Why Is the Plight of ‘Comfort Women’ Still So Controversial?

HONG KONG — One recent night after dinner I was standing with friends near the Henry Moore sculpture in Exchange Square. We were trying to prolong our goodbyes, but a loudspeaker blasting behind us forced us to part hastily. “The Japanese government has never apologized sincerely or compensated the hundreds of thousands of women that the Imperial Army forced into sexual slavery,” a recording of a high-pitched female voice was proclaiming on a loop in Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese and awkward English.

It was a small protest: two burly middle-aged men lounging around, a woman resting her head on a table with flyers and a donation box, and two bronze statues of young girls, seated and barefoot. One of the girls was Korean, judging by her traditional dress; the other one wore a Chinese pajama tunic.

The bronze girls stared vacantly toward the Japanese consulate nearby, clenched fists in their laps. Defaced images of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan had been placed under their feet, as if they had stomped on his face.

The statues, and the protest, purported to pay homage to what are widely known as “comfort women”: the 80,000 to 200,000 women — mostly from the Korean Peninsula, but also from China, Taiwan, the Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries — who were recruited to provide sex to Japanese soldiers during World War II.

But the two men by the statues belonged to a Hong Kong group that calls itself “Defend the Diaoyutai,” referring to a set of islands claimed by both China and Japan. (Japan calls the islands the Senkaku.) Most of the banners hanging by the bronze girls carried anti-Japanese slogans: “Oppose Abe remilitarization” and “The Diaoyutai are Chinese soil.”

As comfort women have been dying off — only 37 South Korean victims were still alive as of late last month — their cause has become both increasingly visible and increasingly vulnerable to being appropriated in the service of other, often nationalistic, agendas. The few remaining survivors are being cast in a heavily symbolic role they never asked to play — yet another blow to their long-running quest for recognition and the restoration of their dignity.

There are more than 20 statues like the pair in Hong Kong throughout East Asia and beyond, most modeled after one representing a Korean girl that was placed in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul in 2011. That original “Statue of Peace,” as its creators call it, has become a rallying point for weekly anti-Japanese protests, some of them belligerent, about islands contested by South Korea and Japan or calling for the boycott of Japanese goods.

The cause of South Korea’s comfort women has fallen hostage not only to nationalistic interest groups, but also to the country’s fractious domestic politics. In 2015, the administration of President Park Geun-hye and the Japanese government came to an agreement that was supposed to finally settle the two countries’ dispute over the issue. The Japanese government admitted wartime Japan’s involvement in procuring women for its soldiers, and agreed to set up a fund of one billion yen (about $9 million) to benefit the 46 South Korean comfort women alive at the time. A government official said that Mr. Abe expressed “anew sincere apologies and remorse from the bottom of his heart to all those who suffered immeasurable pain and incurable physical and psychological wounds.”
But Mr. Abe’s wording hewed close to an official declaration from 1993, which some comfort women had found lacking in sincerity. To some, Mr. Abe also later seemed to backtrack from his own statement when he told the Diet that the 2015 deal did not require Japan to issue letters of apology to South Korean comfort women. The deal itself, which was problematic from the start, became even more so.

Last December, on the first anniversary of the agreement, opponents erected another bronze statue near the Japanese consulate in Busan, South Korea’s second-largest city. Japan asked for its removal, and when the South Korean authorities refused, it recalled some of its diplomats.

The new government of Moon Jae-in, which was elected in May after Ms. Park’s impeachment on corruption charges, has recently announced that it intends to designate an official day of commemoration for comfort women starting next year — most likely Aug. 14, the day of Japan’s surrender in 1945. The Moon administration has also announced plans to build a dedicated museum and research institute in Seoul.

One reason the government has given for considering these measures is that, according to a recent poll, 75 percent of South Koreans think the 2015 agreement did not, in fact, settle the comfort women dispute. Another reason — this one not given — is that the issue has become the symbol of Korea’s humiliation at the hands of imperial Japan, and by way of that most taboo of subjects: women and sex.

In 1991, as more and more former comfort women began to speak up, the Seoul authorities rejected a proposal to build a monument honoring them in the city center, citing “impairment to the landscape.” But their refusal belied a deep discomfort, a collective shame. Public discussion about the issue seemed to return, again and again, to the notion that the purity of comfort women had been violated. In early 1992, the daily newspaper Dong-a Ilbo published many reader letters decrying the women’s soiling, including one claiming that “Korean women regard chastity as more important than life itself.”

To this day, the only site in South Korea that chronicles the experience of comfort women is the “House of Sharing,” a shelter and museum in the countryside built by a private Buddhist foundation in 1992, where survivors live and practice art therapy. Many of their paintings show women dragged by the arms and legs, bloodied and visibly in despair. The images are nothing like the innocent-looking, nearly ethereal girls of the bronze statues.

But any account that strays from exalting the purported purity of comfort women remains controversial. Park Yu-ha, a professor of literature at Sejong University, in Seoul, argued in her 2013 book “Comfort Women of the Empire” that these women’s wartime experience should not be reduced to a story about “pure innocent teen girls coerced by Japanese soldiers to be sex slaves.” A group of survivors sued Ms. Park for defamation, and though they lost the case, she was branded “a pro-Japanese traitor” by critics, including some historians.

In her book, Ms. Park argued that some of the women in military brothels were paid sex workers, and others were servants. Pointing to archival documents and firsthand accounts, she also claimed that while many comfort women were indeed forced into sexual slavery, not all of them were young girls, and that much blame for their suffering lay with the Korean men who had promised them paid work by the front. Ms. Park, in other words, suggested that at least some Koreans had collaborated with the Japanese.

This is why for some, comfort women must be represented as having been young and pure, virginal, sex slaves: Anything else would mean wrestling with the far more challenging notion that some of South Korea’s women did sleep with the enemy, literally and metaphorically, and that the rest of the nation may have had something to do with that.

The first known footage of comfort women surfaced last month, and it shows, standing next to Chinese soldiers, a half-dozen cowering women, not girls. Yet as the real, ravaged bodies of such women continue to disappear, a simplistic account of their suffering — an exalted story about innocence violated — is replacing them and obviating the need for a fuller reckoning of everyone’s, including Koreans’, wartime actions. In East Asia and elsewhere, next to chaste bronze statues that both do and do not represent the plight of comfort women, loudspeakers and banners blare out a version of history that cannot contemplate its own complexity.