'Comfort women' monuments and globalizing memories

By Kim Mi-kyoung

When people move around, their stories travel with them. The expression “Storied community” defines their existence and cohesive identity. For many diasporas, a sense of collective historical memory is a key source of ideational inspiration. The number of overseas Koreans, now seven million, account for 15 percent of the total Korean population, and they, too, have carried with them stories internalized from their homeland. It is not surprising that three monuments dedicated to the comfort women have been built on U.S. soil, since the United States is a major destination for Korean emigrants. The sites are located in Palisades Park, New Jersey, Nassau County, New York and Glendale, California.

The New Jersey monument, the first memorial dedicated to Korean comfort women, was built within a broad national political and social consensus in the U.S. There were important preceding movements paving the road for the monument’s construction. In 1997 Congressman William Lipinski (D-Illinois) first proposed a bill denouncing Japan’s wartime brutalities and the coercion of comfort women; Lane Evans (D-Illinois) submitted further such bills in the House for five consecutive years, until 2006, when the House Committee on Foreign Affairs passed House Resolution 759. Michael Honda (D-California), a Japanese American, took up the effort in January 2007, submitting the resolution to the subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific and the Global Environment of the House. A public hearing was held on Feb. 15, 2007. On June 26 of the same year the House Committee on Foreign Affairs passed House Resolution 121 39 to 2. The U.S. Congress unanimously passed the bill on July 30, 2007.

The Japanese government followed these legislative moves carefully and responded with indignation. The first cabinet of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe asserted that there was no evidence of forceful recruitment of the comfort women by the Japanese military. During a visit to the U.S. Congress in 2007, Abe stated that he felt “a sense of apology” and “sympathy” for the women’s hardships. A group of Japanese politicians, professors, commentators, and journalists, most of them members of the Liberal Democratic Party, took out a full-page advertisement under the title “The Facts” in the Washington Post on June 14, 2007. The advertisement again denied the Tokyo government’s involvement in the coercion of comfort women. Upon Congressional approval of the resolution, they protested that it was no proven by facts. The current controversies caused by right-wing Japanese elites on comfort women issues show that little has changed between now and then.

Japan reacted toward the comfort women monument in Palisades Park by launching a campaign to collect signatures to pressure U.S. President Barack Obama to remove the statue, calling on the President to intervene in order to stop the “international harassment” of Japanese people. Most of the signatories seemed to be Japanese citizens or their descendants living in the U.S. Japan’s lobbying had the effect of drawing renewed attention to an issue that had gone without extensive notice in the U.S., and in fact backfired in that it spurred a movement to build more monuments. The comfort women monuments are to remind visitors of a shameful past. The message is clear: now it is the turn of the victims to demand justice, and it is a matter of human rights protection. Koreans in their homeland and in the diaspora are pushing Japan to remember its dark past. It is a message that holds important implications for its future as a democratic nation as well as for its relations with Korea, China and other Asian neighbors.

Historical reconciliation can be a messy process. When memory discourse is shaped by victimhood and diverse identities it is bound to clash with any constructive dialogue. Japan and Korea are caught up in just such a tangled process. Korea blames Japan for its past aggression and colonial rule, while Japanese people blame their former military leaders for warmongering which ended in disaster for the Japanese empire. This creates an endless cycle of finger-pointing. The ongoing controversies over comfort women monuments suggest that both countries must transcend the status quo of historical contestations.

Reconciliation involves multiple stages of self-reflexivity, acknowledgment, redistributive justice, corrective mechanisms, and a final movement of forgiving. In contrast to Western Europe, East Asia is yet to undertake an effective reconciliation process. In order to transcend the counterproductive blame games, memory and reconciliation need to be interwoven. This interactive orientation opens up a self-reflexive and deliberative engagement with history. Memories are no longer confined within national borders. As the U.S. comfort women monument particularly shows, they become increasingly cross-border and even global.

Kim Mi-kyoung is associate professor at Hiroshima City University-Hiroshima Peace Institute in Japan. She can be reached at mkkim_33@hotmail.com.