Artist, Panel Address Plight of WWII-Era “Comfort Women”

Between May 6 and October 6, phone booths around New York City displayed posters by visual artist Chang-Jin Lee that proclaimed, “Comfort Women Wanted.” Each featuring a portrait of a woman or the outline of a woman, they were a reference to actual World War II ads that attempted to recruit women into a sexual service system for the Japanese military.

On September 25, a screening of the project's video component attracted a full audience at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia. The event brought forth a conversation around wartime sexual violence.

The artist presented her interviews with women who were exploited as sex slaves in Asia during World War II, as well as a former Japanese soldier who described the military “comfort stations” where these women -- often teenagers at the time -- worked.

Panel speakers including Elazar Barkan, director of Columbia’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, highlighted the importance of victims coming forward with testimonies even after years of feeling powerless.

In the case of the comfort women, Barkan said there was “almost an empty book of victims” for decades. It was only in the 1990s, as rape was defined as a war crime in the wake of violence in the former Yugoslavia and in Bosnia, that the women began to speak out.

In Chang-Jin Lee’s interviews, the women were Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, Indonesian, Dutch, and Filipino.

The women's voices accompanied black-and-white still images of parts of their faces, showing their 80- or 90-some years of age. As they spoke of their experiences from more than 60 years ago, their words were stamped across the screen in a sober typewriter font.

Though visually minimalistic, the audio clearly moved the audience, and at certain moments hands in the crowd could be seen moving to stifle gasps.

According to the women, girls as young as 11 years of age were kidnapped and forced to work at “comfort stations.” These were brothel systems set up by the Japanese empire during the Second World War for its soldiers across Asia. The former Japanese soldier in the interview described military men lining up at comfort stations throughout the day, saying that each girl served around 50, or maybe as many as 100 men a day.

In her artist statement, Lee said that she wanted people to understand “comfort women” as an international human rights issue, rather than as a solely Korean or Asian issue, as it has often been framed. She stressed that European women were also among those exploited by the Japanese soldiers, in what may be the largest case of human trafficking in the 20th century, involving about 200,000 young girls and women by some estimates.

Panelist Margaret Stetz, a professor of women’s studies and humanities at the University of Delaware, pointed to the importance of education in seeking redress.

She expressed concern about the Japanese prime minister’s agenda to remove “disputed facts” from Japanese textbooks, as Japan considers the country’s responsibility for the WWII military slavery system to be disputable. But importantly, Stetz also noted the invisibility of the comfort women in Western history books.

“It’s not only the distortions of history in Japanese textbooks that should worry us — it’s the blank pages in our own,” she said.

— Doyeun Kim MIA ’14