Comfort women statues carry deeper historical meaning
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By Kyung Moon Hwang
A year ago this column predicted that the just-signed agreement between the South Korean and Japanese governments to resolve the “comfort women” issue, once and for all, would instead last only as long as the two current administrations are in power. This appears to have been an over-estimation. Without even knowing the life span of Park Geun-hye’s presidency, the brouhaha over the latest statue, which will not be the last, indicates that the agreement is already unraveling.
As usual, there are important historical factors worth examining. Due to the terrible nature of what happened and the postwar amnesia in Japan, the comfort women issue will always arouse nationalist passions across Asia. In South Korea, however, it would be beneficial also to consider the country’s complicated history of sexual exploitation and state-sponsored prostitution.
“Comfort Women” or “Comfort Corps” was the euphemism for the military prostitution system servicing the Japanese imperial army in World War II, an offshoot of the “Sacrifice Corps” (“Jeongsindae” in Korean) that produced goods and services for the battle fronts. Various studies over the years have painted a fairly secure picture of how this system worked: The Japanese military helped mobilize and provided the clientele for numerous “comfort stations,” run mostly by non-military entrepreneurs (pimps and human traffickers, more or less), that followed the soldiers as they rampaged through Asia.
The question that will never get fully resolved, but which lies at the heart of the continuing controversy, is the extent to which the Japanese government was involved in luring, coercing, and brutalizing these girls. This was not a uniform system, and there was a variety of channels that brought the girls to the comfort stations, although most of the victims appear to have been deceived into circumstances that trapped them in the unrelenting horrors of serial rape.
In the end, of course, it doesn’t really matter whether Japanese officials actually managed this system directly, since the Japanese military created and oversaw the demand from its wars of aggression in the first place. The Japanese government, in sum, was responsible for this deplorable reality, and hence this government today should acknowledge and rectify it.
Beyond this general understanding, we would do well to dig deeper into the historical background of the comfort women system and to examine its aftermath. By doing so, we find that the story is more complicated than what is suggested by placing statues in front of Japanese diplomatic compounds.
First, as twisted and repulsive as it might seem, the imperial Japanese army’s primary interest in cultivating the comfort women system was a military one, that is, to maintain its fighting prowess through a hygienic and “safe” sexual outlet for its soldiers. Raping and pillaging were among this army’s primary functions across Asia, and at least the raping had to be controlled and regulated.
The Japanese army had begun focusing on disease prevention as a most important factor in military success as early as the wars of imperialism against China and Russia at the turn of the twentieth century. And the systematic provision of “clean” prostitution, an extension of the system that had developed over centuries at home in Japan, became an overriding concern.
Here’s where Korea comes in. Not only did these Japanese wars take place mostly in Korea, but the resulting Japanese colonial rule, beginning in 1910, drew from these battlefield experiences as well as from the longstanding culture of state-sponsored prostitution and sexual exploitation in Korea itself.
We speak here of the nationwide network of “gisaeng” courtesans who functioned, effectively, as government employees in the Joseon era. This was only the most visible feature of the larger culture that connected political and social status with sexual exploitation. In the Japanese colonial period, these practices and the gisaeng were both refreshed, re-systematized, and combined with Japanese traditions to produce a state-regulated prostitution system. The comfort women setup thus built on the foundation of such structures of sexual exploitation that had long developed in Korea.
More evidence that the comfort women ordeals were not only a Japanese phenomenon came after the Japanese rulers retreated from Korea in 1945. The “comfort women” label was retained and became the basis of the military prostitution system servicing the American military in South Korea, beginning around the time of the Korean War (1950-1953). Thereafter, with the unofficial backing of successive South Korean governments, the “camp towns” surrounding American military bases funneled thousands of Korean women into prostitution.
The history of the comfort women cannot be divorced, in other words, from the succession of military or militarized dictatorships on the peninsula for most of the 20th century, beginning with the Japanese colonial occupation in 1910.
Given this, one becomes even more suspicious of the motivations behind the late December 2015 agreement. President Park tried to complete this deal within the 50th anniversary year of her father’s 1965 normalization treaty with Japan, to be sure. But one wonders to what extent she also sought to whitewash this long history of systematic prostitution supplied to the American military by past South Korean regimes, especially her father’s.
In any case, South Koreans driven by understandable anger at the Japanese government would benefit also from looking inward for the causes and outcomes of the comfort women tragedy. Statues are fine, but they should symbolize something more than only Japanese offenses.
Kyung Moon Hwang is a professor in the Departments of History and East Asian Languages and Cultures, the University of Southern California. He is the author of "A History of Korea ― An Episodic Narrative" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). This and Prof. Hwang's other columns can be found on https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/category/subsection_633.html