BOOK REVIEW | 'Comfort Women of the Japanese Empire'

Park Yu-ha's book Comfort Women of the Japanese Empire is an in-depth archival and legal re-examination of the comfort women controversy that continues to divide South Korean and Japanese society.

Activist organisations led by the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (Korean Council) continue to accuse the former Japanese military of forcibly abducting 200,000 Korean women and girls to be sex slaves, otherwise known as comfort women. Meanwhile, the Japanese government has categorically denied such allegations.

In 2015, the conservative Park Geun-hye administration in Seoul negotiated a bilateral agreement with Tokyo that declared the comfort women dispute "resolved finally and irreversibly." It accompanied a formal apology from the Japanese government and 100 million won ($89,348) compensation per woman or her surviving family.

This was accepted by 35 out of the 47 living women and the families of 65 out of the 199 deceased.

The Unresolved Conflict

The Korean Council, however, rejected the 2015 agreement and again sued Tokyo in South Korean courts. On January 8, 2021, the Seoul Central District Court ruled that Tokyo must pay 100 million won ($90,400 USD) to each of the twelve comfort women plaintiffs. It cited Japan's "systemic crimes against humanity in violation of international standards and norms," thus implicitly rejecting the 2015 agreement.

*This comfort women statue was erected in front of the former Japanese Embassy in Seoul. (©Kim Byungheon)*

The ongoing legal battles over this historical issue make the release of the book's English translation ever more timely. Two key themes emerged from Park's study of the comfort women issue: the weaponization of memory to support specific political narratives and the legal implications of distorted histories.

Weaponization of Memory

The book opens with the way collective memory is used to support anti-Japan sentiment among Koreans or the absolution of responsibility among Japanese people.

According to Park, memories of victimhood are foregrounded at the expense of stories about reconciliation or camaraderie. Japan and South Korea had been at odds for much of their history since the end of World War II. An ongoing source of tension is the Japanese military's usage of South Korean comfort women. Members of the Korean Council have used shocking and outlandish claims to fuel the South Korean public's hostility towards Japan.

Lee Yong-soo, a former comfort woman, at a Wednesday Rally. In 2020, Lee held press conferences accusing Yoon Mee-hyang and the Korean Council of taking advantage of former comfort women. (Justice for Comfort Women's Facebook post)

Specifically, the Korean Council spread the "abduction narrative" of the comfort women issue, claiming that the Japanese military kidnapped underage Korean girls and forced them to have sex with 60-70 soldiers per night. After the war, the girls were said to have been killed in torturous ways. In this narrative, comfort women are forced to exist as oppressed daughters of the nation.

As popular as the abduction narrative has become, the complex truth that Park explores through archival materials exposes an even more disturbing and endemic patriarchy underlying women in Korean society and the war environment. The archives primarily consist of interviews with comfort women by Senda Kako, a Japanese journalist who published Military Comfort Women: The Indictment of 80,000 Voiceless Women in 1973.

Park considers this book to be a credible source for several reasons. First, the comfort women issue had not been politicised yet. Second, they consist of interviews taken closer to the time of the historical events.

Nuances of History

Park points out that middlemen, consisting of both Korean and Japanese men, managed the women with the most cruelty and often exploited a Korean family structure that sold or abused their daughters. Middlemen conned the girls into comfort stations with false promises of a better life than in their households. Park also infers from a soldier's expression of surprise at a 14-year-old's presence at the comfort station that the kidnapping of young girls was an anomaly rather than common practice, as the abduction narrative suggests.

As Japan's imperial subjects, South Korean women were seen more as stand-ins for Japanese women, as reflected in a less-acknowledged aspect of the comfort women wearing "Japanese clothing." Archives suggest that the women served as typical mothers and lovers rather than just sex objects, sometimes forming close bonds with Japanese soldiers.

As detailed in the book, the comfort women system was a complex business model supported by a variety of actors, such as middlemen aiming to profit from women's suffering under patriarchal norms in Korea. Despite this, activists often omit these aspects and spotlight the Japanese military as the sole carriers of blame. These historical distortions have real legal consequences that threaten national reconciliation as well as our understanding of the past.

Distorting the Truth

The book's detailing of litigation cases in Chapter 7 demonstrates that determining the truth about South Korean comfort women is not simply an academic exercise for historians.

In 2011, 64 comfort women and their supporters directed attention to the issue after bringing up a 2006 court case stating that the South Korean government's lack of effort to resolve the comfort women issue was unconstitutional. The case was successful, but based on assumptions that the women were under sexual slavery and forcibly abducted. According to Park, these claims were based on poor documentation and media narratives.

*Former Korean comfort woman Lee Yong-soo (center), lawyer Lee Sang-hee (left), and others hold a press conference on November 23, 2023, in Seoul (©Kyodo News)*

Even when official reports were amended, the media often ignored any alterations that downplayed the notion that comfort women were sex slaves. For example, as written in Chapter 8, the United Nations' Coomaraswamy Report (1996) recommended that the Japanese government "accept legal responsibility, provide compensation, disclose documents, issue an official apology, and punish those concerned."

However, an updated version of the report issued two years later included amendments that acknowledged the Japanese government's attempts at educational reform and financial compensation. The updated report also stated that the Japanese government had not taken legal responsibility, but that this might be due to the ongoing six related court cases filed in Japanese courts. Notwithstanding, primarily the 1996 version of the report has been shared throughout South Korea and used to demand legal responsibility and compensation from Japan.

Judicialization of History

One problem with litigating comfort women issues is that everyone most intimately connected with the history has died or aged significantly. These include not only the comfort women themselves but their supporters and other reporters who may have witnessed direct accounts. After all these years, the reliability of accounts that could be gleaned from primary actors in comfort women history is questionable, especially given the impact of trauma and politicization of the issue in the media.

Despite the ever-fading sources of direct testimony, some professors have faced legal punishments for raising any doubts about forced abduction narratives. The author herself published the original version of Comfort Women of the Empire in 2013, which questioned abduction narratives and earned top academic awards in Japan. In South Korea, however, her work was censored. She was fined 90 million won ($64,400) in civil court and, after years of litigation, was finally acquitted of criminal defamation in 2023.

Responding to the ruling, then-mayor (and currently President) Lee Jae-myung posted on Facebook: "This professor…Is she still holding her position as a professor? How did I end up breathing under the same sky as someone like her… sigh. These remnants of pro-Japanese collaborators must be cleared away."

The comfort women issue has generated a substantial number of other notable academic freedom controversies. Lew Seok-choon of Yonsei University faced criminal charges for stating comfort women were "half-willingly and half-heartedly" recruited during a September 2019 lecture. Acquitted in January 2024 after Park's precedent-setting case, he was still fined 2 million won ($1,500) for defaming an activist group and pressured into early retirement.

The Chilling Effect

Harvard Law professor J Mark Ramseyer was denounced as a war crimes denialist for his 2021 article "Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War." In it, he examined contracts between Japanese and ethnic Korean comfort women and brothel owners, finding large advances, one- to two-year maximum terms, and provisions allowing women to leave earlier if they generated sufficient revenue.

Diane Klein, Vice President of the California Conference of the American Association of University Professors, called for boycotting the journal that published Ramseyer's article and removing his endowed professorship.

*Cover image of "Harvard Professor Explains the Truth About the Comfort Women Issue" published on January 3 in Korean. (© Kyobo Books)*

In March 2021, an editor of a Japanese studies journal reportedly recommended that a prospective author delete all citations to Ramseyer, even though Ramseyer was a noted expert in Japanese law and the works cited were not related to comfort women.

The stigma of war crimes denialism in South Korea has extended not only to academics who deviated from the dominant narrative but also to those who defended their freedom to do so.

Hanyang University professor Joseph Yi's co-authored essay calling for "debating not censuring" Ramseyer inspired more than fifteen hundred students from his university to petition for his immediate termination. Korean media characterized both dissenting academics like Ramseyer and Park Yu-ha and those who defended their academic freedom as "different shades of denialism regarding the Japanese military atrocity."

Debate Over Censorship

The analysis in Comfort Women of the Japanese Empire provides several lessons about understanding collective trauma and war history. Within the context of Korea-Japan relations, the shaping of collective memory in South Korea to support the forced abduction narrative motivates people to hold onto animosity based on questionable ideas of history.

The Korean Council claimed to represent former comfort women. But in reality, they silenced those who deviated from the victim narrative in any way. In a current climate of autocratisation, fellow democratic countries would do well to highlight their common objectives.

*Speakers at the Third International Comfort Women Symposium pose on stage, July 10, 2024 (©JAPAN Forward by Daniel Manning)*

On top of that, it took several years for Park's book to come out in English translation. In that time, material promoting the forced abduction narrative has proliferated. Stories of rape and exploitation travel far wider and faster than one can hack through historical and legal documents from Japanese and Korean archives. Seemingly minor distortions, omissions, and exaggerations can cause public sentiment to spiral out of control and justify ongoing violence.

Comprehensive as it is, Park Yu-ha's book need not be the definitive guide on the comfort women issue. For example, one can challenge her reliance on inference from qualitative sources, specifically Senda Kako's transcripts. However, oppositions should take her lead in meticulously scrutinizing and providing alternate interpretations of the data. Legal threats and exploitation of collective guilt have no place in academia.