“Not-So-Comforting Apologies”
by Michael Lujan Bevacqua
The Guam Daily Post
December 30, 2015
After years of denials, Japan and South Korea appear close
to making a deal over apologizing for the comfort women issue from World War II.
Money is being promised, although to give a sense of how late this, estimates
show that there might have been as many as 200,000 Korean comfort women
(although these estimates vary due to records being lost or destroyed.) The
Associated Press reports that there are only 46 left alive today.
This potential deal comes after a number of quiet, but
embarrassing protests against Japanese denial of their history of sexual
slavery. In 2011, a statue of a young Korean woman sitting next to an empty
chair was erected across the street from the Japanese consulate in Seoul.
Korean women comprised the majority of those used by the Japanese for sexual
slavery. The statue was meant to symbolize the untold number of Korean women
who wanted for apologies or reparations from Japan over their mistreatment. The
Japanese government complained ferociously about how embarrassing this statue
was. Earlier this year, prior to a visit to Seoul by Japanese Prime Minister
Abe, two more statues appeared in a park, one symbolizing Korean comfort women,
the other Chinese. Since the early 1990s, this issue has been prominent and
sometimes strained relations between Japan and South Korea. In 1965, the two
countries signed a treaty that was meant to put an end to any reparations
claims related to World War II. For the past two decades, more and more women
have come forward to share their stories of being sexual slaves for the
Japanese military, refusing to allow the issue to disappear. The timing of the
apology is intriguing, as Abe’s government seems more interested than ever in
finding ways to revitalize the faded militaristic past of Japan.
But the issue of comfort women during World War II is far
greater than just an issue between these two nations. It is a terrible history
that brings together women from a number of countries and islands, the
Philippines, Chuuk, Okinawa, Indonesia, Taiwan, Burma, and the Marianas.
Local history textbooks regularly mention the issue of
comfort women on Guam during World War II, but scarcely provide any details.
The Guam Legislature has approved a number of resolutions calling upon the
Japanese government to apologize for their “vicious coercion of young women
into sexual slavery and for their cruelty towards the people of Guam during its
occupation.” The sexual violence that Chamorro women endured remains one of the
most public secrets from that time period. It is something that all take for
granted and know happened in various forms, but it remains a taboo subject,
something better not spoken of or investigated.
But in the messy mire, what we commonly find is that the
issue of comfort women in Guam is largely obscured by misconceptions or the
larger specter of sexual violence during the Japanese occupation. The various
ways in which women were victimized leads to some ways, which represent far
complicated or difficult histories go unspoken and lost.
When I was conducting my research on World War II about 12
years ago, I interviewed more than 100 survivors of “I Tiempon Chapones.” As of
today, the majority of those I interviewed have passed on, and I feel grateful
to have spent time with so many. sitting at their kitchen tables, their outside
kitchens, or meeting them for coffee at Hagatna McDonald’s to hear their
stories.
When I would broach the topic of comfort women, it was
clearly something that was very difficult to discuss. But even in this
difficulty, there were problems of definition. When I asked one woman about her
knowledge of comfort women on Guam, she said her mother had been one of them.
Noting that this was a rarity, as people tended to speak generally about comfort
women, knowing of their existence, but also careful never to be too specific,
to name any names, I seized this chance to learn more about the life of
Chamorro comfort women. But when she described her mother’s experience, she had
been raped by a Japanese soldier at their ranch, I realized she had
misunderstood what it meant to be a comfort woman.
Sexual attacks on Chamorro women were all too common during
the occupation. Families took care to hide the young women in their family, or
alter their appearance in ways to make them less “appetizing” to your average
soldier turned rapist. In other instances, women felt compelled to be
“friendly” to Japanese soldiers or officers in order to obtain favors or
protection for their families. They became girlfriends or mistresses to the
Japanese troops, something which made sense in the heat of war, but afterwards
became an almost unmentionable act.
This everyday coercion and violence that Chamorro women felt
obscures the ways in which Guam was incorporated into the comfort women system.
The rapes or the abuse was horrific, but the comfort women represented a more
naturalized form of sexual oppression, where women were recruited to be part of
a system whereby they would regularly serve the “comfort” of soldiers. The
random acts of sexual violence represent one traumatic aspect of war, the
comfort women represent an entirely different form of trauma, which can’t be
accounted for in random or calculated acts of sexual violence. The comfort
women system used by the Japanese military in Asia and the Pacific, was a
system of sexual slavery, a massive human trafficking operation. It speaks to
something beyond the character of individuals soldiers or commanders, but to
the Japanese nation and its treatment of human beings, especially those it
deemed as inferior.
It remains to be seen how this apology and this reparation
process for South Korea might affect the Chamorro struggle for apologies or
restitution for their suffering during World War II.
