Korean "Comfort Women": Military Brothels, Brutality, and the Redress Movement

By Pyong Gap Min

Arguably the most brutal crime committed by the Japanese military during the Asia-Pacific war was the forced mobilization of 50,000 to 200,000 Asian women to military brothels to sexually serve Japanese soldiers. The majority of these women died, unable to survive the ordeal. Those survivors who came back home kept silent about their brutal experiences for about fifty years. In the late 1980s, the women’s movement in South Korea helped start the redress movement for the victims, encouraging many survivors to come forward to tell what happened to them. With these testimonies, the redress movement gained strong support from the UN, the United States, and other Western countries.  

Korean “Comfort Women” synthesizes the previous major findings about Japanese military sexual slavery and legal recommendations, and provides new findings about the issues “comfort women” faced for an English-language audience. It also examines the transnational redress movement, revealing that the Japanese government has tried to conceal the crime of sexual slavery and to resolve the women’s human rights issue with diplomacy and economic power.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Mar 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781978814981

Book preview

Korean Comfort Women

Genocide, Political Violence, Human Rights Series

EDITED BY ALEXANDER LABAN HINTON, STEPHEN ERIC BRONNER, AND NELA NAVARRO

Nanci Adler, ed., Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice: Crimes, Courts, Commissions, and Chronicling

Alan W. Clarke, Rendition to Torture

Alison Crosby and M. Brinton Lykes, Beyond Repair?: Mayan Women’s Protagonism in the Aftermath of Genocidal Harm

Lawrence Davidson, Cultural Genocide

Daniel Feierstein, Genocide as Social Practice: Reorganizing Society under the Nazis and Argentina’s Military Juntas

Alexander Laban Hinton, ed., Transitional Justice: Global Mechanisms and Local Realities after Genocide and Mass Violence

Alexander Laban Hinton, Thomas La Pointe, and Douglas Irvin-Erickson, eds., Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, Memory

Douglas A. Kammen, Three Centuries of Conflict in East Timor

Eyal Mayroz, Reluctant Interveners: America’s Failed Responses to Genocide from Bosnia to Darfur

Pyong Gap Min, Korean Comfort Women: Military Brothels, Brutality, and the Redress Movement

Walter Richmond, The Circassian Genocide

S. Garnett Rusell, Becoming Rwandan: Education, Reconciliation, and the Making of a Post-Genocide Citizen

Victoria Sanford, Katerina Stefatos, and Cecilia M. Salvi, eds., Gender Violence in Peace and War: States of Complicity

Irina Silber, Everyday Revolutionaries: Gender, Violence, and Disillusionment in Postwar El Salvador

Samuel Totten and Rafiki Ubaldo, eds., We Cannot Forget: Interviews with Survivors of the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda

Eva van Roekel, Phenomenal Justice: Violence and Morality in Argentina

Anton Weiss-Wendt, A Rhetorical Crime: Genocide in the Geopolitical Discourse of the Cold War

Timothy Williams, The Complexity of Evil: Perpetration and Genocide

Ronnie Yimsut, Facing the Khmer Rouge: A Cambodian Journey

Natasha Zaretsky, Acts of Repair: Justice, Truth, and the Politics of Memory in Argentina

Korean Comfort Women

MILITARY BROTHELS, BRUTALITY, AND THE REDRESS MOVEMENT

PYONG GAP MIN

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Min, Pyong Gap, 1942– author.

Title: Korean comfort women : military brothels, brutality, and the redress movement / Pyong Gap Min.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2021] | Series: Genocide, political violence, human rights | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020020861 | ISBN 9781978814967 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978814974 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781978814981 (epub) | ISBN 9781978814998 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978815001 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Comfort women—Korea—History. | World War, 1939–1945—Women—Korea. | Service, Compulsory non-military—Japan. | Reparations for historical injustices. | Women—Crimes against—Korea. | Sexual abuse victims—Korea. | Women and war—Korea—20th century. | World War, 1939–1945—Atrocities—Korea.

Classification: LCC D810.C698 M56 2021 | DDC 940.54/05—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020861

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2021 by Pyong Gap Min

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Abbreviations

Chronology

Introduction: Background Information about Japanese Military Sexual Slavery and the Redress Movement for the Victims

1 Theoretical and Conceptual Frameworks

2 Enough Information, but the Issue Was Buried for Half a Century

3 The Emergence of the Comfort Women Issue and Victims’ Breaking Silence

4 General Information about the Comfort Women System

5 Forced Mobilization of Comfort Women

6 Payments of Fees and Affectionate Relationships

7 Sexual Exploitation, Violence, and Threats at Comfort Stations

8 The Perils of Korean Comfort Women’s Homecoming Trips

9 Korean Comfort Women’s Lives in Korea and China

10 Progress of the Redress Movement in Korea

11 Divided Responses to the Redress Movement in Japan

12 Responses to the Redress Movement in the United States

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

ABBREVIATIONS

CHRONOLOGY

Korean Comfort Women

Introduction

BACKGROUND INFORMATION ABOUT JAPANESE MILITARY SEXUAL SLAVERY AND THE REDRESS MOVEMENT FOR THE VICTIMS

THE MOST BRUTAL CRIME committed by the Japanese military during the Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945) was the forced mobilization of approximately 50,000–200,000 Asian women to Japanese military brothels (JMBs) to sexually serve Japanese soldiers. Korean girls and women are believed to have been the largest group of victims of the comfort women system (CWS), due mainly to the fact that the Japanese military was able to recruit women and girls from its main colony most effectively. The majority of these women seem to have died as a result of physical abuse, malnutrition, sexually transmitted diseases, injuries from bombings or other military attacks, or other tragic circumstances. Many others are presumed to have committed suicide or been killed by Japanese soldiers. Most Korean survivors returned home after Japan was defeated in August 1945, but many others were stranded in the country of their sexual servitude (most commonly, China). Due to strong patriarchal norms stigmatizing sexual victims and other historical events, Korean survivors kept silent about their brutal experiences in JMBs for about half a century.

In the late 1980s, the women’s movement and the replacement of a longtime military dictatorship with a democratic government in Korea helped start the redress movement for the victims of Japanese military sexual slavery (JMSS). In 1990, thirty-seven women’s organizations in Korea established the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (the Korean Council). The Korean Council made six major demands to the Japanese government (H. Lee 1992, 314–315), including that it provides a sincere apology and compensation to the victims (see chapter 3).

The Korean Council helped Hak-sun Kim, a Korean victim of JMSS, to come forward in August 1991 and recount her past experiences in JMB. Her testimony encouraged 239 other Korean comfort women (KCW) as well as other Asian comfort women (ACW) to come forward and talk about their own brutal experiences in JMBs. Moreover, in January 1992, Yoshiaki Yoshimi (1993b, 2000), a professor emeritus of history at Chuo University, discovered in the archives of Japan’s War Ministry historical documents demonstrating the Japanese military government’s responsibility for planning, establishing, and operating JMBs. The emergence of comfort women survivors and the discovery of key historical documents accelerated the redress movement. In August 1993, Yohei Kōno, the Chief Cabinet Secretary in the Japanese government, made an announcement that became known as the Kōno Statement. He acknowledged that the Japanese Army had forced Asian women to work in military-run brothels during the Asia-Pacific War, and he made a sincere apology to the comfort women victims (CWV) on behalf of the government (Kōno 1993).

When the Kōno Statement was released, members of the Korean Council and many others thought that the Japanese government would resolve the comfort women issue (CWI) quickly. However, both the government and Japanese citizens have taken more nationalistic turns on the CWI since the mid-1990s. The emergence of historical revisionism (Fujioka 1996) and neonationalism in the mid-1990s has led to rejections of the interpretation of the CWS as sexual slavery offered by progressive scholars and redress activists. Murayama Tomiichi, a Japanese prime minister from the Socialist Party, established the Asian Women’s Fund in 1995, which used donations from Japanese citizens to provide financial compensation to surviving ACW.

The Japanese also tried to resolve the CWI through a 2015 agreement between the Japanese and Korean governments. The agreement included a promise from the Japanese government to give one billion yen ($90 million) to the South Korean government to provide compensation and medical care to surviving KCW. But the agreement was to pay the funds through a foundation to be established by the Korean government. Moreover, the Japanese government emphasized that, after it provided its financial support, both governments would accept that the CWI had been resolved finally and irreversibly and that they would not criticize each other in the international community in connection with the issue (Kim et al. 2016, 60–72). In addition, the representatives of the two governments approved the agreement without asking the Korean Council or KCW whether it was acceptable or not. Quite naturally, both KCW and the Korean Council adamantly rejected the agreement.

However, the redress movement has gained global support from the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, as well as from the United States and other Western countries. Since 1994, the United Nations and many international human rights organizations have sent roughly twenty resolutions to the Japanese government, urging it to acknowledge the CWS as sexual slavery, to make a sincere apology and reparation to the victims, and to include information in history textbooks as a way to avoid repeating such activities in the future (Korean Council 2015). Based on an investigation, the U.S. House of Representatives (2007) also passed a tough resolution in July (House Resolution 121), urging the Japanese government to formally acknowledge, apologize, and accept historical responsibility in a clear and unequivocal manner for its Imperial Armed Forces’ coercion of young women into sexual slavery … during its colonial and wartime occupation of Asia and the Pacific Islands from the 1930s through the duration of World War II. Following the lead of the U.S. Congress, the Canadian, Dutch, and European Union parliaments sent similar resolutions to the Japanese government later in that year. The global feminist movement and people’s increased awareness of wartime sexual violence against women as an important women’s human rights issue have significantly contributed to the global support for the redress movement.

THE BEGINNING, INTERRUPTION, AND RESTARTING OF THE BOOK PROJECT

In January 1993, the Korean-American Association of Greater New York invited Geum-ju Hwang, a Korean victim of sexual slavery who was then on a testimonial tour on the U.S. East Coast, to give her testimony to the U.S. media. I served as an interpreter for that event. Her testimony touched my heart deeply. Before her testimony, I was somewhat familiar with the history of suffering that Korean and other Asian victims of sexual slavery had gone through at the hands of the Japanese military. However, my personal encounter with Hwang halmeoni (grandma) and her testimony of misery and agony led me to engage with her experiences on a personal level. I realized that as a conscientious intellectual, I should do something to help bring honor and justice to these victims of sexual slavery. The goal of the redress movement is to make the Japanese government acknowledge its crimes of sexual slavery, to make a sincere apology to and compensate the victims, and to take other necessary measures so the tragedy will not be repeated. One effective way of putting pressure on the Japanese government is to tell English-speaking people in detail what happened to the victims. I realized that I could help the redress movement by writing a book in English about the victims of sexual slavery. This is how I started my book project.

I visited South Korea during five summers between 1995 and 2001 to collect data on the CWI and the redress movement. I completed the first few chapters of the book and published an article based on data I had collected in the late 1990s (Min 2003). However, I left the book unfinished in the early 2000s, mainly because of a major event that occurred in my personal life and the pressure to continue my research on immigration and Asian Americans. But I felt guilty about the KCW victims and redress movement leaders who had responded generously to my requests for personal interviews.

The problematic and unacceptable nature of the 2015 agreement between the Korean and Japanese governments has reinvigorated the redress movement for the victims in Korea and the Korean communities in the United States. It also increased my determination to complete the unfinished book project. In January 2016, I restarted the project by reviewing the literature on the CWI and the redress movement. I found that several dozen articles focusing on various issues related to comfort women had been published recently. I also found several English-language anthologies of testimonies given by comfort women, some edited volumes (Choi Schellstede 2000; Henson 1999; Howard 1995; Kim-Gibson 1999; Ruff-O’herne 1994; Stetz and Oh 2001; J. Yoon 2014), and some English-language books that provided information about the CWI (Hicks 1995, 1997; Qiu et al. 2014; C. S. Soh 2008; Yoshimi 2000). However, I found that the books by Yoshimi (1993b, 2000, 2013), and by Qiu, Zhiliang, and Lifei (2014) were more helpful than the other books in understanding the CWI.

The only English-language book that tried to cover both the CWI and the redress movement for the victims comprehensively was Chunghee Sarah Soh’s The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan (2008). Soh is an anthropology professor at San Francisco University who also happens to be a Korean immigrant. I quickly ordered the book and began to read it. However, I was very surprised to find that the author criticized the Korean Council harshly for taking an ethno-nationalist position by not paying attention to Korean society’s masculinist sexual norms, which she argued was the main factor that contributed to the mobilization of a large number of KCW to JMBs (C. S. Soh 2008, viii–xviii, 32). She also claimed that sexual slavery was not an accurate way to characterize comfort women’s experiences at comfort stations because of the diversity of the victims’ experiences. To support her claim, she introduced several cases of KCW who, she claimed, had affectionate relations with the Japanese soldiers they served (181–190). In another work, she did not accept the identification of KCW as a group as sexual slaves on the ground that many KCW received designated fees for their sexual services (C. S. Soh 2000, 66). And she rejected KCW as sexual slaves on another ground: that most KCW were mobilized to comfort stations through sales by their family members and Korean recruiters (C. S. Soh 2008, 3–4).

I found that Yu-ha Park had published another controversial book in Korean, Jeguk-ui Wianbu: Sigminjijibae-wa Gieog-ui Tujaeng (Comfort women of the empire: Colonialism and struggles of memory) in 2013. Park is a Korean professor of Japanese literature at Sejong University in Korea. She was born and completed her elementary and secondary education in Korea, but she earned her bachelor’s and PhD degrees in Japan. The central theme of her book is that KCW and Japanese soldiers felt camaraderie and sympathy for each other because both groups were citizens of the Japanese empire. Her book is similar to Soh’s in emphasizing the diversity in the experiences of KCW and the complicit role of Korean parents and recruiters in pushing Korean girls and women to JMBs.

Progressive scholars of the CWI and redress activists harshly criticized Park’s book in two Korean-language books (Y. Chung 2016; Sohn et al. 2016), many journal articles, and social media in Korea. In addition, in April 2014 residents of the House of Sharing (Nanum-ui jib in Korean), a communal house where several KCW live together, filed both civil and criminal suits against Park for defaming them. A Seoul local civil court issued a temporary injunction in February 2015 to force Park and the publisher to stop printing, publicizing, and selling the book. Both the civil and criminal suits are pending as of December 2019. In sharp contrast, the Japanese-language version of Park’s book¹ published in Japan in 2015 gained a great deal of popularity, receiving two prestigious book awards (Y. Chung 2016, 29–30). Chung, a third-generation Korean Japanese professor in Japan, indicated that the unusually enthusiastic acceptance of the book in Japan reflects the right-leaning nationalist trend in Japanese society since the late 1990s (ibid.). Japanese politicians and intellectuals seem to especially like Park’s claim that the very nationalistic attitude of the redress movement leaders in Korea has become the major hurdle to the resolution to the CWI between Korea and Japan (Y. Park 2013, 35).

Determining whether the CWS was sexual slavery or commercial prostitution is the key to resolving the CWI. The Japanese government and neonationalists have rejected CWS as sexual slavery for two major reasons. First, they have rejected the idea that ACW were forcibly mobilized by emphasizing that no official historical document demonstrating such mobilization has been found, and that most comfort women were mobilized through their own view of human trafficking—the sale of the women by their family members and Korean recruiters. Second, the government and neonationalists have argued that ACW were paid fees for their sexual services at comfort stations, and therefore comfort stations were not much different from commercial prostitution houses. We can find these arguments in Japanese revisionist historians’ books (Hata 1999; Fujioka 1996; Kobayashi 1997).

As noted above, Soh also partially rejected the view of the CWS as sexual slavery on similar grounds. Her book also offered several seemingly sophisticated, but wrong, arguments for rejecting that view. However, unlike Japanese neonationalists, Soh did not reject the entire CWS as sexual slavery. Focusing on several deviant cases of KCW, she emphasized diversity in KCW’s mobilization to JMBs and their experiences there. Her 350-page book seems to have had a great deal of influence on researchers of CWI and neutral readers.

Nevertheless, I found in early 2016 that while many researchers cited Soh’s book, no one has provided major criticisms. Only two of them have provided minor criticisms (Qiu et al. 2014; Stetz 2010). I have found only recently that Caroline Norma has provided a longer, five-page critique of Soh’s book (Norma 2016, 40–44). However, as will be indicated later, Norma criticized the book because she misunderstood it. Her main criticism of Soh’s book is that Soh made a sharp distinction between Japanese comfort women (JCW) as prostitutes and other ACW as sexual slaves. As I will clarify throughout this book, Soh did not emphasize the differences between Japanese and other ACW. On the contrary, she too neglected to examine the differences between the two groups. My main criticism of Soh’s book is that, based on small numbers of KCW who were mobilized to JMBs through human trafficking and/or received designated fees for their sexual servitude, she criticized Korean redress activists and scholars for labeling all KCW as sexual slaves. Also, in the conclusion, I will respond critically to Norma’s critique of progressive scholars and redress activists for making a sharp distinction between JCW and other ACW in their experiences.

My failure to complete the book project in the late 1990s and instead finishing it twenty-five years later has made it possible for me to write a better book. First of all, since many English-language journal articles and a dozen books focusing on the CWI and the redress movement have been published over the past two decades, I have had the opportunity to critically evaluate other scholars’ interpretations of the CWI. Second, I have had access to eight volumes of KCW’s testimonies and many other secondary data sources for my research that were not available twenty-five years ago. Finally, the postponement of my book project allowed me to examine the changes over time in the redress movement and responses to it, especially in Korea (see chapter 10).

THE MAIN OBJECTIVES AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BOOK

This book has two major objectives. The first is to analyze the CWI systematically and comprehensively, mainly using the 103 testimonies given by KCW