Mariela Lampinen
A POSTCOLONIAL LOOK AT KOREAN GRANDMOTHERS
Representation of Comfort Women Survivors in a Post- Conflict Society
Faculty of Social Sciences Master’s Thesis May 2021
Mariela Lampinen: A Postcolonial Look at Korean Grandmothers: Representation of Comfort Women Survivors in a Post-Conflict Society
Master’s thesis Tampere University
Master’s Degree Programme in Peace Mediation and Conflict Research May 2021
The comfort women system was a system of sexual slavery set in place by the Japanese Imperial Army during the period of the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War. The victims of the system were taken from around the Japanese empire, but especially Korean women made up a large part of the body of victims. In the early 1990s, many Korean comfort women survivors came forth with public testimonies of the crimes they had faced. These public testimonies brought the survivors to general public consciousness both on a national and international level. While Korean survivors were able to connect through NGOs, take on legal actions, and gain some monetary compensation, many of the survivors still feel disenfranchised and that they lack reconciliation for the crimes they faced.
In this study I have looked into the way the Korean comfort women survivors were represented in South Korean society in the 1990s and how their agency was present in the said representation. I analyzed this through a framework of post-colonial studies and subaltern studies as a way to look into subaltern knowledge creation of the survivors vis-à-vis the national Korean grand narrative of model victimhood. The data I used consisted of Byun Youngjoo’s The Murmuring documentary film trilogy which was published between 1995 and 1999.
What I found is that a model victim narrative persisted in the representation of comfort women survivors, and in some cases, it had been internalized by the survivors themselves. However, Byun’s documentary trilogy took a different stance in letting the survivors themselves determine how they are shown on screen and how they themselves narrate their lives and experiences, thus offering a form of alternative knowledge creation origination from the survivors themselves. This knowledge portrays the survivors not as a homogenous group of melancholic victimized grandmothers, but as individuals with differing experiences and stories. While the survivors have gained an ability of knowledge creation among some platforms, such as the documentary trilogy used as data in this study, they can still be argued to occupy a subaltern status as they have not reached a position of similar power in the Korean society.
The post-colonial look of this study is limited in scope and thus there still remains work to be done on researching the current status of comfort women survivors, in Korea and in other societies, as well as subaltern knowledge creation, and more sustainable practices to peace.
Keywords: comfort women, Korea, peace studies, postcolonial studies, subaltern studies The originality of this thesis has been checked using the Turnitin OriginalityCheck service.
CGT syndrome = Chosenness, Glory, and Trauma syndrome NGO = Non-governmental organization
The Korean Council = The Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan
U.S. = The United States of America USSR = Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
1. Introduction ... 1
2. Background and research design - The comfort women system and its survivors ... 5
2.1. Background look on the comfort women system ... 5
2.2. Current approaches to comfort women survivors in Korea... 7
2.3. Comfort women survivors as subjects in academia ... 8
2.4. Research question and design of this study ... 10
3. Literature review - Peace studies and postcolonialism ...12
3.1. Peace studies ... 12
3.2. Postcolonialism ... 18
4. Methodology - Postcolonial and visual methods ...21
4.1. Postcolonial methodology and analysis ... 21
4.2. Ethics and limitations of this study... 22
4.3. Documentary series as data ... 24
5. Data – The Murmuring trilogy ...27
5.1. The Murmuring trilogy ... 27
5.1.1. The Murmuring ... 28
5.1.2. Habitual Sadness... 31
5.1.3. My Own Breathing ... 32
6. Discussion – Subaltern grandmothers? ...35
6.1. Concurrences and subalternity in The Murmuring trilogy ... 35
6.2. Agency of the comfort women survivors ... 38
6.3. Politicizing personal trauma ... 39
6.4. Perspectives for postcolonialism and peace studies ... 42
7. Conclusion – Observing the silences ...45
7.1. Broadening the perspectives for peace... 45
7.2. Trauma, healing, and retribution ... 47
7.3. Comfort women survivors now ... 50
7.4. Future for Othered knowledge ... 52
References ...54
1. Introduction
The term comfort women frequently emerges in discussions about the legacy of the Second World War in East Asia, especially when examining the relations between Japan, Korea and China. The term is an euphemism for victims of organized sexual slavery practiced by Imperial Japan in its colonies and warfronts (Tanaka, 2002). In international forums and media the topic flares up occasionally, sometimes in relation to regional trade disputes in the area (Bremmer, 2019) or in relation to legal cases the survivors wage against the Japanese state (Yeung et al., 2021). The subject of Imperial Japan’s comfort women system is often seen as a delicate and highly politicized one and thus it has remained somewhat understudied. Academically comfort women survivors have been studied usually from a legalistic perspective (S. R. Lee, 2003; Park Sonen, 2012), and from the more traditional perspective of women in conflict (Pike, 2011; Tanaka, 2002).
In this thesis, I will focus on the survivors of the comfort women system of Korean origin in the modern societal context of the Republic of Korea, commonly known as South Korea. While the Korean comfort womens survivors are perhaps one of the most studied and prevalent groups of survivors (Norma, 2016), I chose to focus on this group as the existing research and my relevant familiarity with the South Korean societal context fit within the scope of a Master’s thesis.
Additionally, while Korean comfort women survivors could be argued to be the most studied group of survivors, academic research on the comfort women system and especially its survivors in the more modern times is still quite an understudied topic. What is even more understudied is a survivor centered approach. This is why I am implementing a postcolonial approach to this research. While some authors have researched Korean comfort women survivors from a more survivor centered approach (Chung, 2009; Pilzer, 2012), these approaches have not really overlapped with peace and conflict studies. Through a postcolonial framework I aim to focus on the survivors themselves and their representation while also highlighting the aspects of positive and sustainable peace with focus on deep structure and deep culture within the South Korean society vis-à-vis Korean comfort women survivors.
The term comfort women itself is contested and problematic as it is an euphemism for forced sexual slavery. This is why many authors and actors choose to use the terminology of sexual slavery or sexual slaves (Chung, 2009; Min, 2003). However, as Pilzer (2012) has noted in his work, the
survivors themselves are reluctant to use these terms and often prefer the terminology of “comfort women” over the terminology of “sexual slaves”. Additionally, the comfort women and comfort women system generally refer to the specific system of organized sexual slavery practiced by Imperial Japan during the Second World War. Thus in this study I have chosen to use the terms comfort women and comfort women system.
Even though I am using the term comfort women, I aim to highlight the agency of the survivors of this system and hence use the term survivor when discussing these individuals instead of the word victim. While victim as a word tends to portray the subject as passive and stripped of agency, Mardorossian (2014) warns against the unconditional condoning of the term victim. She emphasizes how the dichotomy of agency and victimhood often goes unquestioned in feminist debates and how seeing victim as a weak, sometimes stereotypically feminine, subject lacking agency can instead cause further violence on the subject in question. Her criticism centers on how within discussions on rape victims, the status of victimhood is not given to victims who have shown sexual agency. As my study centers on individuals subjected to sexual slavery, terminology is something to be taken into consideration.
All this considered, I still choose to utilize the terminology of a comfort women survivor. This is due to the survivors’ themselves often opting for the term “comfort women” instead of the phrasing of
“sexual slaves”. In addition, the terminology of a victim, the prevailing ideology of victimhood, and especially the idea of a glorified model of a victim, emerge as a problematic phenomenon as discussed later in this study. While critiquing the avoidance of the terminology of victims and victimhood is relevant, I see that steering away from the model victim narrative by choosing the terminology of survivor is beneficial. In this manner, as a way to not cause further violence on the subjects of my research, I use the term comfort women survivor when discussing the individuals who were subjected to the crimes of organized sexual slavery under Imperial Japan during the Second World War.
Alongside this terminology of comfort women, I use the Korean order of words when spelling Korean names, meaning that the surname of an individual becomes before their first name. When referencing academics with Korean names I use the spelling present in the piece I refer to. When discussing of specific comfort women survivors, their names can be spelled differently in different
sources as Korean language has several different manners of romanization. In this study I aim to use the most common ways of spelling the names of the survivors used by other researchers who mention these same individuals by name (such as Pilzer, 2012). I also believe that when discussing the survivors and their statements, using their names rather than leaving them as anonymous survivors enhances their agency on the subject. However, as the most common spelling can differ from the spelling in the subtitles of my data set, there might be divergences among the spellings of the names between this study and other works.
The research question I present in this study is in what way was the representation of Korean comfort women survivors built in South Korea in the 1990s in Byun Youngjoo’s The Murmuring documentary trilogy and how to view this representation through the lens of postcolonial theory.
The data I use in this research is a three part documentary series, The Murmuring trilogy by Byun Youngjoo (1995, 1997, 1999), which focuses on Korean comfort women survivors and their daily life in House of Sharing, a shelter run by a Buddhist NGO. I analyze the representation of the survivors in this documentary series and contrast it with how the survivors have been portrayed in media and academia. The postcolonial framework used in this analysis is based upon Spivak’s (1988, 1996) ideas of subalternity and subaltern studies and Pemunta’s (2018) ideas on concurrences in knowledge formation.
What this research found was that the public representation of Korean comfort women in South Korea in the 1990s was heavily influenced by a model victim narrative, as noted in some earlier research as well (Ueno, 1999). This placed the survivors in a certain mold which was then in turn used as a method for processing colonial trauma on a national level. In this way, the survivors themselves were limited in their own agency over the trauma they had faced. In Byun’s documentary series, however, the approach to the survivors originates from themselves and they are given more agency in the way the documentary series is made and how the survivors are represented. This places the survivors in an interesting locus in terms of subalternity. Though the survivors have been able to emerge to public discourse through public testimonies and legal actions taken against the state of Japan, their agenda has been harnessed and utilized by other actors taking the agency away from the survivors themselves. Still, in some instances such as works of Pilzer (2012) and Byun (1995, 1997, 1999), the survivors have been able to narrativize their trauma and bring forth new knowledge that had previously been overlooked. In this way, I hope that this study
has been able to highlight an aspect of silence often excluded when discussing the comfort women system and its survivors.
The structure of the thesis is as follows: first a background chapter looking into the historical context and formation of the comfort women system, how the survivors have been presented in modern South Korea and in academia, and the research question and design of this thesis. Then, a literature review on peace studies and postcolonial studies followed by a chapter on methodology that addresses postcolonial and visual research methods alongside the ethics of this study. After this I present a chapter describing the data set used. Subsequently I will go into the chapter discussing this data from the point of my analytical framework, followed by the concluding chapter considering the need of further research from departing points of peace studies, comfort women survivors, and healing in post-conflict societies.
2. Background and research design - The comfort women system and its survivors
In this background chapter I introduce the comfort women system of Imperial Japan and describe its formation and functions briefly. I explore the historical developments relevant to the comfort women survivors from the beginning of the Japanese war effort during the Second World War to Korean independence, the decades of authoritarianism and the democratization movement, and the first public testimonies. Alongside this historical overview I will look into how comfort women survivors have been researched in academia and conclude the chapter with my research question and design.
2.1. Background look on the comfort women system
During the early decades of the 20th century, Japan became a growing empire in East Asia. Under the idea of pan-Asianism, an idea that consisted of a united Asia rising against European imperialism, Japan sought to grow its influence in the region through aggressive expansion. Due to these ideals of Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, East Asian regions such as Taiwan and the Korean peninsula became protectorates of Japan (Song, 2014; Yellen, 2016). In these protectorates, Japan exercised a heavy method of Japanization of the local societies. As China fell into civil war, Japan acquired the area of Manchuria and eventually started a large scale war effort against China that eventually spiraled to large scale military expansions around East and South Asia and pulled Japan into the midst of the Second World War (Eckert, 2016; Tanaka, 2002).
The extensive war efforts mobilized the Japanese society and its protectorates at large. One of the forms of this total mobilization manifested in the form of the comfort women system. Though arguments critical of the extent of state-led organization and forced recruitment involved have been made (Pike, 2011), it has been generally established that in order to avoid the formation of anti- Japanese sentiment in its new colonies, Imperial Japan set in place an elaborate system of sexual slavery in order to limit the pillaging and rape practiced by its soldiers. The women used in this system were often recruited from territories already under Japanese rule, such as Taiwan and Korea.
This was done in order to secure against possible intelligence risks posed by the local population
from the areas of Japanese expansion alongside addressing concerns regarding the venereal health of the soldiers. The recruitment process took many forms, and while at the early stages of Japanese war effort in East Asia the recruitment encompassed professional prostitutes from existing civilian brothel networks (Norma, 2016), it soon expanded onto forced trafficking through false promises of employment opportunities and outright arrests by the colonial police in the Japanese colonial territories (Tanaka, 2002). Essentially, comfort women system was an organized, state-led operation of forced prostitution and violent sexual slavery with up to 200,000 victims (Chung, 2010; Min, 2003).
As the end of the war drew near, Japan started a retreat from its colonial territories. Those stationed in territories that remained under Japanese rule even at the end of the war, were partly still kept in systemized prostitution as the system was modified to serve the The Allied Occupation of Japan, led mainly by the U.S. and supported by British Commonwealth (Tanaka, 2002). While the comfort women system was no longer as state-led and bureaucratic as it had been, the system was never addressed as a war crime by the Allied forces. Tanaka (2002) argues that one reason for this is that as the majority of victims were Asian, they were not considered victims of Japan in the same way as the citizens of Allied nations. This is highlighted by how the legal actions the Dutch took against Japanese officers dealt only with the forced prostitution of white Dutch citizens in Indonesia, while any victims of Asian origin were disregarded. Essentially, those in the comfort women system that were stationed in the colonies, were left to their own devices. Some eventually made it back home years after the war ended, many estranged and shunned by their families while also suffering from mental and physical traumas (S. R. Lee, 2003; Min, 2003; Park Sonen 2012). Thus began the silent decades of the Korean survivors of the comfort women system.
After Korea gained independence from the Japanese empire, the peninsula became divided into two states in the aftermath of the Korean War in 1953. During the following decades, the survivors of the comfort women system were navigating the rapidly altering social scene while living with their trauma. In South, authoritarian state-led development expedited the normalization of relations with Japan as the Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea was signed in 1965.
The treaty was seen as a deal in which compensation for colonial wartime property damages in the form of economic support overruled the civilian suffering experienced under the Japanese rule and the reparations for it (Agreement on the settlement of problems concerning property and claims
and on economic co-operation, 1965; S. R. Lee, 2003; Song, 2014). Hence, in a society with intersecting class and gender oppressions formed through traditional societal hierarchies and aggressive authoritarian state led economic development, the taboo of sexual crimes alongside with the economic need of normalizing political relations with Japan led to internalized shame that kept the victims of sexual slavery silent (S. R. Lee, 2003; Min, 2003; Park Sonen, 2012).
2.2. Current approaches to comfort women survivors in Korea
It was not until the end of the 20th century that the survivors of the comfort women system were able to publicly discuss their experiences and come forth with claims for reparations. In the early 1990s the issue emerged to national consciousness as the first victims took a stance and testified publicly of the crimes they had faced. This led to legal action taken against the Japanese state in court in Tokyo. The case eventually died out as the Japanese government claimed lack of evidence (Park Sonen 2012; Pike, 2011). Another group of survivors also took Japan to court in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. However, Japan claimed immunity from U.S.
jurisdiction and the case petered out (S. R. Lee, 2003; Park Sonen 2012).
Even with no success in legal litigation, as the victims came forth in public, they were able to organize for their cause. This led to the beginning of Wednesday demonstrations, a tradition of weekly demonstrations held in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul (The Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, n.d.; Park Sonen, 2012). Even after bringing forth the testimonies of the victims of the sexual slavery, it was not until later in the 2000s and 2010s that the discourse on the victims and their suffering became more mainstream in the Korean society at large. Chronologically, embracing this discourse sat into the wider picture of the larger democratization movement of South Korean civil society (Ueno, 1999). Even now, the NGO that has grown out of the Wednesday demonstrations, The Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (commonly refered to as The Korean Council), states that it positions itself “in solidarity with civic groups, women, students, citizens, and other various individuals and organizations” (The Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, n.d.).
As the issue came into wider public knowledge, the agenda of the survivors of the comfort women system started to evolve into a grievance of a national scale. The South Korean society took the issue of repartitions for the survivors of the comfort women system to heart and the justice for the Korean
“grandmothers” became a fight associated with national identity and national traumas of Japanese rule from the early 20th century (Bemma, 2017; Park Sonen, 2012; Pilzer, 2012). LaCapra (1999) discusses this phenomenon of national identity building centering around a shared absence and loss. This shared loss can trigger a sense of nostalgia, melancholy, mourning and a yearn for utopist politics. In this way, the idea of adequate compensation and reparations to comfort women survivors, and thus national reparations to the Korean identity from the time of Japanese rule, form this unattainable goal to reach for. The identity of a victim and victimhood, while centered around the survivors of the comfort women system, simultaneously works as a national identity in politics vis-à-vis South Korea and Japan. While this seems like a coping mechanism of a national identity level, it may prevent actually working through the past trauma. This becomes evident as the representation of the Korean survivors of the comfort women system now took a larger place in the national consciousness, the survivors’ own control and participation in formation of the discourse on them dwindled.
2.3. Comfort women survivors as subjects in academia
Academical approaches to the issue of the comfort women system of the Japanese Imperial Army stem from several different perspectives. As the historical documentation on the issue has been largely destroyed over the decades, the research on comfort women system and its survivors has provided different views on estimations of the number of victims, on the role of Japanese state, and on the aspect of what is considered true in terms of the recorded data versus the testimonies given by the survivors (Pike, 2011; Tanaka, 2002; Ueno, 1999). As my approach centers on the representation of comfort women survivors in South Korea through a postcolonial framework, I will not focus on the existing research debating, via hegemonic knowledge creation, the historical accuracy of the survivors’ testimonies and claims. Instead, I will focus on the studies on the comfort women survivors themselves.
Comfort women survivors have received much attention from the perspective of gendered violence.
Tanaka (2002) provides a comprehensive summary and gender studies based analysis on the details
of the Japanese comfort women system and repression of women in Japan and abroad during the war effort and the following U.S. occupation by relying on numerous primary sources. As well as Tanaka’s analysis, Pike’s (2011) chapter on comfort women survivors relies on the traditional violence against women approach as he analyzes the lack of legal recognition and compensation for the victims mainly due to their status as racialized women. Norma (2016) takes a strong stance for the Japanese comfort women survivors from an anti-sexwork approach, arguing that the Japanese survivors of the system have been largely ignored and scapegoated in the discussions on the comfort women system and its survivors. Other works, such as S. R. Lee’s (2003) and Park Sonen’s (2012) also address the intersectional facets of the issue, yet still mainly focus on legalistic aspects of the survivors and their lack of reparations and redresses.
Important to studies on comfort women survivors is also the work of Ueno (1999), especially her definition of model victim narrative which criticizes the framing of comfort women survivors in patriarchal South Korean society as a homogenic “Korean woman whose purity was violated in a forced abduction” (p. 141). Alongside Ueno, Yoo and Seo have provided analyses on colonial melancholia (Yoo, 2012) and national “popular narratives of collective memories” (Seo, 2008, p.
370). These works have problematized the relations between the survivors and their surrounding society, especially in terms of the survivors themselves losing the agency in their own trauma and narrative. Alongside these more critical approaches, the topic has also been studies through a queer studies perspective by J. J. Kim (2014) who analyzes the desire and language present in Byun’s The Murmuring trilogy and contrasts this with the queerness of the director herself.
A title that adopts a less common survivor centered participatory approach is Pilzer’s Hearts of Pine (2012) which is a research based on ethnomusicology. In his research, Pilzer frames these former comfort women as survivors, not as victims. The subjects in his research were able to represent themselves and their identities in a way they wished to be represented, against “the image of a generic, archetypal elderly victim of the ‘comfort women’ system in South Korean public culture”
(Pilzer, 2012, pp. ix-x). Pilzer also takes a more personified approach in his study, naming the survivors he has interviewed. Much of the research on the survivors leave them anonymous, referring to them as just “survivors”, “women” or “subjects”, even when directly discussing their testimonies in e.g. Byun’s The Murmuring trilogy (Chung, 2009). By naming the individuals in question in interviews and testimonies, they are given more agency and credit over their
experiences and statements. In this way, as Pilzer highlights the subject through giving a voice to the subaltern survivor of Japanese sexual slavery, his methodology aligns somewhat with a postcolonial approach.
In summary, the study of survivors of the Japanese comfort women system has focused largely on its Korean victims. This is partly due to the fact that according to the remaining records and testimonies, Korean women constituted a large body of the system’s victims and often claimed to have received the most violent forms of abuse (Min, 2003; Park Sonen, 2012). While many of the survivors of the system are also Japanese, Chinese, Dutch, Indonesian, and Filipina, their grievances have been studied in separate forums or remain understudied (Norma, 2016; Tanaka, 2002). In the case of Korean comfort women survivors, the adaptation of their agenda to a larger national level has increased the issue's visibility. Within academia, while critical and de-constructive approaches have been presented by e.g. Ueno (1991), much of the research has centered on legalistic aspects of the issue or the gendered aspect of sexual crimes in conflicts. A substantial body of research on comfort women also exists outside the English-speaking academia. However, this body of research was left outside this study due to limitations in language.
2.4. Research question and design of this study
My aim in this study is to focus on the representation of Korean comfort women survivors in the Korean society in the late 1990s and how to view the construction of this representation through the lens of postcolonial theory. Thus, my approach to the survivors of the comfort women system is not that of studying historical accuracy or the legal framework of victims and perpetrators.
Instead, the focus of this study lies in the representation of these survivors, and how actively they have been able to participate in this representation of themselves. This representation is closely linked to the authority and agency of the knowledge on comfort women survivors, an approach that has been deemed lacking when discussing comfort women survivors in an academic setting (J. J.
Kim, 2014).
In essence, the research question in this study is: In what way was the representation of Korean comfort women survivors formed in Byun Youngjoo’s The Murmuring trilogy and how to view the construction of this representation and agency through the lens of postcolonial theory? Through
this research setting I analyze the representation of comfort women survivors in South Korea in the 1990s during a time when the issue first emerged to public consciousness on a national level.
I study the representation and participation in said representation through analyzing a documentary series directed by Byun Youngjoo. Byun’s documentary trilogy, consisting of The Murmuring (1995), Habitual Sadness (1997), and My Own Breathing (1999), visualizes the lives and representation of comfort women survivors in South Korea at the turn of the millenium. During this time the agenda of recognizing the crimes committed against these women became more prevalent in local and global settings. Yet, the point of departure for Byun’s documentary is centered around the subjects and they are given the ability to construct the document’s narrative in the way they themselves wish it to be. This serves as a counterpoint to the prevalent idea of the same subject, a comfort women survivor, in Korean society and also in some academic settings.
I conduct the analysis by a postcolonial framework, a framework that adopts a critical look on colonizing discourses and practices (Loomba, 1998). The field of postcolonialism seeks to question the prevailing authority on and procurement of knowledge and in this way illustrate the dominant powers and practices at play (Said, 1978). It seeks to highlight history as a practice of standardized truth-establishing vis-à-vis alternative histories often centering on the groups and individuals that have been left outside the standard knowledge creation, those who have been actively Othered by the dominant knowledge creators. This field, especially the work of Spivak (1988, 1996), also focuses on the subalterns, the subjects of research and narration, that have been left without a voice of their own.
Postcolonialism also offers tools to address biases and points of privilege when studying certain issues and phenomena. As in this study, a physical and cultural distance to the subject matter creates a need to locate oneself in the study and in the discourse. This self-reflectivity is highlighted by Spivak (1996), as she encourages to look critically at one’s own history and see whether a privilege prevents gaining a certain type of Othered knowledge. These dimensions of de- construction and possibilities of closer study enable me to analyze my data in a way I see important and least harmful to the survivors of the comfort women system.
3. Literature review - Peace studies and postcolonialism
I build this study on the basis of peace studies and the theoretical framework of postcolonialism.
While peace studies offer a point of departure for studying societies in and after conflicts, postcolonialism offers a more comprehensive framework for looking into comfort women survivors and their representation in society.
In this chapter I cover Galtung's foundations of peace studies with his theories of positive and negative peace. I also explore his theory on the CGT (Chosenness, Glory, and Trauma) syndrome and its relation to comfort women survivors in the Korean context. Additionally, I will look into the ideas of sustainable peace and critique on liberal peace building and how these have played a part in the post-conflict society formation in South Korea. The later half of this literature review will look into postcolonial theories, focusing on ideas of dominant knowledge creation, subalternity and epistemic violence.
3.1. Peace studies
The scope of this study, while analyzed through a postcolonial lens, is based on the academic disciple of peace studies. This disciple focuses on resolution of conflicts and the transformation of societies from a state of conflict to that of post-conflict. In this way, as opposed to the security studies’
discourse on violence, peace studies shifts the focus to that of peace. As my analysis in this study centers around a society and subject matter not in active violent conflict, the peace studies theories discussed here focus on the dynamics of a post-conflict society where negative peace might have been reached while positive peace is yet to emerge.
The peace studies tradition established by Johan Galtung (1964), has conventionally centered on two aspects of peace, negative and positive. Negative peace refers to the absence of physical violence and threat while positive peace refers to the absence of structural and cultural violence in a society (Galtung, 2007). This terminology differentiates the mere cessation of hostilities in conflict from the building of peace within a society, thus offering tools to focus on the processes that take place in a society before, meanwhile, and after the most visible forms of violence.
Galtung’s (2007) approaches to peace are further expressed in his concepts of peace culture and peace structure. He sees these as enablers of legitimizing peaceful and violent structures in society.
Peace culture focuses on the deeper cultural conditions in society that enable peace or violence, such as the way history is taught or war glorified in art and other narratives. Peace structure in turn focuses on the distribution and access to power and resources. The limitations of the aforementioned can contribute to societal violence, while access to those contributes to positive peace, especially by shifting the access from only the stratum of diplomats to civil society actors. In Galtung’s approach then, the goal of peacebuilding and achieving positive peace is depolarization and humanization in the society. According to him, while the depolarization has to be reached in society, it is also the inner deconstruction of pre-existing concepts and ideas that needs to happen in individuals participating in peacebuilding. Thus, peace cannot be implemented from outside, but rather from within the members of society in conflict.
In the classification of Galtung’s (2007) model, the location of the South Korean comfort women survivors can depend on whether the perpetrated violence is considered to be the sexual slavery practiced by the Japanese state or the structural violence practiced by the Korean society. The comfort women survivors in South Korea are in a stage of negative direct peace. They no longer face a direct threat of violence from the state of Japan or the South Korean society. In terms of positive direct peace, the agency and agenda of the survivors has been somewhat heard in the terms of their local society. However, positive direct peace has not been achieved with the Japanese state, as the survivors have not been acknowledged by the perpetrator. On the structural and cultural levels of peace, obtaining negative and positive peace with the South Korean society has been partial or still lacking. While the comfort women survivors are now acknowledged within the society, their support still largely relies on the civil society actors while the governmental sphere has not taken their agenda as a part of their policy formation, or has done so only recently and with limitations (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Korea, 2017). The progress with peacebuilding with the Japanese perpetrators in turn cannot proceed unless they acknowledge the claims of Korean comfort women survivors through positive direct peace. This line of analysis, alongside a more elaborated definition of perpetrators and victims, could be conducted further through an in-depth conflict analysis, which is not in the scope of this study.
The concepts of peace structure and peace culture can be analyzed further through the civilization theory’s concepts of deep structures and deep culture (Galtung, 1996, 2000). This line of analysis enables the critical examination of deep-lying issues preventing or spoiling peacebuilding in society.
In accordance to Galtung’s (2000) TRANSCEND approach of peaceful conflict transformation, Graf et al. (2007) define deep structure as “patterns of relations between the segments of society” and deep culture as “religion and ideology, language and art, empirical and formal science” (pp. 132- 133) that contribute to the justification of the means of structural violence and oppression.
Examining these aspects of deep structure and deep culture promote the transformation from a violent conflict to that of a peaceful one.
This line of analysis is also relevant in observing the effects of Japanese colonialism and the comfort women system in the Korean context. As part of deep culture, Galtung (1996, 2007) introduces the CGT syndrome, an emotional expression of Chosenness, Glory, and Trauma within a state. Graf et al. (2007) further describe that:
Nations with a CGT syndrome suffer from heavy traumata (multiple traumatic events), and dwell on injuries and defeats that were perpetrated by enemies. They maintain and publicize myths which tell of their past and future glory. And they live with the conception of being chosen by transcendental forces for political missions.
(p. 133)
The theory of CGT syndrome in South Korean society sheds light on the model victim narrative that can be seen in the discussions around comfort women survivors. As Park Sonen (2012) notes, The Korean Council has utilized a narrative of shared memory of injustice in order to strengthen coalition with other civil society actors aiming to address the legacy of Japanese colonialism in Korea. Park Sonen quotes Ueno, who summarizes the popular Korean narrative of comfort women survivors as
“[a]n innocent virgin is suddenly taken by force, gang-raped and forced into labor as a comfort woman. She tries to escape but is stopped and lives through unbearable suffering. This is the model comfort woman’s story” (Ueno, 1999, p. 143). Here Park Sonen highlights that this builds a model victim narrative, the suffering of “innocent virgins” in the hands of the outside force of Japanese colonial agents. While this narrative radically simplifies the issue of the comfort women system, it
also leaves out those survivors who do not perfectly fit the model of the victim deemed most beneficial to the desired narrative.
The need to build this model victim narrative resonates with the theory of CGT syndrome. The trauma of Japan in Korean, compiled of several incidents and conflict throughout the second millennium, culminated in imperial Japan’s annexation of Korea. The trauma has been dwelled on and built into feelings of anger and grief on a national level. These feelings have then been directed towards convenient vessels, such as the Koren comfort women survivors. While there is no singular religious drive of “Chosenness” in the Korean case, apart from the Confucian societal tradition, the trauma has been obtained and shared intergenerationally, thus altering the violence and trauma suffered by the comfort women survivors to that of all of the nation. Pilzer (2012) observes how
“the colonial suffering of the ‘comfort women’ became a kind of ultimate example of the violation of a metaphorically female national body” (p. 25). Seo (2008) also notes that, “[f]rom the perspective of a masculine nation state, women are regarded as domesticated for the purpose of national production, therefore the loss of the women’s chastity was treated as the loss of the nation’s essential property” (p. 377). By this process, the agenda of comfort women survivors has been transformed to also that of Korean men and their emasculation.
In this way, while there is no religious “Chosenness”, the colonial trauma unifies to a strong national ethos. “Glory” can then manifest by overcoming the perpetrators. While this overcoming and reaching of “Glory” has manifested itself most forcefully and violently in the Korean independence movement, modern day equivalence can be seen in the glorification in the independence day celebrations and how the old trauma still manifests itself in current politics (Bremmer, 2019; Kang, 2020; J. W. Lee, 2014). While CGT syndrome does not center only on the issue of comfort women survivors, the syndrome sheds light on how the agenda of comfort women survivors has been adapted to a larger national narrative of trauma.
The Galtungian take on peace studies and the processes of peacebuilding can be seen as pervasive, especially as the aims of his theory mostly entail a total reformation of society. As a response to this, peace studies scholars such as Ledarach (1997) and Richmond (2001) have discussed an alternative approach, that of sustainable practices. These practices can be seen as occupying a different level
of analysis, moving from societies as a whole to more micro-level actions, such as individual projects, programs or policies (Keating & Knight, 2004). This approach can be seen as a more pragmatic and targeted approach, while still obtaining a holistic approach to peacebuilding. An aspect that fits into the level of sustainable peacebuilding is Richmond’s (2014) critique on modern peacebuilding policies, particularly liberal peacebuilding.
The more recent focus in peace studies for the last couple of decades has been on liberal peacebuilding, and the critical response to it. As Richmond (2014) elaborates, liberal peacebuilding offers a normative framework through which statebuilding is exercised in societies in conflict by dominant states from the global North that support liberal market democracy prevalent in the Western world. Thus, in societies in conflict, negative peace is often achieved through a Western intervention followed by a security sector reform alongside with processes aimed at positive peace through establishing a civil society and democracy in the name of neoliberal modernisation. This approach often ignores asymmetrical power relations in the target society or might instead use these relations for profit while exercising this agenda. In some cases, depending on the reactions to liberal peacebuilding in target societies, a hybrid peace is achieved through these methods. In this way, a certain level of negative or even positive peace can be achieved. However, this form of peace can often be strained due to the possible tensions between the local society and the intervening power. In addition, existing and underlying tensions or power relations in society that might have not erupted in violence yet, are often left unattended.
As one the more vocal critics of liberal peace, Richmond (2011, 2014) has voiced the need to implement approaches like postcolonialism in peace studies. This way the gaps in understanding the local and the subaltern could be better addressed in peace processes. The benefits of a postcolonial approach become evident also in the case of Korean comfort women survivors. While in the narrative presented by the comfort women survivors the Japanese state and its soldiers have been designated as the perpetrators of violence (Byun, 1995, 1999), the state building practices that took place in Korea after its liberation from Japanese rule have also contributed to the systematic violence experienced by the comfort women survivors.
The measures taken in Korea after the end of the Second World War are not necessarily much different from the practices included in the 21st century liberal peace building. As Japan lost its claim over Korean peninsula, the U.S. and USSR established administrations in South and North, respectively. However, after the surrender of Imperial Japan and liberation of Korea, the existing institutions in Korea set in place by Japan and the oppression built in them were not dismantled. As the U.S. was eager to diminish the communist influence in Asia, they were quick to pardon Koreans who had worked for Imperial Japan or even fought in its army. Eckert (2016) notes that:
[Korean graduates of Imperial Japanese Military Academy] would find a welcoming presence in the American occupation forces, who were more concerned with building up a native force for maintaining order, and later, for containing a potent communist political threat than with arresting or punishing men who had served a now utterly defeated enemy. (p. 322)
In this way, while Japan’s claim on the Korean peninsula ended after the second World War, it was the state building of the U.S. that replaced the former colonial ruler. A cookie cutter method of putting in place a government ignored the underlying issues in society, leading to physical violence of Korean War and the societal and cultural violence suffered by those Othered in society.
Furthermore, after the Korean War, a military coup organized by Koreans who had formerly served in the Japanese Imperial Army, took power in Korea. This coup was headed by Park Chunghee, whose authoritarian development led rule lasted for nearly twenty years. During the Park Chunghee era, relations with Japan were normalized for economic gain and alliance with the U.S. emphasized through the rhetoric of communist threat in North Korea (S. R. Lee, 2003; Song, 2014). These policies marginalized the experiences of colonial violence that many in the South Korean society still carried with them. Thus, while a negative peace had been achieved in the society through U.S. intervention and Park Chungee’s authoritarian development, the lack of positive peace was indicated, among other groups, through the experiences of comfort women survivors.
While the basis of peace studies literature offers a wide framework to approach issues in post- conflict societies, gaps still remain. Postcolonial approaches offer some tools to address these issues left with lesser attention. These approaches offer a critical look at the processes that societies have been built on, their inner peace culture and structure, and the colonial influence that has shaped and enabled that. In this context, I turn to look at postcolonial theories next.
3.2. Postcolonialism
Although studies of comfort women survivors have examined the historical claims and legal litigations of the crimes committed, there have been fewer intersectional and participatory approaches, especially ones originating from the survivors themselves. Thus shifting the lens of analytic focus on postcolonialism enables another point of entry with Korean comfort women survivors.
Postcolonialism aims to look at colonial domination and legacies of colonialism through a critical lens. It does not necessarily imply that colonialism would merely be a product of history, a thing of the past, and something that humankind would have surpassed. Instead postcolonialism frames itself as oppositional to still occurring colonizing discourses and practices while acknowledging that these experiences and ways of marginalizing take on multiple forms. Drawing from the Foucaultian tradition of sociology, postcolonialism questions the discursive representation of our world and authority of this knowledge creation (Loomba, 1998; Said, 1978). Through questioning this authority and the prevailing ways of procuring knowledge, we are able to refocus the narrative, the discursive representation, on Korean comfort women survivors. This refocusing can help to highlight the intersections of gender, race and class while aiming to build sustainable peace among the Korean comfort women and society at large.
In Orientalism, Said (1978) discusses the framing of knowledge and its creation between the West and Orient. He questions the process through which “ideas acquire authority, normality, and even the status of natural truth” (p. 325). Here Said argues that as the prevailing understanding of the Orient is always framed by the West, the formation of dominant knowledge is heavily linked to colonial experiences. Thus, the natural truth on the existence of something called the Orient, and the further dominant knowledge on it, has been created through the Western understanding. The Orient has been defined from the point of the West, it is something other and something outside of the West, and thus in turn the created Orient also defines the West that created it. Through this definition of the Orient, as it is so heavily centered on the colonial narrative created by the West, the subjects deemed to be part of the Orient have not necessarily had the space to represent themselves, or at least participate in or control the narrative of themselves. The dominant
knowledge on the Orient is thus an imaginative history, set in place by the West, created from the emotional sense of time, place, and events West has held of the Orient.
As the dominant creation of knowledge can be seen as a part of the imaginative history set in place by the West, or other actors with authority on knowledge creation, the focus now turns to the alternative actors and ways of creating knowledge. What kind of knowledge is created from the point of the subjects of dominant Western knowledge creation themselves? This line of thought in postcolonial studies has been associated with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and her work on subaltern studies.
The term subaltern has its origins in Gramsci’s work. Antonio Gramsci, a Marxist philosopher from the early 20th century, defined the subaltern as an opposing term to hegemonic (Gramsci &
Henderson, 1988). While originally the term was used to differentiate between the hegemonic and subaltern classes, in the 20th century the term has been adapted to a wider cultural application. For Gramsci, the subaltern is not part of the civil society, because for him, the civil society exists as a tool to secure political hegemony, not as something that would oppose and challenge it. Thus, the subaltern always remains outside of this network of influence, and if it were to gain access to this influence, in Gramsci’s words winning the “war of position”, it would lose its status as a subaltern and become something else (Green, 2011, p. 87).
This exclusion to power means that the subaltern is never recorded in history. This also intrigued Gramsci who wanted to define this political entity that had left no records of itself. Gramsci theorized different paths and stages of development for different subalterns. At first, the subaltern would not have resources to organize and record their actions, but in the later stages the subaltern could be able to organize and act politically (Green, 2011). Eventually then, the subaltern gains such a position in society that they would shift away from their status as a subaltern.
Spivak’s approach to the term subaltern differs from Gramsci’s original one. Spivak argues that Gramsci’s focus is heavily on the macro level of power, thus ignoring the more micro level dynamics of power (Green, 2011). Spivak (1988) is also critical of Gramsci’s ideas of progression in participation in power for the subaltern. She sees the subaltern not just politically oppressed, but
so far removed from power, that they lack all representation and organization as they exist outside of what is determined as an empirically “concrete experience” (p. 69).
The concept of epistemic violence and removal from empirical experience is also central to Spivak’s framing of the subaltern. Epistemic violence occurs through harmful representation and Othering of the subaltern through empirical data. In Spivak’s (1988, 1996) view, this becomes prevalent especially through the homogenized presentation of the Othered colonial subject which ignores any additional intersectional advances experienced by these subjects, were it related to class or gender.
Due to epistemic violence, Spivak places an emphasis on the lack of recorded history of the subaltern, and highlights the importance of critically observing those who have recorded this history. Critical observation on the recorded history enables the analysis of biases and privileges of the authors of this hegemonic knowledge. This is how Spivak calls into question the ability of the subaltern to speak, regardless of Gramsci’s theorized processes of participation. She warns how, through epistemic violence, “the subaltern woman will be as mute as ever” (1988, p. 90).
Spivak sees that the hegemonic knowledge creation gravitates towards the representation of a “monolithic third world woman” (1988, p. 92). In a similar way, the hegemonic representation of Korean comfort women survivors has been a monolithic idea of a model victim of sexual violence.
A deconstruction of this representation is thus needed. Spivak’s tools to this are unlearning the prevailing biases and looking into the silences left in the hegemonic knowledge.
4. Methodology - Postcolonial and visual methods
I base the methodology of this study on postcolonial analysis. However, as the data set of the thesis is a series of documentary movies, visual research methods are also applicable to this study’s methodology. In this chapter I discuss postcolonial analysis and its tools, the ethics and limitations of this study, and those dimensions of visual research methods that are relevant to this study.
4.1. Postcolonial methodology and analysis
The postcolonial analysis which I employ in my study focuses on the critique on creation of knowledge out of dominant discourses. Through analysing a documentary series on Korean comfort women survivors, I contrast the narratives present in this series against the dominant understanding of Korean comfort women in South Korea in the 1990s as discussed in the data and in existing research. Through this I can highlight the creation of alternative knowledge opposing the hegemonic discourse and how listening and finding these narratives that are missing from the hegemonic discourse is important in establishing positive peace in a society.
Postcolonialism highlights a Foucaldian understanding of the world, how the world in itself is understandable to us only through its discursive representation and how “human beings internalize the system of repression and reproduce them by conforming to ideas of what is normal and what deviant” (Loomba, 1998, p. 41). This is why placing focus on the processes that create knowledge, and through knowledge, systems that violate groups in society, is crucial. Thus, as discussed in earlier chapters, postcolonial analysis serves as a tool that can shed light on practices of dominance and, instead of accepting these practices, to look for places in which subaltern voices can be heard.
As a tool to analyze these competing processes of knowledge creation through a postcolonial lens, I turn to concurrences. Merriam-Webster dictionary defines concurrence as “the simultaneous occurrence of events or circumstances” (Merriam-Webster, n.d.). In a postcolonial framework, Pemunta (2018) introduces concurrences as a method of highlighting histories and narratives that differ from the hegemonic understanding of history. He describes the concurrent approach as
“[c]hallenging structures of power and actions that silence alternative, subaltern voices by recovering these voices” (p. 16). This methodology highlights how concurrences as a way of
depicting simultaneous cultural movements and processes seek to amplify subaltern’s voice and agency while taking into consideration the multiplicity of these voices.
Concurrences as a method shows how different understandings exist and relate to each other. While discussion on dominant knowledge creation easily categorizes different formations of knowledge to dominant and non-dominant, concurrences seeks to take into consideration the plurality in power in terms of different ways of creating knowledge. Pemunta (2018) summarizes how “[c]oncurrences suggest that different perspectives and locations are always and inescapably entangled and human beings constantly negotiate the different and sometimes incompatible demands arising out of these concurrent conditions” (p. 20). Thus, in my study I look at how the subaltern voice is presented in my data, and how those multiple voices and narratives contrast to the hegemonic knowledge on Korean comfort women survivors. As the survivors have occupied different positions in society, and different positions of subalternity, looking at these narratives benefits from the pluralistic understanding of concurrences.
4.2. Ethics and limitations of this study
Central to peace studies, especially in regards to groups and communities that have suffered from violence or are otherwise vulnerable, is to avoid exposing the subjects to further violence through research. This is why I see a postcolonial approach as the most beneficial and ethical approach to the topic of this study. Through a postcolonial methodology, the author of the study must also expose themselves to critical evaluation of their own positionality vis-à-vis their subject. As Said (1978) states, “[t]he study of human experience usually has an ethical (and political) consequence in either the best or worst sense” (p. 327).
Postcolonial approaches center on deconstruction. In addition to deconstructing the processes of power that have created hegemonic knowledge, the deconstruction has to encompass also the author. The author needs to address their biases and privileges in regards to the subject matter, and in regards to the knowledge the author sees as hegemonic. Spivak (1996) highlights the process of self-reflection in postcolonial research as one’s privilege can prevent gaining a certain type of Othered knowledge. Through this deconstruction and critical assessing of self as an author, the subaltern can be researched without further epistemic violence.
My positionality towards the subject matter of this study seems far-removed. As a white woman from the global North, I have no experience or personal contact to Korean comfort women survivors.
Yet I chose this topic for my research as I think this topic has not been well explored through a postcolonial lens. I witnessed public discourse on the Korean comfort women survivors during my studies in South Korea from 2013 to 2017. While the representation and societal status of the survivors had somewhat changed from the timespan I focus on in this study, I always found most of the public discussions and representation of these survivors as politicized and removed from the subjects themselves. Due to the politicized nature of the public narrative, I found the discourses problematic and the exploration of the agency limited in the national hegemonic knowledge setting in the Republic of Korea.
The limitations of this study are not merely due to personal positionality. The data used in this research is also limited as it is not based on personally collected primary sources. The data I use has been collected and framed by someone else, namely the director and producers of this documentary series, and thus I cannot control the variable of the agenda of the makers and collectors of this data. Additionally, my personal command of the Korean language does not enable me to completely understand my data set without subtitles. So while I am able to follow the general meaning and essence of discussions had in the documentaries, I am also heavily dependent on the subtitles and the choices in terms of language that has been made in translation.
The survivors that have taken part in these documentaries also bring in a participatory effect. One could argue that the documentary series does not represent comfort women survivors at large, but rather certain types of survivors are presented in this documentary series. Yet I see this data as a good tool in analyzing the representation of comfort women survivors in Korea. The producers of this data also have a shorter personal distance to the subject matter than I have, thus providing a far richer data set than I personally could. The data produced also seems an ethical choice of data as it approaches the subject in a sensitive way with an approval of the participants. It does not sensationalize the subjects and gives them a sense of agency in the documentaries.
In addition to my own positionality and limitations in the data, the theoretical framework in this study also has its own limitations. Postcolonial approaches tend to focus on aspects of colonial histories through race and gender, which in the realm of this study would encompass the Othering of Koreans by Japanese within the comfort women system, but also the Othering of Korean survivors by Japanese and Korean men. However, the aspect of class is also an important variable in the experiences of Korean comfort women survivors as most of the survivors are from lower stratas of Korean society. Yun Chungok, a scholar and one of the earliest researchers on the topic of Korean comfort women survivors, has noted how even as a coeval to many of the survivors, she was able to avoid the comfort women system due to her higher societal status in colonized Korea (Min, 2003).
As the strategies of obtaining individuals to the comfort women system included false promises of labor, forced mobilization for the war effort, and outright kidnapping, girls and young women from lower social classes were easier targets to the colonial forces in Korea (Min, 2003; Tanaka, 2002).
Even after the war, the survivors of this system were largely ostracized in the Korean society, keeping them in lower social stratas (Min, 2003; Park Sonen, 2012). Thus, class is also an important intersecting variable to the experiences and representation of Korean comfort women survivors.
While postcolonial approaches do not necessarily always include the variable of social class within the colonized society, I will keep this intersecting aspect present in this study.
4.3. Documentary series as data
As the dataset used in this study is a documentary series, some consideration should also be given to visual methods in research. While the main framework for this study’s analysis is postcolonialism, visual methods provide a point of departure for handling such visual data as documentary films even when the main analytical framework would come from another discipline. As Pauwels (2020) states:
Visual researchers have a broad range of theories and analytical frameworks to choose from when trying to make sense of images and visual artifacts ... However, these theories and frameworks do not necessarily offer a well-integrated and clear path towards a systematic interrogation of visuals with respect to their social and cultural significance. (p. 23)
Visual research methods refers to research methods in which visual material is used as a part of providing evidence in analyzing research questions (Rose, 2014). While a large part of the literature
on visual research methods focuses on visual data collected by the researcher themself or generated through participatory generated methods, it still offers approaches to dealing with visual data produced outside the study itself.
Visual research methods became more prevalent in political science, international relations, and peace research after the aesthetic turn in international relations studies in the early 2000s. The aesthetic turn, coined by Bleiker (2001), emphasized the importance of adopting alternative methods of research to the field of international relations. In contrast to the mimetic research, i.e.
traditional rational methods and linear narratives, this turn to aesthetic approaches would deepen the understanding of different phenomena in international relations. Through this, the focus in research is shifted from the diplomatic level of actors and documentations to the artistic products challenging the prior epistemological approaches (Callahan, 2015).
The aesthetic turn in international relations and visual research methods often place themselves as oppositional to hegemonic knowledge and as an alternative form of knowledge creation. While Bleiker (2001) challenges the traditional methods in international relations, Wagner (2020) frames visual research methods as new modes of knowledge production. Within visual research methods, the knowledge production encompasses not only the production of visual material for research, but extending the understanding of visuality, of how things are seen (Callahan, 2015; Chalfen, 2020).
Rose (2014) highlights the collaborative nature of visual research methods, and the new type of knowledge generated through this. While my data set is not purely based on participatory visual methods, the style of the documentary encourages the subjects to narrate their own experiences.
This supports the baseline of postcolonial analysis used in this study.
Within visual research, documentary films are located as a part of cinema. Munster and Sylvest (2015) provide an analytical framework for documentary films based on perceptibility. This refers to the ways of saying and showing present in the film. Through perceptibility, “documentaries cannot just provide a window onto reality, but constitute visual constructions of reality, if not distinct epistemologies” (p. 231). An example for this, would be a mode of perceptibility where privileged is shown instead of said, often referred to in film as cinema véritée. Still, even in cinema véritée, nothing is ever just merely shown, but the agenda of the film presents itself through
speaking underneath the level of showing. Expressions akin to cinema véritée are also present in my data set. The first two installations of the documentary series, The Murmuring (Byun, 1995) and Habitual Sadness (Byun, 1997) include body-centric imagery of the survivors expressing both fragility and strengths through visual presentation as I discuss in later chapters.
The documentary series used as data in this study can also be labeled as a testimony. While this places certain expectations on the validity of the testimonies presented in the series, the framework of the study does not deal with a singular valid truth but rather aims to look at concurrent truths, and especially on the representation these testimonies bring forth. Alongside the postcolonial approach, visual methods also do not look for a singular truth, but rather the power relations at play in the visual representation (Callahan, 2015). In a case of conflict and trauma, documentary testimonies can also serve as ways of narrativizing trauma for the survivors (Herman, 1992; Sarkar
& Walker, 2010). Ueno (1999) also highlights the importance of narrativization to comfort women survivors, especially as the model victim narrative has been prevalent and the voice of the survivors themselves muted. Thus, while the focus of this study is not on the visual aspects of the data itself, visual research methods offer some additional tools in analyzing the narrative present in the data.
5. Data – The Murmuring trilogy
In this chapter I describe the data set I have used in this study, The Murmuring documentary trilogy by Byun Youngjoo. I briefly explore the background and setting that led Byun to make these documentaries after which I will describe the documentaries through the interviews, participants and the way they present themselves, and how they are perceived and shown by the camera and the director.
5.1. The Murmuring trilogy
The data I use in this thesis, The Murmuring trilogy, is a series of three documentaries, The Murmuring (1995), Habitual Sadness (1997), and My Own Breathing (1999), directed by Byun Youngjoo. Byun was first introduced to the issue of Korean comfort women survivors in 1991 as she was making a documentary about sex tourism in South Korea. While filming, she met a prostitute whose mother was a comfort woman survivor. This inspired Byun to film a documentary about the comfort women survivors, who had emerged into public view after Haksoon Kim’s testimony in 1991 (Byun, 1995).
This trilogy is used as a data set in this study as it centers around the experiences of the survivors, giving them agency in narrating their experiences. At the same time, it offers glimpses of the experienced social reality of the survivors, and how the society around them has perceived them.
The documentary does not focus on historical documents, apart from a few photographs, and it does not seek to present facts or show the perpetrators. Rather the focus is on the survivors and their lives. While every now and then the films shift from showing the more mundane everyday lives of the survivors to interviews in which the survivors discuss the crimes they were victims of, the focus on these interviews is not necessarily on the gruesome details of these crimes. The settings of the interviews also show how the survivors have the freedom to end the interviews and change the topic when they hope to do so, giving them agency in the way their experiences are shown and told.
Byun’s proximity and personal connection to the survivors in the series establishes a relationship based on trust with her interviewees. Initially, before filming the first part of the documentary series, The Murmuring, Byun’s request to make a documentary of the comfort women survivors living in House of Sharing was rejected by the survivors themselves. Only after spending a year with
