The “Endangered Voices” of the Taiwanese Victims of

Volume 2, Number 2 Japanese Sexual Slavery Fall 2019 DOI: 10.25335/PPJ.2.2-09 Towards Postcolonial Feminist Ethics of Listening to Trauma

Magdalena Zolkos

Abstract While the question of justice for the victims of sexual slavery institutionalized by the Japanese Imperial Army during the war has generated great communal and scholarly interest, in Taiwan it remains a pressing and unresolved concern what implications this traumatic history has had for the consolidation of the postcolonial and post-authoritarian publics. This is not only because the sexual enslavement of Taiwanese women unfolded before the backdrop of Japan’s colonization of Taiwan, in particular of the Indigenous “highlander” groups but also because the post-war public (and private) narra- tivization of this history, and any pursuit of justice, were impossible during Chiang Kai-shek’s authoritarian era. Referring to the victims by the Taiwanese term “Ama” (rather than the more common but problematic term “comfort women”), I propose that in contemporary Taiwan the traumatic history of female sexual enslavement is of great significance for contemporary public life because it functions as a kind of “optic,” which reveals and magnifies broader historical dynamics of colonial appropriation, of sexual and epistemic violence against women, and of the marginalization of Indigenous and economically disadvantaged groups. Methodologically, the identification of such an optic draws from cultural theory of psychoanalysis, which links traumatic experience to “unspeakability” and to psychic repression of overwhelming contents, and from sociological and philosophic insights into silencing as a mode of epistemic violence. 1. Historical Trauma of Sexual and in terms of her compliance with traditional gendered norms in post-war Taiwan. Slavery in Taiwan These women are known to the contempo- In a 1998 film,A Secret Buried for 50 Years A rary public in Taiwan as “Ama,” which is a Secret Buried for 50 Years—The Story of the Taiwanese-Hokkien term for an “elderly aun- Taiwanese “Comfort Women,” a Taiwanese tie.” According to the information in the Ama survivor of the Japanese sexual slavery pro- Museum in Taipei, the name Ama connotes gram during the Pacific War, Shen Chung Li, “endearment [and] respect for women of the describes the psychological effects of the vio- older generation.”3 In recent years it has gained lence she endured at the hands of Japanese popularity as a supplement to the formal terms soldiers as a paradoxical experience of liv- for the victims of the Japanese sexual enslave- ing-through her own death: “my life had end- ment program: “sexual military slaves” or “com- 1 ed on [that] day,” she says poignantly. Another fort women.”4 What is equally important is that survivor, Jung-mei Chaung, speaks of a contin- uous pain, which has not decreased in severity 3. Exhibition on the history of sexual enslavement of Tai- wanese women by the Japanese imperial army during for fifty years, thus also narrating the effect of the Pacific war, and of the subsequent struggle for justice, her trauma as a “devitalization,” or “withering,” Ama Museum. The material was collected during my field- of subjectivity. A third survivor, Kuei-Ying Tsai, work in Taiwan in 2017. says in an accusatory gesture directed at her 4. The survivors and their supporting activists, legal work- ers, and local allies have preferred the name “Ama” over absent perpetrators, “Our fate was sealed by “comfort women,” which is a direct translation of the Jap- you.”2 With this she hints at the difficulties of anese ian-fu and a euphemism for a female sex worker, overcoming the stigmatizing social effects of as well as the term used by the military policies of sexual sexual violence but at the psychological level slavery during the war. Incorporating within the discourse on the victims of Japanese sexual slavery an alternative 1. A Secret Buried for 50 Years—The Story of the Taiwan- name for the survivors (Ama) has been important for ese “Comfort Women” (Taipei: Taipei Women’s Rescue reshaping the debate. The language of “comfort women” Foundation, 1998). and “comfort stations” had been detrimentally colored 2. Ibid. by the Japanese nationalist and reactionary depictions Zolkos PPJ 2.2 (2019) 2 the use of the name Ama has become a way of the repression of the traumatic contents, its signalling to the Taiwanese public that there is “belated” (Nachträglich) return to the sub- a political urgency in receiving their demands ject’s life, and the aforementioned discursive and listening to their testimonies in the present, and philosophical link between trauma and given the advanced age of the survivors. And death.7 In a text often considered synonymous not only that—the sense of exigency in grant- with the beginning of the “trauma turn” in ing public recognition to the survivors’ stories contemporary theoretical humanities, Cathy also stems from the fact that the avenues for Caruth argues that trauma should be seen not achieving justice for the Taiwanese survivors only as a psychological condition but also as had been exhausted in 2002 when their case a critical and philosophical idiom for the en- was dismissed by the Tokyo District Court and counter with an extreme, incomprehensible, when, in 2004 and 2005, their appeals were and consciously unassimilable occurrence.8 rejected by the Tokyo High Court and Tokyo The “unconscious histories” witnessed by the Supreme Court, respectively.5 In the context of subjects of trauma, as Caruth argues, consti- the impending disappearance of these first- tute “a new kind of historical event,” which is hand accounts, I refer metaphorically to the characterized by “individual not-knowing” and Amas’ voices as “endangered” in order to draw which focuses the testimonial knowledge not attention to the temporal-political urgency of on “what [the subjects] know . . . but on what listening to Amas as something that needs to they do not fully know in their own traumatic happen now as “the time is running out.”6 pasts.”9 In Caruth’s Freudian theorizing of trau- ma, the subject sustains a kind of “wounding” The testimonies of the surviving victims of the that brings about a temporal disjunction in Japanese military sexual slavery presented her life in that it produces two distinctive life- in the filmFaces of Ah-Ma resonate strongly phases: “before” and “after” trauma. Trauma with the key motifs of the cultural and psy- has to do with the subjective impact of a choanalytic theory of trauma. These include discrete event of catastrophic proportions for which the subject is utterly unprepared in the of the survivors as voluntary profiteers of the economic “opportunities” of the system (perhaps most scandalously, moment of its occurrence and that they are Yoshinori Kobayashi’s manga books “On War” and “On Tai- incapable of absorbing and assimilating in the wan”). Since 1996, the UN has used the name “military sex- present. Caruth thus writes that “trauma is not ual slaves” to refer to the victims, which has been a mark locatable in the simple violent or original event of international recognition of the issue as a war crime and as a gross human rights violation; however, some of in an individual’s past, but rather in the way the survivors expressed their unease with a terminology that its very unassimilated nature—the way it that, they argued, reduced and solidified their identity as was precisely not known in the first instance— (solely) the victims of oppression, and sought to depict returns to haunt the survivor later on.”10 themselves instead as (also) “refractory subjects”—sur- vivors of oppression and agents of history. Scholars and In the case of the trauma of sexual slavery and activists have acknowledged the importance of the term “sexual slavery” as a historical descriptor of the program, the Taiwanese Amas, these theoretical insights rather than older term “enforced prostitution,” but have into the structure of trauma as the haunting also pointed out the limitations stemming from the UN effects of an unassimilable violent event, and and ICC definitions of slavery, which emphasize primarily as a compulsive reenactment of supressed and the commercial exchange and monetary profit as char- acteristics of slavery, and only mention sexual violence unbearable contents, need to be adjusted, or, as its secondary aspect, thereby excluding the victims’ to put it stronger, critiqued, in two important experience of “the loss of control over their bodies” from respects. First, the abstract idiom of a “violent the definition of sexual slavery. C. Sarah Soh, “Japan’s Na- event” in cultural trauma theory, which in Fac- tional/Asian Women’s Fund for ‘Comfort Women,’” Pacific Affairs 76, no. 2 (2003): 209-33. es of Ah-Ma refers to the Taiwanese women’s 5. For reasons of Taiwan’s history and geopolitical situa- experience of sexual enslavement by Japanese tion, the Taiwanese survivors had far less success with ar- soldiers, needs to be located more closely with- guing their case internationally than, for instance, the Ko- in the specific colonial, ethnic, and economic rean survivors. See Tina Dolgopol, “Searching for Justice: The Tokyo Women’s Tribunal,” Open Democracy 12 (May 7. See, for example, Roger Luckhurt, The Trauma Question 2015), https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opensecurity/ (London: Routledge, 2013). searching-for-justice-tokyo-womens-tribunal. 8. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narra- 6. Christine M. Chinkin, “Women’s International Tribunal tive and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996). on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery,” The American Jour- 9. Ibid., xiii, xvi. nal of International Law 95, no. 2 (2001): 335-41. 10. Ibid., 3. Zolkos PPJ 2.2 (2019) 3 context of gender relations in Taiwan before research on that subject and the survivors’ the war. It is perhaps appropriate to speak in testimonies emphasize the daily practices of this context of “intersectional trauma,” where dehumanization and objectification of the the military occupation and sexual enslave- women, who in the military documents were ment are only two vectors in a more complex referenced as “units of war supplies.”13 In re- mosaic of violence that materializes on these gard to the theoretical and methodological women’s bodies—its other important constit- debates in the field of cultural trauma studies, uents are both the history of colonization of the case of the Taiwanese Amas suggests, Indigenous Taiwanese populations and the first, that there is a need to suture the gap way that the Kumintang governance after between event-centric approaches to trauma 1949 had shaped the dominant interpretations and the broader systemic and environmental of Japan’s colonial rule of Taiwan as positive conceptualizations of trauma—a discrepancy and benign. The estimated number of sexually spotlighted by scholars who have pursued a enslaved Taiwanese women by the Japanese “decolonized trauma theory.”14 At the same military was 2,000, with fifty-eight confirmed time, the history of the Taiwanese survivors survivor cases; the victims included Indigenous of the Japanese military sexual enslavement women from the Taroko, Atayal, and Bunan system can serve as a generative focal point for tribes, as well as the Chinese, Hakka, and Min- the debates about contemporary meanings Nan women, with their shared characteristic of postcolonial sociality and justice in Taiwan, of socioeconomic vulnerability.11 The women including the critique of continuously popular were recruited forcefully, placed in military interpretations of the Japanese rule as a bene- or privately-run “comfort stations” and, with ficial and benign governance, and a period of the exception of the Indigenous women in Taiwan’s modernization and civilization.15 Hualien, trafficked overseas; the official aims of the policy were to maintain soldier discipline, When approached from the perspective of secure public safety, and prevent the spread cultural trauma theory, the testimonies by the of sexually transmitted diseases among the Taiwanese survivors of the Japanese sexual recruits. The victims suffered continuous sex- slavery system accentuate the dual dynamics ual violence, as well as mental and physical of the lack of political will and capacity to bring assaults, torture, starvation, and forced labor.12 the issue to the international fora until many decades after the war, as well as the practices The traumatic experiences of sexual enslave- of social silencing, shaming and stigmatization ment of women in the territories occupied of the Amas on their return from the overseas by the Japanese army during the war needs stations, blocking not only avenues for the to be seen within the larger historical and achievement of justice, but also expressions political context framing and enabling the es- of grievability.16 In Taiwan (as in South Korea) tablishment of the “comfort women” system. 13. C. Sarah Soh, “Japan’s National/Asian Women’s Fund In Taiwan that context includes Japanese col- for ‘Comfort Women,’” Pacific Affairs 76, no. 2 (2003): 209- onization (1895-1945), which coincided with the 33. See, also, Yuki Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women (Lon- colonial strategies of pacifying and subjugat- don: Routledge, 2002); Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Comfort Women. ing the Indigenous peoples of Taiwan. As such, Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military during World War II (New York: Columbia UP, 2002). I argue that the violent claim on the ownership 14. See, for example, Irene Visser, “Trauma Theory and of the women’s bodies by the Japanese army Postcolonial Literary Studies.” Journal of Postcolonial reflected and magnified the colonial logic of Writing 47, no. 3 (2011): 270-82; Michael Borzaga, “Trauma appropriation and exploitation that had exist- in the Postcolony: Towards a New Theoretical Approach,” Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in the Con- ed prior to the events. That logic rendered the temporary South African Novel, ed. Ewald Mengel and bodies of colonized women “thing-like”—ap- Michael Borzaga (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), 65-9; Jennifer propriable and disposable. Both the historical Yusin, “Postcolonial Trauma” in Trauma and Litera- ture, edited by Roger Kurtz (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 11. Chou Ching-Yuan, “A Cave in Taiwan: Comfort Women’s 2018), 239-54. Memories and the Local Identity” in Places of Pain and 15. See, for example, Yoshihisa Amae, “Pro-Colonial or Shame: Dealing with ‘Difficult Heritage’, ed. L. William et Postcolonial? Appropriation of Japanese Colonial Heri- al. (London: Routledge, 2008), 114-127. tage in Present-Day Taiwan,” Journal of Current Chinese 12. Christine M. Chinkin, “Women’s International Tribunal Affairs 40, no. 1 (2011): 19-62. on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery,” The American Jour- 16. See Emma Dolan, “The ‘Comfort Women’ Apologies: nal of International Law 95, no. 2 (2001): 335-36. Gendered Victimhood and the Politics of Grievability” Zolkos PPJ 2.2 (2019) 4 the public invisibility of the violence against powerful and subversive because they show “comfort women” coincided with the post-war violent appropriation and objectification of period of authoritarian rule—in Taiwan the female bodies as political and as colonial. They “White Terror” of 1949-87—and it was only with reveal the fictitiousness of dominant historical the beginning of the democratic reforms in narratives by testifying to the violence and late 1980s that the survivors started to publicly brutality perpetrated systematically by the come forward and demand justice, supported allegedly benign colonizer, thereby pointing institutionally by the establishment of Taipei to its dual logic—the appropriation of wom- Women’s Rescue Foundation (TWRF) in 1992. en’s bodies and the dispossession of Native Here the question of the psychic mechanisms peoples—that had always already been an of suppression becomes inseparable from the integral part of the imperial project.20 social repudiation, stigmatization, and silenc- ing of the survivors.17 The temporal gap be- Drawing upon theories in trauma, this article tween their endurance of trauma and its pub- examines the complex issue of sexual slavery lic surfacing is demonstrative not only of what in Taiwan to gesture towards a philosophy of Freud (and, more recently, Jean Laplanche) traumatic listening. Recent sociological and theorized as “belatedness” (Nachträglichkeit) philosophical literature on listening has ar- of trauma, but also of what Arthur S. Blank Jr. gued that we approach practices of listening has called the societal and political “aversion as a mode of enhanced connection with others to knowing [what is] too painful and horrifying and as a nuanced process of mutual atune- and difficult.”18 Within this conceptual-the- ment between the speaker and the listener oretical matrix, in the case of the Amas, it is, rather than solely a passive reception of verbal- 21 perhaps paradoxically, not the victims them- ized contents. Drawing on that scholarship, I selves but the post-war Taiwanese public that propose a conception of “traumatic listening,” cannot process and assimilate the events by which, in the contact of Taiwanese Amas’ “refusing to recognize the reality of a traumatic testimonies, means a political but also ethical perception.”19 I suggest the silencing and era- process of becoming collectively receptive of, sures of these rape testimonies in the post-war and affected by, these historically marginalized public and cultural discourses establishes a voices. The effect of such “traumatic listening” particular version of Taiwanese colonial his- is not simply factual knowledge, but, poten- tory, whereby the Japanese imperial project in tially, connection-building and repair. The Taiwan, specifically in regard to the attempted motif of “listening” to Amas’ stories contributes assimilation and subjugation of the Indigenous important feminist and non-Western insights populations, is being constructed as a mutual- to the theory of trauma through the emphasis ly beneficial and relatively benign expansion on embodied, sensory and affective reception of cultural and technological achievements of traumatic histories by the larger public, within the East Asian region. In other words, and it potentially weaves into trauma theory a the Amas’ stories of sexual enslavement are so 20. Focusing on a photographic archive from Berlin in in Re-Writing Women as Victims: From Theory to Prac- 1945, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay reinterprets photographs tice, ed. by María José Gámez Fuentes, Sonia Núñez Pu- conventionally read as a documentation of the destruc- ente, Emma Gómez Nicolau (London: Routledge, 2018), tion of German cities in the end of the war as an “affective 26-38. and sonic register” of the erased history of the mass rape 17. While I wasn’t able to interview any of the surviving of women by the Allies’ soldiers. Azoulay argues that the Amas for this research, I have exchanged emails with invisibility of women and of rape in these photographic Henry K. M Chunag in October 2018. Mr. Chunag was one representations of the destroyed Berlin (which she sees of the founders of the Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation as an urban topography of rape) has to do with “the Allies’ and one of the providers of legal counsel to the Taiwan- post-war efforts to present themselves as saviors, thus ese victims of Japanese military sexual slavery system in legitimizing their continued imperial dominance.” Ariel- 1990s. la Aïsha Azoulay, “The Natural History of Rape,” Journal of 18. Cathy Caruth, “Apocalypse Terminable and Intermina- Visual Culture 17, no. 2 (2018): 166-76, 166. ble: An Interview with Arthur S. Blank Jr.” in Listening to 21. See, for example, Leah Bassel, The Politics of Listening: Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Possibilities and Challenges for Democratic Life (London: Treatment of Catastrophic Experience, ed. Cathy Caruth Palgrave, 2017); Tanja Dreher and Anshuman A. Mon- (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2014), 271-96, 274. dal, “From Voice to Response: Ethical Responsiveness and 19. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Lan- the Politics of Difference” in Ethical Responsiveness and guage of Psycho-Analysis (London: W. W. Norton, 1973), the Politics of Difference, ed. Tanja Dreher and Anshuman 118. A. Mondal (London: Palgrave, 2018), 1-19. Zolkos PPJ 2.2 (2019) 5 more hopeful conception of the subject, who “the theoretical-constative certitude”23 of what assumes an affirmative and agential relation to happened (of course, there is plenty of material the past. evidence and documentation confirming the existence of “comfort stations,” their systematic and forced character, as well as its geopolitical 2. Philosophic Perspectives on scope). That further emphasizes the precarity Listening to Trauma of their voices in the face of the political denial of responsibility and of the failure of justice. In the writings of Cathy Caruth, and of many Thus, the question of the public attention to the other contemporary theorists of collective voices of Amas is also a question about the re- trauma, the idiom of “listening to trauma” is lationship between public listening to trauma differentiated from the attempts at compre- and a more radical conception of justice; one hending or “grasping” the inner life of a person beyond the formal justice of the law, or what who has experienced an extreme form of vio- Derrida also calls “the justice of a judgement.”24 lence. “Listening” to trauma and obtaining a narrative knowledge about the violent events What Derrida’s philosophy of witnessing helps are thus divergent and potentially conflicting us notice in the Amas’ testimonies is their modes of engagement with trauma. In trauma entwinement of heterogenous temporalities. theory, “listening” is closely linked to adopting Derrida emphasizes the intertwining of “pres- a position of ethical receptivity towards the ence” (being there) with “present” (narrating victim, even though one might never be able past in the continuous tense) in the act of to comprehend her experience. Furthermore, witnessing; he writes that “[he] or she will have trauma listening as an act of receptivity to the been present at, in the present, the thing to voice and story of the other is premised upon a which he testifies.”25 For Derrida, listening in testimonial address. a testimonial context is a laborious, difficult, and yet necessary act: reading Celan’s poems In his philosophical reflections on the poetry of is akin to an ethical task of listening to the wit- Paul Celan, Jacques Derrida describes the wit- ness. The intertwining spatial-temporal motifs ness as someone who implicates the listener of “being-present” and “being-in-presence” into their story through a specific speech act: resonate strongly with the first-person testi- “Believe me, I have been there”; “Believe me, I monies collected by the Ama Museum: the have seen it.”22 The etymology of the word “wit- striking characteristic of the survivors’ testi- ness” comes from two Latin words: testis (“the monies is that they are often not formulated in third”—someone capable of producing an the past tense, as events that had come to an objective proof of her experience) and super- end, but, rather, as continuing or reverberating stes (literally, “one who stands by,” i.e., in direct in the present, with powerful psychological, proximity to the violent event, and who sur- social, and cultural effects: what they endured vives it). Derrida argues that the fundamental has “ended,” “ruined,” and “sealed” them as speech act of a witness is a plea to be believed “worthless women.”26 in spite of the lack of formal proof, by which he means the subject’s inability to produce such Dori Laub links the practice of listening to material evidence of their story that would survivors of atrocities and “bearing witness to position it beyond any questioning or doubt. trauma.”27 Laub says that “[for] the testimoni- No matter what evidence is produced, Derrida al process to take place, there needs to be a argues, in testimonial speech there is always a bonding, the intimate and total presence of possibility of doubt and disbelief; what’s more, [another]—in the position of one who hears.”28 the possibility not to be believed is the very 23. Ibid., 75. condition of witnessing. This insight resonates 24. Ibid., 142. strongly with the Taiwanese Amas who never 25. Ibid., 74. achieved formal justice in the court of law. In a 26. Kuei-Ying Tsai in Faces of Ah-Ma (Taipei: Taipei Wom- en’s Rescue Foundation, 2005). sense, one could perhaps argue that the Amas 27. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises “cannot” produce proof, or what Derrida calls of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1992), 70. 22. Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question (New York: 28. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises Fordham UP, 2005), 75-76. of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History Zolkos PPJ 2.2 (2019) 6

This complicates the subject position of a lis- voices,”30 that at stake in both these trajectories tener, who doesn’t simply “listen to trauma” has been the gathering and “holding together” but also “from the site of trauma.” From this of the previously dispersed and suppressed perspective, the contemporary Taiwanese voices in communal, therapeutic or artistic public is “fixed” within an identity that is both spaces. postcolonial and post-authoritarian. Thus, listening to the stories of Amas is an attempt at recognizing that these stories are simulta- 3. ‘Listening to Amas’ at the neously external to the listeners (in the sense Tokyo Tribunal of not having any experiential knowledge of it) and internal to them, in that these stories do The Women’s International Crimes Tribunal on not simply dispassionately narrate but affect, Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery (2002-01), was stir, and activate the subjects’ own (direct or the result of the concerted efforts of nongov- trans-generational) trauma related to the war ernmental organizations grouped within the or the “White Terror” period. framework of the Violence against Women in War-Network Japan. It was a result of collab- In this context, listening to trauma exceeds the orations and activism in the region since the goals of production of the historical knowledge 1990s, and, in addition to Taiwan, it included about Japan’s sexual slavery system; rather, it is prosecution teams from North and South Ko- about the recognition of the entwinement of rea, China, Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Amas’ voices with Taiwan’s history of colonial Malaysia, East Timor, and the Netherlands. and authoritarian violence and the psychic Despite the invitation to participate in the pro- resonance between the personal and public ceedings, the Japanese government did not articulations of this history. Elsewhere, Laub offer a response. makes a somewhat puzzling statement about the ethical dimension of “listening to trauma” As a people’s tribunal, the Tokyo Tribunal as the creation of “a record that has yet to be was an unofficial and symbolic process; even made,” by which he means that testimony does though it couldn’t “impose sentences or order not preexist the practice of listening, but that it reparations,” it did “make recommendations takes “shape” (Gestalt) with, and through, that backed by the weight of its legal findings and listening. He compares the practice of listening its moral force.”31 It was organized from a posi- to the “work of a midwife,” in that the listener’s tion of critique of the failure of the formal jus- role is to “create a place in the imagination for tice system to address the claims of victims of the trauma . . . in order to transmit the testi- the Japanese sexual slavery system, and it built mony, it needs to process with an imaginative on the larger premise that “law is an instru- midwife who [is] there ahead of time, ready ment of civil society,” which “does not belong to receive.”29 In the case of Amas, just as it is to governments” and thus “when states fail to important to recognize in their narratives of exercise their obligations to ensure justice, civil return to their families and local communities society can and should step in.”32 Its institution- after the war the poignant emphasis on (to al framework was the World Courts of Women, paraphrase Laub) the “unwillingness to receive” with an explicit goal of creating a testimonial (the Amas’ testimonies), so is it significant to platform for women’s voices.33 The indictments recognize the current displays of national and were organized as if the Tokyo Tribunal was international attention to Amas’ stories as a a continuation of the International Military shift towards public listening and receptivity. I Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE); it stated that discuss below two trajectories through which Japan’s prosecution of war crimes was “incom- such public listening has proceeded—qua- silegal and artistic-therapeutic—and argue, 30. Lena Herzog on Robert Harrison, Entitled Opinions, invoking Lena Herzog’s phrase “endangered February 2, 2018, https://entitledopinions.stanford.edu/ lena-herzog-dying-languages. (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1992), 70-71. 31. Christine M. Chinkin, “Women’s International Tribunal 29. Dori Laub in Cathy Caruth, “A Record That Has Yet to on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery,” The American Jour- Be Made: An Interview with Dori Laub” in Listening to nal of International Law 95, no. 2 (2001): 339. Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and 32. Ibid., 339. Treatment of Catastrophic Experience, ed. Cathy Caruth 33. Tina Dolgopol, “The Judgment of the Tokyo Women’s (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2014), 57. Tribunal,” Alternative Law Journal 28, no. 5 (2003): 242-49. Zolkos PPJ 2.2 (2019) 7 plete” precisely because it had “inadequately 4. ‘Listening to Amas’ at the considered rape and sexual enslavement and had failed to bring charges arising out of the Ama Museum 34 detention of women for sexual services.” The Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation One important difference between the Tokyo produced two documentary films about the Tribunal and the IMTFE was that in the for- victims of the Japanese sexual slavery system: mer the victims of the crimes, rather than the A Secret Buried for 50 Years—The Story of the perpetrators, were “the moral point of depar- Taiwanese “Comfort Women,” which docu- ture.”35 Supporting my suggestion that one of ments the Amas’ experiences during and im- the key functions of the tribunal was to provide mediately after the war, and Song of the Reed, a listening platform for “engendered voices” of which focuses on the local and international the women, Dudden argues that the tribunal struggle for justice and the reparative process- “aimed to enable and encourage surviving es undertaken since 1990s and highlights the 39 victims to speak out, [and] to tell the truth of Amas’ survival and defiance. The films are their lives in front of judges and witnesses who directed first and foremost at their Taiwanese believed them.”36 This interplay of listening and recipients but also at the audience beyond believing was a key part of the reparative pro- Taiwan’s borders. While different in their goals, cess that sought to counter the history of social narrative orientation, and affect, the films have silencing of the survivors by “restoring dignity in common that they construct archives of to [them].” The practice of listening within the the Amas’ voices, and as such, I suggest, they testimonial platforms of the tribunal resulted exemplify artistic and historiographic practices not only in extensive knowledge about Japan’s of listening. The temporality of “endangered sexual slavery system37 but also in granting voices” has provided an organizing frame for epistemic and interpretative significance to the the TWRF activities—there is a sense of ur- Amas’ voices and in what Dudden has called gency in both the calls for accountability and “restoration of dignity.”38 The Tokyo Tribunal recognition and in documenting the victims’ gathered and “held together” the previously experiences. In my analysis of the films, I use dispersed and isolated voices of the victims, the language of “listening” both in line with the contributing to cross-national solidarity and previously elaborated philosophical concept community building. of ethical attentiveness to a testimonial voice and as an idiom for public process of engaging with this cinematic material that, potentially, impacts the meanings and constructions of Taiwanese postcolonial sociality. The first documentary, A Secret Buried for 50 34. Christine M. Chinkin, “Women’s International Tribunal Years, introduces the Taiwanese Amas and on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery,” The American Jour- consists of short direct interventions in which nal of International Law 95, no. 2 (2001): 337. they narrate their experiences (it also includes 35. C.M. Argibay, quoted in Alexis Dudden, “‘We Came to Tell the Truth’: Reflections on the Tokyo Women’s Tribu- the perspectives of bystanders, such as Lin nal,” Critical Asian Studies 33, no. 4 (2001): 592. Chun Chiang, a former Japanese soldier of 36. Alexis Dudden, “‘We Came to Tell the Truth’: Reflec- Taiwanese descent). The key motif in the Amas’ tions on the Tokyo Women’s Tribunal,” Critical Asian stories is, first, the feelings of shame upon Studies 33, no. 4 (2001): 593, emphasis mine. 37. The Tokyo Tribunal formed a detailed and robust nar- their return to the communities, and silence rative of the system of sexual enslavement as “integral to surrounding their victimization, even in their the Japanese war machine.” What emerged in the course families (the common phrase used by the sur- of the proceedings and in the court verdict was a shared vivors was that of “hiding” or “hiding face”).40 In understanding that “rape […] formed part of the very engine of war in which the sexual enslavement of women a particularly poignant moment of the film, a was considered necessary to the pursuit of military objec- Taruko woman, Hsiu Feng Ho, covers her face tives.” Christine M. Chinkin, “Women’s International Tri- bunal on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery,” The American 39. Song of the Reed (Taipei: Taipei Women’s Rescue Journal of International Law 95, no. 2 (2001): 340. Foundation, 2015). 38. Alexis Dudden, “‘We Came to Tell the Truth’: Reflec- 40. A Secret Buried for 50 Years—The Story of the Taiwan- tions on the Tokyo Women’s Tribunal,” Critical Asian ese “Comfort Women” (Taipei: Taipei Women’s Rescue Studies 33, no. 4 (2001): 593. Foundation, 1998). Zolkos PPJ 2.2 (2019) 8 with a hand while narrating, in a gesture that [and] ‘opening’” was also adopted; it “symbol- is not only evocative of shame (hiding the face izes the mental wounds and bodily memories from the world) but also that is about the un- encompassed in the [Amas’] artwork.” Putting willingness or incapacity to see, again, the site “two of these characters together suggests of her trauma. [that] the Amas’ voices have joined forces, demonstrating women’s power and the sister- During the art therapy and wellness workshops hood of mutual support.”44 The drama counsel- organized by the TWRF, and which continued lor, Hung Su-Chen, described such reparative for sixteen years, the figure of the face (as a “undoing” as an aporetic attempt to not only metaphorical idiom and as material “item”) relive their lives, but to “live [their lives] back- has been the focus of great attention. In one wards . . . to [live] their lives on their own terms of the exercises, called “Prison, Prohibition, . . . [to] create their own life experiences and to Taboo,” the Amas created dark rectangular re-enact all kinds of possibilities at will.”45 masks, through which only their eyes were visible—it expressed what they could not say or show about their experiences through “the 5. Conclusions customary frame,” that is “the pressure of fami- ly, society and custom.”41 In two other exercises, I have argued in this essay that philosophic the Amas were asked to paint white masks discussions about “listening to trauma” offer to express how they see their faces (“mask of unique insights into the ethical stakes of the emotion”) and to paint figures of themselves to public engagement with the narratives of the express how they see their bodies (“a dialogue Taiwanese victims of the Japanese military with your body” and “the body speaks out”). sexual slavery system, produced either within The result was a powerful collection of repre- a quasi-juridical framework of the people’s tri- sentations of pain, abjection, and violation, as bunal in Tokyo or within the commemorative well as of lost youth and beauty. The therapist space of the Ama Museum. The philosophy noted the contrast between the Amas’ living and ethics of “listening to trauma” capture an elderly body and their self-image of a young attitude of collective receptiveness towards woman, as if, she suggested, something froze these first-hand accounts of marginalized and or ossified internally at the time of their viola- stigmatized history. Emphasizing the tempo- tion. For instance, Hsiu-mei said that her mask, ral-political urgency of such happening in the with “dark, chaotic lines inside . . . , signified her present moment and capturing the Amas’ inner self that went unseen.”42 voices as “endangered” because of their social, bodily and mnemonic vulnerability, it also The listening spaces of the therapeutic work- offers a glimpse into a more radical notion of shops evolved around practices or rituals of justice in a situation when the formal juridical “undoing the past”: some of the iconic images processes have failed to hold the state actors of Amas that have circulated in Taiwan were to account. of their pictures in wedding dresses. This was a 2006 project called “Realizing the Dream of The conclusions from linking philosophy and Wearing Wedding Gowns.” Ama Hsiu-Mei had ethics of listening to trauma with the analysis another unrealized dream—of becoming an air of the recent public attention to Amas in Tai- hostess—and in result the “TWRF coordinated wan are twofold. First, the philosophical insight with China Airlines to arrange for Ama Hsiu- into trauma listening suggests the Taiwanese mei, at the age of 93, to work for one day as the publics’ intimate relation to the marginalized oldest flight attendant in the air line’s history.”43 history of “comfort stations” due to its import- The workshops adopted the “healing frame- ant and frequently unrecognized colonial and work” of the Chinese character for “return” in authoritarian context, or what I have referred order to “signify healing and companionship.” to as “trauma environment” of the “event” of Further, the “Chinese character [for] ‘mouth’ sexual slavery. The practice of such listening includes, but is not identical with, the produc- 41. Faces of Ah-Ma (Taipei: Taipei Women’s Rescue Foun- tion of knowledge about the atrocities; rather, dation, 2005). 42. These quotations are from the inscriptions at the Ama Museum. 44. Ibid. 43. Ama Museum. 45. Ibid. Zolkos PPJ 2.2 (2019) 9 it also concerns what I have called an uncon- lony: Towards a New Theoretical Ap- scious resonance between different histories proach.” Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in of violence and trauma. As such, the Amas’ vic- the Contemporary South African Novel, ed- tim testimonies of sexual enslavements offer a ited by Ewald Mengel and Michael Borzaga, unique prism into the larger history of colonial 65-93. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. appropriation and subjugation of Native pop- ulations, of militarization and imperial power Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, that violently objectified and “thingified” bod- Narrative and History. Baltimore: Johns ies of the Taiwanese women in the service of its Hopkins UP, 1996. goals and prerogatives. ———. “A Record That Has Yet to Be Made: An Second, an important aspect of the Amas’ sto- Interview with Dori Laub.” In Listening to ry is that it was silenced and/or marginalized in Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in post-1949 Taiwan during the Chinese national- the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic ist one-party rule, and that, in the present, the Experience, edited by Cathy Caruth, 47-81. relevant actors continue to struggle to receive Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2014. appropriate restitutive responses. Philosoph- ———. “Apocalypse Terminable and Intermina- ical discussions of trauma suggest that there ble: An Interview with Arthur S. Blank Jr.” In is no straightforward relationship between Listening to Trauma: Conversations with listening and justice but that ethical listening Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of “radicalizes” justice by locating it beyond the Catastrophic Experience, edited by Cathy economy of retribution and reparation. The Caruth, 271-96. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Amas’ narratives complicate what justice is and UP, 2014. how it can be achieved, as well as what comes after a failure of justice; rather, in spite of the Ching-Yuan, Chou. “A Cave in Taiwan: Comfort fact that the juridical process has not achieved Women’s Memories and the Local Identi- the desired aims, the practice of listening to ty.” In Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing Amas reveals gestures or glimpses of a more with ‘Difficult Heritage’, edited by L. Wil- radical justice. liam et al., 114-127. London: Routledge, 2008. 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