Comfort Women statues and threats of terror

Back in Seoul after an unusually long hiatus, I was eager to visit a few places I'd been reading about in the news and blogs. Among them was the Comfort Women statue (or should I say, enforced sex slaves) located right across the street from the Japanese embassy.

So last week I headed there with my Nikon D60 and my iPhone 4. I walked purposefully down the street (I'd been to the embassy a few times, once to purchase a used right-hand drive Toyota Crown back in the 1990s, so I knew where it was). Down the street, I could see several policemen in the area, which is hardly surprising since they are tasked with protecting the various foreign missions, including the embassy of the former occupiers.

But as I approached the statue and stopped in order to position my Nikon, I was told by the senior police officer there, in Korean, that I could not take any pictures of the statue. Obviously I asked why that would be, and he told me there had been threats made to the statue.

Lest someone think that my rusty-from-Hawaii's-ocean-breeze Korean skills may have yielded a comprehension FAIL!, the polite-but-stern senior police officer (who looked to be in his late forties) mentioned the English word "terror" when he reiterated the reason.

I am usually not a confrontational person, though I can be when the situation warrants. This was not one of those times, and I thought that I would try charm and reason (I am very charming when I want to be). I told the guy I am from Seoul but lately I've been studying in Hawaii where I do a Korea news blog, and I'd been reading about this poignant statue — which I support — and I was keen to get a picture. I told them I'd read about the right-wing Japanese asshat (though I didn't say asshat) who had messed with the statue and I was sure was on their minds, but they said their threat was one from the future.

He asked me what my blog was and I used the ambient wifi to quickly type www.rjkoehler.com on my iPhone to show him Monster Island. Fortunately I had something a little less ridiculous than usual as the top post and he did that pensive ajŏshi sigh to show he was going to relent.

Just one picture, he said. That, too, he reiterated.

I quickly had to decide whether I should use the Nikon or the iPhone. The latter had the advantage of instantaneous editing and, with the ambient wifi (I really need to trademark that phrase), I could send it out right away (Blogger has a function where you can send posts via an email to a specially created Blogger address) so I went with that.

I asked the senior police officer and his young juniors if they'd like to be in the picture. They declined and parted like the Red Sea. I got my lonesome picture of the lonesome girl, with a banner to An Chunggŭn in the background.

Though they didn't ask, I showed them the picture and went on my way (I was late for a meeting at a 1970s-ish tabang with a friend who works with the mayor).

Before I blogged the little incident, though, I started to wonder if this was prudent. I emailed The Marmot, Zen Kimchi, and a couple others and asked if they knew anything about a no-photos regulation. They said they didn't, mentioned it's in a public area and there should be no reason it can't be photographed, and said I should go ahead and blog about it (if the cautious Marmot says go ahead, I figure there's nothing to worry about; I hope I don't end up in some Michael Breen-esque legal matter... I'm too pretty for prison).

So this was all on my mind when I read the news, a few days later, that someone Korean asshat decided, in protest of the Japanese right-wing asshat, to drive his truck into the Japanese embassy.

Could it be that the "terror" threat they were worried about was a domestic one? And did the police momentarily mistake me for an asshat?

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If we try real hard, then it neeeeeeeever happened.

It's ironic that this news would come on Memorial Day. And it's telling that it would come so soon after the news that Japanese officials were pushing a city in New Jersey to remove a monument to the hundreds of thousands of "Comfort Women" sex slaves (which I addressed here last week and The Marmot's Hole wrote a dedicated post on today).

안세홍_박대임-류산_흑백인화_127×200cm_2003 [source]

The news is that Nikon has decided to cancel an exhibition of the work of one Ahn Sehong, a photographer whose work includes some very touching photos of surviving* Comfort Women, including some Korean women left behind in China:

In the latest flare-up over Japan’s ongoing handling of Korean “comfort women” during World War II, Tokyo-based camera company Nikon Corp. has stirred controversy by cancelling a planned exhibit on the subject by a South Korean photographer.

The exhibit was to have been shown at the company’s Shinjuku salon from June 26 to July 9, and included photos of women who said they had been held as sexual slaves by the Japanese military in China in the 1930s and 1940s.

A spokeswoman for the photographer, Ahn Se-hong, said an official from Nikon called him last week and told him the exhibit would be cancelled, but did not give him any reason. The spokeswoman, Sadik Lee, told JRT that a Nikon official said they would like to meet Mr. Ahn in person to apologize, but he refused until he was given an explanation.

A Nikon spokesman, who declined to be named, confirmed the cancellation, and told JRT that “considering various circumstances in a comprehensive way, we have come to decide to cancel it. This is all we can say.”

The spokesman wouldn’t elaborate, but did confirm Japanese press reports of protests that Nikon received against the planned exhibit. The Asahi Shimbun reported that several complaints surfaced on the Internet, branding the exhibit a “betrayal” of Japan, and calling for protests of the exhibit.

The Wall Street Journal blog piece also ties this in with the Japanese diplomats' efforts to get the heavily kyopo (Korean American) community of Palisades Park** to remove the memorial. (Note, below, that the memorial does not mention Koreans once, even though Korean women made up the bulk of the women forced or duped into the Ianfu (Wianbu in Korean).

Though I think Japan and South Korea make far better friends than enemies, issues like this linger. But the critics of Korea (and the knee-jerk Japanophiles) who like to characterize this kind of issue as one where Korea likes feeling bad about this and constantly nitpicks at a generally contrite and (since World War II) well behaved Japan, utterly miss the point.

While they like to depict Japan as the one rational player here, this kind of action — going beyond deliberately downplaying unpleasant history and instead attempting to sanitize the historical record of some of the most egregious wrongdoing of Japan's imperial past — this concerted movement to instill collective amnesia at home and abroad goes beyond the pale.

Make not mistake: this is a pattern. We saw the same thing late last year after a simple but profound statue dedicated to the Comfort Women (pictured below) was erected across the street from the Japanese embassy to mark the 1000th weekly protest by surviving* Comfort Women at the same spot. That, too, brought official complaints from Japanese diplomats.

I shan't go any further into official Japan's shameless whitewashing of imperial Japan's shameful history. The reprehensibility of it all speaks for itself. Nikon, on the other hand, deserves to be called out for its cowardice in the face of such protests. I mean, if they thought Mr Ahn's work was worthy of an exhibit and they knew the contest of his photographs, how on Earth could they justify yanking his exhibition?

I'm truly torn. This is the kind of thing that can influence me to boycott certain products in protest. But I already have bought the Nikon D60. Back when I was undecided between the Nikon and its Canon equivalent, this would have easily sent me over to Canon (who, as far as I know, has not turned invertebrate in such a way, but who themselves may never have sought such a controversial exhibition at all).

I wish that there were some way that I and others in the anglophone K-blogopshere could individually or collectively exhibit Mr Ahn's work as a show of solidarity.

* I've started adding the word surviving to "Comfort Women" not just to reflect their advanced age but also because I've been reading lately how many women died during the actual war from disease, bombs, or bullets while "serving" in the Wianbu. It's much more than I'd realized. 

** At the risk of sounding glib in such a serious post, I find it amusing that so many Koreans have flocked to the New Jersey communities of Palisades Park and Fort Lee. But I'm easily amused.

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In Korea, March 1 is Groundhog Day

As in the Bill Murray movie. Or so it would seem.

Every Independence Day (삼일절) in South Korea, the country and its political leaders look back on the colonial past with a sense of victory, owing to the nation's progress since liberation, along with a feeling of unresolved resentment and even bitterness (han, if you will) over the less than full-throated contrition by the brutal colonizing power itself (i.e., Japan).

You can go to Wikipedia and see a "list of Japanese war apology statementss," but that politically motivated entry doesn't include the, "but, but, but..." remarks that so often come with the actual apologies, or the statements of the right-wing parliamentarians falling over themselves to insist that PM Murayama's or PM Hosokawa's truly heartfelt and sincere apologies are just their own, or the later declarations by people in the ruling elite that the Comfort Women sex slaves were mostly prostitutes or that colonization was actually good for Korea. (The aforementioned list also lumps mealymouthed "statements of regret" in with actual apologies.)

No, from that self-serving litany, one wouldn't get the sense that any official Japanese apology, thus far, comes with an asterisk.

Anyway, on his last Independence Day as president of the Republic of Korea, Japan-born President Lee Myungbak decided to take on the issue. In a Marmot's Hole post well worth the read, President Lee is quoted as having said this:

For the two countries [Korea and Japan] to intimately cooperate as true companions, the true courage and wisdom not to avoid the historical truth is necessary above all. In particular, among many current issues, the Comfort Women issue is a humanitarian issue that needs to be concluded quickly. The grandmothers, who carried their pain in their hearts, are well past their late 80s. If they pass away without resolving the burden of their hearts while they were alive, it is not the case that all problems will disappear; rather, Japan will forever lose the opportunity to resolve this issue. This is why I urge the Japanese government to take a more active posture.

There is nothing I can find there with which I disagree. To many in the commentariat, however, their knee-jerk position is to do whatever is the antithesis of what most Koreans believe in, which prompted The Korean to write this:

The commentariat response on this issue, time and time again, never ceases to amaze me. It is as if they have no moral compass. This is one of the most heinous war crimes in World War II, and they think Korea is the bad guy.

Indeed, taking the Korean view and going the opposite way is, at best, an amoral compass. Sure, there are their oft-repeated justifications for taking the contrarian view — "They signed a treaty!", "Korea's post-war prosperity was built with Japanese money!", "This issue is nothing more than a cynical ploy to marshall support by corrupt politicians!", "South Koreans have sex slaves today!" — but the fact is that there are women living today who experienced the hell of brutal, unending, and often deadly sex slavery at the hands of the Japanese Imperial military and government.

I'm sure for those women and those close to them, it's a bit difficult to "get over it and move on." But thinking about this stuff in human terms is just so bothersome. Wouldn't it be easier if they just died and stopped protesting? Then we'd have the convenience of this truly being "all in the past," to which many have already relegated it because, essentially, the plaintiffs are Korean.

I'm not 100.0% in agreement with The Korean, though. As I've noted in past posts (like here and especially here), I do think the South Korean government owes money to those women as well, even if I don't think that lets Japan off the hook. In 1965, Tokyo was trying to do an end-run on its victims by working with a pro-Japan former officer of the Imperial Japanese Army, Park Chunghee, an iron-fisted ruler of South Korea who used the grants and loans (see, it wasn't all a gift, as some have made it out to be) and used them for regional and national development instead of compensation for Japan's direct victims.

The Korean describes Park Chunghee and the 1965 Basic Treaty thus:

You mean, the contract that flatly contravenes jus cogens, negotiated and entered into by an illegitimate dictator who was formerly an officer of the Imperial Japanese Army, who did not even know the existence of the Comfort Women issue, without the consent of the people whose rights he signed away for less than a penny on a dollar?

The Korean, by the way, writes his own post on his own blog regarding the Comfort Women issue, also worth a read.

We'll have to see if President Lee gets anywhere with this. Expect it to be played out again in August, around Liberation Day.

In the meantime, another commenter, Yuna, pointed to what the Comfort Women survivors themselves are looking for, lest one think, as the nattering nabobs of uri nara naysaying say, that no apology will ever be good enough:

1. Acknowlege the war crime
2. Reveal the truth in its entirety about the crimes of military sexual slavery
3. Make an official apology
4. Make legal reparations
5. Punish those responsible for the war crime
6. Accuraely record the crime in history textbooks
7. Erect a memorial for the victims of the military sexual salvery and establish a historical museum

All told, doesn't sound terribly unreasonable (though guidance should be given for what constitutes an "official apology" and by whom under what authority). But if your counterpart's goal is to whitewash history and deal with a painful past by rationalizing it or just ignoring it, it might be a tall order. There are a lot of good people in Japan who recognize this as wrong (or would if they knew better about the issue), but there are those in power who are beholden to a sanitized view of the past where Japan was the victim of World War II, not the instigator.

Some day in the near future, it would be wonderful if we could stop replaying this issue as if March 1 really were Groundhog Day. That would take an effort on both sides, but the ball is clearly in Japan's (imperial) court.

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Sorry, Mr Psihoyos, those spots are reserved for the elderly

Louie Psihoyos, the director of the Oscar-winning documentary The Cove, a heart-wrenching work that chronicles the slaughter of dolphins in Japan's Wakayama Prefecture, has taken his anti-whaling protests to Seoul.

When I'd first heard that, I thought he was in town to protest against South Korea's own resurgence of it's supposedly 8000-year-old whaling industry, centered in the port city of Ulsan (formerly Kobe Bryant), which has been attracting more and more negative attention in recent years.

But he was there in front of the Japanese embassy to focus on Japanese consumption of whale meat and "toxic" dolphin meat, which Mr Psihoyos claims is illegally labeled as whale meat and fed to schoolchildren. It isn't clear from the video that accompanies the Huffington Post piece linked above (also found here) if he is also in Seoul to protest against ROK policies on whaling, which seem to favor hiding in Japan's shadow on the issue.

This is the same spot, by the way, where one often finds elderly women who were once sex slaves of Imperial Japan, known euphemistically as "Comfort Women," protesting the lack of adequate direct government compensation by Tokyo, which asserts that it was "finally settled" in the 1965 treaty to which the women were not a party to, some three decades before the Japanese government admitted their existence.

I mention that, because the two issues — continued whaling to Australians and lack of adequate direct compensation to sex slaves of Imperial Japan's military — are two very public and emotional issues where Tokyo earns a lot of ill will by stubbornly holding to an unethical position that benefits very few.

One thing I'm curious is if Mr Psihoyos got a permit, or if anyone noticed that his visa (presumably a tourist one) prolly does not allow public protests.