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) HONG Yunshin - 9789004419513 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 05:53:30PM via free access <UN> 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 aca- demic 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 war- time 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 ac- counts 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 ex- periences. 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. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004419513_014 HONG Yunshin - 9789004419513 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 05:53:30PM via free access <UN> Afterword 501 1 The Comfort Stations as Sites of Remembrance My specialty is international studies, particularly theoretical research on hu- man 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 dif- ferent angle. As my research progressed, however, the possibility of a totally different approach presented itself—that of studying Japanese military comfort sta- tions 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 experi- ences 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 relation- ship? 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 “over- coming” 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 HONG Yunshin - 9789004419513 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 05:53:30PM via free access <UN> 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 vio- lence 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 vio- lence 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 frag- mentary. Nonetheless, surviving historical records have been opened to the public, and many of these are now available in South Korea as well. I have in- cluded 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. HONG Yunshin - 9789004419513 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 05:53:30PM via free access <UN> 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 docu- ments archived overseas.