“Yes, sir,” Endo said, “that seems to be the conclusion. But what I was thinking of mostly again was the volunteers.” “You’ll have your due turn,” I said, annoyed that he was still preoccupied with the issue[.] “But if I can make myself clear, sir, it’s not that way at all. I’m not thinking about when I’ll see one of them. In fact, sir, I’m almost sure of not visiting. I won’t seek their comforts at all.” This surprised me, but I said anyway,
“Of course you’re not required to. No one is.”
Chang-rae Lee, A Gesture Life
Although sex trafficking from Europe to the Americas, as analyzed through Joyce’s “Eveline,” gained momentum at the turn of the twentieth century, the world wars interrupted the flow of women and presented the opportunity for new destinations. Now the large concentrations of men along conflict zones “naturally” demanded prostitutes near military camps. Edward Bristow observes that the military made full use of indigent prostitutes during World War I. As an example, Bristow mentions that the “Germans were particularly efficient in organizing prostitution for their armies. They dispatched mobile brothels to the front and from 1915[,] as their forces advanced in the East[,] the red light districts of Lodz, Warsaw, and Vilna were expanded for the use of the troops” (285). The army’s association with prostitution would continue throughout the armed conflicts and, as will be demonstrated here through the case of the Japanese Imperial Army, it would become more brazen during World War II.
The relationship between the military and prostitution in fact reflects an old story that conflates assumptions about men’s masculinity, women’s femininity, and a society’s patriarchal ideas. More than ever, in times of war “values of patriarchal order are pushed to the extreme[,] brutal force and physical strength are admired and rewarded, and those men who are in uniform and engaged either in combat or in confined, regimented situations become preoccupied with sex” (Oh 6). Regardless of the nation, the military has continuously attempted to regulate more or less directly the presence of (female) prostitutes around military bases for the personnel to consume.1 In this respect, sociological studies on the link between prostitution and the military have uncovered suggestive results: the National Health and Social Life Survey (NHSLS) carried out in the US in 1992 determined through “an anonymous questionnaire” that “the percentage of men who had paid for sex and had served in the army was triple (35.9%) than those who had not served in the army (12.6%)” (qtd. in Di Nicola 7).2
So what ideologies normalize and make possible the use of prostitutes by a state-sanctioned institution such as the military? Cynthia Enloe has written compellingly about the subject, arguing that “it has taken calculated policies to sustain that [the military and prostitution] ‘go together’” (Bananas, Beaches and Bases 81). In fact, looking closer into this problematic relation, Enloe finds only cracks and contradictions in what apparently manifests itself as natural.3 “The common conception,” Enloe argues, “is that decisions are driven by tradition and culture rather than deliberate, conscious thought. Nowhere is this easy assumption more pervasive than when patriarchy and militarization converge—in the gendering of militarization” (Maneuvers 33–34). Enloe further contends that commentators “on both domestic and international politics have spent many years not investigating how militarization occurs and how its progress relies on particular constructions of femininity and masculinity because many of these observers have lazily assumed that either tradition or culture was at work” (34). Ideas inherent to the military institution—such as that “men will be men,” prone to violence and the exercise of unbounded sexual appetite when under stress and isolated—have justified the presence of prostitution close to military bases all over the world. In light of such unquestioned assumptions, military officers have considered regulated prostitution a necessary evil, arguing that base-stationed men will supposedly be less inclined to rape “respectable” women in times of peace or combat if they have access to the services of sex workers—this is the reason that actually prompted the Japanese imperial army to establish “comfort stations” after countless Chinese women were raped by Japanese soldiers during the Nanking massacre of 1937.4 Commanders have also feared that, unless “clean” women are easily accessible, men will contract venereal diseases that could impact their performance in combat or will turn to homosexual encounters that could affect their “manliness.” As a general rule, the more militarized the context, the more normalized prostitution becomes.
Not surprisingly, given Latin America’s infamous history of military “interventions,” many Latin American authors have targeted the military and its use of women in their writing. The Peruvian 2010 Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, for example, unsettles patriarchal beliefs justifying the liaison between the military and prostitution in his modernist novel The Green House (1968), where pubescent girls are abducted for sexual purposes and the cultural assumptions that enable this exploitation are exposed through a mordant look at the link between the Catholic Church and the military. Vargas Llosa has also satirized the relation between prostitution and the military in his Captain Pantoja and the Special Services (1973), in which an army officer is assigned the undercover mission of creating a squadron of prostitutes to serve the military in order to avoid the rape of local women by the soldiers.5 Like Vargas Llosa, the Colombian 1982 Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez has targeted the military and sex trafficking provocatively.6 García Márquez alludes to the ostensibly “natural” occurrence of soldiers paying for sex with a child sex slave in “The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and her Heartless Grandmother.”7 The author’s criticism of the military and the state is evident since, throughout, government representatives aid the pimp (the Grandmother) instead of the underage victim (Eréndira). From these literary examples, readers understand that, as the quintessential masculine institution, the military has always made use of women’s services. As Enloe explains, the key lies in the capacity of the military to “be ensured of sufficient control over women” by the state and society in general (Maneuvers 45). Yet in the narratives above described, the military still tries to keep a façade of “decency” by distancing itself from prostitution. The novel this chapter explores, on the other hand, reveals the carefully planned and officially executed strategy to traffic and prostitute colonized women for the Japanese military “without any humbug,” as one of George Orwell’s anti-imperialist characters would say (32).
Camouflaged Procurers: When the Military Runs the Brothel
Korean-born Therese Park’s first novel, A Gift of the Emperor (1997), describes the active role the Japanese military played in procuring and condoning trafficking of women for prostitution during World War II. Young girls (some as young as eleven) from Korea, China, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, or any place Japan colonized and used as a base, were deceived/kidnapped, enslaved, tortured, and raped to serve as what were euphemistically called “comfort women” for the Japanese imperial army.8 Given Japan’s historically imperial relation with Korea, it is not surprising that about 80% of the “comfort women” were from this colony. These women’s fate remained silenced for decades since, by the end of the war, the majority of them were dead. But some did survive and, after forty years of traumatic shame, began to talk—and Therese Park listened.
The author, who has lived in the US since 1966 and is now a retired cellist, confesses that she felt the urge “to give a voice” to the “comfort women” after learning about the atrocities committed against them during the screening of a documentary film:
Often, the feeble voice of the powerless turns into a thunderous roar when our inner ears are open to it. This happened to me in a summer of 1993, at the Harry S. Truman Library, while I watched a documentary film about World War II in which three former “comfort women” testified that the Japanese government had forced them into prostitution[.] As each woman told of her abduction, torture, and repeated rapes in a military brothel, most of the men in the courtroom showed contempt and disgust. Only a few Japanese women wept with the plaintiffs. (“To Give a Voice” 218)
At the time of that screening, Japan still maintained an attitude of complete denial of the crimes against women committed by the military. When the evidence began to mount, Japan then claimed that these women were voluntary prostitutes working for economic benefit, shielding themselves from any responsibility through the prostitute/sex slave dilemma and its focus on female agency, which safely forecloses any debate on the topic. Years later, after consistent international pressure, especially from feminist groups, the Japanese prime minister Hashimoto Ryutaro admitted some responsibility and expressed in 1996 an ambiguous apology in a letter to the president of South Korea, Kim Yong Sam. Crucially, this apology was not conveyed on behalf of Japan, but was meant as an expression of personal sympathy towards the women affected, and therefore it cannot be considered an official admission of guilt. The Japanese historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi clarifies that “owabi,” the word used by the Prime Minister, is an “expression with a wide scope for interpretation that can range from a very minor sense of being sorry [“slightly more weighty than an ‘Excuse me’ offered when one bumps shoulders with someone on the subway”] to a serious acknowledgement of wrongdoing and proffering an apology” (Comfort Women 25). Yoshimi explains:
The Japanese government has not acknowledged any crime[,] so the Prime Minister’s owabi can only be interpreted as something trivial. A further regrettable point is that, in the English translation, the letter is clearly identified as an expression of “my [the Prime Minister’s] personal feelings.” This locution seems an attempt to dilute the impression that the letter is an owabi offered by the Prime Minister in his official capacity. (25)
Skeptics have interpreted this gesture as a calculated political maneuver to protect trade agreements between Japan and Korea when it became impossible to keep avoiding the subject any longer. Critics indicated that, at the time, the Korean government did not push the matter further for fear of losing Japan as an economic ally. A similar phenomenon was observed in other Asian nations; a 2013 article in The Asahi Shimbun, for example, exposed that the Japanese embassy in Jakarta “helped to thwart [in 1993] a publication of a book on ‘comfort women’” by the Indonesian Nobel Prize-contender Pramoedya Ananta Toer because such publication could “hurt bilateral relations” between Japan and Indonesia (Sato).9
Despite the disturbing evidence presented by scholars, journalists, and human rights activists (as in Nelia Sancho’s 1998 War Crimes on Asian Women: Military Sexual Slavery by Japan During World War II, published by the Asian Women Human Rights Council), the Japanese government’s response to the plight of the “comfort women” has ranged for tepid to inflammatory. So far, the official strategy seems to lie in delaying any resolution in the hopes that the survivors will die of old age. One should remember that only about 25% of the estimated 200,000 comfort women survived: some were murdered by the army so as not to leave traces of the crimes, others died as “collateral damage” during the war, and many contracted deadly diseases or committed suicide. To add a further layer of irony, most of the few survivors remained childless, either because their wombs were permanently harmed or because their emotional scars prevented them from forming families, so many have no relatives left who could receive any compensation. To this day, Japan’s denial and avoidance persist. Early in 2013, an article in Clarin informed that Osaka’s mayor Toru Hashimoto publicly asserted that the “comfort women” were “necessary” to maintain the morale and discipline of the soldiers in combat (“Las Esclavas Sexuales”).10 That same year, an article in the Financial Times reported that the “former sex slaves [ … ] stand at the heart of a damaging flare-up in diplomatic relations that undermine military and economic co-operation between Japan and South Korea and is having a knock-on impact on US ambitions in Asia” (“Sex Slave Past Still Sours Japan’s Economic Ties With S Korea”). These women’s plights thus seem lost among diplomatic and economic discourses that still ignore them and in turn reaffirm their apparent “worthlessness.”
Outraged, Asian and Western feminists and intellectuals particularly in the fields of Asian studies, human rights, history, art, sociology, anthropology, political science, and women and gender studies have fought to give the remaining “comfort women” visibility and presence, but the administration hasn’t responded as expected. Japan has tried to silence the issue through the establishment of private funds to compensate the victims, but, understandably, survivors demand a public admission of guilt and compensation money to come from the state, not charities. The rhetoric has also been challenged as the obvious association between the words “compensation” and “prostitution” resonates offensively with the survivors, thus they demand “apology” money instead. To this day, the Japanese government’s approach seems to be working as the women are gradually dying. Yet, arguably, delaying official reparations can end up turning the victims into emblems of the abuses committed during the war. Like the Freudian return of the repressed, the ghosts of the past will continue to resurface in the nation’s consciousness until the few survivors and the victims’ families are acknowledged and compensated.
Thoroughly researched, the stories of Asian “comfort women” told by Park trace the hypocrisy with which the army has dealt with the crimes committed against them, offering a direct counter narrative to the one Japan officially disseminated. A book like Park’s A Gift also brings to the fore issues of representation (who should speak and for whom? are Korean-American authors best suited for the task?), as Hyun Yi Kang has analyzed in her study of the vast artistic representations of “comfort women” existing today (26).11 Together with Park, then, other Korean-American authors have brought attention to this topic in their fiction. Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman (1997) and Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life (1999), for instance, have crafted compelling narratives about “comfort women.” Keller’s Comfort Woman explores the psychological consequences of the atrocities through the relationship of a former “comfort woman” and her adolescent daughter, while Lee’s book recounts the events from the perspective of a Korean/Japanese doctor who medically treated “comfort women” during the war and fell in love with one of them.12 Both works rely on the characters’ memories of the past several years after the conflict while they now live in the US, thus dealing with the aftermath of the ordeals. What makes Park’s novel the focus of this analysis is that she unravels the odyssey of a “comfort woman” as it evolves, from abduction by the military to the enslavement and multiple rapes at the “comfort stations” following the characteristic intimacy of a memoir. Coinciding with the recent popularity of the memoir as a human rights narrative genre, Park’s first-person fictional account reads almost like one.13 Many of its scenes indeed appear to have come straight out of the documentary film and non-fictional book Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women (1999) by Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, where the author/director gathers heart-wrenching testimonials from some remaining survivors.14 At the same time, this novel presents an interesting case because the narrative occasionally engages in the same type of discourse it seeks to dismantle, while it showcases a character whose situation is exceptional rather than representative of the majority of the “comfort women’s” circumstances. Throughout, Park clearly highlights her main protagonist’s agency within a historical context where most women had very little and perished. This text thus complicates issues of representation and prompts a fruitful interrogation of the way art can address the ethical implications of militarism in the lives of subaltern women trafficked during war.
Published by a small American feminist independent press, Park’s novel has not yet generated such a significant number of critical responses as other authors featured in this book, possibly because the author does not account for such a long literary trajectory as Mahasweta Devi or Chris Abani (after A Gift, Park published several articles and two novels dealing with the war and the aftermath of it).15 Nonetheless, A Gift has been well-received: in 1998, it was featured in the Miami Bookfair, the Los Angeles Bookfair, and the Heartland Bookfair. Park’s first novel was also selected in the reference volumes Reading Groups Choices for 1998 and Contemporary Authors 2001; that same year, A Gift was published in Turkey, a country with its own troubled military history.
In A Gift of the Emperor, the military becomes trafficker and consumer, so this chapter will examine the representation of sex trafficked women in terms of their agency, the violence committed against them and their aggressors, as well as the role postcolonial literature plays in describing such institutionalized systemic abuse. Looking at the army as producer of a mythology of nation-building, I explore the Althusserian ideological state apparatus that endorses militarism and justifies women’s oppression—and, as Cynthia Enloe suggests, how a society (men and women) becomes complicit by supporting such militarism. While I argue throughout that sex trafficking is condoned by ideological and repressive state apparatuses in order to maintain the hegemonic status quo undisturbed by ethical interrogations, nowhere does the relation between a legitimized institution and sex trafficking become more explicit than in this novel. Drawing from Michel Foucault’s notion of “biopolitics,” Achille Mbembe developed the concept of “necropolitics,” explaining that the state (or a state-sanctioned institution) claims the power to control whose lives are worth living and whose lives are disposable: in this case, clearly, to preserve the “health” of the men engaged in combat, the lives of thousands of women and girls from Japan’s colonies were sacrificed.16 In response, and especially challenging the official discourse that represented them as “volunteers,” Park’s novel shows that the majority of the “comfort women” were slaves chosen for systematic rape because of their structural condition: they were poor, colonized women.
“We were bones to the dogs”: Portrait of a Young Comfort Woman
“On the front wall of our high school classroom hung a huge portrait of Emperor Hirohito,” begins the novel (Park, A Gift 1). Thus, from the start, Park immerses readers within a colonized background, with the ideological state apparatus (the school) reinforcing submission to the empire. We learn that Korean children sing “the Japanese national anthem” every day, “as loudly as [they] could,” and that they have been forbidden to use their native language, as Ngugi Wa Thiong’o would claim, in an effort to colonize their minds as well (1).17 For school or any official affair, Soon-ah, the main character, must use her imposed Japanese name (another emblematic imperial trope) instead of her Korean one. A few pages into the novel, readers discover that, as in any typical colonial situation, land and property have been confiscated, leaving Koreans in dire poverty, desperate for jobs. In such context the military enters—and changes—Soon-ah’s life forever.
One morning in 1942, two delegates of the Japanese empire come to the school with the mission of recruiting young Korean girls “to tend the soldiers’ wounds, talk to them, and entertain them with [their] talents. [These girls] will be the Emperor’s special gifts to the soldiers!” (4). Two weeks later, the girls are subjected to a humiliating examination of their genitals by the military medical crew, unknown to them, to ensure their virginity. Once at home, when Soon-ah describes this occurrence, her mother in panic hides her and explains the truth to her: the Japanese intend to use her as a prostitute for the soldiers. Despite her mother’s precautions, Japanese officials kidnap Soon-ah by force, transport her in a van with several other girls, and confine her in a ship destined for a war zone. Soon-ah is raped several times during the trip, and, when they reach their destination in Palau, she is placed in an appalling “comfort station” where she begins to service the soldiers as a sex slave. For the first half of the novel, the girl endures vicious sexual exploitation until she meets a sympathetic Japanese soldier/correspondent (Sadamu) who takes pity on her and helps her transfer to a brothel for high-ranking officers. Sadamu and Soon-ah then fall in love and after the Japanese soldier deserts his regiment, they escape together to a tropical island. In this way, Park gives her (presumably Western) readers some respite from the violence. 18 The introduction of the romance element allows Park to diverge from the tropes of torture and rape dominating the first part and turn the narrative into an adventure in times of war during the second half. This strategy not only lets the author craft a resilient protagonist, but also makes the story more palatable (and therefore marketable) for audiences generally reluctant to read about women’s victimization and hopeless endings. Soon-ah’s lover is eventually killed during the war while helping the Allies, yet the girl manages to get back home to Korea and reunite with her family. By the end of the novel, the author leaves readers with a strong, evolved character who has survived and therefore becomes the heroine of this tale.
On a closer look, readers can see that, from the beginning, Park goes to great lengths to avoid representing Soon-ah as a victim. First of all, unlike the majority of the real “comfort women” who died during the war (approximately 75% of them), she is a survivor telling her story. Crucially, Park does not make her main character eleven or twelve years old like some of the real “comfort [children?]”; instead, the girl’s nightmare starts at seventeen—too young for her ordeal during the first half of the novel, but old enough for readers to accept her relationship with the Japanese soldier at the end.19 Even on the ship, while being transported from Korea to the war zone, she distinguishes herself from the rest of the girls because of her “flawless Japanese and [her] physical beauty” (36). Intelligence and beauty increase her value as a commodity and place her in a superior position compared to the other, less educated or attractive slaves (the unfortunate vast majority that will be killed by the end of the novel). Within the stratified and hierarchical military world, Soon-ah promptly reaches the highest rank, as the captain of the ship claims her as his private sex slave enforcing an “exclusive” rape-relation for the duration of the trip. By the end of the voyage, the captain offers to “recommend [her] to an officer’s House of Relaxation,” where he suggests she will be “happier”—raped by educated officers instead of common soldiers (36). For Soon-ah, this privilege does not bring any relief, so she drops the captain’s recommendation note into the sea and ends up in a dreadful “comfort station” with the rest of the women, through whom the author will reveal the most gruesome side of the exploitation later in the novel.
That Park never intended Soon-ah to resemble a victim also shows in the girl’s daring actions, even though her lower rank entails unquestioned submission to military men. Once, during a particularly brutal rape by a soldier, she talks back to the man, “gently” reminding him that he is not “supposed to kiss [her] in the mouth [and that he is] violating the rules of the military” (42). Her audacity earns her a vicious beating and the manager’s reprimand, so Soon-ah quickly learns what to avoid in order to stay alive. Through what trauma studies define as “dissociation” (that is, the alteration of “consciousness [e.g. feelings of unreality] in response to extreme stress”), the girl then accepts her daily rapes and lets her mind fly away during her ordeals, detaching as much as possible from her unbearable reality (Allen 296). During a dream, the girl’s unconscious mind reminds her of her best coping mechanism: “Remember that you are in a tiger’s cave. Do you want to scream at the tiger and poke him? You fool! You must hide like a rabbit in a hole without even breathing” (Park, A Gift 91). In this way, the author reinforces that Soon-ah’s acquiescence is only a strategy for survival, not an inherent trait of her personality. For the most part, Soon-ah keeps a cautious distance when other sex slaves take what she considers dangerous risks. She tries to dissuade another “comfort woman” when she attempts to rescue a child from the forest, and discourages a friend’s romantic relation with a Korean soldier passing for Japanese. Despite Soon-ah’s warnings, both girls ignore her and end up predictably killed. The female protagonist feels that men are not to be trusted, so she assumes an obedient position and keeps a low profile.
But she never gives up her power completely. Regardless of the horror, Park endows her heroine with the ability to shift her perspective and find the emotional strength to survive: “I suddenly realized that what I had lost wasn’t that much—a few kilograms of my flesh and my childish ideals. I still had my mind and my soul that kept telling me I must love myself in spite of the daily tortures I endured and never dwell on what I had lost” (92). When at some point during her enslavement she gets pregnant, the Japanese nurse who discovers her condition mistreats her and blames her for not insisting on condom use, to which Soon-ah responds with boldness and defiance: “‘I do insist’[, cutting her short]. How stupid, [she] thought. ‘Why do you think I don’t insist? Because I am dying to conceive a Japanese baby?’” (74). Through the female nurse, the author reflects the paradoxical tension Enloe so powerfully criticizes between women who support militarism and, in so doing, condone a patriarchal institution intrinsically hostile to them. The angry nurse, already interpellated as an imperial subject, does not question the ethics of the military’s actions or even the misogynist hierarchy that places colonized women as suitable subjects for daily sexual exploitation. She turns instead Soon-ah to a male doctor, who, reminiscent of Chang-rae Lee’s male protagonist in his fictional version of the “comfort women” horror, empathizes with the girl and performs an abortion on her. Still, even though the physician understands the abuse committed against the “comfort women” (“We must educate our soldiers first!”), he remains unable or unwilling to challenge the military system for which he works (76). The doctor then recommends a prolonged recovery period until she stops bleeding before resuming intercourse with the soldiers, but after only seven days, Soon-ah is forced to start working again. Park then gives readers a glimpse of the spectrum of activities “comfort women” were forced to perform, as this time the convalescent teenager must dig graves for the rotting corpses of dead soldiers. Because of her physical condition after the abortion, Soon-ah faints and ends up back at the military hospital, where the love story with Sadamu, the Japanese male character who will help her escape, begins.
Arguably, the introduction of this “savior” turns Soon-ah’s account into pseudo-Cinderella story likely to disappoint some readers, yet, however implausible this plot line may sound, some of the few survivors’ testimonies show that Park’s narrative reflects a composite of actual events.20 More interesting, perhaps, is the fact that Park makes the girl’s lover Japanese, which grants her narrative a provocative political edge worth exploring in detail. Sadamu’s nationality reminds readers that, of course, not all military men became blind subjects to the workings of imperial ideology. This move also undermines the collective mentality typically attributed to the military as it places responsibility on individuals instead. If, following Lacan, Althusser would argue that ideology is so pervasive that no one can escape it, this character represents a counter-hegemonic position challenging the dominant ideology (in fact, there are testimonies of Japanese soldiers who, after the war, admitted their understanding that what was being inflicted on the “comfort women” were “horrible acts”).21
Noticeably, while the narrative targets the Japanese emperor and the military’s “horrible acts” with little ambiguity, the Allies are often portrayed through zealous rhetoric. For example, after witnessing the execution of two American soldiers by a ruthless Japanese officer (incident that actually prompts Sadamu’s desertion), Sadamu describes to Soon-ah how one of the American soldiers “wasn’t like any Japanese soldier” he knows, who can “fight viciously as long as there’s a commander ordering them, but they don’t know how to make their own choices. The American pilot didn’t need an order. He was freely living out the last moment of his life. It was powerful watching him singing [the American national anthem] in front of his killer” (128). Later, once Sadamu starts helping the Allied forces, readers learn through Soon-ah’s words that “General MacArthur, Admiral Halsey, and other Americans adore [Sadamu] because he has killed so many Japanese” (205). While it seems logical that the Korean (and anti-imperialist) characters would idealize the Allied forces, the historical context only makes such passages ironic since, after the war was over, the “comfort women” issue was suppressed by every side, despite the Allies being “well informed” of the abuses committed (Oh 14). Dai Sil Kim-Gibson notes that if “Japan destroyed most of the relevant documents immediately after the war and continues to lock away whatever was spared in order to hide the sexual slavery, the Allied Forces, especially the United States, did little to seek justice for Asian atrocities committed in Japan” (7).
Regarding the rest of the Japanese soldiers, Soon-ah shows at times compassion for some (“I began to see that these men were as powerless as I was[.] They had been fighting for too long and were sick of being the Emperor’s puppets”) and loathing for others (“Each soldier hurt me. Some of them slapped me when I screamed. I hated them”) (40–41). But, like most of the narratives analyzed in this work, readers never get any insights into their minds other than their willingness to exert sexual violence over the girls. Indeed, most of the soldiers depicted in this novel are anonymous callous men who do not see Soon-ah or the other “comfort women” as human beings. In Soon-ah’s anti-colonial voice: “We were bones to the dogs. The soldiers would devour us piece by piece until nothing was left. This was what the Emperor had in mind, so his soldiers would conquer more countries, kill more innocent people, and become the most feared species on earth” (16). Even before becoming a sex slave during the war, Soon-ah has witnessed a Japanese soldier killing her father and another one raping her mother. In a typically dehumanizing war context, what she and the other girls endure at the hands of these unnamed men shows that Japan’s imperial policies have classed Koreans as disposable merchandise, without a sense of remorse for actions that are clearly ethically questionable. As the anthropologist Chunghee Sarah Soh observes, regulations “stipulated that military ‘comfort women’ be regarded as common properties of the soldiers,” so they beat and rape the girls throughout, feeling entitled to use these women’s bodies for their personal satisfaction (75).Through ideological indoctrination—something that the military has traditionally excelled at—most of these men have consciously dehumanized the girls just as they dehumanize the “enemy” in order to kill and maintain a clear conscience, even when their personal experience contradicts ideological mandates.
In The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), Slavoj Žižek illustrates this point convincingly. Even though Žižek’s example comes from a Western context (Germany pre-World War II), it is worth citing at length because it shows the ideological atmosphere before the war, which readers can extrapolate to compare with the ideological indoctrination the Japanese received during the time Korea was a colony:
Let us [ … ] take a typical individual in Germany in the late 1930s. He is bombarded by anti-Semitic propaganda depicting a Jew as a monstrous incarnation of Evil, the great-wire-puller, and so on [sex trafficker?]. But when he returns home he encounters Mr. Stern, his neighbor: a good man to chat with in the evenings, whose children play with his. Does this everyday experience offer an irreducible resistance to the ideological construction?
The answer is, of course, no. If everyday experience offers such a resistance, then the anti-Semitic ideology has not yet really grasped us. An ideology is really “holding us” only when we do not feel any opposition between it and reality—that is, when the ideology succeeds in determining the mode of our everyday experience of reality itself. How then would our poor German react to this gap between the ideological figure of the Jew [ … ] and the common everyday experience of his good neighbor Mr. Stern? His answer would be to turn this gap, this discrepancy itself, into an argument for anti-Semitism: “You see how dangerous they really are? It is difficult to recognize their real nature. They hide it behind a mask of everyday appearance—and it is exactly this hiding of one’s real nature, this duplicity, that is a basic feature of the Jewish nature.” An ideology really succeeds when even the facts which at first sight contradict it start to function as arguments in its favour. (49)
Similarly, the captain of the ship transporting Soon-ah to the “comfort station” admits to her: “You know, I always thought Chosenjin [Koreans] were ignorant, dirty, and lazy, but you make me think differently of your race. We were told that your people’s intelligence level is little higher than that of guinea pigs, but I’m finding out that isn’t true. For a Chosenjin, you seem intelligent and quite attractive. How unfortunate you were born a Korean!” (Park, A Gift 27). Reminiscent of Žižek’s anti-Semitism example, then, despite having first-hand knowledge of the inconsistency of his ideological stance, the captain responds to the interpellation of empire and dismisses the tangible evidence so that he can (conveniently) take advantage of his position of power and rape Soon-ah throughout the trip. Even though the military discourages the questioning of authority and regards attempts to counteract hierarchical mandates as subversive, the captain admittedly understands that the messages he has received are false, and yet dismisses them—in Žižek’s terms, ideology has “grasped” him. At that point, Park suggests this man rapes Soon-ah multiple times because he bears the privilege of the imperial authority supporting him. Žižek’s illustration is doubly pertinent, since it could be argued that Germany made systematic political efforts to redress the horrors and (granted, after a period of denial) accepted full responsibility for the atrocities committed on Jewish populations. If Japan is moving in that direction, it is taking too much time—when time is of the essence for the remaining “grandmas” (Kim-Gibson 11).
“Unspeakable things”: (Not) Representing Rape
Unlike the previous chapter of this book—where we do not witness images of sexual violence possibly because the “paralyzed” Eveline never takes the plunge into her supposed adventure—the rest of the stories developed here show rape or the aftermath of it. It is striking, though, that most authors in this work represent rape in a similar way: as a brutal abuse of male power from the victim’s point of view, while the majority of the violent scenes tend to rely on what trauma survivors have identified as coping mechanisms, namely, out-of-body experiences of detachment, complete surrender as a method for self-preservation, or numbing of the senses.
In order to avoid creating a spectacle of the sexual violence Soon-ah endures, Park includes only a few lengthier passages showing Soon-ah’s rapes, but the audience is led to assume that the violations occur multiple times daily at the comfort stations. When readers witness sexual violence, the author showcases the event as experienced from the victim’s perception, not the rapist’s or a third party. Soon-ah’s first rape, for example, does not reveal much about the perpetrator other than his viciousness and his belonging to the military, suggesting that for her these men are all nameless figures to whom the state has given power to violate the women, regardless. In Soon-ah’s eyes, the first rapist becomes a “shadow,” a terrifying demon who assaults her with impunity (16):
[ … ] a huge black shadow knocked me down. I smelled alcohol on his breath. He pushed his hands into my chogori, the Korean tunic, and grabbed my breast. I screamed. The dark figure struck my face repeatedly. [ … ] I couldn’t tell if the scream I heard was mine or the other girls in the room. A huge bolt struck between my legs and drilled into my flesh. It was so painful I couldn’t breathe. (16)
Initially, Soon-ah fights with fierce determination to avoid the rape as she “pushed the soldier with all [her] strength, but like a tombstone, he didn’t budge” (16). “I bit his arm,” she says, so, in response, he “slapped me hard with his free hand. I wasn’t about to let him go: I bit him harder. He struck me repeatedly and I passed out” (16). After being brutalized, Soon-ah quickly understands that these men are endowed with the state authority, physical strength, and weapons to overpower her, so fighting back will only assure her death. When she is raped a second time (now by the captain of the ship), she surrenders:
He tore my tunic with both hands and pushed me on the bed. I didn’t fight. I lay there. He was the conqueror, I the conquered. My fate had been decided thirty-three years ago, even before I was born, when the Japanese took over our Yi dynasty, pushing away Russians, Americans, British, and Chinese who had drooled over our tiny peninsula[.] The captain jumped on top of me, spreading the smell of alcohol all over me. I tried to listen to the sound of the waves. It seemed the sea was shouting in protest. The wind cried sharply, scratching the window[.] Finally I heard a huge splash on the side of the ship and wished a hurricane would come. (28–9)
Like Anne McClintock in Imperial Leather (1995), Arieh Shalev explains that “[w]oman is symbolically connected with the earth, the territory,” thus the contested prevalence of rape as a metaphor for the imperial violation (180). In the scene above described, the author intertwines colonialism and rape, as the captain becomes a synecdoche for the Japanese empire, Soon-ah for the Korean nation. Yet the focus is clearly Soon-ah’s painful experience, though apparently detached, mediated through an environment that shouts (the sea), cries sharply and scratches (the wind), and finally destroys (the hurricane). Suggesting the limitations of language to convey the corporeality of pain, as Elaine Scarry would argue, the narrative often resorts to overpowering images of nature and disengages the girl from the rapes she is experiencing. Readers learn, for instance, that one particularly violent soldier “kept hitting [her] as if determined to beat a demon out of [her]. Each blow contorted [her] body, like the limb of a tree in a violent wind” (41). Thus, for the most part, the girl avoids naming directly the sexual violence being inflicted on her and mentions instead “unspeakable things” (27). Like a patient etherized upon a table, each night at the captain’s chamber, Soon-ah numbs her feelings as a survival mechanism: “I separated my mind from what was happening to me so that the physical abuse I received every day wouldn’t destroy me completely” (Park, A Gift 36). In this way, the girl creates a distance between herself and the torturers, if only in her mind.
From a psychological perspective, the “unspeakable things” Soon-ah mentions reflect a common behavior. Rape victims often cannot verbalize the situation for lack of a previous memory of abuse and the intensity triggered by the stressor, while they tend to block the traumatic event from their consciousness. 22 The discourse on rape to this day remains highly problematic not only from a representational or aesthetic point of view. In real life, raped women often face great difficulties at the time of prosecuting the crime, especially in patriarchal societies that presume that the victim’s moral conduct has instigated the rape (phrases like “she deserves it for wearing skimpy clothes, going out at night, being promiscuous,” etc. directly accuse the victim rather than the perpetrator).23 Such assumptions have permitted Japan to defile the moral stance of the “comfort women,” implying that they were prostitutes before and therefore no responsibility should be placed on the government. Park’s novel, nonetheless, makes it clear that what “comfort women” endured were war crimes and that international society should take a stand so that the atrocities committed do not end up lost in oblivion and impunity. Even though for the vast majority of the “comfort women” the accusation of prostitution was a lie—Korean girls were in fact preferred for their cultural adherence to Confucianism and their preservation of virginity before marriage—, Margaret Stetz and Bonnie B. C. Oh invite readers “to overturn hierarchies of gender that have ranked [ … ] ‘pure’ women above both rape victims and prostitutes” (Legacies xii). The stigma society places upon prostitutes and rape victims contributed to the shame and hiding of the few survivors, which has ultimately benefited the military and the government providing the perfect cover for their crimes. Thanks to feminists’ efforts, especially in the late 1980s, the definition of rape finally changed from an offense against female chastity to a crime and a violation of human rights. Soh explains:
In comparison to the Geneva Conventions, which characterize rape as a crime against the honor and dignity of women, feminists have argued that rape is a crime of violence against women’s bodies, autonomy, and integrity, comparable to other cruel and inhuman treatment. From the perspectives of feminist humanitarianism, sexual violence against women is a violation of human rights, and rape by the military in wartime, a war crime. (80)
As noted before, Park’s novel chooses to emphasize a “comfort woman’s” agency, so the author devises strategies to preserve her main character from the worst violence—for example, Soon-ah’s good looks that attract a decent man, her exceptional intelligence, her astuteness in remaining obedient, her escape with her lover to a deserted island. The girl actually finds out about the most gruesome aspects of the other sex slaves’ tortures and murders through a former “comfort woman” (Yun Hee) with whom she reunites by chance once the war is over. It is through this friend that Soon-ah hears that, once she escaped, the girls were transferred to Guadalcanal, where they endured the harshest torments. Clearly impatient with Soon-ah’s reticence to know what really went on, Yun Hee confesses:
A tent was set up next to [the soldiers’] and when the fighting stopped, our ordeal began. We received thirty to forty soldiers a day! They were animals, Soon-ah, demanding oral sex and trying to reach orgasm several times. When they couldn’t get what they wanted, they beat us often and slashed us with daggers for no reason at all. We were surrounded by devils dancing with swords. Our wounds became infected in the humid weather and attracted maggots. [ … ]
I covered my ears. “Please stop, Yun Hee. It’s too much,” I said.
Yun Hee drew another sigh. “I can’t believe the way you react, Soon-ah. We went through hell: we were dying, but you don’t care!”
“It’s not that. It’s very hard for me to picture …”
“How can you picture what it was like? You weren’t there! It’s easy to cover your ears and say, ‘It’s too much. Please stop!’ Isn’t it?” Yun Hee accused me, her eyes wide and blank, almost frightening to look at. “What I am telling you is nothing compared to what we went through!” (216–17)
Yun Hee finishes her account by letting Soon-ah know that all the comfort women ended up shot by soldiers and that she escaped miraculously because they assumed she was dead. Appalled after this encounter, Soon-ah later reflects: “I don’t remember saying good-bye to Yun Hee. I think I almost ran away from her, afraid that I too might die if I let her talk more” (220). As a stylistic choice, Park preserves her protagonist from this final horror, but not readers. The author thus addresses the worst atrocities through a minor character barely developed in the novel, not Soon-ah. Without minimizing the caliber of the crimes, Park tells the story from the point of view of a strong character who resists victimhood throughout the narrative and has more luck than the rest of the girls depicted because of her resilience, beauty, and cleverness (while readers can assume that Sadamu falls in love with her precisely because of those attributes).
Such authorial decision—to craft Soon-ah as a more empowered individual within a historical context where most women died—may trouble some readers. Is this a market-conscious strategy meant to cater to the Western demand for subaltern heroines mentioned in the introduction? Is this character anticipating the audiences’ general reticence to read about female victimization? In other words, could Soon-ah’s distance from the worst violence actually stand for the reader’s assumed distance? While this could be true, one should acknowledge that Park’s focus on Soon ah’s agency has a political aim as well. Kimberly A. Nance persuasively explains that, to achieve a political objective, authors of testimonials who have experienced atrocities often have to preserve their readers (however unfair this may sound) from the violence suffered in order not to distance them and thus accomplish their purpose.24 Jon G. Allen, for his part, explains that “[v]ictim and survivor are vastly different perspectives on the same traumatic reality [but] Both are true,” depending on where the narrative constructs its focus (111). This could be the reason why Park chose to show a resilient female character telling the story from her point of view, as a tribute to the courage of those women who managed to survive and to honor those who could not escape alive. The author even chastises her main character through Yun Hee’s accusatory words (“we were dying, but you don’t care!”), as if to stress that Soon-ah’s situation by no means represents the way in which most “comfort women’s” lives ended. The most politically relevant aspects of the narrative are in fact disclosed by less developed characters, not precisely Soon-ah. Through Sadamu’s desertion and Yun Hee’s revelations at the end, the novel takes a more daring direction: on the one hand, it acknowledges the possibility of a counter-hegemonic position even within a context pervaded by imperial ideological indoctrination, and, on the other, it forces readers to confront the bleak reality most “comfort women” suffered. And even though Park’s main protagonist does not speak for majority, Chunghee Sarah Soh warns us that “the categorical representation of ‘comfort women as sex slaves denies—however unintentionally—the remarkable human agency exercised by some of the ‘comfort women’ against gendered oppression in their adverse social conditions. [Like Soon-ah’s, the] life stories of some survivors clearly reveal their independent spirit and risk-taking actions” (81). The fact that to this day a few survivors are fighting for official recognition then allows Park to place the spotlight on the one character who overcomes her ordeal and stays alive, an unambiguous reminder that there are still some “comfort women” left among us, who must be acknowledged.
Conclusion
Cynthia Enloe explains that rape “isn’t about money and it isn’t about sex. It’s about power over women” (Maneuvers 118).25 Libby Tata Arcel, for her part, argues that “war rape happens because of a genocidal mentality and nationalistic superiority” that find especially fruitful grounds to proliferate within a patriarchal institution such as the military (Shalev 190). Ideologically, then, the possibility of violations against “comfort women” directly correlated with Japan’s imperialistic dominance:
By the mid-1930s, imperial Japan, led by extreme militarists and with the divine emperor as a leader, was positioned to “guide” all its Asian neighbors. It was convinced of the superiority of its race and the absolute moral correctness of its mission in the military conquest of other parts of Asia[, considering World War II] a holy war for imperial Japan to redeem Asia from Western imperialists. (Oh 7)
Like Germany during the Holocaust, the “comfort women” issue presents another regrettable example of the way a state-legitimized institution managed to convince the majority (granting the benefit of the doubt to some) of its recruits to uncritically accept massive rape, torture, and murder of girls from the colonies.26 The women were simply ancillary or “public toilets [kyodo banjo],” as they were called (Soh 76–77). What the “comfort women” endured exemplifies some of the worst cases of sexual slavery to this day, as these young girls were forced to deal not only with massive rape, but also the ordeal of trying to survive in the middle of an armed combat in which they were not supposed to participate (Fic). Anchored in a traditionally patriarchal society, Japan’s imperial army was ruthless in its treatment of colonized women, as demonstrated by the testimonies of the few survivors (Kiana Davenport writes in “Beyond Healing” that many survivors “saw women skinned alive by Japanese soldiers, or crucified for sport. They saw women’s breasts hacked off. Women beheaded”–the sickening list goes on) (44). The atrocities committed present an extreme example of the abuse of patriarchal state power and the hypocrisy of governments that, after the war, have participated in the hiding of responsibilities precisely because of these women’s “insignificance.”
While the Japanese government destroyed most of the evidence and to this day denies responsibility for these crimes, the Allies justified their silence by maintaining that rape would be difficult to prove, an unfortunately common argument within the legal discourse on rape. “Another factor of the Allied forces’ deliberate oversight,” Oh explains, “was that they themselves had condoned the existence of prostitution stations for their own troops although, unlike those set up by the Japanese military, there were not officially recognized or regulated by the military or staffed via forced recruitment” (14). To throw the first stone at Japan would obviously complicate the Allied Forces’ moral standing. After all, these abuses against women are made possible precisely by “the latent misogyny that thrives in patriarchal societies and institutions, such as the military,” and there is ample and convincing evidence showing that the military has used women for sexual purposes (trafficked or not) regardless of the nation (Shalev 180).27 The “comfort women” issue, then, should not be treated as a conflict of nationalisms but as crimes against humanity.
Finally, it is important to remember that an analysis of sex trafficking during World War II that focuses only on Japan—without disregarding its obvious, undeniable culpability—runs the risk of staying within a myopic discourse that ignores practices against women that, as illustrated above, the military has traditionally relied on. While Japan’s actions should be internationally condemned in order to prevent similar atrocities from happening in the future, these “comfort women” stories offer an opportunity to extrapolate local circumstances, interrogate inherent assumptions, and rearticulate foreign policies that favor a militarism that, ultimately, destroys the most vulnerable populations and environments on either side of the conflict. War, in fact, perpetuates social inequalities for the benefit of a capitalist, imperialist military-industrial complex that directly profits from armed conflicts—and, as argued throughout, gendered social inequality breeds sex trafficking.28 Not coincidentally, the Korean “grandmother” Kap Soon-Choi began her testimony at the University of Michigan in 2001 with an unambiguous, “We were so very poor” (Schaffer and Smith 123). In this respect, Yoshimi emphasizes that most “comfort women” came from utterly deprived backgrounds, so the crime should be understood not only in terms of race and gender oppression but, critical to this analysis, as class exploitation as well (Comfort Women 8). With this in mind, and after the initial moral outrage this issue provoked internationally, societies should begin to debate collectively and more insistently about where national funds are allocated and consider diplomatic alternatives to wars, without unquestioningly assuming military interventions to be the first or best approach to conflict resolution, in turn sustaining a very lucrative “state of war.” 29
Park’s book’s subject matter is indeed uncomfortable, as the fact that the military has turned into the legitimized abuser necessarily forces readers to question its role in general—which brings us to the significance of literature. As stated in the introduction, the humanities offer a unique forum for deconstructing, understanding, and reformulating the world around us, especially when it comes to the type of untenable/unethical policies this chapter describes. Stories like the ones here explored, above all, invite readers to reflect. The Japanese military orchestrated massive rape with the official consent of the government, so what lesson can we learn from these women’s ordeals? “To consider [ … ] the ‘comfort women’ as having any legacy to give,” Stetz explains, “is to begin by assigning value to women who have been designated, in multiple contexts, as without value. They were chosen for systematic rape, in the first place, because they were seen as worthless and, afterward, defined as worthless, because they had been raped” (Legacies xii). At the same time, the “comfort women” of World War II invite audiences to ponder on what happened partly because the exploiters are not marginal or obscure pimps and traffickers from a third-world country (the usual suspects), but a “civilized” government through one of its most symbolic institutions, the military.
In this respect, critics such as Stetz recognize the fruitful potential of teaching “comfort women” stories in Women’s Studies courses on American campuses and acknowledge that this subject offers an opportunity to express solidarity and re-asses anti-feminist claims that regard feminism as only concerned with American, white, middle-class issues (“Teaching” 18). But Stetz notes that to criticize Japan’s military seems easy for some students, yet when their own military is brought into question, especially on its assumed “moral authority,” many students tend to reject the topic altogether or even express “active hostility toward the content” (19–20). In Stetz’s own words:
Indeed, not only does the history of the “comfort women” invite students to make the leap from a distant sphere to a nearer one, and to recognize the danger of giving uncritical support and free hand to any military system, anywhere in the world, but it also forces them to look afresh—and perhaps askance—at the American army’s record of abuse of women during the postwar years in Japan. (20)
Regarding even more recent abuses, an article in the Guardian uncovered troublesome details about rape within the US military, stating that a “female soldier in Iraq is more likely to be attacked by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire” (Broadbent)—which begs the question: why such resistance to face these uncomfortable truths? and, more importantly, for whose benefit?30 In Does Khaki Become You? (1983), Enloe suggests that “[p]erhaps more than in any previous era, we are living at a time when women can draw on their own experiences with the military to expose the military for the contradictory and patriarchal institution it is and always has been” (220). Enloe further contends that there are “times [ … ] when the military’s contradictions around women grow so acute that they threaten to expose not just the weakness of the military as an institution, but the hypocrisy running through the entire idea of ‘national security’” (215). Such “contradictions” only make the discussion more pressing.
In an uncanny maneuver, as of 2013, Japan is negotiating with the US the possibility of forsaking its constitution and fully rearming. A recent article in The Asahi Shimbun reports that Japan “is moving closer to commissioning a US Marine-like amphibious force that can better protect outlying islands in areas of potential conflict” with China (Sonoda). Speculating the geopolitical implications of a military alliance between the US and Japan against China, the new “imperialist” blocks in the twenty-first century, feels utterly disturbing in light of what happened between 1939 and 1945.31 With the few remaining “comfort women” still demanding an increasingly less likely official recognition (at least no promising gesture has been made as I write this chapter), and Japan actively seeking to militarize again, the issue seems ever more urgent.
At the end of the World War II, where Park’s novel leaves readers, Korean people hoped for the peace and progress decolonization would supposedly bring. But Soon-ah’s last words (“Omma [mother], let’s move to the south”) ominously anticipate the division and conflict waiting to unfold (Park, A Gift 238). For other colonies, as will be analyzed in the following chapter through the case of India, decolonization also meant partition, violence, and, for those women caught up in the most abject poverty, sex trafficking.
NOTES
1. For an analysis of women and militarism see Cynthia Enloe’s Does Khaki Become You?: The Militarization of Women’s Lives (1983). Here, Enloe explores the relation between women and the military by looking at the position of army wives, nurses, camp followers, prostitutes, and women soldiers within the institution. For an excellent analysis of war and torture, see Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain (1985), Chapter Two.
2. Since 2006, under article 134 of the US military’s criminal law, patronizing prostitution is a crime when committed by service members (Raymond).
3. See Enloe’s Does Khaki Become You?, page 220, in this bibliography.
4. For further critical background on the “comfort women” issue, see also Keith Howard’s True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women (1995), Chungmoo Choi’s The Comfort Women: Colonialism, War, and Sex (1997), Margaret Stetz and Bonnie B. C. Oh’s Legacies of the Comfort Women of World War II (2001), and Yuki Tanaka’s “Introduction” to Comfort Woman: A Filipina’s Story of Prostitution and Slavery Under the Japanese Military (1999) in this bibliography.
5. This novel was adapted for film in 2000.
6. García Márquez’s Memoria de Mis Putas Tristes [Memory of My Melancholy Whores] (2004) also deals with sex trafficking, although the military is not represented in this work. Still, the novel sparked an international controversy because some critics (the Mexican journalist and human rights activist Lydia Cacho among them) claim that it condones child prostitution and pedophilia; the book was adapted into a movie in 2011, but the “filming prompted a group called the Regional Coalition Against Trafficking in Women and Girls in Latin America and the Caribbean to file a criminal complaint with Mexico’s attorney general’s office” (Cass 115).
7. This story was adapted for film in 1983.
8. Other terms were used to name these women, “such as ‘waitress’ (shakufu) and ‘special’ (tokushu) ianfu” (in Japanese, the word used was ianfu; in Korean, it was wianbu) (Soh 76–77). The Japanese official name, jugun ianfu, seems to have originated with Senda Kako, a journalist who published a book titled Jugun Ianfu [in 1962, proving that the topic has been known and documented in Japan at least since then]. The phrase is translated into English as ‘military comfort women’” (76–77). There were other, more derogatory, terms to refer to the “comfort women,” such as “the phrase ‘public toilet’ (kyodo benjo)” (76–77).
9. The book was finally published in 2001.
10. The article was originally written in Spanish; this is my translation. See also Carol Giacomo’s article “Did Japan ‘Need’ Comfort Women?” in the New York Times and Amy Davidson’s “The Mayor and the Comfort Women” in the New Yorker.
11. For other examples of fiction on “comfort women” by non-Asian authors, see Simone Lazaroo’s The Australian Fiancé (2000) in this bibliography.
12. Keller also published in 2000 Fox Girl, a novel dealing with prostitution (this time “comfort women” servicing American GIs) in post-war Korea. For a review, see Freely.
13. For a memoir, see Maria Rosa Henson’s Comfort Woman: A Filipina’s Story of Prostitution and Slavery Under the Japanese Military (1999) in this bibliography. For a critical analysis of the popularity of the memoir as a human rights narrative, see Schaffer and Smith in this bibliography.
14. Any narration of a historical event is a political act, and Kim-Gibson has admitted taking some creative license in her documentary film. For example, she resorts to re-enactments of certain scenes to accompany the women’s testimonials, even though the visuals do not correspond to the actual survivors (see Hyun Yi Kang’s “Conjuring Comfort Women: Mediated Affiliations and Disciplined Subjects in Korean/American Transnationality”). Schaffer and Smith for their part point to the fact that human rights narratives often trap the survivor into repeating the same “ur-narrative” for the sake of maintaining a consistent discourse where the survivor must continue to victimize herself for the cause, even in the present time (137). “Rights activists,” the critics observe, “require for their activism and expect from the informants a particular story of victimization” (137).
15. See Therese Park’s When a Rooster Crows at Night: A Child’s Experience of the Korean War (2004) and The Northern Wind: Forced Journey to North Korea (2012) in this bibliography.
16. See Achille Membe’s “Necropolitics” (2003) in this bibliography.
17. Soon-ah, the main character, explains: “We knew nothing about our own ancestors, only learned about the Japanese warriors, admirals, pirates, and bandits. No Korean poets or writers were allowed to express anything in Korean” (229).
18. On several occasions along the narrative, the author translates Korean words for the reader; for example, when Soon-ah describes her first rape, she clarifies what “chogori” means: “He pushed his hands into my chogori, the Korean tunic” (16).
19. Of course, I do not imply that being an adult justifies in any way the violations committed by the Japanese military. My comment refers to Park’s aesthetic choices only.
20. Indeed, like Holocaust fiction, stories in which the protagonist survives within a broader historical context of systemic exploitation and murder are doomed to sound unrealistic, and yet, surely, there were people who survived the atrocity through striking means. For testimonials, see Keith Howard, Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, and Nelia Sancho’s edited collection, the memoirs by Maria Rosa Henson and Jan Ruff-O’Herne, and Soon Duk Kim’s “Quest for Justice” in this bibliography.
21. See Yoshiaki Yoshimi’s video “Japanese History Professor on Comfort Women-Yoshiaki Yoshimi” (2012) in this bibliography.
22. For a detailed analysis of how trauma operates, see Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996) in this bibliography.
23. For an in-depth analysis of the discourse on rape, see Catharine A. Mackinnon’s “‘Sexuality’ from Toward a Feminist Theory of the State” (1993) in this bibliography.
24. See Kimberly A. Nance’s Can Literature Promote Social Justice? (2006) in this bibliography.
25. Catharine A. Mackinnon argues that “conceiving rape as violence, not sex [fails] to answer the rather obvious question, if it’s violence, not sex why didn’t he just hit her[;] this approach made it impossible to see that violence is sex when it is practiced as sex” (419).
26. A key feature of the training military personnel receive consists in learning to dehumanize the “enemy” and lose all empathy for him/her. Individuals are highly discouraged from questioning authority: a good soldier obeys and stays with the group, while certain hypermasculine actions are regarded as necessary to reinforce the cohesion of the institution. In the case of the “comfort women,” the Japanese imperial army considered that exerting sexual power over them promoted the soldiers’ male bonding and strengthened their masculinity.
27. See any book by Cynthia Enloe in this bibliography.
28. As Noam Chomsky observes, one nation’s poor fights another nation’s poor to protect the interests of select capitalist elites. Unequal balances of power between so-called first and third world nations predictably assure that one side of the conflict (the poorest country) will end up paying the highest price, with the death and degradation of local populations and environments. See Chomsky in this bibliography.
29. The amount of money devoted to the fighting of a war does not merely include the money allocated before and during the actual conflict, but also the money spent in dealing with the aftermath. For example, Chris Rohlfs’s “Does Combat Exposure Make You a More Violent or Criminal Person” analyzes, among many variables, the costs the US state had to pay once the war of Vietnam was over. In his study, Rohlf proves that the men involved in combat were far more prone to commit violent acts or crimes than civilians because of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. According to Rohlf, “the social cost of the increase in violence and crime due to the Vietnam War was roughly $65 billion”—and that is only the money spent dealing with the social consequences after the war (273).
30. See BriGette McCoy’s “The Military’s Sexual Assault Response Is a Catastrophic Blight on Our Service” (2014) in this bibliography.
31. China declared a new “air zone [under its control in the East China Sea] in November [2013] and demanded that aircrafts flying through provide flight plans and other information. The United States and its allies rejected the Chinese demand and have continued to fly military aircraft into the zone” (Reuters). On December 13, 2013, the Guardian reported that a “US guided missile cruiser operating in international waters in the South China Sea was forced to take evasive action last week to avoid a collision with a Chinese warship” (Reuters). The consequences of a potential collision between the Chinese and American aircrafts would be, predictably, politically disastrous.