The Comfort Women by C. Sarah Soh

Author:C. Sarah Soh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Private Memories of Public Sex

Even now, if there were two men proposing, one Korean and the other Japanese, I would rather marry the Japanese.

—Pae Chok-kan, a Korean comfort woman survivor, in Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, Silence Broken, 1999a

Japanese soldiers enjoyed my singing. On my part, I was pleased to see the soldiers having a good time. Not just my sweetheart Yamada Ichirō but other soldiers as well comforted me; they would say: “I know it’s a hard life here, but I hope you will survive it and return home safely and be a loving child to your parent.” There were many good ones among the Japanese soldiers, and they all had a hard time, and I felt sorry for them.

—Mun Ok-chu, a Korean comfort woman survivor, in Mun Ok-chu, Mun Oku-chu: Biruma Sensen Tateshidan no “Ianfu” Datta Watashi, 1996

Don’t you know they say there is no national border in love?

—Yamada Ichirō, a Japanese soldier, speaking to Mun Ok-chu, in Mun Ok-chu, Mun Oku-chu: Biruma Sensen Tateshidan no “Ianfu” Datta Watashi, 1996

She became my first love.

—Motoyama, a Japanese soldier speaking of his encounter with a Korean ianfu, in Nishino Rumiko, Jūgun Ianfu, 1992

THANKS TO THE KOREAN comfort women movement, the 1990s saw an increase in the production of documentaries and an avalanche of publications on the subject in Japanese, including scholarly works, which—with such rare exceptions as those of Suzuki Yūko and Takasaki Sōji—had been conspicuously absent. In March 2000 the online database of the Japanese government–supported nonprofit organization Asian Women’s Fund listed 2,708 Japanese publications, including 1,622 books on the comfort women. Some of these publications were written by people who view the transnational redress movement as ahistorical and an unfair imposition of a post–cold war human rights sensibility on customary sexual behaviors among men in patriarchal societies and among soldiers in war. Individual Japanese veterans have also recounted a variety of personal memories of their experiences of public sex at the comfort facilities as militarized masculine sexual subjects.

Human rights activists and supporters of the comfort women movement in the international community may regard the story of “Madam X” as a representative instance of horrific sexual violence committed by Japanese troops. She was a fifteen-year-old Chinese living in British Malaya in 1942 when three solders raped her in full view of her parents and brother. She was then taken by force and made a “comfort girl” at the ianjo, which was set up at the Tai Sun Hotel.1 She stated that sex at the ianjo was “excruciating” and that she was paid half of the fee; the “mama-san” took the rest, as she did with all the comfort women.2

By contrast, as this chapter demonstrates, the private memories of a number of survivors of their lives at ianjo significantly complicate the categorical images, drawn by the lawyers for the 1994 International Commission of Jurists mission report, of a living hell. Although the vast majority of the countless wartime comfort women, who came from various ethnic and national backgrounds and social circumstances,

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