FSD Newsletter - Article: Can the 'Comfort Women' Speak?

The following article won the best student paper award from the FSD at the ICA conference in Seoul. Jin-kyung Park’s article about the Korean comfort women embodies a perfect example of one way in which feminist scholarship serves an activist function. By giving voice to this group of women, Park seeks to replace historical patriarchal conceptions of these women and "restore the comfort women as the historical subject in colonial and post-colonial Korea." The following article has been edited into a shortened version of Park’s lengthier academic investigation into this area of Subaltern Studies.

The term "comfort women" or "military comfort women" refers to the estimated 100,000 to 200,000 Asian women who were mobilized, coerced, and shipped to the war front lines by order of the Japanese state and military in order to serve as prostitutes for the Japanese military during World War II.

Three reasons illustrate why the phenomenon of comfort women occurred. First, the setup of comfort stations was proposed and made by Japan’s military leaders in an effort to satisfy the sexual desires of soldiers. Recruitment of comfort women was part of this plan. Second, the comfort women system was proposed as a way to avoid the bad publicity (due to the Japanese soldiers’ rape of civilian women) from the Nanjing Massacre in China. It was the leaders’ belief that official sexual services would in part discourage the soldiers to rape other women in civilian population. Finally, the establishment assumed that the comfort women system would prevent sexually transmitted diseases among Japanese soldiers.

The massive mobilization of Korean women is one of the most important aspects of the comfort women system. It is suggested that Korean women constituted as much as 80 percent of the estimated total of wartime comfort women. Japanese colonial leaders identified Korean women as ideal candidates on the grounds that they were half-assimilated and racially inferior to Japanese as well.

A series of documents demonstrate that most of comfort women were from lower classes and unmarried. Kidnapping was a primary method of the mobilization. Otherwise, they were often promised employment at the time of draft. Former comfort women have contended that they suffered from constant rape, coercion, sexually transmitted disease, brutal treatment, violence, fear, and horror when they served as comfort women.

At the end of the war a large proportion of comfort women were intentionally abandoned or killed on the battlefield by the retreating Japanese forces. The Japanese comfort women system began to receive substantial attention when some former comfort women asked for official apology and reparation from the Japanese government in the 1990s. Since then, serious scholarly investigation on the issue has followed.

In this essay, I would like to raise some questions which further research on comfort women should address. This is to pursue alternative histories of female subjectivity, subaltern agency, and representation centered on the issue of comfort women in colonial Korea. What deserves a primary investigation is the extent to which the recruitment of comfort women mobilized political, social, and intellectual debates in colonial Korea. We must interrogate whether the discourse of comfort women is largely a post-colonial invention or the issue was the object of a political and social discourse during the colonial period.

The feminist works associated with Subaltern Studies has focused on analyzing multi-sited colonial discourses of sati as its key methodology in documenting the particular form of patriarchal violence that erases female voices and suffering in colonial Indian society. In contrast, none of the literatures on comfort women is concerned with the extent to which the mobilization of comfort women was drawn to political debates/colonial discourses by the colonial state, nationalists, reformers, the intellectuals or some other social forces (if the comfort women themselves) in colonial Korea.

What does the complete silence on comfort women in colonial Korea mean? Allegedly, the 80 percentage of mobilized comfort women was from Korea. More importantly, the recruitment of comfort women was never unknown to colonial Korean society. However, did the story of comfort women enter the record of colonial Korean history? If it did not, what does this tell us about? In particular, it is worth asking if Korean nationalists and the forces in independence movements were concerned with the issue of comfort women, given the central space that they occupy in Korean historiography of colonialism. It is also significant to investigate if the silence and unconsciousness of nationalists and reformers alike on the issues of comfort women can be held accountable for the gendered dimensions of Korean nationalism and indicative of indigenous patriarchy. Or could this be enunciated as the violence of colonialism and colonial representations that oppressed subaltern voice?

These questions would allow us an opportunity to articulate whether the historical silence on the issue of female subjectivity and subaltern agency concerning comfort women is rooted in Korean nationalist and independence movements’ sin of ignorance on the colonial patriarchal violence in colonial Korea. Simultaneously, this would lead us to examine the extent to which the silence lies in the Korean elite historiography’s omission and marginalization of the subaltern women. I suggest that it be the question of the politically-committed representation of the subaltern sexed subject with which postcolonial intellectuals should engage.

The second concern is the question of representation with particular emphasis on our strategies of representation. To be certain, there are skeptical voices concerning the existence of a wide range of historical records regarding the comfort women issue represented by other political and social forces and nationalist intellectuals as well as by comfort women themselves in the colonial period. One of the most significant questions is how to recover and reconstitute a history of Korean comfort women in colonial Korea.

I suggest that there is a compelling need to pursue an imaginative reconstruction of the lives of Korean comfort women. It is imaginative on the grounds that on one hand, comfort women, like every other nonelite group, might not have held a privileged position to record their own lives. It may be not easy to find instances where comfort women speak or represent themselves directly under the excruciating colonial violence. Their lives as those of subaltern subjects might, one the other, have been entered into historical record when someone wanted to count, regulate, cure, pathologize, warn about, rescue or deploy them as a symbol in a larger social panorama (Hershatter, 199).

Third, subsequent research would require a more complex articulation of the specific political, economic, social, cultural, and ideological fabric in which the issue of comfort women was embedded. It should attend to the intersections and conjunctions between the actions of comfort women and the sites on which the discourses of colonial power/institutions, the colonial state, cultures, and the subaltern indigenous communities converged. To put it differently, when speaking of female subjectivity, agency, and resistance in the complex conditions of colonial modernity in Korea, we need to question, as Rosalind O’Hanlon (2000) has argued, how the insistence on the presence of the subaltern, Korean comfort women, challenges us to reconsider the complex nature of colonial power and the ways in which it operated upon its subaltern subjects and the subaltern resisted.

Therefore, in an attempt to destablize current historical research on comfort women, I propose that we pursue the recovery of the subject -- Korean comfort women -- through the locus of the suffering body. This aims at comprehending the complex power operation and compelling cultural dimension of the issue as part of a critique of the statist disposition, documenting the materiality of suffering/pain that Korean comfort women have experienced, and constituting/representing comfort women as historical subjects. To do so, it is crucial to document the Japanese preoccupation with military hygiene and medical control of epidemic disease during its colonial expansion.

Imperial Japan was obsessed with how military fighting power was affected by infectious diseases and particularly cautious of keeping military male bodies intact from diseases. As a result, the Japanese military hygiene system and medical control of epidemic diseases was far more advanced than those of other military powers at the turn of the twentieth century (Seaman, 1906). The persistence of the spread of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) among soldiers and the recovery of time from diseases, however, were a large threat to military power and led Japanese military leaders to be alert to potential infection of soldiers’ bodies (Yoshimi, 1995).

To this regard, there is a need to rethink about Bonnie B. C. Oh (2001). She has insisted that what appears to be distinctive in the Japanese comfort women system is its official governmental initiative in establishing the mechanism and apparatus that the government authorities systematically and methodologically carried out as well as the infliction of extreme brutality and inhuman treatment on comfort women. Here I attempt to problematize the uniqueness of the Japanese comfort women system in terms of its official governmental initiative.

There are numerous instances that the state, although indirectly, were involved in the management of military prostitution in colonial history. In particular, historical examples have demonstrated that imperial governmental authorities took initiatives in the management of military prostitution in colonies in order to control STDs. They sought to protect imperial male bodies largely from colonial women’s bodies, typically understood as transmitters of diseases, in the forms of governmental management and control of the prostitution system as is the case in the comfort women system.

Violence was an evident fact (Levine, 1994, 1998; Manderson, 1997). To be sure, the direct, active state mobilization of prostitutes and the level of violence that were involved in the comfort women system could distinguish themselves from other cases of state-management of prostitution. Yet I argue that what should deserve a far more serious consideration is why the Japanese government directly recruited women who eventually served as prostitutes to provide sexual service to the soldiers of the Imperial Army rather than enlarging and managing the existing civilian brothels. I suggest that the Japanese obsession with the maintenance of military hygiene and with disease control at the period of imperial expansion largely and uniquely shaped the ideas and practices of the military comfort women system. Let me point out some specific cases that highlight the Japanese imperial obsession with the management of military hygiene and the protection of male soldiers’ bodies from STDs.

First, I would like to direct our attention to the systematic and meticulous recruitment of young Korean comfort women and the well-organized route of transporting the recruited comfort women to North China and the South Pacific Islands where comfort stations were located. Why did the Japanese Imperial Army prevent soldiers from entering civilian brothels available in the war front lines (Yoshimi, 2000, p. 47, 69)? Why did it instead recruit young women in colonial Korea and send them off to war front lines at the expense of time and cost during the excruciating war period? Why did the Japanese government recruit mostly young, 10-20 years old, unmarried Korean women? These questions should compel us to imagine the Japanese imperial obsession with the health of military male bodies and military/medical fear as well as strategies to protect imperial male bodies from STDs by the means of providing uncontaminated bodies.

Second, historical documents concerning extensive medical examination for both soldiers and comfort women at comfort stations indicate the gravity of medical control and subjugation of comfort women’s bodies largely contingent upon the imperial preoccupation with soldiers’ health and bodies by the means of policing comfort women’s bodies. The Imperial Army, with the assistance of military medicine, systematically carried out hygienic policies in order to regulate STDs among the populations of soldiers. Japanese military and medical records demonstrate that the Imperial Army, in conjunction with the Ministry of War (the hygiene section of the medical bureau), acknowledged the necessity of comfort stations for the management of STDs and conducted medial examinations of prostitutes and serving women, designating special hospitals for the treatment of STDs. There is an instance showing that a set of precautions were taken against STDs by sending military physicians beforehand to conduct physical examinations of comfort women. Comfort women were required to have medical inspections before they first served at comfort stations and were afterwards subjected to regular medical examinations. Evidence demonstrates that these inspections were conducted twice a week (Yoshimi, pp. 44-56, 51-72, 84-5, 119-22, 136-40, 148-9).

Third, the Japanese imperial obsession with military hygiene is also found in its medical treatment of comfort women and the compulsory use of condoms required for medical purposes. Comfort women were treated with an excessive amount of antibiotics, 606, when they contracted STDs as comfort women recall. "606" (or Salvarsan) at the time was a popular arsenic compound which came as the therapeutic coup for syphilis in 1909. It was discovered by Nobel laureate immunologist Paul Ehrlich, while working with his Japanese assistant, Sahachiro Hata. 606 was named as such because the 606th experiment resulted in an arsenic compound after Hata’s persistent trials. As the social hygiene movement in the early twentieth century America has shown, the use of 606 had a miraculous effect on the treatment of syphilitic patients. But a number of side-effects, partly due to the agent’s high toxicity, also followed. Thus, there came a less toxic but also somewhat less effective compound called 914 or Neosalvasan, which was also discovered by Dr. Ehrlich and became widely available in the United States by 1915 (Brandt, 1985, pp.40-1; De Kruif, 1926, pp. 308-30). It is worth asking why more toxic "606" was used consistently for the treatment of syphilis among comfort women.

Moreover, the main supply of the Imperial Army relates an intriguing case in which during the course of the Asia pacific war, a Japanese paymaster first Lieutenant was dispatched to the International Rubber Industries in Japan, the forerunner of condom producers, in order to direct the production of condoms for the Army (Yoshimi, 2000, p. 61). Simultaneously, the facts that solders were strictly required to use a condom when they had sexual intercourse with comfort women and that it was compulsory for operators of comfort stations to track down the number of condoms used by soldiers (p. 138) provide us with instances that stress the Japanese preoccupation with military hygiene and the centrality of medical control in the management of the comfort women system.

As I have mentioned above, when a substantial amount of attention is directed to the issue of military hygiene and medical control of STDs (more specifically the Japanese imperial obsession with the management of military male bodies) in the comfort women system, it opens up critical space in which we can re-articulate comfort women as historical subjects. This can be done by visiting the Japanese archive of military medicine.

As Yoshimi (2000) has shown, comfort women are present in the record of Japanese military medicine. The comfort women entered historical records through military physicians who vigilantly conducted physical examination of the comfort women in an effort to prevent the spread of STDs. At this point, the availability of military medical record is open to investigation. According to Yoshimi (2000), many documents concerning the comfort women system were destroyed at the end of the war, and many of those that survived have not been made public. Nevertheless, as Loomba (1993) has suggested, postcolonial female intellectuals should keep looking for subaltern women and attempting to rediscover them. I suggest that we politically commit ourselves to discovering the subaltern female subject and representing their erased voice and thereby more instances where comfort women act as historical subjects could be represented.

In my view, in approaching the comfort women issue in terms of the problematic of military hygiene and medical control, we could become more grounded on the specific space where the suffering female body was subjugated and also the subaltern female subject (comfort women) was resisting as a historical subject. For example, the suffering of the comfort women amounted to that of the diseased body. I argue that the contour of resistance also accounted for a bodily one that strove to protect the subject itself. A number of former comfort women have testified that they severely suffered from STDs. Keum-ju Hwang, a former Korean comfort women recollects: "The Japanese gave me diseases, and I bled so much that I lost my uterus...I am [still] alive only because of penicillin" (Schellestede, 2000, p. 9).

It is known that many comfort women died from STDs and other illnesses at comfort stations (Yoshimi, 2000; Schellestede, 2000). Under these circumstances, never were Korean comfort women just present at comfort stations; they were resisting against compulsory sexual intercourses with soldiers and trying to escape from comfort stations and to protect their bodies from infectious diseases.

In conclusion, I suggest that uncovering, re-mapping, and re-presenting of the locus of the suffering body be understood as part of an attempt to recover and document Korean comfort women’s own versions of subjectivities, the materiality of pain/suffering that they endured, and a series of their own forms of submissions, struggles, negations, and resistance. Simultaneously, it would also allow us to document more subtly the complex operation and exercise of colonial power over the bodies of the comfort women and open new analytical possibilities for understanding how power can be reconsolidated in new historical forms (Burton, 1999). In so doing, the issue of comfort women must become a vanishing point for a theory of subaltern agency and female subjectivity as well as a complex form of patriarchal violence embedded in the operation of colonial power in Korean women’s history.

References

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