Jason Lim is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture.
Korea's 'uncomfortable' truth
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By Jason Lim
The unassailable narrative about comfort women in Korea was that they were innocent, young Korean girls who were tricked or forcibly taken from their homes by the Japanese military to work as sex slaves in far-flung corners of their World War II Empire. They were enslaved, raped, and abandoned when Japan lost the war.
However, history, like any other “stories,” is far more nuanced and complex. From afar, the tree might look uniformly green, but every leave will have different shades and gradations when examined closely. Similarly, while the larger narrative of Imperial Japan either directly operating or indirectly inducing a supply system of sex slaves is widely accepted, there are bound to be subtle shades and tones whereby the narratives don’t fit nicely. But the tree is still green despite the brown spots on individual leaves.
People are people. When placed in threatening situations, they will survive in different ways and engage in actions that they won’t under normal circumstances. This could mean that ethnic Korean pimps eagerly participated in the human trafficking scheme, poverty-stricken parents sold off their daughters to middlemen promising menial jobs, or precocious girls took the foolhardy chance to make a life for themselves rather than face an inevitable life of despair and poverty.
Unfortunately, they all ended up in sex camps serving Japanese soldiers. Most were abused and dehumanized, some curried favor with their Japanese overlords for special treatment, others professed patriotism to Imperial Japan to gain some level of privilege, and few maybe even fell in love with ordinary Japanese soldiers who were just as miserable and lonely as they were.
These variations in individual stories are just as valid as the larger historical story of the comfort women. One doesn’t take away the credibility of another. They might clash and mesh as different strands of narratives weave themselves into a larger, coherent historical picture that gives context with which the past events can be explained to future generations.
This is why the prosecution of Professor Park Yu-ha of Sejong University is so misguided and dangerous. She published the book, “Comfort Women of the Empire,” in 2013, expecting criticism for presenting non-mainstream, nuanced and alternate views of some aspects of the comfort women narrative. What she got was far more than that. This past February, South Korean court forced her to redact 34 passages that it determined contained false facts and thereby defamed the surviving comfort women. Then on Nov. 18, the Seoul Eastern District Prosecutors Office indicted Park without arrest for allegedly defaming the honor of former comfort women; this is a criminal prosecution.
Let’s take this to its logical conclusion to see why this is so dangerous. Say that the prosecution wins by somehow proving that Park “defamed” the surviving comfort women with the contents in her academic book. Then the book would be pulled from the market and made unavailable in Korea. This means that you won’t be able to read this book in Korea. In effect, the prosecution ― by extension, the government ― has just determined which book you can’t read. This is censorship.
Keum Tae-seop, a well-known attorney who briefly received a political spotlight as a confidant of Ahn Cheol-soo, writes in his Facebook page: “‘Comfort Women of the Empire’ is not a book about an individual’s personal life. It presents a perspective about a historical event that happened several decades ago in our nation’s history. Freedom of interpretation of history must be allowed. A judge or prosecutor should not be able to decide whether a specific viewpoint should be accessible by readers.”
He further goes to point out that Koreans today can buy and read Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” However, reading Mein Kampf doesn’t make everyone into a fascist. Rather, it gives the reader an understanding and perspective with which to formulate one’s own opinion of Hitler and what he stood for in the context of what actually transpired in history.
Democracy depends on lively public debate based on a diversity of opinions. There are mainstream viewpoints on certain topics, to be sure. However, no matter how distasteful they might be, other perspectives must have the freedom to be presented and given the opportunity to succeed or fail in the marketplace of opinions. Who could have imagined same-sex marriages even just 20 years ago? Or interracial marriage 50 years ago? An African American president of the United States of America? These were all taboo at one historical period or another.
This is especially true when it comes to history. There is no one interpretation of what precipitated and resulted from a specific event in history. It’s all a matter of opinions. Some opinion might have more general agreement, but all opinions are valid from individual perspectives. Dealing with different versions of the uncomfortable truth is the nature of history. It’s dynamic, varied, and often painful. Using the prosecutorial power of the government to take sides in such debates is misguided and represents a dangerous precedent for a democratic society.
Jason Lim is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture. He has been writing for The Korea Times since 2006. He can be reached at jasonlim@msn.com, facebook.com/jasonlimkoreatimes and @jasonlim2012.