Higuchi to meditate, contemplate, and reflect on the Comfort Women. This ritual is, by its very nature, a private one. There are no overt images of enslaved women or sexual abuse; rather there is an environment for understanding, compassion, and healing” (12–13). Medvedow also points out the similarities with an earlier work by Higuchi titled Executive Order 9066: “The bamboo, grid-like sculpture was tied together with wire, and randomly covered with black tar paper, recalling the makeshift and flimsy barracks used to house the internees in camps from California to Arkansas” (13). A slightly altered version of the essay is published as“‘Unsuspecting Souls’: Art Evokes History at the Isabella Stewert Gardner Museum” in Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War II, ed. Margaret Stetz and Bonnie B.C. Oh (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2001).
25. Sasha Y. Lee, “Cover-up and Denial/Playboy,” positions: east asia cultures critique 5.1 (1997), 284.
26. Choi, x. 27. Sau-ling Wong, “Denationalization Reconsidered: Asian American Cultural
Criticism at a Theoretical Crossroads,” Amerasia Journal 21, 1&2 (1995): 1– 27. See also King-kok Cheung, “Re-Viewing Asian American Literatures” in An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, ed. King-kok Cheung (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 9.
28. Susan Koshy, “The Fiction of Asian American Literature,” Yale Journal of Criticism 9, 2 (Fall 1996): 322.
29. Koshy, 336.
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30. Arjun Appadurai, “Patriotism and Its Futures,” Public Culture 5 (1993): 422. 31. Appadurai, 423. 32. Appadurai, 424. 33. Appadurai, 424. 34. Kandice Chuh, “Transnationalism and Its Pasts,” Public Culture 9 (1996):
93–112. Interestingly, Chuh also suggests that one reason why Italy and Germany did not incite as much hatred—and why in turn Italian American and German Americans were not interned—because “neither physically invaded the U.S. as did Japan”: “This transgression of the geopolitical border cast Japan as an enemy in close proximity, delocalizing Japanese nationality and further catalyzing an imagining of Japanese transnationality” (100).
35. Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), 363–364.
36. Takaki, 365. 37. As Elaine H. Kim has pointed out in her discussion of Theresa Hak Kyung
Cha’s Dictée, “many Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb victims were Korean conscripts in Japanese munitions plants and other war industries.” “Poised on the In-Between” in Writing Self, Writing Nation: Essays on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée, ed. Elaine H. Kim and Norma Alarcon, (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1994), 10. For a more in-depth consideration, see Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
38. Haithman, 8. The article goes on to cite Tim Dang, the artistic director of the East West Players, as saying that the subject of the play was appropriate since “the theater had been looking for ways to reach out to Los Angeles’ fastest-growing Korean community.”
39. Writing about the Assembly Resolution 27 proposed by Mike Honda, Yoneyama points out that “the Resolution is lacking notably in any reflection on the U.S. imperialist presence in the Pacific and Asia before and after the war.” Yoneyama adds, “It certainly does not refer to the postwar, Cold War history in which U.S. foreign policies acted to deliberately suppress pro- democratic forces in different parts of Asia that also tried to condemn the colonial and military injustices brought about by Japanese imperialism.” In note 10, Yoneyama points to the coverage of the measure in the Pacific Citizen: “But overall, Honda’s introduction of JR 27 was collectively welcomed as fostering a new coalition among the increasingly diversifying community of Asian and Pacific Americans, uniting different North and South East Asian and Pacific Islanders.”
40. Press release by United States Department of Justice, Tuesday, December 3, 1996. Included in Comfort Woman Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military, ed. Sangmie Choi Schellstede (New York: Holmes & Meier, 2000), 134.
41. Stetz and Oh, xii.
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42. Margaret D. Stetz, “Representing ‘Comfort Women’: Activism through Law and Art.” IRIS: A Journal About Women 45 (October 31, 2002): 26.
43. Stetz, 83. 44. Pamela Thoma, “Cultural Autobiography, Testimonial, and Asian American
Transnational Feminist Coalition in the ‘Comfort Women of World War II’ Conference,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies XXI, 1/2 (2000): 29.
45. Thoma, 36. 46. Thoma, 47. 47. Thoma, 29. 48. Chunghee Sarah Soh, “Prostitute versus Sex Slave: The Politics of
Representing the ‘Comfort Women’” in Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War II, ed. Margaret Stetz and Bonnie B.C. Oh (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2001), 76. Soh adds, “In reality, some ‘comfort women’ who served frontline soldiers in remote battlefields were indeed forced to follow the move of the military units, but those who labored in settled and/or urban areas such as Shanghai had no need to follow the troops.”
49. Soh, 77. 50. Soh, 80. 51. See Chin Sun Chung, “The Origin and Development of the Military Sexual
Slavery Problem in Imperial Japan,” positions: east asia cultures critique 5:1 (1997): 219–253.
52. Alice Yun Chai, “Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery During the Pacific War,” in Bamboo Echoes: A New Work by Mona Higuchi-Dedicated to the Comfort Women (Boston, MA: Isabella Stewert Gardner Museum, 1996), 17–21.
53. See her “Militarism, Colonialism, and the Trafficking of Women: ‘Comfort Women’ Forced into Sexual Labor for Japanese Soldiers,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 26, 4 (October–December, 1994).
54. O’Brien continues, “Here I generally use ‘survivor’ and ‘victim’ interchangeably to refer to women who were forced to serve as comfort women. I’ve retained the use of ‘comfort women’ to describe wartime practices and attitudes that perpetuate wartime views of the women.” Translator’s note in Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II, Yoshimi Yoshiaki (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 213, n2.
55. This category is sub-divided into various national and disciplinary boundaries. It is interesting to track how the three Korean/American novels discussed above are categorized. Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman does not come up in a subject search for “comfort women,” and is listed instead under: “Mothers and daughters—Fiction”; “Korean Americans—Fiction”; “Hawaii—Fiction”; and the intriguing generic category of “Domestic fiction.” In contrast, Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life, is the only book that comes up under the category of “Comfort women-fiction” along with “Japanese Americans—Fiction,” “World War, 1939–1945—Women—Fiction,” and, New York (State) Fiction. In contrast, Therese Parks’ A Gift of the Emperor is the
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only one of the three categorized under “Comfort women—Korea—Fiction” along with a Korean-language collection of short stories by the South Korean writer, Paek U-am.
56. In a March 31, 2000 editorial in the Los Angeles Times, Chalmers Johnson points to how the “United States required that Japan pay only minimal reparations after the war because it was trying to integrate Japan into the U.S.’s Cold War structure” and thus “blocked all private claims against Japan.” He adds, provocatively, “The surviving American prisoners of war thus could make as good a case against their own government’s indifference to their sufferings as against Japanese corporations today.”
57. Lauren Berlant writes that “the subject who wants to avoid the melancholy of insanity of the self-abstraction that is citizenship, and to resist the lure of self-overcoming the material political context in which she lives, must develop tactics for refusing the interarticulation, now four hundred years old, between the United States and America, the nation and the utopia.” The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 217.
58. This essay would not have been possible without the initial invitation to consider the issue of “comfort women” by Lisa Yoneyama for a session at an American Studies Association conference and the tireless efforts by Kandice Chuh to compile and edit this Special Issue. Their critical brilliance and political acuity inspire me to try harder. In addition, I would like to thank the faculty and students in Critical Gender Studies and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and in Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, for their generative questions and helpful suggestions in response to earlier versions of this essay, especially Rosemary George, Yen Le Espiritu, Lisa Lowe, and Seung-kyung Kim.
