The Comfort Women in Northern East Asia As Represented by Plays

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The Comfort Women in Northern East Asia

As Represented by Plays, Rallies, and Exhibits

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of

Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Yi-Ping Wu, M.A.

Graduate Program in Theatre

The Ohio State University

2019

Dissertation Committee:

Stratos E. Constantinidis, Adviser

Jennifer Suchland

Lynn Itagaki

Beth Kattelman

Copyrighted by

Yi-Ping Wu

2019

Abstract

This dissertation examines why and how the wartime experiences of the comfort women were used by politicians and playwrights in postwar years to buttress the nationalist agendas of the victimized nations, namely China, Taiwan, and Korea. The dissertation shows how the personal stories of the victimized women became public memories, public speeches and theatrical performances when they were introduced to the national narratives in China, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. The wartime ideology

(and its rhetoric), which helped the Japanese to justify why they exploited the bodies of these women is contrasted to the peacetime ideology (and is rhetoric) that helped the

Chinese, Taiwanese, and Koreans to transfer the stigma from the victims to the perpetrators and to demand reparations in postwar years. The focus of this dissertation project is on the process by which national politics and gender politics in the postwar era re-humanized these women and turned their private stories into a public discourse through theatrical performances, political rallies, and museum exhibits.

Dedication

To my parents, Mei-Lian Yang and Jin-Ling Wu

with great respect and lots of love

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Acknowledgments

I want to thank my dissertation committee (Stratos E. Constantinidis, Jennifer

Suchland, Lynn Itagaki, and Beth Kattelman) for their generous support and patience from 2014 to 2019.

I also want to thank the Director of the Women’s Active Museum on War and

Peace in Tokyo, Japan; the staff members of the AMA Museum in Taipei, Taiwan,

Professor Zhi-Liang Su at the Chinese Comfort Women History Museum in Shanghai, and Mr. Guang-Jian Liu, researcher at the Nanjing Museum of the Site of Liji Lane

Comfort Station in Nanjing, China, and Mrs. Sun-Shil Kim, director of the War &

Women’s Human Rights Museum in Seoul, South Korea.

My research trips for this dissertation were supported with funds from the

Alumni Grants for Graduate Research and Scholarship of The Ohio State University.

Vita

2006……………………………B.A. History, National Chengchi University

2011…………………………….M.A. Theatre, National Taiwan University

2014 to present…………………Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of

Theatre, The Ohio State University

Major Field: Theatre

Minor Field: Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Table of Contents

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………..ii

Dedication………………………………………………………………………..iii

Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………..iv

Vita………………………………………………………………………………..v

List of Figures ……………………………………………………………………vii

Chapter One. Introduction……………………………………………………...…1

Chapter Two: Conflicting narratives about the Comfort Women in Japan………19

Chapter Three: Political performances about Comfort Women in Taiwan………45

Chapter Four: Theatrical performances about the Comfort Women in Korea……70

Chapter Five: Exhibits and plays about the Comfort Women in China…………..94

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………….122

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………..127

List of Figures

Figure 1. Pak Young Sim’s room (Room No. 19, second floor) in the Kinsui House renamed the Museum of the Liji Lane Comfort Station, Nanjing, China, 2018…..23

Figure 2. Yokoi Kazuko in the role of Pak Young Sim in Watanabe Yoshiharu’s play, The Eye Holds the Truth (2009) on tour, San Francisco, California, 2009………..25

Figure 3. Yasukuni Jinja (Yasukuni Shrine), Tokyo, Japan………………………..34

Figure 4. Nippon Ling (Japanese Zero) Yushukan Museum, 1st floor, 1st zone, Tokyo, Japan, 2018………………………………………………………………………...40

Figure 5. The human torpedo Kaiten, Yushukan Museum, 1st floor, 1st zone, Tokyo, Japan, 2018………………………………………………………………………...41

Figure 6. The entrance of the Ama Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, 2018……………….50

Figure 7. Nu Wan’s painting, Full Body Map, Ama Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, 2018.51

Figure 8. The “mental lamps” project on the second floor of the Ama Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, 2018………………………………………………………………………..53

Figure 9. Yoshinori Kobayashi, On Taiwan (Mandarin translation) Taiwan, 2001…63

Figure 10. Student protesting the “Minor” Modification are handcuffed by the police outside the Ministry of Education in Taipei, Taiwan, on July 17, 2015…………….65

Figure 11. Lin Kuan-Hua protesting against the “Minor” Modification in front of the Ministry of Education, Taipei, Taiwan, July 22, 2015………………………………66

Figure 12. Students protesting against the “Minor” Modification after the suicide of Lin Kuan-Hua, August 2, 2015……………………………………………………...67

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Figure 13. Luke Woods (Michey Theis) in Hansol Jung, Among the Dead, directed by Ralph B. Pena, performed at HERE Arts Center in New York by the Ma-Yi Theater Company, 2016…………………………………………………………………….71

Figure 14. Ana Woods (Julienne Hanzelka Kim) and Comfort Woman No. 4 (Diana Oh) in Hansol Jung, Among the Dead, directed by Ralph B. Pena, performed at HERE Arts Center in New York by the Ma-Yi Theater Company, 2016………………………72

Figure 15. Wednesday Demonstration in front of the Japanese Embassy on June 26, 2018, Seoul, South Korea………………………………………………………….82

Figure 16. The Wall on The Left Side of The Gravel Road Women’s Active Museum, Seoul, Korea……………………………………………………………………….88

Figure 17. Exhibit in The Basement War & Women’s Human Rights Museum, Seoul, Korea, 2018………………………………………………………………………..89

Figure 18. Statue of two Comfort Women, backyard of the Women’s & Human Rights Museum, Seoul, Korea, 2018……………………………………………………..90

Figure 19. Sarah (Ding Chen) in Sarah (presented by Nanjing University of the Arts, performed at the Nanjing Culture & Art Center, December 12, Nanjing, China) ..95

Figure 20. Comfort Woman No. 18 in Li-Quan Wang’s Comfort Station presented by the Jinling Institute of Technology at the Liji Lane Comfort Station, July 5, 2017..100

Figure 21. “Endless Flow of Tears” in the Nanjing Museum of the Site of Liji Lane Comfort Station, Nanjing, China, 2018……………………………………………109

Figure 22. Display of “Tears of Silence” in the Liji Lane Comfort Station, Nanjing Museum, Nanjing, China 2018…………………………………………………….111

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Chapter One: Introduction

A) The socio-historical context of the project

Following the Meiji Restoration (1868-1889), which consolidated the pre- industrial feudal political system in Japan under Emperor Meiji’s rule (1867-1912),

Japan emerged as an industrial imperial power on the world stage. The central goal of the Meiji Restoration was to strengthen Japan and other East Asian countries against the control of Western colonial powers. The Japanese plan for a Greater East Asian

Commonwealth resulted in Imperial Japan colonizing several countries in East Asia through military force. The human and material resources of these countries were placed under the control of the Japanese Empire and were exploited to serve Japanese expansion.

Among the human resources exploited by the Japanese were the so-called

“comfort women” who were used to satisfy the psychosexual needs of the Japanese soldiers. According to Tian Tian Zheng, a small number of these women were

volunteers, but most of them were forced to serve in the Japanese military brothels where they became sex slaves and performed like “sex machines” (44). The Japanese misnomer for a military brothel was “comfort station” (iango). Comfort stations were established in all of the countries that were occupied by Japan. The exact number of comfort stations and the exact time that each of them was set up is difficult to determine because most of the military records were destroyed when Japan surrendered in 1945.

It is clear from the relatively few surviving documents that the first Japanese military brothels for the exclusive use of troops and officers were set up by the Japanese Navy in Shanghai, China, in 1932 during the so-called “Shanghai Incident” (Tanaka 8).

However, it is also clear that, under the command of General Okamura Yasuji, who was Deputy Chief of Staff of the Shanghai Expeditionary Army, the Japanese Army established its own comfort stations in Shanghai also in 1932.

The Japanese high command gave two reasons for setting up “comfort stations” in the occupied countries: a) to prevent venereal diseases from spreading among the

Japanese soldiers, and b) to prevent Japanese soldiers from raping women in the occupied countries. Following the 1937 massacre at Nanjing where the Japanese Army mass murdered Chinese civilians and mass raped Chinese women during the Second

Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese high command rapidly increased the number of the

Japanese comfort stations in China. In order to keep the rape count as low as possible

in the occupied countries, the officers of the Imperial Japanese Army in Central China were ordered to establish comfort stations.

The existing systems of institutionalized prostitution in China and the other occupied East Asian countries made women available to male clients – both soldiers and civilians – who could afford to pay for their services (Zatlin 26.) However, the system of the comfort stations was, historically speaking, a relatively “new institution” because it derived from the dynamics of capitalism, militarism, and a different sexual culture, according to Sarah Soh (115). These distinctions are articulated by Sung Chung

Chin who classified the comfort stations into three categories: a) comfort stations run by the Japanese military authorities; b) new comfort stations run by civilians but licensed by the Japanese authorities; and c) old privately run brothels that were requisitioned by the Japanese authorities for military use” (16). The old privately run brothels were also licensed by the Japanese military authorities, but their managers had to pay a monthly business tax. These three types of comfort stations exploited the sexual labor of the comfort women who were subjected to the demands of the Japanese soldiers.

The Japanese misnomer for these “sex slaves” was “comfort women” (ianfu), and it included the willing Japanese prostitutes. In other words, the Japanese misnomer described all categories of women who were used for the sexual gratification of the

Japanese soldiers. However, the sex slaves were forced to obey the Japanese rule, and

they came only from the countries occupied by the Empire of the Sun – primarily

Indonesia, Korea, and Taiwan. The Japanese misnomer did not distinguish between professional prostitutes (free labor) and sexual slaves (commandeered labor). The misnomer was questioned in postwar years by the surviving “comfort women” who were forced to become sex slaves. Interestingly, the misnomer was also objected to by the Japanese neo-nationalists for the following reason:

The right-wing objection to the term jugun ianfu is twofold: Whereas this term

implies official affiliation with the military [...] it is a postwar neologism that

clearly implicates the close connection between the military and the comfort

women, which is one reason Japanese neo-nationalists object to its usage in

reference to wartime comfort women. (Soh 70)

After the Nanjing Massacre in 1937, the Japanese military intensified the trafficking of Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese comfort women to China instead of commandeering Chinese women for the comfort stations in China. The Japanese did so because any attempt to drag the local Chinese women into prostitution would have jeopardized their security in two major ways: a) it would have intensified the anger of the occupied Chinese against the Japanese and would have spurred even more

rebellions against the Japanese occupation army; b) it would have made it easy for the

Chinese resistance forces to recruit the Chinese comfort women to spy on the Japanese and to pass vital military information to them (Qiu & Su 31). The number of Korean and Japanese comfort women that were sent to China increased in 1938. According to

Dr. Aso, a gynecologist and medical officer at the Army Communication Hospital in

Shanghai at that time, the Japanese soldiers preferred the Korean comfort women:

“many women from Korea were relatively young and physically pure, but most of those

[Japanese comfort women] from Kyushu were undoubtedly professionals in the business" (Tanaka 14).

The issue of the comfort women has been documented and presented by

Japanese academics who are experts in international law and social history. For example, all of the reports from the International Public Hearing Concerning the Post

War Compensation of Japan, which was held in Tokyo in 1992, were collected and published in one volume, War Victimization and Japan. This volume contains the testimonies of six women from six different countries, and it describes the rules, regulations, and routines imposed on the comfort women.

Yuki Tanaka, a Japanese history scholar, describes the history of the comfort women system in her book, Japan’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during World War II and the US Occupation. She investigates the medical and social

reasons given for the establishment of the comfort stations and describes how Korean and Taiwanese women were recruited through deception and then were forced to serve in comfort stations. She also discusses why the US military forces ignored the comfort women issue and how the allied occupation forces sexually abused women after the war had ended. Tanaka believes soldiers of all nations share the idea that “women are morally obligated to offer amenities to soldiers who risk their lives to defend their nation” (87). In short, Prince Konoe Fumimaro, articulated the Japanese perspective when he stated that the comfort stations were established “to protect Japanese women and girls [from] the possibility of mass rape” (133).

Another Japanese historian, David Andrew Schmidt, records the testimonies of the comfort women survivors as oral history and from the vantage point of the Japanese military. His book, Ianfu –The Comfort Women of the Japanese Imperial Army of the

Pacific War examines, through textual analysis and in great detail, the ways in which the development of the comfort women system benefited the Japanese during the war in the Pacific Ocean. In short, Tanaka, Qiu, Soh, and Schmidt represent a common front on the issue of the comfort women.

The Japanese perspective was diversified and modified by other historians as well as anthropologists and feminists. For example, historians Qiu, PeiPei, Su Zhiliang, and Chen Lifei offered a different perspective to the comfort women issue in their book,

Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan's Sex Slaves. They focused exclusively on Chinese comfort women in China and traced their history from the inception of the war to its aftermath in great detail. Their account is based on interviews they had with twelve Chinese comfort women survivors. They reported on their lives in postwar China as part of an effort to raise the public’s awareness about these war victims, and to make reparations to them.

Anthropologist Sarah C. Soh examined the issue of comfort women from a much wider chronological and geographical perspective – beginning with the prostitution tradition in Korea in the thirteen century. Soh used both qualitative and quantitative research methods for her book The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and

Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan, and concluded that the comfort women system was a product of colonialist agenda pursued by the Empire of the Sun. In another study, “Prostitutes versus Sex Slaves: The Politics of Representing the Comfort

Women,” Soh discussed the perspectives of the state, the military, and the feminist activists as the three essential entities in shaping the issue of the comfort women. She analyzed these three entities as manifestations of patriarchal fascism, masculinist sexism, and feminist humanitarianism in order to show how the issue of the comfort women had been uncovered, formulated, and debated in postwar years.

Margaret D. Stetz made clear that rape is not an aggressive manifestation of male sexuality, but rather an act of extreme violence which is channeled through sexual aggression. In her article “Wartime Sexual Violence against Women: A Feminist

Response,” she denied the premise that “rape has to do with an uncontrollable male drive that, insofar as it is not restrained by culture, [... becomes] unavoidable” (93).

Both East Asian and Western feminists in various disciplines worked together to develop new forms of therapy to help the traumatized comfort women survivors.

Japanese feminists joined forces with feminists from other countries to condemn the

“gendered crimes of the military” (94) and asked the Japanese government to make reparations to the comfort women instead of brushing their issues aside and by silencing the comfort women survivors.

When it comes to the discussion about the uses and misuses of the female body,

Michel Foucault’s theories are beneficial for the study. Foucault, the well-known

French social theorist and literary critic, used the term “biopower” to describe how political rationality takes control over life and populations as its own subject to ensure and sustain this kind of life and put this life in order. For him, biopower is an indispensable tool for the development of capitalism because it contributes to the

“controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production” and, more specifically in the case of sex slaves, it initiates the utilization of their bodies into the machinery of

reproduction (1995: 141). Even though, as Jana Sawicki explains, “in many of his later writings, the absence of specific attention to women's sexual and procreative bodies as pivotal targets for the new forms of power that he described is glaring”(68), Foucault's interpretation of biopower still informs and inspires the thinking of many feminists such as Barbara Ehrenreich, Deirdre English, and Ruth Hubbard. In For Her Own Good:

Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women, Ehrenreich and English explain how male experts (from hospital doctors to college professors) purport to “help” women in all kinds of systems of biopower. The bodies of these “helpless” women are defined and controlled by the subjects and institutions of patriarchy. In her book, The Politics of Women's Biology, Hubbard offers a detailed depiction about how patriarchy controls the education and employment of women in the sciences and how the prevailing prejudices make privileges inaccessible to women. Following these studies, Foucault's theory of biopower is used to think through the manner in which the imperial Japanese military used the bodies of the commandeered comfort women to serve the needs of the patriarchal ideology in Japan and the countries under Japanese occupation.

When feminist scholars talk about the “gendered body,” they use the theories of

Judith Butler. Butler discussed how war makes life precarious for everyone. She clarified that life is not stripped bare of its social frames of reference and relations of power when it becomes precarious (2009: 51). Life becomes precarious when people

are pushed out of their customary lifestyle and severed from all previous relations of equilibrium and empowerment. Clearly, the commandeered comfort women were taken out of their normal lives by the occupation military and were turned into sex slaves against their will as soon as they were stripped of all control over their own bodies.

This dissertation project postulates that the commandeered comfort women were forced to experience a precarious life and to accept “a range of perspectives” that were not their own (2009: 53). Their bodies and testimonies, which manifest the physical and psychological wounds and scars from that era, merit a closer study.

Judith Butler's theory of performativity is also relevant. In Butler's words, performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate “act,” but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice” (Bodies 2) by which feminine essence is displayed organically in the performances of bodies, such as dressing and makeup. In other words, gender performativity pinpoints how gender is articulated, expressed, and performed by everyone under the demand of the patriarchal system. Butler's theories are effective to display the interpretation of women bodies and how women performed their sexualities during the Second World War and the postwar era. Both the theatrical reenactments and the politicized debates about the plight of the comfort women are

“performative” while some of them are clearly “fabrications” manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means (136). The comfort

women were forced to perform “femininity” under the patriarchal system of the

Japanese military. The human condition of these women explains, in part, why sexual slavery is a symptom of patriarchy and how gender is made (or manufactured) to serve social demands.

It is for this reason that there are hardly any analytical accounts about the manner, in which plays and performances stage the issues of the comfort women mainly in theatre, but also in public squares. Elizabeth W. Son is the only scholar in performances studies who discussed some of the plays and productions about comfort women. She examined how the comfort women issues were interpreted and adapted for theatrical presentation by both traditional and innovative theatre companies in South

Korea.

In her article “Korean Trojan Women: Performing Wartime Sexual Violence,”

Son analyzed Aida Karlic's production of Euripides’ The Trojan Women, a nonrealistic adaptation that mixed Greek tragedy with the Korean pansori singing and testimonies.

She argued that “the re-visioning of these Korean cultural forms, such as the use of cloth in the ritual scene, offers a symbolic reclamation of violated bodies while providing a redressive space for the audience to witness the long history of wartime sexual violence against women” (369). In Son’s opinion, Karlic tried to demonstrate how the history of military sexual slavery is an on-going occurrence and has become

an international narrative shared by many theatrical producers and their audiences.

Son’s research interests focus solely on the issue of violence against women, especially on the comfort women. Her work utilizes performance theories (both Greek and Korean) to analyze plays and productions that make audiences aware of the sexual violence against women.

In her article “Transpacific Acts of Memory: The Afterlives of Hanako,” Son discusses the different versions of Chumgmi Kim's Hanako (1999). The play was revised twice, and its two versions were staged in different countries: The Comfort

Women (2004) in New York and Nabi (2005-9) in South Korea, Toronto and Vancouver.

Son points out two important characteristics of Hanako to explain its significance. On the one hand, Hanako brings “these two histories into conversation —the conscription of Korean colonial subjects into the Japanese Imperial Army and the American bombings of Japan during World War II.” On the other hand, “the play challenges this discourse of shame and presents survivors as dignified people and as people who are integral to the social movement” (268-9). Son's discussion on these two versions of the same play have proven helpful for the analysis of similar plays and performances in this dissertation project.

For those performances that take place in public squares, the research questions are guided by the theoretical analyses of Baz Kershaw. In The Politics of Performance.

Kershaw argues that it is more “useful to investigate the theatrical and the performative in the political” rather than to search for the political in theatre” (256). Kershaw understands political protest as an action which becomes increasingly theatricalized not only because of its own rhetorical strategies but because of the media attention that it attracts. It is his understanding of political protest as a social performance that will guide the analysis of the performative aspects of political speeches and activist rallies about the comfort women – especially the so-called “Wednesday Demonstrations” – which allows the South Koreans to perform their nationalist causes in public – literally in the streets. Political protest is viewed as a theatricalized performance enacted before television crews, and the line of questioning and analysis in this dissertation project demonstrates that public protest is not simply a symptom of social instability but also a means to initiate a new kind of action-based dialogue in society (Kershaw 273).

Also relevant to the analysis is the work of Diana Taylor, professor of

Performance Studies and Spanish at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Taylor's

Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's Dirty War, was instrumental for discussing the vital connection between the bodies of the victims and the bodies of the agents of Japanese imperialism and Korean or Chinese nationalism. Taylor analyzes the corporeal suffering of the victims at four different levels: 1) the conditions of existence, 2) the strategies of terror, 3) the strategies of

resistance; and 4) the disavowal of death (140). Especially helpful to this dissertation project was the way Taylor explains how the bodies of the victims became national icons. Her line of questioning and reasoning is useful for analyzing the case of comfort women. Their bodies, which were victimized during the war, became the sites of public debate in postwar years. This dissertation project discusses how their bodies were put through a similar process: they were “hidden bodies” in the files of the Japanese military before they “disappeared” during the Cold War era and then reemerged as national icons of suffering.

Studies such as the above are helpful for problematizing and discussing the experiences of the comfort women during and after the Second World War in a meaningful and constructive way. From all of the above, it is clear that there are many performance studies scholars - like Kershaw and Taylor - who have done research on the topic of political protests and disappearing bodies. Several researchers such as

Schmidt, Soh, and Stetz work on the issues of comfort women in the fields of political science studies, legal studies, and history. Except for Son, there are no scholars who focus on the theatrical and public performances about the comfort women. This dissertation project analyzes Son’s work to this date and then proceeds to fill a massive gap in our knowledge about the theatrical performances of both actors and politicians

who dramatize the politicized dialogue about the comfort women. This dissertation project takes the discussion about the comfort women to another level.

This dissertation project focuses on the theatrical representations of Korean,

Chinese and Taiwanese comfort women. It focuses on performances sponsored by museums in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and China for the following reasons: Korea was the country from which the Japanese extracted most of the women and dragged them into this form of slavery. China was the country to which the Japanese brought the comfort women and created the largest number of comfort stations. Taiwan was the country which, due to its geopolitical situation in East Asia, played a significant role in articulating the issue of the comfort women in postwar years. Last but not least, Japan was the country that masterminded the victimization of these women and tried to destroy the records of their enslavement and abuse.

This dissertation project discusses a wide variety of cultural materials related to the saga of the comfort women in East Asia. The most important or controversial pieces of theatrical performance and political performance in four countries (Japan, China,

South Korea, and Taiwan) are analyzed. Each chapter starts from a general discussion of how the issue of comfort women was staged and curated in each of the four counties from 1990 till 2018. Then the analysis focuses on those cases that articulate how nationalism was formulated through the issue of comfort women, and, at the same time,

how the issue of comfort women was exploited to serve nationalist agendas. Each chapter examines how these performances and their ideological underpinnings served nationalist narratives. The focus of this project is on the process by which in postwar times national politics and gender politics re-humanized” these sex slaves and turned their private stories into public discourse through theatrical and other performances.

This dissertation project has five chapters that collect, examine and discuss data that address the following two questions: how and why the personal stories of the comfort women were made public memories and were introduced into the national narratives of the above four countries in postwar years. What was the ideology (and its rhetoric) that justified the transfer of the stigma from the victims to the perpetrators and demanded reparations in postwar years?

In Chapter One, such terms as “comfort stations” and “comfort women” are defined, and the history of the comfort women is summarized according to the available data. The relevant literature on the topic is reviewed in the context of the two major investigative questions set for this study in an effort to identify the need for additional research about the representation of the comfort women in theatres, museums, and other public spaces.

Chapter Two examines the mainstream Japanese perspective on the comfort women and uses the Yushukan Museum in the temple of Yasukuni Jinja as a case study.

In addition to the mainstream Japanese perspective, this chapter also includes a secondary Japanese perspective on the comfort women which assumes responsibility for all war crimes (including the plight of the comfort women). This secondary perspectives is best articulated in the stage play, The Eye Holds the Truth and in the work of the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace in Tokyo. These two perspectives are in conflict and the conflict shows in an exemplary way how the issues of the comfort women are framed and discussed by nationalist ideologues in postwar years.

Chapter Three focuses on the work of the Ama Museum in Taipei, and it analyzes two political controversies: a) the debate about Yoshinori Kobayashi’s book,

On Taiwan (translated into Chinese and published in 2001) and b) the debate about a

“Minor” Modification in the Textbooks of Secondary Education in Taiwan (2015) which shows how the Taiwanese authorities dealt with the issue of Comfort Women and how the Taiwanese students responded to it.

Chapter Four discusses Hansol Jung’s play, Among the Dead (2017), which deals with the postwar social and political circumstances of the Comfort Women survivors in South Korea. The chapter also analyzes the so-called “Wednesday

Demonstrations” that are held outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul and it details the

work of the War & Women’s Human Rights Museum in Seoul regarding the issue of the South Korean Comfort Women.

Chapter Five focuses on how the Chinese government recognized and formulated the issue of Comfort Women in order to educate the Chinese. The chapter also analyzes how two plays, Chen Ding’s Sarah (1930-1941), and Li-Quan Wang’s

Comfort Station (1940) raised public consciousness and initiated discussions and protests regarding the predicament of the Comfort Women. The second play was staged in the Museum of the Site of Liji Lane Comfort Station, which marks the site one of the comfort stations in Nanjing. The discussion also includes the performative activities of a major museum which is called The Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing

Massacre by Japanese Invaders.

Chapter Two: Conflicting narratives about the Comfort Women in Japan

Imperial Japan expansionist agenda began in 1868 during the Meiji Restoration and ended at the end of the Second World War. Their revised Constitution, which was ratified on May 3, 1947, symbolizes a turn in their strategic plans for the postwar years especially during the cold-war period. Prior to its defeat in 1945 Imperial Japan was a militarized society and a colonial power that was forced to demilitarize and to abandon it colonies on continental South Eastern Asia. The most critical factor that made Emperor Hirohito surrender Japan to the allied forces was the atomic bombs detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki killing over 130,000 Japanese civilians instantly. The Japanese Instrument of Surrender was signed on the deck of battleship

Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945.

This chapter examines how the Japanese in postwar years commemorated their wars from the medieval times to the present through the construction of several temples

(such as Yasukuni Jinja) and war museums (such as the Yushukan Museum, which is supported by government funds, and the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace, which is supported by private funds). It also examines how theatre responded to accusations of war crimes perpetrated by the Japanese with such plays as Watanabe

Yoshiharu’s The Eye Holds the Truth which offers a different perspective on the way the Comfort Women were treated by the Japanese. The chapter discusses the conflicting perspectives between Japanese nationalists and Japanese liberals.

The Comfort Women as presented in The Eye Holds the Truth

The Eye Holds the Truth is an extraordinary play both in terms of form and content. It exemplifies a growing, but yet minor, perspective among the Japanese regarding the past and present of the Comfort Women both in the Comfort Stations of the Imperial Japanese military during the Second World War and in China, Korea, and

Taiwan in the postwar years. The play tells the history of the Comfort Women from the perspective of the Japanese; but it also takes issue against Japanese imperialism and colonialism in the first part of the 20th century. The play allows us to understand what exactly the Comfort Women meant to the Japanese during the war and continue to mean to the Japanese after the war.

I will first discuss the testimonies of the Comfort Women in the play and the

Japanese directors’ address to the audience at the end of the performance. During his address the stage director admitted that his father was classified as a Class-B war

criminal by the Tokyo Tribunal in 1948 and he attested to the fact that the Japanese military treated the Comfort Women as sex slaves. Then I will discuss how the Japanese soldiers used a surveillance system to physically control the Comfort Women, and how the physical suffering of the Comfort Women was transformed into a psychological trauma and a social stigma in the patriarchal societies of the colonized countries. The play is written for a solo performance and its narrative weaves the sexual ordeal of three

Comfort Women – two Koreans (Pak Young Sim and Yi Yoon Soo) and one Chinese

(Shao Lan Wei) – as well as one male child (Shang Shun Ruo) who was born to a

Chinese Comfort Woman because she had been raped by several Japanese soldiers.

The Eye Holds the Truth, is a six-act play that was co-written by Japanese actress Yokoi Kazuko and her husband, Watanabe Yoshiharu, who is also the director of the play. They took their play on a tour in 2009 and performed it in major cities such as Shanghai, Nanjing, New York, and San Francisco. In Preface to the play, Kazuko explained that her father was a businessman who traded with the Imperial Japanese army, and that she was haunted by feelings of guilt towards her neighbor (a Korean salesman) and her friend Keiko (a Japanese woman whose father and brother had been conscripted). Keiko had suffered greatly during the war. The play became a means for airing her guilt and the truth. In the second act, Kazuko plays the part of Yi Yoon Soo, and in the third act, the part of Pak Young Sim. Kazuko played both roles by using

expressive body language and by voicing the emotions felt by those two Comfort

Women. The sixth act, titled “Confession and Remorse,” begins with a short speech by

Kazuko and it ends with Yoshiharu who reveals to the audiences that his father was classified as a Class B war criminal by the International Military Tribunal in 1948.

Bothe Kazuko’s and Yoshiharu’s stories make the audience realize the severe impact that the war had on the Japanese men and women as well.

Violence on the Performative Body

The main character is Pak Young Sim. She was born in a small village in South

Pyongan, Korea, in December 1921. When her mother passed away, her father remarried and had two more daughters. Pak was a hard-working teenager in her father’s farm. She was seventeen years old when she was kidnapped by a Japanese military police officer in 1939. She and some other girls from her village were taken to the

Pyongyang train station in Korea. They took the train to Pukou where they changed trains and ended up in Nanjing, China. Pak was forced to stay in the Kinsui House, a comfort station near the Japanese army base. The Kinsui House stands to this day and

Pak’s room (Room No. 19) is on the second floor.

Figure 1. Pak Young Sim’s room (Room No. 19, second floor) in the Kinsui House renamed the Museum of the Liji Lane Comfort Station, Nanjing, China, 2018

In The Eye Holds the Truth, Pak (as played by Kazuko) expresses her feelings of fear and humiliation to the audience. “My life has been filled with agony,” she says,

“Fear rips my body apart as I groan and wail uncontrollably”. Pak's sentiments correspond to those of rape victims:

a violent invasion into the interior of one's body represents the most severe

attack imaginable upon the intimate self and dignity of a human being. It results

in physical pain, loss of dignity, an attack on her identity, and a loss of self-

determination over her own body. (Seifert 55)

Pak felt hurt and humiliated and dehumanized while she was being raped and was being treated as a sex slave. The continuous threat of repeated rapes is an effective way for intimidating women. “Sexual sadism arises with astonishing rapidity in ground warfare, when the penis becomes justified as a weapon in a logistical reality of unarmed noncombatants, encircled and trapped. Rape of an doubly object dehumanized – as woman, as enemy – carries its own terrible logic. In one act of aggression, the collective spirit of women and of the nation is broken, leaving a reminder long after the troops depart. ” (Brownmiller 181)

On the stage, Kazuko angrily shook her fist, and released Pak's pain and humiliation though a loud cry. The audience also sensed the violence done on Pak through Kazuko’s body language and gestures. In addition, the bio-power that the

Japanese soldiers had sustained and inflicted, stemmed from their military training that had already dehumanized them and had made the dehumanization of others, including that of the Comfort Women, possible and permissible in their eyes. “The dehumanizing

process ranged from all-pervasive, arbitrary abuse, the daily static, to the extreme

'testing of mettle', when soldiers had to execute prisoners by bayonet or sword” (Hicks

53).

Figure 2. Yokoi Kazuko in the role of Pak Young Sim in Watanabe Yoshiharu’s play, The Eye Holds the Truth (2009) on tour, San Francisco, California, 2009.

Under the pernicious influence of their military training and war experiences, the Japanese soldiers felt it was normal to bully, beat, and abuse all foreign women, including the Comfort Women who served their sexual needs. Pain and pleasure are two aspects of sexuality and “sexuality is primarily a matter of associating psychological or emotional states like pleasure and pain” (Langer 52). It can be said that violence became an alternative to sexual intercourse for the Japanese soldiers to

affirm their manliness. “By representing the female body as thoroughly saturated with sexuality and inherently pathological, a certain knowledge was established which allowed the regulation of desire and sexual relations with the ultimate aim of discipline and control” (McNay 41). When sexuality was paired with violence, it both controlled and “disciplined” the female victims of the Japanese soldiers. “Corporeal violence and looming threats of violence have accompanied and bolstered these forms of control

(Spade 107).

In sum, the Japanese army controlled the Comfort Women through violence, and this control demonstrates Foucault’s point that the power of men over their female victims is similar to the institutionalized forms of violence that totalitarian governments use over their subjects. For Foucault, all violence is attached to relations of power, but not all relations of power necessarily entail violence (Flynn 244-5). In Foucault’s words, the comfort station system, allowed male sexual violence to overpower these women.

When Pak initially refused to “serve” the Japanese soldiers, her Korean managers beat her up and locked her in the “penalty room” (sic) in the basement where she was starved to submission. Comfort stations enforced discipline through a coercive form of sexuality management enforced on the Conform Women by hired female managers. Pak describes the effect of this management most graphically in the play:

“She [the manager] angrily put me in the [penalty] room, undressed me and let me lie down [before she started] beating me badly.” Pak's story weaves together the histories of Korea, China, and Japan during the Second World War.

Pak informs her audience that she was forced to work in the Kinsui House for three years. She could not escape her predicament because she was heavily guarded day and night. In Foucault's words, a comfort station like Kinsui House was "the protected place of disciplinary monotony". It embodied the discipline that life in the military forced upon the soldiers and the women transforming them into “docile bodies”.

Foucault perceptively noted that any form of "discipline sometimes requires enclosure, the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself"

(Foucault 141).

Comfort stations solved the sexual needs of the Japanese soldiers and forced the

Comfort Women to become sex slaves and to serve their “customers” as hard as they could. It is clear that "the aim is to derive the maximum advantages and to neutralize the inconveniences, as the forces of production become more concentrated" (Foucault

142). The concentrating forces implement the effect by building the institutional power and controlling the “docile bodies”. The way men practice violence against women is not incidental, but has structural and large-scale political aspects. (Oksala 72). The

recruitment of young females to work as Comfort Women involved an additional level of violence.

It could be said that all of these women became comfort women by force.

More concretely, they are divided into two categories: those forcibly taken

from the beginning and those deceptively taken with false offers of good

jobs but later forced into sexual service. Those forcibly taken from the

beginning were taken mainly by soldiers or army policemen. Those taken

by false offers were taken by civilians. (Lee 13)

Lee’s description above corresponds to Foucault’s definition of “discipline power” which is afforded to soldiers and policemen. Foucault’s “discipline power” is strikingly similar to his later definition of violence: it is power that acts directly upon bodies; it oversteps the rules of law and right, and is addressed to “men-as-bodies;” it is exercised through constant surveillance, but also through more manifestly violent means such as physical coercion (Oskala 104). The Japanese military used “discipline power” to establish comfort stations and an obedient labor force of women in all the areas occupied by Imperial Japan. It could be said that sexual violence was condoned and protected as a “legal practice” by the Imperial troops and the government they

represented. One way to legalize violence is to professionalize violence and turn it into a bureaucracy with its own rational (Ron 283-4).

The commandeering of young women to serve as Comfort Women was also a way of making over 200,000 women face a precarious life during wartime. The relationship between wartime experiences and the “precarious life” is analyzed in

Butler’s Frames of War. “Encountering a life as precarious is not a raw encounter, one in which life is stripped bare of all its usual interpretations, appearing to us outside all relations of power” (Butler 51). A man or a woman encounters the precarious life when his/her life is pushed out of his/her ordinary comfort zone and lifestyle and is severed from all previous relations of safety and empowerment. The Comfort Women were deprived of all previous relations when they were shipped to the comfort stations and encountered the “precarious life” in all its raw bareness during the Second World War.

War sustains its practices through acting on the senses, crafting them to

apprehend the world selectively, deadening affect in response to certain

images and sounds, and enlivening affective responses to others. This is

why war works to undermine a sensate democracy, restricting what we

can feel, disposing us to feel shock and outrage in the face of one

expression of violence and righteous coldness in the face of another (Butler 52)

Pak’s wartime experience of the “precarious life” forced her to lose control and power over her own body. It can be said that her body in life and on stage is “outside itself, in the world of others, in a space and time it does not control” (Butler 52).

The Daily Performative Body

Pak was given a Japanese name and Japanese clothes (kimono) when she arrived at the Kinsui House. “Korean comfort women, considered subjects of the Japanese

Empire, were often given Japanese robes or uniforms by the military. On important

Japanese holidays, they were required to dress up for the entertainment of the soldiers”

(Qiu 70). Pak was “repackaged” to perform like a “Japanese” prostitute by acquiring the mannerisms of a Japanese woman. “Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means.” (Butler 136). Pak's body was asked to perform the role of a submissive, gentle Japanese woman.

The feminine worldview of The Eye Holds the Truth presents a Japanese version of “gender performativity.” Performativity must be understood not as a singular or

deliberate “act,” but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice” (Butler 1993: 2).

Kazuko's performance on stage demonstrates the feminine “essence” of the Japanese woman. Kazuko played three female characters in the play who talk about their female life experiences. The play becomes a female narrative history presented to the audience by a female actor. Kazuko's body becomes an icon that represents the tormented bodies of the Comfort Women and she would easily say that “my body is the fabric into which all objects are woven, and it is at least in relation to the perceived world, the general instrument of my comprehension” (Merleau-Ponty 235).

Pak’s subjugated body became the occasion and the condition of its productivity, and was therefore exploited by the Japanese as a productive vehicle. Her body is not two bodies (one subjected and one productive), but just one body that moves between subjection and productivity (Butler 2004: 187). Butler offers another lens of realizing the female body as a subjected and productive machine to complement Foucault's understanding of the docile body. As Butler aptly notes in Frames of War, “war is precisely an effort to minimize precariousness for some and to maximize it for others”

(54). The Comfort Women, had a hard time surviving their precarious life, while the

Japanese soldiers were experiencing a different form of precarious life in the battlefield.

If Pak’s body is “where we encounter a range of perspectives that may or may not be our own” (Bultler 2004: 53), then Pak's precarious life was inscribed on her body as

wounds and scars. In the play, the victimized women speak out and the male perpetrators confess. However, the play seen it its entirety (with the Preface and the

Confession) presents a double perspective and a tragic conflict from which escape is impossible for both the victims and the victimizers.

Next to plays such as The Eye Holds the Truth, museum exhibits complement the changing views of the Japanese about the war atrocities. For example, the Women’s

Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM), which opened in 2006 (sixty years after the defeat of Imperial Japan), has as a part of its educational mission to support the cause of the victimized Comfort Women through exhibits and publications.

Our goals: 1) to apply gender justice to all issues of wartime sexual violence,

starting with the “comfort women;” 2) to document experiences of sexual

violence, to probe its causes, to bring its perpetrators to justice; 3) to act with

the People, not with the State; 4) to be a place for women working together for

a peaceful world; and 5) to promote solidarity through global civil society.

(WAM program)

WAM argues its goal is “to act with the People, not with the State” in the fight for justice for women and for ending the sexual violence against women. Clearly WAM is in line with the message of The Eye Holds the Truth in the sense that the Japanese

people regret the victimization of the Comfort Women regardless of the past and present positions of the Japanese state. The distinction is significant when the state controls the people rather than the people controlling the state. So, the message from both the stage play and the museum program exemplifies how some Japanese – especially feminists and liberals – interpret their wartime experiences in postwar years.

They divide the Imperial state from the Japanese people to explain the wartime atrocities and apologize to the war victims even though they themselves were not the perpetrators of any war crimes. Japanese feminists and liberals are in the minority. The textbooks for Primary and Secondary Education continue to present the Japanese people as the victims, not as the perpetrators, of war crimes. So far, no official apology has been issued by any of the Japanese governments to the Comfort Women survivors.

The Yushukan Museum and the Spirit of Japanese Nationalism

The exhibits of the Yushukan Museum in the Yasukuni Jijna in Tokyo promote the traditional, mainstream patriotic beliefs about the Second World War and deny all responsibility for the crimes perpetrated against the Comfort Women. The Yushukun

Museum was established in 1882 (Meiji 15) and its mission is to preserve the testament

and the relics of the enshrined deities of the Yasukuni Shrine who devoted their lives to build a “peaceful nation”. In a sense the museum is the cultural manifestation of the religious shrine. Both the museum and shrine share the strong national religion (Shinto).

Figure 3. Yasukuni Jinja (Yasukuni Shrine), Tokyo, Japan, 2018.

It is important that “Shinto” is understood in the context of both the shrine and its museum. In her book, Beyond the Mushroom Cloud, Yuki Miyamoto uses a term

“emperor cult” to explain the innovative Shinto spirit.

The ‘‘emperor cult,’’ in which the Meiji administration demanded

veneration of the emperor as part of a divine lineage and himself a living

kami — a veneration that would eventually stimulate a will to self-sacrifice

among Japanese soldiers. This self-sacrificial will was abetted by an emerging

narrative of commemoration for fallen soldiers, in which the spirits of those

who died on behalf of the emperor were enshrined and elevated to an eirei, or

heroic kami. (Miyamoto 55)

Miyamoto’s account presents Shinto practices as an effort to build up a lineage between the gods and the Japanese emperors. Also, it shows how Shinto was revised during the Meiji Administration for the purposes of patriotic propaganda. For example, anyone who would sacrifice himself for the nation and the emperor, he would be enshrined and would become a heroic kami.

There were two categories of kami in the early version of Shinto according to

Joseph M. Kitagawa. The first category included the spirits that resided in nature. The second category included actual historical figures, the spirits (tama) of the dead, and especially those of noblemen who became kami” (Kitagawa 14). However, Shinto was exploited during the Meiji Restoration in the late 19th century and it was turned into an effective ideological tool to unite the modern Japanese nation-state under an emperor who was seen as a vital link between the present and the past. The emperor as the head of the Japanese nation was written in the first Constitution of the Empire of Sun.

Miyamoto argues that two sholars, Norinaga Motoori (1730 - 1801) and Atsutane

Hirata (1774 – 1843), were instrumental in reshaping Shinto.

Motoori’s thought, with its emphasis on locating Japan’s ‘‘authenticity’’ in the

emperor and his divine lineage, stimulated an emerging nationalistic sentiment

that formed the ground work for the Meiji Restoration, which overturned the

shogunate and restored the reign of the emperor. (Miyamoto 53)

Motoori reinforced the imperial lineage by locating it into the kami narrative of the Shinto; and Hirata affirmed the uniqueness of Japanese culture. Thomas Kasulis clearly explains how Hirata managed to do that. “First, by focusing on a single deity in

Japanese mythology, Ame-no-minaka-nushi, as the creator of the islands of Japan,

Hirata places Japan at the origin of the world” (Kasulis 123-4). That is to say, Hirata turned Japan into the motherland of kami, and developed the concept of the afterlife by claiming that Okuninushi, a mythological deity, judged the dead and rewarded the good ones with a merry afterlife as kami. It is important to note that, in traditional Shinto, death is impure and the idea of an afterlife is absent. It is essential for this dissertation project to see how Hirata’s theory about the afterlife strengthened the growth of Shinto.

The theories of Motoori and Hirata, which had set the emperor as the head

of Japan, were used by the Meiji Restoration in 1868 that ended the 200-year rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and Emperor Mutsuhito Meiji.

To accomplish these ends, the feudal system was abolished, a judicial system

was instituted, and a military force was established. In order to inculcate the

idea of a new ‘‘nation’’ (kokumin) in the minds of the Japanese people, the Meiji

government produced a Shinto ideology deriving from the thought of Motoori

and Hirata, placing the emperor at its head. This Shintoist teaching was

combined with moral teachings from Confucianism to create subjects of a new

nation-state. (Miyamoto 55)

In Shinto the emperor was now worshipped as a kami and those dedicated

Japanese men who sacrificed themselves for the emperor and the nation also became kami after death. Emperor Meiji founded the Shokonsha Shrine in Tokyo in 1869. It was renamed Yasukuni Jinja (Shrine) in 1879 (Yasukuni means “to preserve peace through combat”) and it has operated as a propaganda tool in the hands of the Japanese government ever since. Its mission is summed up in a “poem” composed by Emperor

Meiji himself in 1874: “I assure those of you who fought and died for your country that your names will live forever at this shrine.” The shrine commemorated and honored the

achievements of those “who dedicated their precious lives to their country” (The

Yasukuni Jinja webpage).

The Yasukuni Shrine asserted and advertised two major privileges for the

Japanese:

A) Regardless of their social status and professional rank, Japanese men were seen as equals to the emperor and they were worshipped as venerable kami. Those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for their nation during national crises (such as the

Boshin War, the Seinan War, the Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese Wars, the First

World War, the Manchurian Incident, the China Incident, and the Second World War known as the Greater East Asian War). Some of these wars are described as “incidents” to detract attention from such terms as “invasion,” “armed aggression” and “incursion”.

Soldiers were told that they would become national gods of the ancestral land

(sokoku kuni) and worshiped at the shrine if they gave up their lives by serving

the emperor in war. To be made a deity inhabiting the Yasukuni Shrine was a

special honor bestowed only on national heroes. (Harootunian 149)

In this spirit, all of the above mentioned wars were not presented to the Japanese people as imperialist aggressions that resulted in the occupation and colonization of

Korea, Taiwan and China, but rather as an effort to educate the “uncivilized people” in those countries to the prospect of having “a greater East Asia.”

B) According to Shinto, respect for the dead is best expressed when we treat them as if they were alive. The rituals at the Yasukuni Jinja included offering meals and thanks to the dead daily. However, twice a year (in the spring and the autumn), the

Imperial family attended these rituals at the Yasukuni Shrine to reinforce the connections between the shrine, the emperor and the kami. At the shrine “the emperor cult provided grounds for the deification of all Japanese soldiers who died in service to the empire” (Miyamoto 56). The Emperor had become the emblem of the Shinto doctrine and of the Japanese nation.

The Yusukan Museum, which was founded in 1882, is the first military museum in Japan. It exhibits over 100,000 pieces – from paintings to weapons. It is the second museum in Japan that was designed by a European architect. It had a two-story central tower flanked by two symmetrical single-story wings with smaller towers at each end.

It was designed by Giovanni Vicenzo Cappelletti, an Italian architect who came to

Japan in 1876 to teach architecture at the imperial school of art (Akiko 58).

The museum is divided into four zones. The great exhibit in the first zone includes shocking weapons collected from WWII battlefields – such as the human torpedo Kaiten, the rocket-powered glider Ohka, a zero fighter, and a Model C56

Locomotive No.31 – intended to inspire the admiration and the appreciation of the

Japanese visitors. These war items are presented in a positive light that minimizes the death and destruction that they caused (Yoshida 151). For example, Model C56

Locomotive No.31, which was used during the Second World War in Thailand, is presented without any mention to the 40,000 war prisoners who died while were laying the tracks for the Tai-Burma Railway.

Figure 4. Nippon Ling (Japanese Zero) Yushukan Museum, 1st floor, 1st zone, Tokyo, Japan, 2018.

Poems, swords, and armors are displayed in the second zone which is designed to express the “spirit of the samurai” in the context of the Shinto doctrine, stressing loyalty, courage, and self-sacrifice. The third zone includes wall-mounted posters that

explain modern Japanese history from the Meiji Restoration to the Greater East Asian

War, as well as mementos that belonged to those Japanese soldiers who died in battle and became kami. The last zone, which is labeled “The Sentiments of the Noble Spirits” presents, through numerous photos and notes, the achievements and the deification of the kami– mainly soldiers, workers, and child-bombers – who died for Japan. The exhibits, which are arranged into four zones, are controversial for their “conspicuous absence of the enemy.” They commemorate the glorious moments of war by erasing

“all traces of trauma” (Breen 148, 152, 161).

Figure 5. The human torpedo Kaiten, Yushukan Museum, 1st floor, 1st zone, Tokyo, Japan, 2018.

The Yushukan is one of a number of institutions and individuals that have

been attempting to write Japan’s war history in a more positive light over the

past twenty years and to provide the base for a more patriotic education of

Japanese children. Through its association with the Yasukuni Shrine, the

Yushukan has become the de facto institutional center for the articulation of

patriotic public memory of the Asia-Pacific War as a historical narrative. (O’

Dwyer 152)

It has been noted by many scholars that among all the existing war museums and kamikaze museums in Japan, the Yasukuni museum seems to be the bluntest and least apologetic purveyor of the hardline revisionists of the Pacific War” (Yoshida 154).

It serves to the interpretation of the nation in the context of Shinto and imperial authority.

It is evident that the ideological orientation of the Yushukan Museum is contradicted by the culture represented in recent plays such as The Eye Holds the Truth. This new postwar perspective could be summed up as follows:

The Tokyo Trial View, in brief is that Japan was guilty since1931 of plotting

and waging an aggressive war in Asia. But the revisionists argue that the war

was in fact a tragic and indeed noble struggle for national survival and the

liberation of Asia from Western colonialism. (Buruma 161)

It is all too clear that many Japanese continue to be in denial of their war crimes even though plays such as the above call for a full admittance of their guilt and for compensating their victims for the suffering their endured in Japanese hands. However, as Igarashi aptly suggests, the past actions of Japan can be resolved collectively through government action, not individually through artistic endeavors. “The legacies of the

Asia Pacific War demand that the citizens of Japan address the issues of responsibility as a nation” (208). This also explains why the women in Korea, Taiwan and China who had been victimized as Comfort Women do not accept the compensation of the Asia

Women’s Fund. This Fund is a private fund, not a government fund.

This chapter has explained why and how plays like The Eye Holds the Truth represent dissenting voices that go against the enshrined nationalist ideology of the

Kushukan Museum. The Eye Holds the Truth documents the suffering of the Comfort

Women, while my explanation shows how and why the issue of the Comfort Women is a minority issue that is not recognized by the mainstream nationalists in Japan. The historical fact shows that Korean, Taiwanese and Chinese Comfort Woman was forced to dress like a Japanese woman and to perform sexual favors according to the desires of a militant patriarchal system maintained by the Imperial troops. Japanese women

were and continue to be an influential resource in the formation of the Japanese nation- state and their change of mind about the Comfort Women could prove to be instrumental in the rewriting of history and in reshaping the future. This effort of reorienting the Japanese public to take a more responsible position towards the suffering of the Comfort Women is represented by the Women’s Active Museum on

War and Peace.

Japanese society has so far avoided to hold the Emperor responsible for the war and the war crimes. The Yushukan Museum and the Yasukuni Jinja are the leading cultural centers that glorify the past and deify the emperor and the kami by reference to

Shinto. The exhibits in the Yushukan Museum and plays like The Eye Holds the Truth are at the opposite sides of the wide spectrum of Japanese public opinion in the way they interpret the Second World War and its victims, including the kami and the

Comfort Women.

Chapter Three: Political performances about Comfort Women in Taiwan

This chapter examines how the Ama Museum dealt with the issue of the

Comfort Women in Taiwan from 1991 to 2018. The Ama Museum is the first museum about the Comfort Women in Taiwan. The focus of the analysis in this chapter is on how the Ama Museum works as a feminist space to practice feminism and to rethink

Taiwanese nationalism. The chapter also examines Taiwanese attitudes towards the

Comfort Women from 2001 to 2015, especially those public debates that used the abuse of the Comfort Women as a means for expressing Taiwanese nationalism.

The first Comfort Woman to talk about her ordeal in public was Kim Hak-sun

(1924-1997), a South-Korean. She spoke about her war experiences in 1991 when she was 65. A year later, three more victimized women came forward taking advantage of the Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation (TWRF) which had established a special telephone line for all Comfort Women survivors. The number of the Taiwanese women who contacted TWRF and revealed their wartime ordeal as Comfort Women quickly rose to fifty-eight.

Following the revelations of these women, the Taiwanese government organized a special committee to manage, in collaboration with TWRF, the cases of the

surviving Taiwanese Comfort Women. The local government in Taipei and Kaohsiung in 1995 began to provide a monthly stipend of TWD 14,800 to each victimized woman; and the TWRF special committee filed many lawsuits on behalf of these Comfort

Women against the Japanese government, demanding justice and compensation.

Taiwanese feminist scholars and activists contributed mightily to the rehabilitation of the Taiwanese comfort women. The Taiwanese Ministry of Foreign

Affairs, the Ministry of Interior, and the Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation provided a variety of services to help the victims receive medical care and financial reparations.

TWRF provided general assistance, including health care, group therapy, and legal consultation services. TWRF also organized public conferences where the victims would effectively speak about their traumatic experiences. Most importantly, TWRF's documentary, A Secret Buried for 50 Years (1995), was the pinnacle of their efforts to make public the individual stories of the Comfort Women.

In the documentary, audiences can see thirteen victims talk about their childhood, their sad wartime experiences, and their postwar financial predicament.

These women explain how the Japanese Army conscripted them and how they made it through the war. It is difficult for them to avoid expressing their anger and other emotions while they relate their stories. They often burst into tears during the interviews, and all of them demanded that the Japanese government should apologize to them. The

documentary becomes a departure point for many politicized performances about the

Comfort Women. By watching it, audiences have the opportunity to witness the tribulations of each woman. A Secret Buried for 50 Years won the Best Documentary

Award at the Golden Horse Film Festival in 1998, and it became a vital resource on the topic of Taiwanese Comfort Women. In a way, the documentary was a form of compensation for the Taiwanese Comfort Women for acknowledging and commemorating their unforgettable experiences. It also became a point of reference for all those who fight for women’s rights.

The issue of the Comfort Women was taken to a different level due to a change in the political climate in Taiwan from 2000 to 2008. The Nationalist Party of China

(also known as the Kuomintang and abbreviated as KMT) was defeated by Democratic

Progressive Party (DPP) in 2000. Chen Shui-bian was elected President of Taiwan, and for the first time in history, the KMT Party lost its ability to cooperate with the Chinese government. Chen Shui-bian regained power when he was elected President of Taiwan in 2004. However, for eight long years, Taiwan was trapped in the political chaos that ensued when three parties – i.e., the KMT, the People’s First Party, and New Party – were united to fight against DPP. During this period all efforts focused on the on-going fight between the Pan-blue Circle Party and the Pan-green Circle Party. The goal of the

Pan-blue Circle Party was to maintain friendly cooperation with China by recognizing

China as the mother nation of Taiwan. The goal of the Pan-green Circle Party was to assert the Taiwanese independence from China. The only valuable political performance on the topic of Comfort Women was a debate that was aroused by a

Japanese comic book, On Taiwan. The comic book, which twisted the facts about the

Taiwanese women, fastidiously argued that the Taiwanese Comfort Women willfully responded to call of Japan and offered themselves for sexual service to the Imperial troops because during that time Taiwan was steeped into Japanese culture and was governed by Japan.

A bi-partisan resolution about the Comfort Women issue was passed in 2008.

The resolution did not have any legal power, but was an effective political gesture to show the support of all political parties in Taiwan to the cause of the Comfort Women.

The bipartisan resolution states that [Tokyo] should do two things: 1) to directly apologize to the victims and compensate those who are still alive in order to restore the reputation and dignity of the Comfort Women; and 2) to take the advice of the UN

Commission on Human Rights and make the facts about the Comfort Women available to the next generation of Taiwanese. In effect, the bi-partisan resolution called for an apology, remuneration, and education. The resolution is significant for uniting partisan politicians and legislators. It is also significant for making a gesture (a performative statement) to Japan. This performative statement shows how the politicians transformed

the issue of the Comfort Women from a war crime to a social cause – even though they felt embarrassed by it.

TWRF and other feminist groups were at the forefront of the debate about the

Comfort Women in Taiwan in 2008. TWRF was clear about its mission – which was to offer Comfort Women an opportunity to heal and to rebuild their lives and their sense of self-worth.” TWRF’s main healing method was to help the victims share their traumatic experiences in group therapy. The goal was to help them regain their lost sense of dignity. The Taipei Women Rescue Foundation also offered the Comfort

Women practical assistance by educating them in legal matters and in helping them to file lawsuits against Japan. The documentary, Song of the Reed (2015), showed the effectiveness of TWRF in helping the Comfort Women who participated in its workshops. The issue of Comfort Women caught the attention of the public for ten years

(2008-2018). Taiwanese politicians utilized the performative aspects of this issue in order to express Taiwanese nationalism. The Textbook Debate in 2015 and the establishment of the Ama Museum in 2016 were two key developments. (“Ama” in

Taiwanese means “grandmother”).

In 1992, TWRF launched an island-wide campaign on behalf of the Comfort

Women, demanding reparations from the government of Japan. Japan did not officially apologize to the Comfort Women and did not make any reparations. Consequently,

TWRF has provided financial assistance and medical care for the aging Comfort

Women to this day. TWRF also collected 5,042 films and books about the Comfort

Women, as well as 730 artifacts for the Ama (Grandmothers’) Museum. The Ama

Museum opened its doors to the public in 2016. The mission of the Ama Museum was to educate the public about the need of social activism on behalf of the Comfort Women, and to empower younger generations of Taiwanese to fight for women's rights. Of course, part of this museum’s mission was to heal “the scars of history” and to

“transform their trauma into resilient action”.

Figure 6. The entrance of the Ama Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, 2018.

The Ama Museum has become the site in which the Taiwanese are educated about women’s issues by reinterpreting the past, reevaluating the present, and retooling its space to reach a wider audience (Malt 117). The Ama Museum is a historic building that was built in the European style in 1922. On the ground floor of this two-story building is a cafeteria where the paintings by Nu Wan, among other Comfort Women, are exhibited. Some of these paintings, like “Full Body Map”, “The Fire Within,” and

“Bonsai with Flower” are impressive.

Figure 7. Nu Wan’s painting, Full Body Map, Ama Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, 2018.

The opposite wall displays how the Taiwanese Comfort Women were recruited, the rooms they occupied in the overseas comfort stations, the accounts of the surviving

victims, the campaign launched by Taiwan, Korea, and China in 1991 to advocate the rights of the Comfort Women, the rampant sexual violence from the First to the Second

World War, and the women's rights movement. The exhibit is arranged to combine artistic presentation and historical explanation.

The life stories of three Comfort Women (Hua Lien, Nu Wan, Chung Sheng, and Tao Chen) are presented in Tree of Life, a painting by Cassie Lin. The painting hangs on the wall on the ground floor by the back yard of the museum. The tree of life also illustrates tears dropping and leaves falling.

On the first floor there is a “memory lane” which is dedicated to the Comfort

Women and is used to exhibit “Song of the Reed Walk.” The names of the Comfort

Women are projected on the floor by over a thousand transparent cylinders and 59 mental lamps, symbolizing the resilience of more than a thousand Taiwanese comfort women. When a visitor holds her hand underneath the light, the name of a Comfort

Woman is projected onto the visitor’s palm, suggesting that the name of that Comfort

Woman is in the visitor’s hands. However, the major exhibit on the first floor features the artistic works created by those Comfort Women who took part in the wellness workshops sponsored by TWRF. These wellness workshops were held regularly between 1996 and 2012 and resulted in 178 artifacts. Only 73 of these artifacts are in the museum, and 31 of them were on display in the museum in 2018.

There is also an audiovisual room where the visitor can see films about the

Comfort Women – from conference discussion panels to fora. The overall design of the museum is intended to facilitate the interaction between the visitors and the exhibited works. The only a permanent exhibit about the history of the Comfort Women is on the ground floor. It is clear that the museum is not conceived as a repository of the past, but as an interactive system that helps the visitors to “discover” the Comfort Women and

“experience” their history through sounds and images, making it difficult for them to forget their names and personal suffering. The museum lives up to its name as a “place to remember, heal, and embark on a journey towards resilience and truth” (Ama

Museum program).

Figure 8. The “mental lamps” project on the second floor of the Ama Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, 2018.

The Ama Museum is a space where women’s issues are allowed to be aired and resonate. French social theorist Luce Irigaray argues that “space is the medium through which the imaginary relationship between the self and the other is performed.” The

“imaginary” is a psychoanalytic term with social and symbolic significance, and as a consequence, in a male driven world, the female imaginary is constrained and not always real. Gillian Rose, who researched the distinction between real and unreal spaces, pointed out that no space is free from human intent, human desire, and human imagination (Mitchell 214). For Rose, a real space is fixed, concrete, and solid and, consequently, limiting. If the space is used as a stage for the performance of identity,

Rose and Irigaray suggest that what is performed is the space itself. Therefore, progressive feminists would seek out new forms of space to stage their resistance to patriarchy. These new forms of space should be multiple, composite, heterogeneous, indeterminate, making it difficult for the new space to be “completely described, defined, discoursed” (Rose 1997: 188). In view of the above, the Ama Museum is a composite space where women’s issues can be re-presented and performed.

Elizabeth Grosz, in an effort to identify the specs for a feminine space, borrowed the Greek term “chora” (χῶρα) that Plato used to define space (place or location). For

Grosz chora contains an irreducible, yet often overlooked, connection with the function

of femininity. Chora is a kind of feminine space which allows women to navigate freely without the surveillance of men. Following in the footsteps of Irigaray, Grosz argued that men have built a world for their purposes and in doing so, they sought to take up all social spaces for themselves. Women are thus contained within buildings they did not build, buildings that were not even built for them, and make them feel homelessness within their own homes (Grosz 55-6).

However, there are some spaces reserved for women. These spaces are not delimited by male design. The Ama Museum is one of them. It is a space designed to support femininity within a male-dominated world that surrounds it. The agency of the

Ama museum rests on the activities of the TWRF which helps women in need of assistance. The Ama museum is a space where the Comfort Women could heal their traumas by participating in its wellness workshops. It is a spiritual home for them, but also a solid platform for advocating the causes of the Comfort Women. In short, the

Ama Museum is a women’s space (chora) which gives Comfort Women agency through story-telling and exhibits.

The works exhibited have a female focus and the stories revolve around women’s issues. The Ama Museum as a “social space” serves to produce and preserve a feminine viewpoint” (Mitchell 217). It exists in juxtaposition to the comfort stations that were built all over East Asia by men to circumscribe and control the role that the

Comfort Women played during the Second World War by submitting their bodies to the desires of the Imperial Japanese troops and to the nationalist/imperialist agenda they served. The Ama museum became a social institution and as such it functioned as a catalyst for the empowerment of the Comfort Women (Malt 124).It presented the experiences of these women to the public, turning them into cultural memories for the community and into a critique of Imperial Japan.

The works exhibited in the Ama Museum continue to emphasize the personal wartime experiences of the Comfort Women and the rights of women. However, most of the exhibits focus on the lives of the Comfort Women during the postwar years. In other words, the Ama Museum displays how the Comfort Women survived during the war, but also how these women survivors lived in Taiwan, their home country, after the war. The Ama Museum presents a feminist critique of Japanese imperialism and

Taiwanese nationalism.

Although, admittedly, the museum’s primary mission is to address the medical and financial issues of the Comfort Women, over time in acquired a secondary mission to address masculine constructions of Taiwanese nationalism by exploring the relationship between public space and private sexuality. The “masculinization” of public spaces, which results from some form of policing men and women, requires the enforcement of disciplining (Rose 1993:37). There is an intimate relationship between

the social construction of space, the cultural construction of gender, and the experiences that men and women have. To some degree, these relationships affect “the very morphology of our physical bodies” (Mitchell 217). The bodies of the Comfort Women, which are displayed in exhibits of the Ama Museum, are taken-for-granted when they are utilized by the Taiwanese government for the purposes of nationalist propaganda.

The bodies of the Comfort Women were controlled and exploited by the Japanese who enforced a set of practices and came up with policies and rationales to legitimize them.

They were indispensable because they allowed the Japanese to implement a controlled insertion and utilization of the bodies of the Comfort Women into the machinery of production and reproduction in the comfort stations (Foucault 141).

The way the bodies of the Comfort Women were used by the imperial Japanese soldiers asserted and consolidated patriarchal power over these women who were foreign to the Japanese. Foucault's concept of biopower which helps explain how the bodies of the Comfort Women were trained to perform as docile and productive machines is taken up by Sawicki in his book, Disciplining Foucault:

Disciplinary Power is a knowledge of, and power over, the individual body – its

capacities, gestures, movements, location, and behaviors. Disciplinary practices

represent the body as a machine. They aim to render the individual both more

powerful, productive, useful, and docile. They are located within

institutions...but also at the micro-level of society in the everyday activities.

(Sawicki 67)

The sexual violence perpetrated against the bodies of the Comfort Women was an effective way to discipline them to the abuses of masculine power. Their bodies were forced to perform a sexual labor by the Japanese military and they contributed to giving the imperial troops a sense of “conquest” over the subjugated people of the Japanese

Empire and an incentive to continue fighting for it. The well-managed bodies of the

Comfort Women were made to be multifunctional when they used for “labor, sex, reproduction, mothering, spectacle, exercise, or even invisibility” as the situation demanded (Singer 57)

After the war, the bodies of the Comfort Women were once again used – only this time by the Taiwanese politicians – to bolster Taiwanese nationalism. The postwar bodies of the Comfort Women were turned into icons of suffering as their paintings, photographs, and stories were exhibited in the Ana Museum. Did the Ana Museum subscribe or unwittingly contribute to reinforcing the nationalist agenda of the

Taiwanese politicians and governments?

Those who visit the Ama Museum can see the sexual violence perpetrated by

the Japanese on bodies of the Comfort Women through photos, paintings, and videos.

However, photos, paintings and videos turn the represented bodies of the Comfort

Women into “performing” bodies. Their “art” transforms the suffering body of the

Comfort Women into a commodified image that, in postwar years is consumed by both

Japanese and Taiwanese visitors at the Ama Museum. The Comfort Women and their suffering is on display to the gaze of the museum visitors. Their personal, intimate experiences are made public, revealing a dark page in the history of both Japan and

Taiwan. The Ama Museum is the space where the visitors have access to the personal experiences of the victimized women as represented by photos, paintings, narratives, and videos, but also expose themselves to various interpretations about the wartime experiences of these women that inform postwar narratives about their place in

Taiwanese history.

It would seem that the Ama Museum exhibits contribute to the formation of

Taiwanese nationalism. The museum was initially established to sensitize the Taipei

City Government to the issues of the Comfort Women and to educate the Taiwanese on women’s rights. Its mission has been to educate visitors about the history of Comfort

Women which has been continuously reviewed and revised since 1945. Depending on a visitor’s gender, age, race, class, and so on, the place of the Comfort Women in history and in Taiwanese nationalism is nuanced by present-day cultural politics. Nonetheless,

the educational mission of the Ama Museum remains strong and effective as far as the issues of the Comfort Women are concerned. Museums can be places of comfort or places of change. The Ama Museum has been both. But, as Molt has pointed out,

“people can find comfort in the continuity of their history – or confusion.”(Molt 125)

Linda McDowell noted that “women’s bodies [are] the sites and expressions of power relations” where “the attributes of femininity [are] mapped onto them, including variants of passive heterosexual desire” (79). In the Ama Museum the wartime bodies of the Comfort Women are – to some extent – exhibited as artistic representations. Their bodies are not only seen as the victims of sexploitation during the war, but also read differently by different socio-political groups that, in postwar years, realized that the bodies of the Comfort Women can become a productive means to pursue patriotic and nationalist agendas calling for social justice.

Foucault suggested that it is more accurate to understand the world as a set of overlapping “heterotopias – spaces of multiplicity or spaces of differences – that are home to conflicting performances between containment or control and fluidity or disorder” (Mitchell 215). The Ama Museum has become a space of multiplicity where nationalist agendas coexist in conflict with feminist agendas. The museum visitors are introduced to the history of Taiwan (a former colony of Japan) which is still searching to define its own cultural identity in post-colonial times. However, the museum visitors

are also introduced to the stories of the Comfort Women whose individual experiences are translated into collective feminist performances. The Ama Museum is a space where feminist and masculinist viewpoints collide over the construction of a Taiwanese national identity.

The Issue of the Comfort Women and the Performance of Politics

The issue of Comfort Women has been an inexhaustible topic for discussion in

Taiwan since 1992, the year the brutal truth was revealed. Ever since, the national government and city government have helped these women survivors. In this section, the discussion will focus on how Taiwanese society was affected by the issues of the

Comfort Women and how these issues were performed by both politicians and artists.

Two important events must be acknowledged: first, the debate on “On Taiwan” by

Japanese cartoonist Yoshinori Kobayashi in 2001; and second, the controversy over the

“Minor” Modification of high school textbooks in 2015. Even though these two events took place fourteen years apart, they had the same causes and effects. The two events were complicated social performances on the issue of Comfort Women that divided the

Taiwanese society.

Yoshinori Kobayashi, a right-wing Japanese cartoonist living in Japan, wrote a comic book On Taiwan in Japanese. The comic book (manga) was translated into

Mandarin and was circulated in Taiwan in 2001. On Taiwan triggered an extensive debate among Taiwanese intellectuals in the newspapers because Kobayashi distorted certain facts about Taiwanese history. He claimed that Taiwan, as a former Japanese colony, is an outstanding example of assimilation under Japanese imperialism. Among his other doubtful claims, the one that deeply angered the Taiwanese was about the

Comfort Women. In one of the illustrations in his book, he depicted eager Taiwanese women, clad in kimonos, lining up to sign up for duty before a Japanese imperial soldier.

To buttress this claim, Kobayashi interviewed Wen-lung Shu, a Taiwanese industrialist, who asserted that no Taiwanese women were forced to serve the Japanese imperial troops during the Second World War (Landler, New York Times). Hsu said that the Taiwanese women who served as Comfort Women worked in more hygienic conditions than regular prostitutes because the Japanese imperial soldiers were required to wear condoms. The Taiwanese government banned On Taiwan (the translation only) when Taiwanese protesters rushed into a bookstore, bought several copies of On Taiwan, and burned them in the street. Kobayashi’s representation of Taiwan was incomplete and limited.

First, Kobayashi purposefully over embellishes or over beautifies the image of

Taiwan in order to manifest the glory of the Japanese spirit. Second, Kobayashi

ignores all other experiences and opinions of Japan that are particular to ethnic

groups, classes, genders, and so on in Taiwan. (Hwang 81-2)

Figure 9. Yoshinori Kobayashi, On Taiwan (Mandarin translation, Taiwan, 2001).

This event made the Taiwanese to rethink their identity, their history, and the ordeal of the Taiwanese Comfort Women. The fight against Kobayashi’s claims and

Shu’ assertions, was spearheaded by women’s rights groups that held a press conference in Taipei on February 21, 2001. They argued that the majority of the Comfort Women were recruited against their will, and they refuted the representation of the Taiwanese

Comfort Women by Kobayashi and Shu. Most Taiwanese agree that the Taiwanese

Comfort Women were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese. They saw themselves as defenders of the victimized women by the imperial troops.

Under the masculinist-nationalist discourse, comfort women in Taiwan have

been shackled with a double burden: the virginity of a woman and the virginity

of a nation. These severe gender discriminations have been imposed on them

for fifty years. They have been denied a voice since their purities as women and

as national subjects were “contaminated” by men and by “foreigners. (Hwang

82)

The controversy over the “Minor” Modification of high school textbooks in

2015 caused a student protest that lasted 25 days. Hundreds of Taiwanese students occupied the Ministry of Education in Taipei to protest the “Minor” Modification to the high school textbooks on July 23, 2015. Dozens of them were arrested by the police.

Scaling ladders, the activists slipped by police and stormed the ministry

building late on Thursday evening. By about 1 a.m., police had succeeded in

expelling the students, some of whom had their hands tied behind their backs

with plastic restraints. In total, 33 persons were arrested, including 24

students—11 of them under the age of 18. Three journalists were also arrested

and taken away. (J. Michael Cole, The Diplomat)

Figure 10. Student protesting the “Minor” Modification are handcuffed by the police outside the Ministry of Education in Taipei, Taiwan, on July 17, 2015.

This twenty-five-day protest consisted of many different activities. The students occupied the entrance to the building of the Ministry of Education, they slept on the sidewalk outside the Ministry of Education, they burned copies of the modified textbooks, and they made public speeches. All these actions constituted a controversial public performance. These street “performances”, which were photographed and televised were seen by 20 million Taiwanese viewers. On July 30, 2015 Kuan-Hua Lin, one of the student protestors, who was celebrating his twentieth birthday, committed suicide. His suicide intensified the conflict between the students and the government.

His dead body became a “performing body” during the protest, even though his family denied any connection between his suicide and his protest.

Figure 11. Lin Kuan-Hua (center) protesting against the “Minor” modification in front of the Ministry of Education, Taipei, Taiwan, July 22, 2015.

About 200 activists gathered outside the Ministry of Education for a candlelit

vigil. At around 10 P.M., the students jumped over the gate of the Legislative

Yuan next door and occupied its grounds for about one hour, chanting slogans

and calling on legislators to intervene by calling for an extra legislative

session…. At around 11 P. M. , they vacated the grounds and returned to the street

outside the education ministry, where they sang “happy birthday” for Lin and

burned ghost money. (The Diplomat)

Figure 12. Students protesting against the “Minor” modification after the suicide of Lin Kuan-Hua, August 2, 2015.

The students ended their protest on August 6, 2015 even though the Ministry of

Education had not made any concessions. However, the causes that triggered the student protest are significant. According to Tsoi, the new curriculum emphasized the ties between Taiwan and China and promoted the view that Taiwan, which is now a sovereign country, was destined to become part of China. According to other critics of the new curriculum, it portrayed the Nationalist Party of China in Taiwan more favorably. Chou Wanyao, a professor of history at the National Taiwan University, estimated that the “modification” would affect over 60 percent of all textbooks dealing with the history of Taiwan. The feminists opposed the modification because it

replaced sentences like “women were forced to serve as Comfort Women” with sentences like “women volunteered to serve as Comfort Women.”

The controversy over On Taiwan in 2001 and the protests over the modification of the history textbooks had the same common denominator – i.e., whether or not the

Taiwanese Comfort Women volunteered to serve the Japanese in their comfort stations.

This issue about the Comfort Women resulted from the Japanese colonization of Taiwan.

It became a sensitive issue about national independence and identity for many

Taiwanese citizens. “Under this masculinist-nationalist discourse, the Comfort Women in Taiwan have been shackled with a double burden: the virginity of a woman and the virginity of a nation” (Hwang 89-90). It is evident that gender played a major role in the formulation of Taiwanese nationalism. In their book, Woman-Nation-State, Nira

Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias summarize seven roles that women have played in nation-building. Women are seen as biological reproducers of babies for their community; as reproducers of the boundaries between ethnic or national communities; as transmitters of their community’s culture and ideology; as markers of ethnic or national distinctions; and as participants in national, economic, political and military struggles (7). When the Comfort Women served the Japanese imperial troops, they did not serve the interests of the Taiwanese nation.

The virginity of the Taiwanese young women and their anticipated maternal role

in the birth of the Taiwanese nation were associated with the purity of the Taiwanese nation. The controversy over Kobayashi’s On Taiwan and the Ministry of Education’s

“minor” modifications in the history textbooks promoted a Japanese point of view that displeased the Taiwanese nationalists. The Comfort Women were seen as “damaged goods” that eroded the idea of Taiwan as an independent, dignified, masculine nation.

The Korean Comfort Women were seen in a similar light. Their wartime suffering brought shame and humiliation upon the Korean nation (Kim 88).

In conclusion, the Ama Museum, the Japanese comic book On Taiwan, and the

“minor” modifications of the textbooks brought the issue of the Comfort Women time and again to the forefront of national concerns. However, the dearth of stage plays about the Comfort Women in Taiwan during this period of time is noteworthy. There exist only two film documentaries, but no fictionalized accounts about the Comfort Women.

The absence of stage plays about the Taiwanese Comfort Women is a symptom of the national/ethnic anxieties of the Taiwanese. The suffering of the Comfort Women in the hands of the Japanese is seen as an unpopular, shameful reminder of Taiwan’s subjugation to Japan and colonization by Japan. Their sad story is confined, for the most part, between the pages of history books and the walls of the Ama Museum. The issue of the Comfort Women is still a painful and difficult topic to stage in Taiwan.

Chapter Four: Theatrical performances about the Comfort Women in Korea

ANA: Once you’ve existed, you don’t ever stop. Breathe in water, and

your absence will do things to the world. Kick your legs, and your life

will do things to the world.

Hansol Jung, Among the Dead (2017)

The first part of this chapter analyzes a South Korean play that addresses the issue of the Korean Comfort Women. The second part of this chapter shows how the issue of the Korean Comfort women was represented by the surviving victims, but also by Korean nationalists whose political performances demanded a official public apology from Japan and reparations for its victims.

Among the Dead is a four-act dark comedy written by Hansol Jung, a South

Korean woman playwright. The play has four characters: Luke Woods, an American soldier from the Second World War (1940-1945) and the Korean War (1950-1953).

Luke witnessed the rape, torture, and murder of a twelve-year-old Korean girl by six

Japanese soldiers during the Second World War. Luke did nothing to save the girl. He is tormented by feelings of guilt and by haunting nightmares, so he eventually kills

himself. “Six devils in the mirror grinning back at me, and I know it’s a dream it’s a dream it’s a dream, but I can’t wake up, lost, among the dead” (Jung 35-6).

Figure 13. Luke Woods (Michey Theis) in Hansol Jung, Among the Dead, directed by Ralph B. Pena, performed at HERE Arts Center in New York by the Ma-Yi Theater Company, 2016.

Luke had a daughter with a Korean Comfort Woman at the end of the Second

World War. When the war ended, he brought his daughter (but not her mother) to the

United States. When Luke was sent back to fight in the Korean War, he left his daughter in the care of his parents. He never saw his daughter or her mother again.

The play begins in 1975 when Ana, his daughter, is a 30-year old Korean

American and goes to Seoul to retrieve her father’s ashes and to look for her mother. In the hotel where she is staying, the bellboy’s name is Jesus Christ. This bellboy has

supernatural powers. He gives Ana her father’s diary. Ana begins to read the diary and, with the help of Jesus, she goes back in time in two separate scenes – one in 1944 and one in 1950 – before she returns to the present (1975). In 1944, during the Second World

War, she talks to a Comfort Woman named “Number 4” and she realizes that she is her mother. Ana, Luke, and Number No. 4 communicate with each other by following the narrative and the dialogue as written by Luke in the diary.

The [Re]-presentation of the victimized female body

Comfort Woman No. 4 talks about her sexual encounters with the Japanese soldiers in the comfort station. “Thirty to forty a day. Multiplied by seven is two hundred a week. If you are bleeding, if you are sleeping, no one cares” (Jung 60). Such scenes of humiliation are followed by scenes of physical violence. The sister of Comfort

Woman No. 4 was raped, tortured and murdered brutally by the Japanese soldiers. Her murder was witnessed by Luke who did not dare to intervene and save her. Comfort

Woman No. 4 talks about the murder of her sister in simple terms. “And suddenly,” she says, “ the bald guy, sort of the leader type,” “he takes a knife, slits her stomach, sits her up against the wall, and salutes” (Jung 14). The memory of her rape, torture, and murder were haunting Luke for years before he committed suicide.

Ananda Breed notes that “rape is used as a systemic weapon of war, strategically terrorizing communities, forcing the rapist’s ethnic identity upon the victim reproductively and performing the dehumanization and violation of the other (Breed

153). Torture, on the other hand, was used to achieve two goals at once – to penalize all “subversives” who undermined the Japanese effort of creating a colony of submissive subjects; and to reaffirm the culture of toughness propagated by the

Japanese military (Taylor 157). The Japanese military imposed its authority over the

Koreans by coercing their submission through torture. Both Korean men and women were feminized and humiliated in the hands of the Japanese soldiers. Rape further intimidated the Koreans because “many rapes involve the element of spectacle, occurring in the presence of a victim’s family, the local population, or other victims.”

(Niarchos 657).

Ana, as the reader of Luke’s journal, empathizes with her father and Comfort

Woman No. 4. She actually begins to identify with Comfort Woman No. 4. Ana gradually becomes Comfort Woman No. 4 as she relives her mother’s war experience and becomes an object for the sexual satisfaction of the Japanese soldiers (Jung 20). In the process, Ana loses both her name and her identity. The stage becomes a powerful vehicle for expressing the memories of her parent’s unforgettable painful experiences.

There are elements in the language of the theatre beyond the text, even beyond

the production, which are often more decisive, more central to one’s experience

of the event than the text or the production… notably the choice of venue,

audience, performers, and the relationship between audience and performer.

(McGrath 7)

Re-presenting the victimized female body on stage requires that directors, actors, and their audiences view the testimony provided by the diary in the play and by the play itself – that is, both the “historical account” and the “fictionalized experience”. It is up to them to take into account not only the injury but also the injustice. However, “another person’s physical pain is an invisible geography, especially in extreme cases such as torture that not only resists language but actively destroys it” (Patraka 87). Nonetheless,

“what is remembered in the body is well remembered” (Scarry 152) and could overcome the difficulty of transmitting the pain of each victim through verbal and body language to the audience. In her book, Spectacular Suffering, Vivian M. Patraka, is optimistic:

Testimony is not easily translatable into theatre. Nonetheless, our efforts, in

theatre and performance, to trace the dual events of human suffering and

injustice should continue. (Patraka 87)

Otherwise, as Patraka put it, any attempt to avoid representing the testimony of pain becomes “a kind of denial.”

The Birth and Rebirth of the Female Body and the Nation

In Scene Eight of the play Comfort Woman No. 4 is searching for her lost sister in 1945 at the end of the Second World War. Her lines, however, are spoken by Ana, her daughter, who is reading her father’s diary.

She is dead. I don’t have to look for her now. I don’t know what I must do

now. I feel so tired. (Jung 58)

Luke’s diary suggests that her sister was the young woman who was raped by the six

Japanese soldiers. The time sequence in Scene Eight changes abruptly from the end of the Second World War (1945) to the beginning of the Korean War (1950) when the

South Korean troops bombed and destroyed the Hangang Bridge over the Han River to delay the invading North Korean forces. The Han River runs through Seoul and divides the city into two parts.

In Scene Eight of Among the Dead, Comfort Woman No. 4 is waiting on the bridge for Luke to show up, when the bombing begins. A South Korean soldier asks her to leave, but she refuses to do so. “I don’t want to,” she tells the soldier, “I’m tired.”

(59). The bridge collapses and Comfort Woman No. 4 goes down with it into the muddy river. She has no desire to swim and save herself from drowning. She is saved by Jesus

Christ (the hotel bellboy). “Kick your legs,” Jesus tells Comfort Woman No. 4 as she is floating listlessly downstream, “and your life will do things to the world” (62). Comfort

Woman No. 4 remembers her baby daughter and says to Jesus: “Like my baby, my daughter. She kicks a lot” (Jung 62). Then she kicks the muddy river water and begins to swim towards one of the river banks. Before reaching the bank, she re-experiences the pangs of childbirth in her mind and the delivery of her baby daughter. At this point

Comfort Woman No. 4 remembers her own name. “My name is… My name is Oh Jin- ah” (Jung 63).

It is clear that the birth of Ana is a rebirth for Jin-ah Oh. In fact, the mother undergoes a mental rebirth that cures the depression, hopelessness, and suicidal mood that have weighed down her life as one she had lost one after the other her identity, her name, her dignity, her sister, but also Luke, and her baby daughter. She is redeemed in the Han River with the help of Jesus. In the final scene of the play Comfort Woman No.

4 is reunited with Ana in 1975. Mother and daughter, who had lived apart for four decades, meet each other on the Hangang Bridge which was rebuilt after the Korean

War. The rebirth of their relationship promises a brighter future for both of them. The predicament of this family echoes the predicament of the entire Korean nation from the

Second World War to the Korean War and the Cold War.

The relationship of Comfort Woman No. 4 with the Korean nation is more intricate and intriguing. According to Anthias Floya and Nira Yuval-Davis, the participation of Korean women in nation building was done in more than one major way. They were not only used in biological reproduction by giving birth to babies, but also in ideological reproduction by educating their children according to the specs set for them by their ethnic group or their national government. Korean women worked hard and participated in national, economic, political, and military struggles.

Women’s role in national liberation struggles, in guerilla warfare or the military,

has varied, but generally they are seen to be in a supportive and nurturing

relation to men even where they have taken most risks. (Floya and Yuval-Davis

8-10)

These women’s minds and bodies were seen as national resources in several ways. Their children were used as soldiers to fight nationalist or imperialist wars. As mothers they lost sons in the battlefields and as women they were in danger of losing their “purity” and jeopardizing the “purity” of the nation when they were exploited by such enemies as the Japanese who exploited the Comfort Women and feminized the

people they colonized. Christine Obbo observes that, “women’s ‘security’ is often the last frontier men have to defend when all the other battles against colonialism and imperialism are lost” (Obbo 85). About six million Koreans (including 370,000 soldiers, sailors, and military civilians) were mobilized during the course of the Pacific War

(Schmidt 82-83), but one needs to keep in mind that mobilization meant forced labor in Korea. Both Korea and Japan had a well-established state-regulated system of prostitution. It is this system that transitioned into the system of the comfort stations that victimized the comfort women during the Second World War.

What is notable about the new “nationalization of women” in wartime Japan is

that women as gendered subjects of the empire were expected to differentially

enact this new extrafamilial, “fourth rule of obedience” in accordance with their

ethnicity, marital status, and personal location in the social and economic, class

structure. (Soh 71)

Korean women, including Comfort Woman No. 4 in the play, were exploited as participants in an ethnic/national/imperialist struggle that assigned to them the function of “wartime prostitutes”. Soh concluded that, “the wartime fascist state of imperial

Japan endorsed the military comfort system as an extension of licensed prostitution for

its armed forces engaged in prolonged warfare” (Soh 117). However, while the

Okinawan prostitutes, for example, were reserved only for the Japanese officers and were remunerated for their sexual services, the Korean women were forced to supply the same sexual service to the Japanese soldiers for no pay and were despised as

“colonial subjects” (Soh 141). The Korean women were both downgraded and degraded by the Japanese military. Along with the Korean Comfort Women – as a captured or commandeered resource – what was also downgraded and degraded was the Korean nation.

Why and how were the polluted and traumatized Korean Comfort Women transformed into a national icon of suffering heroines who had sacrificed their purity for the motherland? The answer to this question is to be found in public performances

– both political and theatrical. In Among the Dead portrays, in abstract terms, the cleansing and the rebirth of Korean Comfort Woman No. 4 and the Korean nation in postwar times. The relationship between a theatrical performance and a political agenda is strong, especially when they support each other in the name of nationalism. In Among the Dead, the audience relives a long and forgotten chapter in Korean history and the public’s awareness of social injustice and the need for restitution are awakened. Luke’s diary brings back to life the Comfort Women and their stories through the suffering of

Comfort Woman No. 4.

Despite their traumatic wartime experiences, the Korean Comfort Women are seen as impure and ruined by their contemporaries. As a result they cannot share their shameful ordeal and intimate memories with their families. This is what infuriates

Comfort Woman No 4:

But the quiet, it hurts. Not just me, everybody. One day, my father’s soles come

off his shoe. He asks me to fix it, he says I worked in shoe factory for two years,

so he smile and ask me to fix his shoe and all I can think is I want to kill you. I

want to, to my father. I love my father. I know I do. But my arm is thinking kill,

my arm is so angry, the things I keep for their happy, for my happy, they build

up layer by layer into sharp steel, this sharp steel it grinds into my insides every

time I breathe, it is so loud, so angry, it just wants to stab, stab, stab. (Jung 60-

When Comfort Woman No. 4 remembers her name (Jung 63) she seems to have a chance to a new and better life. She is no longer a number. She has a name and an identity. She reunites with her long-lost daughter on the Hangang Bridge in 1975 on the day of Ana’s birthday. The rebirth and redemption of Comfort Woman No. 4 is facilitated by Jesus Christ.

The Wednesday Demonstrations as political street performances

The lines quoted from the play in the beginning of Chapter Four were used during the Wednesday Demonstration in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul on

June 27, 2018. This political street performance (that I attended) called attention to the human trafficking and sexual violence perpetrated by the Japanese military during the

Second World War. The Wednesday Demonstrations (from 1992 to the present) dovetail with Hansol Jung’s Among the Dead about the issue of Comfort Women in South Korea.

Figure 15. Christian Catholic nuns participating in the Wednesday Demonstration in front of the Japanese Embassy on June 26, 2018, Seoul, South Korea.

The Wednesday Demonstrations in Seoul, Korea, are the longest lasting political street performances in the world, and are comparable to the Thursday

Demonstrations of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The

Wednesday Demonstrations in Seoul take place in front of the Japanese embassy and the demonstrators ask for the restitution and the remuneration of the Korean Comfort

Women. This weekly protest has become a well-known “show” not only to the Koreans but to the world as well.

The first Wednesday Demonstration was organized by a few activists who wanted to protest the visit of Kiichi Miyazawa, the Japanese Prime Minister, on January

8, 1992. Elizabeth Son discusses the development of the Wednesday Demonstrations and their influence on South Korean society. The Wednesday Demonstrations have become internationally recognized for “giving voice to the victims” and for “bringing supporters of all ages and nationalities to the weekly protests in Seoul” (Son 42). The

Wednesday Demonstrations have gradually changed the attitudes of the public towards the Comfort Women.

The Wednesday Demonstrations (that I attended in 2017 and 2018) went on for no more than two hours and had attracted no more than one hundred participants who spoke against human trafficking and sexual slavery by reading a well-prepared script. The “show” began with a brief introduction by the organizers of the

demonstration and then both organizers and participants sang together Inhyeok Yu’s protest song, Bawi Jeoreom (Like a Rock) which was written during the Minjung

Undong (People’s Movement) in the 1990s. Next, the organizers gave a report on the current news in Korean. The report was followed by scripted speeches in Korean that were given by the participants and the “show” ended with the chanting of Korean slogans. The two demonstrations were attended primarily by women, including Korean feminists and one or more surviving Comfort Women. The underlying theme of everything that was going on was a call for justice and restitution.

The Wednesday Demonstrations turned the space outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul into a “Korean women’s space,” a “chora” (Grosz’s term). These shows were intended for Koreans, leaving the non-Korean participants outside the linguistic space that the Korean language circumscribed. The show was clearly for South Koreans by

South Koreans even though the demonstration was also attended by a small international audience. It appeared as if the Wednesday Demonstrations were structured to address the issue of the Korean Comfort Women rather than the issue of all Comfort

Women, including Chinese and Taiwanese Comfort Women.

The Korean Comfort Women are used to chisel out a Korean national consciousness and dialogue vis-a-vis the Japanese who are watching the Wednesday

Demonstrations from the windows and cameras of their embassy. The Wednesday

Demonstrations, as a public spectacle, become a meaningful space or locus for the construction of communal identity. They transmit social memories through collective participation and have been reshaping the views of the South Koreans about the

Comfort Women for the past 27 years.

Battles for land and national identity have been staged on, over, and through the

female body –literally and metaphorically. (Taylor 32)

The Wednesday Demonstrations have shown the Comfort Women and debated their issues in front of the Japanese Embassy with the intent of both restoring the marred reputation of these women primarily among the South Koreans and of helping them to re-enter South Korean society with a cleansed record washed by the tears of their suffering and, metaphorically, by the waters of the Han River.

The Museums of Comfort Women in South Korea

Four museums in South Korea bear witness to the suffering of the Comfort Women:

1) the Museum of Sexual Slavery by the Japanese Military, 2) the National Women’s

Historical Hall in Memory of their Sexual Slavery for Japanese Soldiers in Busan, 3) the War & Women’s Human Rights Museum, and 4) The HEEUM Museum of Sexual

Slavery under the Japanese Military. These four museums daily demonstrate to the

Koreans and the world that the issue of the Comfort Women is not water under the bridge, especially the Hangang Bridge. South Korea built more museums about the

Comfort Women than any other country in the world. Museums, especially wartime museums, function as historical sites that help South Koreans better understand how their national identity has developed after the Korean War. The museums about the

Comfort Women effectively present how Korea became a sovereign nation by gaining its independence from the Japanese Empire.

The Museum of Sexual Slavery by the Japanese Military was founded in

Seoul in 1992 with funds raised by Buddhist organizations, but it was moved to

Gwangju City in 1995 when it was granted land. It is a “living museum,” dedicated to enlighten the public about trials and tribulations of the Comfort Women (WAM 5). The

National Women’s Historical Hall in Memory of their Sexual Slavery by the Japanese

Soldiers in Busa was founded in 2004 with funds raised by the Mun-sukand Kim and the Busan Council. This Hall of Memory reminds the public about the lawsuits filed by the Busan Council against the Japanese military and the Japanese government on behalf of the Korean Comfort Women. The War & Women’s Human Rights Museum was

founded in 2012 and it is an affiliate organization of the Korean Council for Women

Drafted into Japanese Military Sexual Slavery. Its mission is to preserve the records about the traumatic experiences the Korean Comfort Women had in the hands of the

Japanese military and to educate the public about the efforts to establish the record about the Comfort Women and the make the Japanese government to make reparations.

The HEEUM Museum of Sexual Slavery under the Japanese Military opened in Daegu

City in 2015 thanks to a volunteer group called “Citizens Hand-in-Hand with

Grandmother (Halmoni).” Its mission is to help the Korean Comfort Women to find closure and remuneration for their troubles.

This section focuses on the War & Women’s Human Rights Museum in Seoul.

The museum occupies a significant space in the intellectual life of the capital of Korea.

Michael Ames speaks about the museum’s “bicultural exhibits” and political agenda as follows: Representation is a political act. Sponsorship is a political act. Curation is a political act. Working in a museum is a political act.” (Ames 7). The visitors enter the museum through the greeting room – a dark room with black walls – on the ground level where they purchase their tickets by using flashlights. The visitors exit the greeting room though a door that leads to a short path paved with stones that are hard to walk on. The museum program explains that the visitors have just entered a war zone and are expected to experience the pain and despair of the war victims. There is a frieze

that runs parallel to the path. The visitors see the faces and the hands of war victims expressing suffering.

Figure 16. Frieze along the path in the Women’s & Human Rights Museum, Seoul, Korea, 2018.

The path leads to a low-ceiling basement where photos of comfort stations and battle-grounds are exhibited. The visitors are shown a 30-minute footage of a Korean

Comfort Woman telling the story of her life. The visitors can feel the isolation and oppression of the Comfort Women in this cold and claustrophobic basement. Alan

Wallach believes that “a successful exhibition is not a book on the wall, a narrative with objects as illustrations, but a carefully orchestrated deployment of objects, images, and

texts that gives viewers opportunities to look, to reflect, and work out meanings.”

(Wallach 121) The visitors become immersed in the experience of the environment and the surrounding images trying to relive the story of a Comfort Woman.

Figure 17. Exhibit in The Basement War & Women’s Human Rights Museum, Seoul, Korea, 2018.

The visitors are then taken to the second floor where they see many photos of comfort stations and comfort women, as well as pamphlets that provide further accounts about their work in those stations. Next, the visitors are taken to the first floor when they can see a special exhibit on wartime violence against women, and visit the museum shop and a spacious backyard where they can see the statue of two Comfort Women.

Figure 18. Statue of two Comfort Women, backyard of the Women’s & Human Rights Museum, Seoul, Korea, 2018.

The mission and scope of the museum is to represent all women who fell victims of sexual violence all over the world, not just the Korean Comfort Women. This is a significant difference between this museum and the Wednesday Demonstrations.

The role Jesus played among the Koreans and the Americans

Hansol Jung’s play, Among the Dead, features one more character next to Ana,

Luke, and Comfort Woman No. 4. This character is Jesus Christ (the hotel bellboy).

Jesus begins his role by offering room-service to Ana and by giving her Luke’s wartime journal (Jung 11). Jesus is omnipresent in the play and controls the outcome of the action. The grip of Christ on the characters in the play is, in a way, similar to the grip of the Christian Churches on the people in South Korea. Christ can be tough in his dealings with the other characters in the play, but he is also soft and kind with them when he is advising them or comforting them.

In Scene Three, for example, Christ calms down Luke who is afraid that he will be shot by the Japanese soldiers. “Luke, no, look at me,” Jesus says, “hold yourself together” (Jung 29). To muster his courage, Luke reads the Bible to himself and every now and then he mutters lines like “the lord is my shepherd I shall not want; he makes me lie down in green pastures” (Jung 29). Likewise, Christ comforts Ana and Comfort

Woman No. 4 when they are depressed. For example, he encourages Ana to save herself from drowning in the Han River.

The presence and power that Jesus exerts over the conflicts in the play echo the

presence and power of the Christian Church in South Korea. Christian missionaries have been used for centuries to proselytize East Asians to European and American cultures and to enlighten them about the ways of the West. Jesus Christ as a bellboy runs to the assistance of those characters in distress during the action of the play in a manner similar to that of the Americans who, historically speaking, responded to the distress calls of the South Koreans and “helped” them militarily, financially, and politically. Jesus Christ is as omnipresent in the fictive world of the play as the

Americans have been omnipresent in the military, financial, and political world of

South Korea.

Jesus Christ contributes greatly to the happy resolution of the suffering of

Comfort Woman No. 4 when she finally meets her long-lost daughter who had been raised in the United States of America. The end of the play is inspiring for South

Koreans because it gives a happy ending to the tragic story of a Korean Comfort Woman.

South Korea is undeniably the most vocal country to speak openly about the issue of the Comfort Women both in the political sphere and the artistic sphere. For example, they produced several films that defend the rights of the Korean Comfort Women – films like Jung-rae Cho’s Spirits’ Homecoming (2016), Hyun-seak Kim’s I Can Speak

(2017), and Kyu-dong Min’s Herstory (2018). South Korea offers a wonderful balance between art and politics on the issue of the Comfort women. It is also significant that

American playwrights and South Korean playwrights are leading the field with groundbreaking plays on the issue of the Comfort Women. They were among the first to understand that theatre had an important role to play in addressing human rights and women’s rights on either side of the Pacific Ocean. Hansol Jung’s Among the Dead offers a happy ending and an exciting new beginning for a Korean mother and her

American daughter by dramatizing the intergenerational transmission of memory.

Chapter Five: Exhibits and plays about the Comfort Women in China

This chapter focuses on a sample of exhibits and plays in order to show how the

Chinese government recognized and formulated the issue of the Comfort Women to educate the Chinese citizens. The plays that show the enduring Chinese spirit to fight against the Japanese are Chen Ding’s Sarah (1939) and Li-Quan Wang’s Comfort

Station (1939). The exhibits are on display at the Memorial Hall of the Victims in

Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders and at the Museum of the Site of Liji Lane

Comfort Station. Both the Memorial Hall and the Museum are located in Nanjing.

The analysis will show that Comfort Station (a play) and Sarah (an opera), which were based on fake news circulated by two Chinese weekly newspapers, are similar in their plots and themes. Both plays were written and performed under Kai- shek Chiang’s Nationalist Party Government in an effort to bolster the Chinese fighting spirit against the invading Japanese imperial troops during the Second World War. Both plays expressed a hope that, once the Japanese imperial troops were defeated, there would be peace between China and Japan. Interestingly, the plays ask the audience to endorse the so-called “Ah Q Spirit” which requires that the Chinese think positively especially during times of great adversity. This spirit is traceable to Xun Lu’s famous

Chinese novel, The True Story of Ah Q.

The analysis will also show that the two plays that were written under Kai-shek

Chiang’s Nationalist Party Government served a similar mission to that of the museum exhibits that were on display under Jin-Ping Xi’s Communist Party Government in 2018.

The two plays and the two exhibits express the need of the Chinese to unify as a nation even though in the late 1930s they unified under the government of the Nationalist Party and in the 1980s under the government of the Communist Party. The analysis will show how the two stage plays and the two museum exhibits served the political agendas of two different Chinese governments.

Figure 19. Sarah (Ding Chen) in Sarah (presented by Nanjing University of the Arts, performed at the Nanjing Culture & Art Center, December 12, Nanjing, China, 2014.

Sarah and Comfort Station

Sarah (an English mistranslation of the Japanese name Akiko) was written in the beginning of the Second World War (between 1939 and 1941) when the Chinese government of the Nationalist Party was surrounded by the Japanese imperial troops and retreated to Chongqing. Chongqing became the wartime capital of the Chinese from

1937 to 1946. It was there that playwright Chen Ding wrote Sarah by adapting a story published in The Peoples Weekly (chun-zong-zou-kan). The story was about a Japanese couple who were separated three months after their wedding when the Japanese government drafted the husband to fight in the war against China and then commandeered his wife to serve as a Comfort Woman for the Japanese imperial troops in China.

The music was composed by Yuan-Luo Huang and the opera was first performed in Cathay Theatre in Chongqing in southwestern China. Apparently, this was the first Chinese opera written and composed according the specs of the European

Opera. Hai-Yan Bai and Yan Meng, in their book, Chinese and Western Music History

(Zhongxi-Yinyueshi-Jianbian), argue that Chen Ding’s Sarah and Yuan-Luo Huang’s music contributed to the development of a Western style Chinese opera (Bai and Meng

82).

Sarah was popular among the Chinese during the war for its excellent music and for exposing the cruelty of the Japanese imperial government on its own people. It was performed repeatedly by different theatre companies in Chongqing and Chengdu in 1942, 1943, and 1944. Parts of the original libretto were lost after the war and Sarah disappeared from the Chinese theatres for seventy years. Sarah was rediscovered and was set to the music of Tai Chen in 2014. It was performed by a group of theatre and music students at Nanjing University on National Memorial Day to commemorate the

Chinese men and women who were killed during the Nanjing Massacre in 1937-1938.

The same group performed Sarah at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2015. Then, the group toured the United States (New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco) in 2018 with funds from the Edgar Cayce Foundation.

The National Memorial Day on December 13, 2014 was the first National

Memorial Day to be celebrated in China. It was proposed by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress of China with the intent to commemorate all of the

Chinese who were killed during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). The names of the Chinese Comfort Women were included in the list of the National People’s

Congress. The performance of Sarah in Nanjing on National Memorial Day in 2014 was a politicized transgenerational performance to broadcast the will of the Chinese

nation by helping younger generations of Chinese remember the sacrifices of their ancestors for the glory of the country.

Sarah has two acts and three main characters. The action takes place in

Yangzhou, China. In Act One, Sarah (Akiko) arrives to serve as a Comfort woman in a

Japanese comfort station. She is forced to become the sex slave of a captain in the

Japanese military stationed in Yangzhou. She is extremely unhappy with her miserable situation. When the captain uses Sarah as a messenger to transport important information to the front, she is seen by her husband (Miyazi) who is one of the Japanese soldiers fighting at the front. He recognizes her, but he is afraid to talk to her.

In Act Two, Miyazi goes to the comfort station and meets Sarah who is taking a walk in the moonlight. The couple is reunited and the other Japanese soldiers take pity on the unfortunate newly-weds. However, the captain, who surprises them, orders the soldiers to arrest Miyazi. None of the soldiers obeys the captain’s order, so the captain takes out his handgun to shoot Miyazi. Sarah steps in the way to protect Miyazi and she takes the bullet. Sarah dies slowly in the hands of her husband amidst the soldiers.

Sarah (Akiko) and Miyazi are Japanese, but their story is the story of many

Chinese Comfort Women who were also commandeered to serve in Japanese comfort stations throughout the war. Sarah’s story and daily life in the comfort station was

virtually the same to theirs. The opera does not make clear two things: a) why was a

Japanese soldier’s wife forced to serve in a Japanese comfort station? and 2) why did the soldiers refuse to obey the Japanese captain’s order to arrest Miyazi? These two key actions by the Japanese government and the Japanese soldiers make the opera seem unrealistic even though, as it has been claimed, it is based on a true story. However, these two key actions make the Japanese government and the Japanese captain to look cruel and, at the same time, they tempt the Chinese audiences to feel hostility towards the government and the captain.

The second play, Comfort Station, is surprising similar to Sarah, the opera, in the way it promotes antiwar and anti-Japanese feelings among the Chinese audiences.

The play, too, is based on an article that was published in the Zhejiang Women Magazine.

Playwright Li-Quan Wang (a student of Yu Cao) read the article and wrote the play.

This one-act play was first published in the 38th volume of The Antiwar Weekly (Kang-

Zhan-Chou-Kan) in 1940. In Scene One, a newly-married Japanese couple are separated when the husband in drafted to fight in the Second World War and the wife is force to become a Comfort Woman in a Japanese comfort station in Nanjing, China.

In the Scene Two, the husband is surprised when he meets his wife in the comfort station.

Her husband cannot bear the shameful thought that his wife has become a military prostitute, so he kills himself. His wife, who shares his shame, also kills herself over

his dead body.

Comfort Station had its world premiere 78 years after it was written. Students from the Jinling Institute of Technology staged the play at the Museum of the Site of

Liji Lane Comfort Station in Nanjing in 2017. It was a low-budget production that happened because of the growing visibility of the issue of the Comfort Women in China,

Taiwan, and Korea. However, the suicide of the Japanese Comfort Woman in this

Chinese play is taken from the standardized plots of past Chinese melodramas that portray Chinese women committing suicide when they become sex slaves and victims of sexual violence.

Figure 20. Comfort Woman No. 18 in Li-Quan Wang’s Comfort Station presented by the Jinling Institute of Technology at the Liji Lane Comfort Station, July 5, 2017.

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It is clear that the opera Sarah and the play Comfort Station share the same plot, the same themes, and the same contention that they are based on two separate true stories as reported by the press. However, there are a couple of significant differences:

1) the husband in the opera is faithful to his wife whereas the husband in the play is unfaithful to her; and 2) the soldiers in the opera are ordered by their captain to kill the husband whereas in the play there are no captains and soldiers, and the husband is killed by his own hand.

Were the opera and the play based on two true stories as it was reported? Sarah was based on a newspaper article titled “Miyazi and Akiko” that was first published in

1938 in Ta Kung Pao, the oldest Chinese language newspaper in circulation since 1902.

The following year, playwright Ding Chen read the same newspaper article that was published in The Peoples Weekly (chun-zong-zou-kan) in 1938, and then he wrote the opera in Yangzhou in 1939. Comfort Station was based on Chong Ren’s magazine article titled “In a Nanjing Comfort Station” and published in the Zhejiang Women

Magazine in 1939. Li-Quan Wang read Ren’s article and then wrote the play in 1939.

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The truth about sources used in the opera and the play

It is highly unlikely that the two playwrights told the truth about their sources.

The newspaper article which was allegedly used for the opera, does not exist. Upon inspection, Ta Kung Pao published no article titled “Miyazi and Akiko” in 1938. The magazine article, which was allegedly used for the play, is impossible to find because the 1939 volume of the Zhejiang Women Magazine no longer exists. However, Chong

Ren’s article, “In the Nanjing Comfort Station,” was quoted by other authors during the war. According to these quotes, Chong Ren informed his readers that he had disguised himself as a Japanese soldier and entered the comfort station in Nanjing to witness the miserable life of the Comfort Women. It is highly unlikely that Ren took such a high risk and the probability that his magazine article is a fictional account becomes plausible. If the two similar stories were simply fabrications invented by the two journalists, then what the two playwrights dramatized in the opera and the play was no more than fake news.

Fake news served government authorities at a time that anti-Japanese propaganda was badly needed. The government of the Nationalist Party had relocated to Chongqing and the Nanjing Massacre fueled the anti-Japanese sentiments of the

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Chinese that eventually were further exacerbated during the devastating Second Sino-

Japanese War that was carried out in China. These two stories triggered the imagination of the Chinese audiences about the cruelty of the Japanese government and the Japanese military and increased their determination to keep fighting the Japanese to the bitter end.

As mentioned earlier, Sarah and Comfort Station were written in the spirit of

Ah Q. Ah Q is the main character in Xun Lu’s novel The True Story of Ah Q that was first published in 1922. Ah Q is Chinese naïve, unclean, uneducated and unemployed peasant who is repeatedly humiliated, ridiculed, and beaten by his fellow villagers who think that he is lazy and a dreamer. Ah Q is wrongly accused of stealing food and killing a police officer. He is unable to prove his innocence and he is eventually executed for a crime that he did not commit. According to Mao Dun, Ah Q represents a medley of some of the negative qualities that can be found among the sub-proletariat in China at the time. Xun Lu wrote The True Story of Ah Q to change the minds and attitudes of the

Chinese people and to make them realize that they need to take control of their lives and their country which was ravished by a number of imperialist powers. The attitudes embodied by Ah Q are precisely the attitudes that the Chinese needed to discard in order to gain back their lives, their country and their future. Ah Q is virtually delusional when he fools himself that his innocence will be proven in the end.

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In Sarah and Comfort Station the story of the tragic Japanese couple is based on fake news and fabricated stories that emphasize how cruel and dreadful the Japanese

Empire is. Even the Japanese people become victims of Japanese imperialism. The opera and the play suggest to their Chinese audiences that victory is within their grasp because even the Japanese soldiers fall victims to the agenda of the ruling Japanese class.

Sarah and Comfort Station, which were originally written to address the concerns of wartime audiences, were re-discovered, restored, and restaged to address the concerns of postwar audiences in 2014 and 2017 respectively. The peak period for

Sarah was the late 1930s and the early 1940s when it was used a propaganda piece to detract the Chinese from their military failures and to strengthen their determination to defeat and expel the Japanese from China. Sarah served a wartime political agenda and it fell into oblivion when the war was over.

When Sarah was restaged in the Zijin Theatre in Nanjing on Memorial Day in

2014, it was revived to perform a chapter in the history of the Chinese nation with the hindsight of the Cultural Revolution and the Cold War in postwar years. Tai Qian, the director of Sarah, who was interviewed about his directorial concept, said that “this staging is to help us to remember our history, not to perpetuate the hatred against the

Japanese; to use our history as a lesson so that we treasure peace” (Chines News 2014).

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Notwithstanding the historic significance of Sarah, it must also be acknowledged that the opera in postwar years lends itself to a feminist treatment for a critique of patriarchy in the imperialist Japanese military and government. Sexual slavery continues to be a social stigma in China in postwar years. It is interesting that in the opera the Comfort Woman gets killed and the two men (her husband and the captain) survive her. Her death resolves the conflict in the opera but, at the same time, her self-sacrifice to protect her husband redeems her in the eyes of the audience.

The Memorial Hall

The Marco Polo Bridge Incident happened on the Marco Polo Bridge (Lu Guo

Qiao) near Beijing in July of 1937 when Japanese and Chinese troops fired upon each other. Four months later, the Japanese troops captured Shanghai and continued their conquest all the way to Nanjing. Nanjing, which was the capital of China at that time, fell to the Japanese on December 13, 1937. The days following its capture, about

300,000 Chinese civilians were killed by the imperial Japanese troops and about 20,000

Chinese women were raped. The Chinese built the Memorial Hall in 1985 to commemorate the Nanjing Massacre. The Memorial Hall was renovated in 1995,

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extended in 2006, and re-opened in 2007. This was one of the memorials that were built as a direct response to attempts made by the Japanese governments “to cover up Japan’s war crimes in China” (Zhu 2005).

The Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by the Japanese

Invaders in Nanjing offers a pivotal example of how geographical location, historical meaning, and cultural ideology are tied together in Chinese culture. The architecture of the Memorial Hall and the historical exhibits in it are impressive and include houses, sculptures, reliefs; photos, bones, and an open burial pit that was discovered in 1998

(Qian 26). The most stunning evidence on display is the open burial pit that shows the brutality of the massacre. Through the use of panels and exhibits the Memorial Hall gives the visitors a tour of the site and the tour becomes the story and the knowledge the visitors take home (Bal 561), That is to say, what the Memorial Hall decides what can be represented and the visitors can see.

The Memorial Hall offers an interesting interplay between place and space. A place suggests stability as a “configuration of positions” (Certeau 117), whereas a space has none of the “stability of a ‘proper’ place” (Certeau 117). The Memorial Hall was built as a “place” that is turned into a “space” by the exhibits and the visitors who interact with them. The Memorial Hall is a museum of the dead where the victims are long gone. It is up to the visitors to interpret the past displayed before them and to turn

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the remnants that they witness into a meaningful memories.

The museum is also a performance site in the sense that its architect, designers,

and management produce representations through objects and so produce a

space, a subjectivity for the spectator…, the museum is a complicated, crowded

stage that solicits a certain spectatorial gaze through skilled presentations… A

holocaust museum, in particular, can be a performance environment where we

are asked to change from spectator/bystander to witness, where we are asked to

make our specific memory into historical memory (Patraka 122)

However, even though the visitors play multiple roles at the same time as witnesses and active interpreters of the past as they interact with the exhibits in the

Memorial Hall, the curators of the exhibits, the director of this national museum, and state governments that fund it, all of them have a major influences on the way the

“narrative” and the “memories” are constructed by the visitors.

The Museum of the Site of Liji Lane Comfort Station in Nanjing

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The Museum of the site of Liji Lane Comfort Station in Nanjing – opened to the public on December 1, 2015. It is a branch (or affiliate) of the Nanjing Massacre

Memorial Hall. It is located in one of the largest and well-preserved Japanese comfort stations in China. It consists of eight buildings which were built by Yang Puqing,

Lieutenant General of the Nationalist Party within a two-year period (1935-1937).

When the Japanese captured Nanjing in 1937, they turned Building no.2 into the

Shinonome comfort station, and building no.18 into the Kokyo-ro comfort station. The complex was turned into a historical site by the Municipal Government of the People of Nanjing in 2014. The restoration of the buildings and the site was completed in 2015.

The exhibits take 3,000 square meters from the total ground area of 3,680 square meters

(Wam 15). The exhibits are displayed into three areas: a) the two Japanese military comfort stations; b) the original historical site before it was used by the Japanese; and c) four thematic exhibits on four interrelated topics. In addition, the museum has over

680 historical photos, 1,600 posters, and 19 film footages (Wam 15)

The theme of tears is pervasive throughout the museum – there is a “wall of tears,” a “ground of tears,” a “road of tears,” a “statue of endless tears” and the “tears of silence.” The theme of tears disclose the tragic history of the Chinese Comfort

Women and the crimes the imperial Japanese troops. The most important mission of the museum, according to Zhi-Liang Su who is the director of the museum, is to present

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the history of Comfort Women system in the hands of the Japanese. The exhibits systematically and comprehensively introduce the visitors to 1) the history of the

Comfort Women; 2) the original site of the Liji Lane comfort station; 3) the other comfort stations in Nanjing, and 4) four thematic displays about a) the comfort stations in Shanghai, b) the comfort stations in China, c) the Korean Comfort Women, and d) the Comfort Women from other countries such Java and Indonesia. All these exhibits focus on presenting the hidden traumas of the Comfort Women.

Figure 21. “Endless Flow of Tears” in the Nanjing Museum of the Site of Liji Lane Comfort Station, Nanjing, China, 2018.

The pervasive theme of tears adds a solemn atmosphere to the exhibits. The visitors can see many large transparent teardrops on the wall of a building near the

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entrance of the museum. Many large teardrops are sculptured on the road between two buildings to symbolize the tears that the Comfort Women shed as they walked between the two buildings which had been converted into comfort stations by the Japanese. The stains of their real tears are faintly visible today as a silent testimony of their pain, sorrow and helplessness to escape their predicament. Behind the two buildings that were used as comfort stations, there is a yard which is called “Ground of Tears.” The soil of the yard is kept moist at all times to signify the tears that roll down the weathered cheeks of the surviving Comfort Women when their recall their past experiences. These three tear-related displays are outdoors.

There are another two tear-related displays indoors. The “Endless Flow of Tears” is a portrait of an aged Comfort Woman who is shedding an endless flow of tears. The visitors are invited to wipe her tears by using one of the many handkerchiefs that are nicely placed on a tray in front of the portrait. By wiping her tears, the visitors make a symbolic gesture of support towards this Comfort Woman and the cause of all Comfort

Women.

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Figure 22. Display of “Tears of Silence” in the Liji Lane Comfort Station, Nanjing Museum, Nanjing, China 2018.

The second indoor display, which is shaped like a giant teardrop, is the “Tears of Silence”. It is a chandelier made of three kinds of things: many photos of the victimized Comfort Women, many platinum-framed transparent teardrops, and many black pieces of iron wire. When sun shines on this chandelier, it lights up like hundreds of light bulbs.

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Museums and Nationalism

The educational missions of both the Memorial Hall and the Museum of Liji

Lane are interrelated and were best articulated by the director of the Museum of Liji

Lane when he said that what happened to the Comfort Women during the Second World

War shames the imperial Japanese government and its military, not the women whom they victimized and to whom they still owe an official apology. The museums with their interactive exhibits bring the past experiences of the Comfort Women to the present of the visitors. They preserve and transmit the traumatic memory of the Comfort Women in the “here and now” and they “make a difference in the way that knowledge is transmitted and incorporated” (Taylor 2002:155). Taylor argues that the traumatic memories of an individual or a group of individuals can be transmitted differently depending on who is transmitting those traumatic memories – artists or bureaucrats.

Cathy Caruth points out that the transformation of a trauma into a narrative memory allows the story to be verbalized and communicated into the present. However, the traumatic experience, which belongs to the past, may lose both the precision and the force that characterizes traumatic recall” (Caruth 153). Other theorists, such as Barbie

Zelitzer and Ananda Breed, caution that collective memories reshape individual

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memories from every angle:

Unlike personal memory and its authority that fades over time, the authority of

collective memories increases as time passes, taking on new complications,

nuances, and interests. Collective memories allow for the fabrication,

rearrangement, elaboration, and omission of details about the past, often

pushing aside accuracy and authenticity so as to accommodate broader issues

of identity formation, power and authority, and political affiliation. Memories

in this view become not only the simple act of recall but social, cultural, and

political action at its broadest level. (Zelitzer 3)

A similar but clearer explanation has been offered by Breed.

Individual acts of memory are swept into the collective but collective memory

is often co-opted towards specific national and political objectives…The

memory and embodiment of trauma are staged nationally and reach

international audiences and donor communities. (Breed 172)

Taylor, Zelizer, and Breed more or less caution how precarious is the co-option

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of individual memory and collective memory in the hands of certain individuals or groups. The Comfort Women were traumatized by the Japanese soldiers during the

Second World War and those that survived the war were asked to relive their trauma before the world in postwar years. The pain became a sort of public performance to serve the agendas of the groups that sponsored them, spoke for them, supported them, or simply exhibited their painful memories and experiences for other to see and learn.

Who else besides the Japanese and the surviving Comfort Women do these exhibits and representations (staged or not) shame again and again? It has been suggested that a part of the shame goes to the specific nation that these Comfort Women belong to – be it

China, Taiwan, or Korea. Can indeed state-funded museums such as the Memorial Hall and the Museum of Liji Lane wipe off the shame from either the past or the present? Is the rape of the 20,000 Chinese women during the Nanjing massacre similar to the rape of the Comfort Women in the Liji Lane comfort station?

“The nation is an imagined political community,” Anderson has noted, “and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (15). In Anderson’s opinion, a nation is a constructed political community that is made of groups that more or less share the same cultural ideology. In Domosh’s opinion “women and the feminine represent that part of a nation that is unchanging and ‘natural,’ whereas men and the masculine represent the political and the volatile official apparatus of the nation”

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(Domosh 161). Jan Pettman added another layer to the discussion of nation and nationalism. She divided nationalism into four different types according to the role that women are asked to play in it, and then argued that “dominant nationalism” uses power to control and often exclude its subjects. Under “dominant nationalism” women are regarded as the “mothers of the nation” and, consequently, their “purity” is of national significance for national cohesion and pride (Demosh 171). Therefore, under

“dominant nationalism” national governments – such as the Chinese – are so concerned about the sexuality and reproduction of “their” women that often impose policies directed at controlling their marital and reproductive rights. (Pettman 50).

Chinese government have always regarded Chinese women as a useful and manageable resource in times of peace. In times of war, however, the control of the

Chinese government and the will of the nation weakened when it was forced to retreat by the invading Japanese imperial troops. As a result, those Chinese women who were forced to sexual slavery in the Japanese comfort stations, came to be regarded as

“polluted” and as a “threat” to the purity of the Chinese nation. It was therefore imperative for the Chinese government to reframe the wartime experience of the

Comfort Women by turning the personal and private trauma of these women into a public and national trauma in the name of patriotism.

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Chinese nationalism is not just about celebrating the glories of the Chinese

civilization; it also commemorates China’s Century of National Humiliation.

Humiliation has been an integral part of the construction of Chinese nationalism.

(Callahan 202)

The rape of the 20,000 Chinese women during the Nanjing Massacre (1937-

1938) and the daily rape the Comfort Women during Second World War (1940-1945) were part of the overall trauma and humiliation suffered by the Chinese nation. The state-funded museums that were built in postwar years to commemorate the Japanese war crimes attest to this fact and the Chinese government’s effort to achieve healing and closure as an ongoing process for reaching some sort of resolution vis-à-vis the

Japanese postwar governments. “Memorials, unlike monuments that strive toward historical closure, concern the ongoing struggles of the living who confront losses that have yet to reach points of resolution.” (Howard 50-1)

Nonetheless, the Nanjing Massacre and the Japanese comfort stations in China are two distinct occurrences of wartime traumas, but they are also different and do not easily fall into the same category of war-inflicted traumas. The Nanjing Massacre was an atrocity that targeted Chinese men, women, and children indiscriminately for two months whereas the comfort stations exclusively targeted women over a four-year

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period. It is perhaps easier for some Chinese to see the random rape of 20,000 women during the Nanjing Massacre in the southern capital of the Chinese nation as a part of the war conflict, but it is a bit more difficult for them to see the systematic daily rape of the Comfort Women, who were singled out to be treated as sex slaves, as part of the war conflict. Some of them felt that the Comfort Women daily had a choice to kill their violators or to kill themselves. However, the Chinese government’s opinion on this matter is that both the victims of the Nanjing Massacre and the victims of the comfort stations were a part of the nation and their wartimes experience deserves to be seen as part of the overall national humiliation and trauma. It is significant that the Chinese government regards the Memorial Hall of the Nanjing Massacre and the Museum of

Liji Lane Comfort Station as two affiliated organizations, rather as two separate entities, and the National Memorial Day commemorates everyone.

However, the Memorial Hall, which is a huge building, has been visited by a far greater number of people than the Museum of the Liji Lane Comfort Station, which is a much smaller building. Does this high vs. low attendance numbers indicate that the majority of the Chinese public continues to block the Comfort Women and their suffering from an equal consideration? Does the majority of the Chinese public still blame the Comfort Women for what happened to them? The memorialization of past traumatic experiences that victimized both men and women is an effective method to

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reunite people by triggering their sense of patriotism. On the other hand, it would seem that the Chinese government did not care to over-memorialize the defeat, the humiliation, and the trauma of the Chinese people during the wars of the 1930s and

1940s, especially during the arising tensions in the region during the Cold War Era that began before the Korean War and ended after the Vietnam War.

The Communist Party, after taking over power in 1949, was preoccupied with

consolidating its regime as well as internal and external problems such as the

Korean War, famine, the Sino-Soviet split and the traumatic Cultural Revolution.

Official propaganda focused on the Chinese people’s fight against the Japanese,

and their ultimate victory over Japanese aggression. Discussions about the

victimization of China were discouraged. (Wakabayashi 3-4)

During the Cold War period, the Chinese government of the Communist Party gave priority to the internal and external forces that challenged its control and was primarily interested in establishing and projecting the image of China as a powerful nation to both its allies and enemies. Therefore, it somewhat manipulated the memory of the Chinese who were born after the end of the Second World War by reframing past defeats and humiliations in a new light that would discourage defeatism and would

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encourage national pride.

Government manipulation of social memory also discouraged any obsession

with past misery. Officials preferred stories of resistance and fighting to those

of bitterness and suffering. Alongside the promotion of national pride and

revolutionary heroism, personal tragedy appeared pathetic and insignificant,

even embarrassing, especially for the female victims who survived atrocities

and sexual abuse. (Qian 20)

It was not until the “textbook controversy” in 1982 that the Chinese government of the Communist Party reached into the past and aired the war crimes perpetrated by the Japanese during the Second World War. The Japanese Ministry of Education in 1982 rewrote the Japanese history textbooks to minimize the extent of the Japanese war crimes against the Chinese. The Chinese government took the initiative to correct the record by inviting the Japanese and the South Koreans to co-write a history textbook that would accurately narrate what exactly happened in the 1930s and the 1940s. A committee that consisted of Chinese, Japanese and South Korean educators and historians worked together for a year, but the textbook was abandoned because they could not reach an agreement on too many historical issues. Since forgetting the past or

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allowing one’s enemies to misremember and misrepresent past events was no longer an option, the Chinese government found a more effective way to promote healing and to establish the official historical record for the Chinese people. The memory of the

Nanjing Massacre was used to unify the Chinese nation during the Cold War and to promote Chinese patriotic nationalism. In the spirit of times and in the context of the

Nanjing Massacre, the Museum of Liji Lane Comfort Station was not just a museum about the Chinese Comfort Women, but a museum about the trials and tribulations of the entire Chinese nation.

The Chinese government of the Communist Party rediscovered the Chinese

Comfort Women and reframed their shameful experiences in the context of “dominant nationalism”. The beginnings of the national redemption of the Chinese Comfort

Women was hinted in Din Chen’s opera, Sarah / Akiko (1939) that was based on fake news in 1939, and it was suggested in the re-staging of Sara / Akiko in 2014 to bolster

Chinese nationalism under both the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party respectively. However, as Walter Benjamin wisely pointed out, “to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it. […] It means to seize hold of memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (Benjamin 255). Indeed, the Chinese government of the Communist Party reopened the discussion on the Comfort Women in 1982 at a dangerous moment of great need for national cohesion. Nonetheless, the representation

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of the Chinese Comfort Women on the theatrical stages and in the museum exhibits in the 1980s and 1990s shows that these women have been used, but not fully redeemed or fully accepted by the Chinese public.

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Conclusion

This dissertation project set out to examine why and how the wartime experiences of the Comfort Women were used by politicians and playwrights to buttress nationalist agendas in Taiwan, Korea, and China. It showed how the personal stories of the victimized women became public memories, public speeches and theatrical performances when they were introduced to the national narratives in China, Japan,

Taiwan and South Korea. Given the available data, the rhetoric used by the Japanese to justify to themselves why they exploited these women was contrasted to the rhetoric used by the Taiwanese, the Koreans and the Chinese to transfer the blame and the stigma from the victimized women to the perpetrators. Each chapter analyzed the process by which national politics and gender politics re-humanized these women and turned their private stories into a public discourse through museum exhibits, political rallies and theatrical performances.

It was important to see how the personal story of each Comfort Woman was retold and, at the same time, was embedded into a wider national narrative in order to serve the political agenda of museum curators, theatrical producers and activist organizations in Taiwan, Korea, China, and Japan. Regardless of their nationality, the surviving Comfort Women remained silent for over half a century – from 1945 to 1991.

This project examined some of the causes for their long silence and but also how and why their revelations were processed and showcased from 1991 to 2019. East Asian women were (and continue to be) expected to be hardworking and submissive to male

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dominance regardless of nationality. During the war, however, the submissiveness of these women temporarily shifted from the dominance of the Taiwanese, Korean and

Chinese men to the dominance of the imperial Japanese men. When the imperial

Japanese military was defeated, those of the Comfort Women, who survived the comfort stations, were women transitioned back to their former submissive lives.

However, they kept their ordeal a secret from the men of their society in order to survive in postwar years.

However, their long silence did not help them to heal by forgetting and forgiving.

So, the first Comfort Woman to speak in public in South Korea in 1991 asked for the

Japanese to acknowledge their guilt and to make reparations. As more and more

Comfort Women came forward, a public narrative began to develop around their issues.

The Comfort Women gained some attention during this period, but none of these

“impure” women who came forward were fully redeemed from their stigma or fully accepted back by their home societies – except when their issues were of some service to the agendas of their national governments and activist organizations in their dealings with Japanese nationalism and patriarchal ideologies that permeate all East Asian societies.

The data collected for this study have made it progressively clear that the

Comfort Women never really recovered their prewar “ordinary” status as wives and

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mothers in their home societies when their stigma was revealed. Instead, they were weighed down by the stigma of their war experience for many years up until they gradually were transformed into a national icon of suffering with the help of activist organizations and various government agencies.

The Taiwanese Comfort Women upset the waters of postwar Taiwanese nationalist discourse to a much lesser degree than the Chinese and the Korean Comfort

Women upset the postwar Chinese and Korean nationalist discourses respectively. To begin with, the Taiwanese have had a long history of racial intermarriage and integration with foreigners because they have been successively colonized by the Dutch

(1624-1662), the Tungning Chinese (1661-83), the Qing Dynasty Chinese (1683-1895), and the Japanese of Imperial Japan (1895-1945) for more than 300 years. The national identity of Taiwan was redefined by each of the above imperialist governments in

Tainan or Taipei. The issues of the Comfort Women gave the Taiwanese one more opportunity to rethink their national identity, especially during two nation-wide political debates caused by a comic book (On Taiwan) in 2001 and a “Minor” modification of the high school textbooks in 2015. The Taiwanese took some time to understand and accept the Comfort Women as an icon of national suffering with the help of the Ama Museum. They now see the Comfort Women as the brave survivors of sexual violence who deserve medical and financial assistance by the government.

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Nonetheless, the Comfort Women embody an ethical issue which calls the Taiwanese public, including the Taiwanese politicians, to take sides.

The image of the South Korean Comfort Women changed over time through the educational activities of museum exhibits, political rallies and theatrical performances. The iconic status of the Comfort Women in South Korea rests on the

Korean experience as a colony of imperial Japan from 1910 to 1945. Like all Koreans, the Korean Comfort Women were the victims of the Japanese occupation, but the

Korean Comfort Women were exported to serve in comfort stations in China during the

Second World War. The liberation of the Korean people from Japanese colonialism coincided with the liberation of the Korean Comfort Women from the Japanese comfort stations in China. Upon their return, the Korean Comfort Women, went through a period of transition that was similar to that of the Chinese Comfort Women. Their common enemy was imperial Japan. Liberation and independence walked hand in hand as the

Koreans formulated their postwar sense of nationality and nationalism during the

Korean Civil War in the 1950s under the influence of the Americans who intervened and won the war for the South Koreans. The new postwar identity of the South Koreans is reflected in Hansol Jung’s play, Among the Dead and the Wednesday Demonstrations in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. Due to the Korean Civil War and its outcome, the restitution of the Comfort Women in South Korea is more complicated and

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protracted than in Taiwan and China.

While China, Taiwan, and Korea regard themselves as the victims of Japanese aggression, the Japanese see their war effort differently. The Japanese suggest that

China, Taiwan and Korea did not fully appreciate the Japanese endeavor to create a

“greater East Asia circle” against Western Imperialism – be it Dutch, Portuguese,

Spanish, German, French, British, and American. When the Japanese plan for a greater

Asia collapsed when the two American atomic bombs victimized the civilians of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that was an occasion for East Asians to mourn with the

Japanese rather than celebrate. The Japanese also deny the charge that they initiated the system of comfort stations. Consequently, successive Japanese governments have found it extremely difficult to accept and apologize for having abducted Taiwanese,

Korean and Chinese young women and for having forced them to serve in comfort stations. In the absence of a public apology by Japan, the victimized countries of China,

Taiwan, and Korea continue to protest Japanese wartime atrocities and to remember the past through theatrical performances, political rallies and museum exhibits. The

Comfort Women collectively have become an icon and a point of reference for the victimized countries to build a case against Japanese aggression and injustice.

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