Shadow of Japanese sex slaves mars relationship with Korea

John Lee reports from Seoul on a 20-year protest by ‘Comfort Women’ and a nation’s refusal to forget

A recently installed bronze sculpture of a young Korean girl in traditional costume sits facing the gates of the Japanese Embassy. The installation of the sculpture has caused a diplomatic row with Japan.

IT’S noon in Seoul, South Korea. Scattered lumps of snow putter down from an iron-grey sky. It’s almost dark.

Yi Sun Shin, Korea’s naval general hero who repelled the Japanese in the 16th century, stands towering amidst the gusts and flurries of cars and snow, staring with perpetual steely-eyed defiance down the city’s main thoroughfare. Crossing the road, the American Embassy hulks in the half-light, it’s flat prison-like appearance only bolstered by the amount of Korean policemen charged with guarding it’s gates.

Rounding the corner, the dry masonry walls of Gyungbukgong Palace, the seat of Korea’s ancient kings, accompany my route for a few hundred metres. The Irish Embassy is almost behind the American one in this flash business/diplomatic district of the city, but I’m looking for the Japanese Embassy. Skipping across the road, a few people trot past, huddled against the cold. The sound of Jang-Gu, traditional Korean drumming, is carried through the cold air. A crowd has gathered. It becomes deafening but stops abruptly as someone begins to speak.

It is Wednesday, December 21, and the 1001st in a series of protests that has been going on every Wednesday for 20 years. It consists of a large crowd, upwards of 500, gathered around two old ladies sitting on chairs facing the Japanese Embassy. Somehow they sit oblivious to the cold and the commotion around them, but that’s not an unusual sight here. On any given winter’s day one can pass old people sitting on street corners in Siberian conditions, selling seasonal fruits, fish, vegetables. Korean resilience is well-documented.

These two old ladies are former “Comfort Women“, the last survivors of a group once amounting to 200,000, mostly Korean, who were forced into sex slavery during Japanese Occupation.

During the occupation of the Korean peninsula, girls as young as 13 were lured from their homes with promises of stable jobs, or simply thrown into the back of trucks to end up in brothels in other parts of Korea or at the fronts of Japanese aggression in China, Burma and the Philippines. There they had to “cater” to upwards of 50 Japanese soldiers a day or rather, be subjected to repeatedly brutal and systematic rape by armed men who racially despised them. Seven days a week. For years on end.

Even those who survived, (many died and were discarded like rubbish), if they made it back to Korea, they never returned home to their villages, unable to live with the shame.

The Japanese government continually refuses to acknowledge this mini-holocaust of human suffering that was committed by their armies against a whole generation of Korean women. They maintain the matter was settled after the Korean War, that they have apologised. The character of their apologies have taken a similar tone to that of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, who in 2007 apologised “for the position these women found themselves in”. Abe would do well to remember that Japanese soldiers loading women onto trucks like cattle was how that occurred.

What is striking about the protest and these old ladies, is their immense dignity and calm defiance. The courage required to protest even once after such degradation, 20 years ago, in a South Korea which was much more conservative and didn’t have time for anything besides modernisation, is hard to imagine. To keep doing that religiously for 20 years, while growing older and older is unbelievable.

Another feature of the protest was the amount of young Korean people there, mostly secondary school students and the atmosphere of hushed reverence with which the old ladies were treated. The cold air was charged with emotion and some tears were noticeably shed. That a new generation of young Koreans identify with the suffering of these ladies, which has been perpetuated by Japan’s failure to come to terms with the dark chapters of her own Imperial past, is testimony enough that no meaningful and lasting reconciliation between the two countries has yet been reached.

Reconciliation can never be reached until there is first acknowledgement and responsibility.

Now that South Korea has achieved modernisation, a feat almost comparable to a second Korean War in terms of the struggle, sweat, blood and tears which brought it about, South Koreans finally have time to reflect on the past. After 500 years of an isolationist policy which was the only way to cope with Japanese and Chinese Invasions, ensuing Japanese occupation and the Korean War which is as yet, unresolved, the time has come to confront the psychological scars of having been colonised, the insidious and cataclysmic tensions which grip this peninsula and the immense frustration at foreign intervention after a long awaited independence.

The incendiary issue of disputed-sovereignty of an island in the East Sea of Korea, Dokdo, shows that Japanese-Korean reconciliation is still a work in progress. Japan have as yet not given up their empire mentally, as in the case of the “Comfort Women”, nor physically in the case of Dokdo, an island registered and documented on maps of the Orient as Korean for hundreds of years.

Now that American foreign policy is redirecting to this region in the wake of the Iraq and Afghanistan withdrawals (in the hopes of containing China), and the uncertainty which hangs over North Korea in the wake of Kim Jong-Il’s death, South Korean-Japanese relations will be pivotal to the political trajectory of the region and South Korea, the base of almost 30,000 US troops, promises to be a crucible for events in East Asia and the Asia-Pacific region at large.

However, if the strong silent message of an old Korean lady, who sits calmly staring at the Japanese Embassy must be heard; I am Korea, ignore me no longer.