Map 12.1 the Administrative Units of Okinawa Prefecture (2019)

Iheya village

Ie village Kunigami village Izenajima village Iejima Kourijima Nakijin village Ōgimi village Yagajijima Motobu town Higashi village Urasoe city Ōjima Sesokojima Ginowan city Nago city Chatan town

Kadena town Kerama Islands Onna village Ginoza village Yomitan village Zamami village Kin town Akajima Kubajima Okinawa city Gerumajima Tokashiki village Uruma city Ikeijima Miyakojima Islands Henzajima Miyagijima Ikemajima Irabujima

Kita Daitōjima Miyakojima city Hamahigajima village Kitanakagusuku village Shimojijima Nakagusuku village Kurimajima Minami Daitōjima Nishihara town village Tsukenjima Naha city Yonabaru town Haebaru town Oki Daitōjima Tarama village Ishigakijima

Nanjō city Yaeyama Islands Kudakajima Kohamajima Yaese town Ishigaki city

Iriomotejima

Itoman city Taketomi town Aguni village Taketomijima Yonaguni town Haterumajima Kuroshima Tomigusuku city Kumejima town Tonaki village Aragusukujima

Map 12.1 The administrative units of Okinawa Prefecture (2019)

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Afterword

This book is based on my Ph.D. dissertation entitled “Koreans and the Politics of ‘Sex and Life’ During the Battle of Okinawa: Military ‘Comfort Stations’ in the Popular Memory,”1 submitted to Waseda University’s Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies in 2012. It was published in Japanese in 2016 by Inpakuto Shuppankai as Memories of the Okinawan Battlefield and “Comfort Stations”2 thanks to a Grant-in-Aid for the Publication of Scientific Research Results from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (jsps KAKENHI Grant Number JP 17HP6009). In 2017, to assist the production of the English translation, I was also the recipient of a jsps grant for overseas publications. I am overjoyed that Brill, a venerable publishing house in the Netherlands with 333 years of academic publishing expertise has agreed to bring this work to an English reader- ship. After all, one of my heroes is an extraordinary woman of Dutch heritage. When many former Korean “comfort women” went public with their wartime experiences in 1992, a woman named Jan Ruff-O’Herne sent the equiva- lent of a “#withyou” message from the Netherlands to Korean survivors on the other side of the globe.3 Ruff-O’Herne was a survivor of sexual violence by the Japanese military in occupied Indonesia during the Asia-Pacific War. She had watched news coverage of the women who courageously broke their silence using their real names. At the same time, she was also stunned by news accounts of the horrendous pain of victims of sexual abuse during the Bosnian War (1992–95), when Serbian forces employed systematic rape as an instru- ment of ethnic cleansing. Angered that military violence against women’s bod- ies was an ongoing issue, she decided to speak out about her personal war experiences. Jan’s fortitude in denouncing the comfort-women system as an egregious offense against her family, society, the international community, and “human security” in general heartened victim-survivors in Asia, including those in South Korea. For me, the Netherlands will always be the country where human-rights activist Jan Ruff-O’Herne lived until her death in 2019. I lament her passing on August 19 at the age of 96 and offer my deepest respect and gratitude for her extraordinary bravery.

1 Hong, “Okinawa senka no Chōsenjin to ‘sei/sei’ no poritikusu: Kioku no ba toshite no ‘ianjo.’” 2 Hong, “Okinawasenjō no kioku to ‘ianjo.’” 3 At the same time, in Okinawa, too, researchers inspired by the survivors who had stepped forward pinpointed the former locations of some 130 comfort stations, many of which had been set up in people’s homes. Ordinary Okinawans also began organizing to support the claims of these women against the denials of the Japanese state.

Afterword 501

1 The Comfort Stations as Sites of Remembrance

My specialty is international studies, particularly theoretical research on human security, which aims to understand and resolve violent conflicts, political and economic crises, endemic poverty, and other ills that threaten the survival, livelihood, and empowerment of people. In reexamining the modern history of Okinawa, I hoped to use the view from Okinawa to confront the seemingly intractable problem of nationalism in Japan-South Korea relations from a different angle. As my research progressed, however, the possibility of a totally different approach presented itself—that of studying Japanese military comfort stations on the Okinawan battlefield from 1944 to 1945. The reason was simple and basic. Many of the Okinawans I met and conversed with recalled Kore- ans and other comfort women and freely shared their memories and experiences with me. As a young researcher, I wondered naively, “Why do Oki- nawans remember all this so well?” I came to feel that war survivors had something important to communicate and wondered, “What can one learn from their perspective?” This book took shape as I slowly came to terms with the various feelings my own questions had aroused in me. For instance, I experienced real discomfort in situations where I was forced to become self- conscious of myself as a “South Korean,” something I had not paid much attention to until then. I was also obliged to wonder about my own “posi- tionality” when listening to eyewitness accounts of war and sexual violence in the course of my research. Behind my personal unease were doubts about what I hoped to accomplish. Could focusing on Okinawa’s war experience help “overcome” the nationalist strains in the Japan-South Korea relationship? I was no longer so sure. One misgiving led to another. Could resolving the comfort-women issue somehow mitigate Japanese and South Korean nationalism? Rather than tackle such an abstract proposition, I decided it was best to examine other questions that had been neglected because they did not fit that particular narrative. What about the sensitivities and treatment of people like Okina wans and Koreans, who were imperial subjects but could not integrate easily into the imperial state and never become completely “Japanese?” What about the “hesitant,” the “indecisive,” the “bewildered”—those who lived through the war but despite the traumas they endured now lead “ordinary” lives? How could their experiences of war have become stereotyped in the postwar years as uniquely “Korean” or “Japanese” or “Okinawan?” Isn’t the first step in “overcoming” nationalism to renounce the ethnocentric adjectives of “Korean,” “ Japanese,” and “Okinawan?” On the Okinawan battlefield, where comfort women, Okinawans, and Japanese and American soldiers intermingled, how

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502 Afterword could an invisible fear insinuate itself into all groups and assume such mon- strous proportions, making the Battle of Okinawa the bloodiest engagement of the Pacific War? Amid this cascade of personal questions, it occurred to me that a study of Okinawa’s wartime comfort stations—those embodiments of military violence against women—could provide an important point of departure from which other issues might also be broached and eventually unraveled. By using the tools and methods of academic research, it might be possible, I thought, to pierce this seemingly inexplicable fear that infused the war zone, attempt to analyze and articulate it, and in the process reveal perhaps some of the under- lying mechanisms that sustained it. When the experiences of totally different “others” turn out to be linked to our own, one may discover that the real question is not how to “overcome” our differences so much as how to empathize with those “others” who are different. Required is an epistemology not of transcendence but of reciprocal honesty. Empathizing, however, also requires one to refrain from identifying uncriti- cally with the “other” and frankly acknowledge existing disparities for what they are. That is why I decided to write this book not from the perspective of the comfort women, but from that of the Okinawans who witnessed them— war survivors whose viewpoints and experiences are dissimilar from my own. They observed the comfort stations in real life and traced the social mutations that this intrusive space brought to Okinawans and their communities. That perspective, I believe, ultimately reveals more about the nature of military violence than would a conventional analysis centered exclusively on those who were sexually enslaved.

2 A Note on Documentary Sources

Primary military documents pertaining to the “memory of the battlefield” were largely destroyed by the Japanese army, and those that remain are few and fragmentary. Nonetheless, surviving historical records have been opened to the public, and many of these are now available in South Korea as well. I have included many relevant military records in this book as tables or figures (most in English translation). Among these are written materials that Okinawa Prefec- ture used in compiling its monumental chronicles of the Okinawan war (see references). Raw data on the Battle of Okinawa include not only the staff after- action reports and field diaries of various army units (jinchū nisshi), but also a wide array of hist orical materials held by the National Archives and Records Administration (nara) in the United States.

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Afterword 503

The former War History Office—since 2011, the Military Archives of the Center for Military History, National Institute for Defense Studies—acquired many of the nara materials and organized them systematically so that they are not only easy to access but also suggest lines of inquiry. Following the Cen- ter for Military History guidelines, it is even possible to obtain copies of documents archived overseas. As noted in the introduction, the Okinawa Prefec- tural Archives in Naha and the Okinawa War Materials Reading Room (Cabinet Okinawa Development and Promotion Bureau, Cabinet Office) in Tokyo hold comparable collections that are indispensable for serious research. The so-called comfort-women issue is viewed by political elites in Tokyo and Seoul as a bilateral diplomatic dispute, but in fact comfort women came from more than a dozen occupied countries and territories in Asia and the Pacific. Ready access to historical documents on this issue and the Battle of Okinawa via government reading rooms and the Internet are vital to the maintenance of academic freedom. Thanks to that institutional support, the days of having to rely solely on partial survivor testimonials are gone. Without that backup, I could never have completed my dissertation in Japan in 2012. Today, some eight years later, I remain convinced that scholars, researchers, and the general public must continue to encourage the government’s vast scholarly apparatus to hew to the task of ensuring unrestricted access to public records and foster- ing the spirit of open inquiry.

Acknowledgements

The bulk of my sources, however, are not military and other official documents, but interviews with Okinawan war survivors and the large body of published testimonies they have bequeathed. It is the memories, the oral histories, of their lived experiences on the Okinawan battlefield that interest me and con- stitute my primary source of data. I first visited Okinawa in the summer of 2002, but didn’t begin conducting interviews on the Battle of Okinawa and comfort stations until 2004. I traveled back and forth between Okinawa and South Korea over a period of nearly 12 years, interviewing Koreans and Okinawans and gathering research materials. If I can share with readers my personal struggle to answer the basic question, “What am I really looking at and seeing now?” that guided me in my research, I will be content. Many people have assisted in writing this book. In particular, I would like to express my gratitude to five Waseda University professors who supported me during the long years of completing my dissertation. From the outset, the act of reading Japanese army activity reports would have been impossible without

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504 Afterword the guidance of my graduate advisors, Professors Gotō Ken’ichi and Nakahara Michiko. From Professor Nakahara, I learned the importance of personal testimonies in understanding the “history of women.” Professor Shinohara Hatsue taught me how to view American “politics” from the perspective of international studies. Attending the series of lectures Professor Gabe Masao (Professor Emeritus, Yamanashi Gakuin University) delivered at Waseda University afforded me a point of entry into the world of Okinawan studies (an added bonus was that, as one of Professor Gabe’s students, I was able to photocopy large quantities of primary source material free of charge). Professor Kurt Radtke, then teaching in Waseda University’s master’s program and now at the International Insti- tute for Asian Studies, Leiden University, introduced me to the excitement and fulfillment of academic research. It was his strong recommendation that led to the publication of the English edition. Having opened the door to academic research for me, Professor Radtke has now opened another door to many thou- sands of readers in the English-speaking world. Those who persevere to the end of this very long tome will have sensed in its pages something akin to sheer horror. The survivors of such horror often become “people who hesitate” (to- madou ningen)—those who have lost their bearings in life. After many years, I have finally understood that perplexed survivors, should they choose to confront and speak of the terror they knew, have a valuable message to share with our conflict-ridden world. That realization has been driven home to me by in- numerable engagements with Okinawan war survivors. It is also the fruit of long years of dialogue with Professor Radtke. With the “historian’s eye,” Professor Gotō Ken’ichi wrote a book about Wakaizumi Kei, a well-known scholar of international relations whom he had met in the mutual pursuit of knowledge. While maintaining a certain distance from this mentor, Professor Gotō wrote the story of Wakaizumi’s decision to make public the contents of a 1969 secret agreement between the Japanese and US governments allowing the introduction of nuclear weapons to post- reversion Okinawa under certain circumstances.4 As I hold that book in my hand, I ponder what kind of student I was in those days. Professor Gotō showed me the way to a relationship in which matters could be discussed as between equals by “observing while maintaining one’s distance.” Now that I

4 The agreement was reached in secret just before the signing of the bilateral accord on the reversion of Okinawa to Japan, which went into effect in 1972. It permitted, in time of military emergency, “the re-entry of nuclear weapons and transit rights” and the “activation of nuclear storage locations” in Okinawa. Wakaizumi was Japan’s official envoy to the reversion nego- tiations at the time. Gotō, “Okinawa no kakumitsuyaku” o seotte: Wakaizumi Kei no shōgai.

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Afterword 505 have students of my own, I realize how fortunate I was. Once again, I express my deepest gratitude to Professor Gotō. I would also like to thank Professor Tomiyama Ichirō for his assistance with the Japanese version of this book. It was through discussions with him that I included the word “presentiments” (予感; yokan) in Part 3. I learned a great deal from Professor Tomiyama, and his well-chosen words greatly encouraged me throughout my fieldwork in Okinawa. After receiving my doctorate, I substantially revised and expanded my dissertation. Without the support of Fukada Taku of Inpakuto Shuppankai—whose boundless patience allowed me to re- write interminable drafts with an almost reckless abandon—the reader would probably be looking at a very different book. I am grateful to Professor Tomi- yama for introducing me to Fukada-san. Although we have never met, Jennifer Obdam, Brill’s social sciences editor with whom I and the translator have corresponded over the past two years, played a major role in getting this project off the ground. She also gave us a flexible framework, enabling us to assemble an international team of collabo- rators who copyedited the text, prepared English graphics, and verified Japa- nese and Okinawan names. Debbie de Wit, our assistant editor at Brill, and Kim Fiona Plas, the production editor, valiantly shepherded this work to com- pletion. Thanks to Brill’s inexhaustible patience, this work will now see the light of day, at nearly 600 pages. I express my gratitude for the generous assistance I have received from Director Utsumi Aiko and the faculty and staff of the Center for Asia Pacific Partnership in Tokyo, a research institute of Osaka University of Economics and Law. I am also most grateful to Professors Kurt Radtke, Professor Emeritus at Leiden University, and Annmaria Shimabuku, an Okinawan scholar and assistant professor of Asian studies at New York Univer- sity, both of whom read the English manuscript in its penultimate form and made many valuable comments and suggestions for improving the text. I also wish to thank Okinawan scholar and activist Chinen Ushi for her moral support and for helping me understand Okinawan “house names” (yagō). The rendition into English of such a complex book would not have been possible without the translation skills and informed editorial work of Robert Ricketts. The present volume with its complex interdisciplinary structure, required a broad translation expertise, including an ability to read Japanese military documents. This was, in the first place, perhaps an impossible task without a versatile translator who, from his own perception of the issues, is warmly inclined toward Okinawa. I take this opportunity to express my sincerest thanks. I offer a heartfelt “shout-out” to the staff of Lingua Guild—a translation company run by the intrepid feminists Takahashi Yui, Matsumoto Makiko, and Kurato Mika—for their overall supervision and close cooperation during the

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506 Afterword two years required to produce this volume. That work included the prepara- tion of first-draft translations of four chapters. Without their experience and understanding, the project would have been unmanageable. For the copyedit- ing and proofreading of the manuscript, we turned to Lynne E. Riggs of the Center for Intercultural Communication, who edited the supplement, trans- lated the afterword, and introduced us to the robust copy-editing talent of Katherine (Roo) Heins. Lynne and Roo helped us unify the style and revise the scholarly apparatus for the book’s 11 chapters and voluminous bibliography. I thank both for their professionalism, expertise, and hard work. Also indispensable was the assistance of Yun HyunSook and Yun Ina, who transliterated Korean proper nouns for us. Additionally, I am thankful to Kim Do-hee and Yoshikawa Kazunobu, who prepared the many maps in my Ph.D. thesis, many of which are included in these pages, and to Inpakuto Shuppankai for making those maps more reader- friendly. Professor Kabira Nario, author of Okinawa: A Lost Year, 1945–1946,5 gave me valuable advice, as did Kawamitsu Akihiro of the Okinawa Peace Net- work, who helped prepare the map of US internment camps for civilians and other graphics for the English edition, including the prewar and postwar maps of Okinawa. Many local historians and municipal government officials generously shared their insights and research data, greatly enriching my analysis of survivor narratives in Part 2. I wish to thank, in particular, the local history committees of Yomitan village, the cities of Nago and Miyakojima, and the Oki- nawa Prefecture Peace Promotion Department. The Okinawa Peace Network’s Kawamitsu, an editor at Nan’yō Bunko born and raised in Okinawa, helped verify the correct pronunciation of Okinawan names. Military historians Suga- hara Kan and Shibata Takehiko generously tracked down the proper reading of a key Japanese army officer’s name. I also benefited enormously from the assistance of Okinawan peace activists Uezato Kiyomi, Shimizu Hayako, Araka- wa Michiyo, Chinen Ushi, Okinawa Times journalist Jahana Naomi, journalist Shiradō Hitoshi of the Ryūkyū Shimpō, Yamashiro Noriko, Koga Noriko, Kawamitsu Akira, and Kakazu Katsuko. Part 3 includes the results of local fieldwork on Miyakojima and northern Okinawa and reflects issues that I began to address after completing my Ph.D. I am particularly indebted to the History of Nago City research team for the opportunity to participate in their project. Earlier accounts of the Battle of Okinawa in the Kunigami region were fragmentary and prone to overgeneral- izations (“the US army didn’t kill civilians but protected them”). The History of Nago City project went to great pains to systematically collect local residents’ recollections of the internment camps, both during the war and afterward. The

5 Kabira, Okinawa: Kūhaku no ichinen, 1945–1946.

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Afterword 507

survivor narratives it recorded have become an indispensable research tool. Although I conducted personal interviews in the north, it was only when I worked with Kawamitsu Akira and other Nago city historians that I felt I was engaging in deep learning, discovering the passion that local historical research can arouse. I spent much of 2018 in Canada as a visiting lecturer at the University of Brit- ish Columbia’s Department of Asian Studies. I would like to extend a special word of appreciation to Professor Hur Nam-Lin and Professor CedarBough T. Saeji of the Department of Asian Studies, and to my very good friends and English teachers Andy Wilkins, Manjit Pawa, Anushka Agarwala, Suh Jiyoung, and Kim Jinsung. I also wish to express my appreciation to Norimatsu Oka Sa- toko (director of the Peace Philosophy Centre), historian Kage Tatsuo, and Ryuko Kubota for introducing me to the Japanese-Canadian peace movement. I am equally grateful to my former professor, Lee Sun Hee, who aided me in every way during my stay in Canada. The person I was in contact with most frequently during my year in Canada was the translator/editor Robert Ricketts. In the English edition, much of Part 3 has been rewritten and differs substantially in some respects from the origi- nal version. Those sections of the work reflect an intense but friendly and con- tinuing dialogue between Ricketts-san and myself.

It is impossible to list the names of all the Okinawan survivors who inspired and assisted me. Most are acknowledged in the footnotes. Here, I will simply honor the special debt I owe to Yoshikawa Yoshikatsu, a resident of Tokashiki Island, who responded enthusiastically to my fledgling’s request to participate in a field survey. I remember one long day when we could not find anything else to ask or say to each other. We just walked around in silence taking photos of the island’s butterflies. I had terrible difficulty capturing a butterfly at the instant of flight. When I finally succeeded, I was as happy as a child who has just seen a baby goat for the first time. That night, Yoshikawa-san, overcoming strong emotions, told me the story of how his mother, who had survived an induced “mass suicide,” buried comfort women who had been killed on the battlefield. “Don’t hold it against anyone,” she told her son. “It was wartime, see? Go back to that place inside where you truly belong.” I will never forget the day, September 29, 2007, when Yoshikawa-san stood on the stage at a rally organized by the Prefectural Association for the With- drawal of the [Government] Opinion on Textbook Screening, which drew 116,000 Okinawans. The audience was protesting the Education Ministry’s elimination from middle-school history texts of references to military -instigated “group suicides” during the Battle of Okinawa. Yoshikawa-san was relating his experience as an eyewitness to one such atrocity. The Education Ministry was

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508 Afterword also quite busy at the time expunging textbook mentions of comfort women from those same history books. Quite by chance, I was able to meet Yoshikawa- san after his talk. He greeted me with the words, “Well, you’re working quite hard now, aren’t you?” At the time, some Okinawan newspapers had featur ed my research on Okinawa’s comfort stations. His voice and the words, “you’re working quite hard now, aren’t you” still reverberate in my mind. On a personal note, I was bothered by a feeling of emptiness after publishing the Japanese book in 2016. I remembered the words of my father, Hong In- phyo, who passed away as I was preparing that tome. The feeling of loss one experiences after an intense undertaking, he said, is due to an internal reevalu- ation of what one has attempted, and that uncomfortable feeling you have af- terwards makes it possible to reassess your work and go forward. The English edition, I believe, is part of that ongoing process of personal reassessment and growth. If, indeed, I have managed to grow, it is also due to my mother, Kim Kyungja; my elder brother, Hong Sungchan; and my younger sister, Hong Jung- min, to whom I am forever indebted. Here, I also wish to thank the following people for their generous support: Professor Son Soon-ok of my alma mater, Chung-Ang University; my friends Takashige Haruka, Kim Gyeyoung, Ahn Zooey, and Analiza M. Rola; and Sonja Dale, Sim Choonkiat, and Junko Imanishi of the Asia Future Conference dis- cussion group (Sekiguchi Global Research Association). I am equally obliged to Professors Song Younok (Professor Emeritus, Aoyama Gakuin University), Sakamoto Hiroko, and Lee Yeounsuk at the Center for Korean Studies of Hitot- subashi University’s Graduate School of Language and Society. I also benefited from the advice and strong moral support offered by Yoon Meehyoung and Kim Donghee of Justice for the “Comfort Women” and Professor Lee Na-Yong, Professor Yang Hyunah, and Professor Kim Chang Rok of the Research Net- work on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery. I am equqally grateful to the research team of Professor Chung Chinsun, Park Jung Ae, Kang Sung Hyun, Kim Sora, and Chung Ching Sun. I am especially beholden to Tamiwa Megumi for her friendship, encourage- ment, and perennial help. For more than a decade, she has stood by me in every aspect of my personal life in Japan, like a second mother—a mother of a different nationality. This volume, with its many issues, has been shaped by the warm counsel and active assistance of so many people who are important to me. I am still unable to find the words to convey my feelings for my deceased father. But I like to believe that my parents thought of their daughter as they watched the beautiful Okinawan seascapes that have inundated television screens in South Korea in recent years as part of the so-called “Okinawa boom.” Cherishing that thought has helped me appreciate the Okinawan sea and its vistas in a different way.

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