‘제국의 위안부’를 읽는 법

Abstract

In her book titled “The Comfort Women of the Empire,” You Ha Park asserts the need for dismantling our memory of Korean comfort women as a reconciliatory strategy for resolving the conflict surrounding the issue of comfort women. Using the concept of the ‘comfort women of the empire,’ she emphasizes that Korean comfort women were in a relationship with the Japanese army that was different from the commonly accepted view that they were the ‘women of the enemy.’ As the ‘poor subjects of the Japanese Empire,’ they were not unilaterally coerced into sexual slavery. Her claim is that the Japanese army and Korean comfort women were in a comradeship and that the comfort women of the empire were able to endure the hardships of the war because of the mutual sympathy that existed between them and the Japanese soldiers. However, there is no doubt that the ‘comfort women of the empire’ that the author talks about were both comfort women and sexual slaves, oscillating between ‘prostitution as rape’ and ‘rape as prostitution’. According to the author, those responsibible for mobilizing the Korean comfort women were Korean brokers or pimps, a point which shows that the use of comfort women by the Japanese army had not been entirely institutionalized. Rather, the comfort women were coerced into ‘forced labor’ by private Korean brokers. On that basis, the author concludes that the Japanese state may have had a symbolic and moral responsibility towards the comfort women, but not necessarily a legal one. This rhetoric of the ‘women of the empire’ asserted by Park seems to me both precarious and inadequate. What we need at this time is not a national sensibility but a sensibility to human rights. To look for a solution to discriminatory and criminal acts against the Korean Japanese by the Japanese right wing in the issue of the comfort women would be inappropriate. There is an urgent need to foster a sensibility about the crimes against humanity being committed in Japan. This is a prerequisite for understanding and dealing with the loud sirens of warning surrounding North Korea’s crimes against humanity. We should note that instead of an epistemological leap that links the issue of comfort women to the current acts of crimes against humanity, we need an ‘epistemological disconnection’ severing that link.