exhibit-room-in-museum

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/crossing-memories-reckoning-loss-past-present-north-south-korea/"></div>“Make reparations! Make reparations,” shouted the crowd.
I stood alongside over 100 <a href="http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/851898.html">protesters</a> gathered across from the Japanese embassy in Seoul, South Korea recently to support Korean survivors’ ongoing claims for redress from the Japanese government.
<a href="http://www.koreafocus.or.kr/design2/layout/content_print.asp?group_id=102900">Won-Ok Gil</a>, a nonagenarian survivor who was a teenager in 1940 when she was deceived into becoming a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/08/world/asia/08japan.html">sex slave</a> for Japanese troops in northeast China, has been at the center of these weekly <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/09/south-korea-world-longest-protest-comfort-women-170908024721239.html">protests</a> since 2002. The protests have been ongoing each week for 26 years.
After WWII, many women journeyed back to their villages, but some, like Gil, were unable to see their families ever again. When Gil, who hailed from Pyongyang, eventually tried to return to her birthplace, she could not because of a newly fortified border between North and South Korea.
“Now it’s all in the past, but if I try to speak about the pain we went through, my heart feels like it could burst,” Gil told me in an interview.
This summer marks the 65th anniversary of the signing of the <a href="https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&amp;doc=85">armistice agreement</a> that formally ended the hostilities of the Korean War. However, it was not a permanent peace treaty.
The two countries, North Korea and South Korea, are technically still at war. As <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/world/asia/north-korea-kim-jong-un-trump-letter-nuclear.html">negotiations for denuclearization</a> on the Korean peninsula wax and wane with every official meeting, a constant question remains about how peace will be achieved and what it will mean for those who live on the Korean peninsula.
The <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/27/world/asia/north-korea-south-border.html">pomp and circumstance</a> of past meetings between the leaders of <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/International/north-korea-portraying-kim-jong-uns-historic-summit/story?id=55856234">North Korea</a>, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/asia/live-news/north-korea-south-korea-summit-intl/index.html">South Korea</a>, and the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/kim-and-trump-on-their-way-to-singapore-for-historic-summit/2018/06/10/4dc77794-6c6a-11e8-bbc5-dc9f3634fa0a_story.html?utm_term=.c904255eb89c">United States</a> cannot obscure the legacy of division, war, and injustice that is the responsibility of these three countries.
It is a history of violence that has been intimately experienced and felt by Koreans and <a href="http://uclajournals.org/doi/abs/10.17953/amer.29.3.k2t76468016pg455?code=UCLA-site&amp;journalCode=amer">passed on</a> to their children. While denuclearization is key, reckoning with this loss is also critical to lasting peace.
At Northwestern University, I teach on and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Embodied-Reckonings-Comfort-Performance-Transpacific/dp/0472037102/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1521560478&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=Embodied+Reckonings">research</a> the relationship between performance and politics in Korea. I spent 10 years chronicling the paths of a group of 10 Korean survivors of <a href="http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/commission/country52/53-add1.htm">Japanese military sexual slavery</a> and their supporters who rely on public, embodied methods such as protests, tribunals, theatre, and memorial building to advocate for justice.
They illustrate that reckoning, grappling and coming to terms with the past is a continual process that demands the presence and participation of bodies committed to social and political change.
After the defeat of Japan in World War II, the U.S. proposed a division of the Korean peninsula along the <a href="https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2013/11/05/why-is-the-border-between-the-koreas-sometimes-called-the-38th-parallel">38th parallel</a> in deciding what to do with Korea, one of Japan’s colonies. This divided the country into the Soviet Union-backed North and the U.S.-backed South. The breaching of this line on June 25, 1950 when North Korea invaded South Korea inaugurated the Korean War.
“After you leave your hometown, you realize how much you miss your parents and your friends,” recounted Gil during her public testimony.
When I last attended a <a href="https://www.comfort-women.org/wccw-events.html">public testimony</a> by Gil in 2016, she expressed this desire to see her mother and explained how she spent every day of the last 70 years dreaming of going back home. Gil’s ache for what was left behind in North Korea is shared by many in the Korean diaspora.
My father-in-law, who is 71 and has lived in Germany, the U.S., and South Korea, was a child in the late 1940s when his family joined the thousands who fled what became North Korea and made their way to South Korea as refugees.
I remember my father-in-law excitedly sharing how he had obtained satellite images of his old village in what is now North Korea. He could only satiate his yearning for home with fuzzy pictures of green and brown topography.
Reckoning with this kind of longing needs to be a central part of the long-term, ongoing peace process on the Korean peninsula.
While I am not an expert in political and diplomatic negotiation, I understand the means of achieving peace on the Korean peninsula are fraught and complicated. For some, the peace process would not only entail denuclearization of the peninsula and a formal declaration of the end of the Korean War, but also the withdrawal of troops at the border and of U.S. troops from South Korea.
Temporary <a href="http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2018/08/356_253386.html">reunions</a> between select groups of North and South Koreans separated by the 1950-53 Korean War point in the direction of attending to the desires of Koreans to be reconnected with lost kin and to return home.
Along with measures to create more open borders and communication between North and South Korea, there also needs to be public acknowledgment and remembrance of not only the history of division and war, but also its legacy—how people have lived with the trauma of separation, destruction, death, displacement, and resettlement.
At a visit to the <a href="http://www.much.go.kr/en/mainen.do">National Museum of Korean Contemporary History</a> in Seoul recently, the sterility of the <a href="http://www.much.go.kr/en/contents.do?fid=02&amp;cid=01&amp;sub=01">exhibit room</a> dedicated to the history behind the 38th parallel line is stunning. At the center of the room hangs a large black-and-white photograph of a family of Korean refugees about to cross the then-nascent border between North and South Korea positioned above a replica of the sign marking the division and a white line on the floor with the number “38” in large print.
The gleaming wooden floor seems to sanitize the violence and trauma represented by this number. I wonder what happened to the family in the photograph and the countless others whose faces adorn the images on the walls. Their voices are absent in the museum underlining the need to create permanent public spaces where the individual voices and personal histories of those who endured the traumas of division and war are heard and remembered.
The responsibility of reckoning, however, is not solely in the reins of governments or public institutions. It is the burden of history that we all carry.
People across the Korean diaspora are already doing this work.
<a href="http://legaciesofthekoreanwar.org/">Legacies of the Korean War</a> is an on-line repository of oral histories by first-generation Korean American survivors of the war. This spring a <a href="https://www.hometownsource.com/morrison_county_record/kyong-juhn-walks-to-promote-peace-and-hope/article_10d32dfa-5ac3-11e8-9521-cf6b2cbe2bf9.html">Korean diasporic artist</a> walked more than 330 miles across Minnesota in memory of her mother who walked the same distance in her escape from Pyongyang in the 1950s.
<a href="http://stillpresentpasts.org/">Still Present Pasts: Korean Americans and the “Forgotten War,”</a> a digital multimedia exhibit of installation art, performance art, film, archival photography, and oral histories, “explores memories and legacies of the Korean War” in a “public space of remembering that breaks the silence about a tragic episode in U.S. and Korean history.” Exhibited in different spaces since 2005, Still Present Pasts continues to be <a href="http://stillpresentpasts.org/exhibit_sites">available</a> for presentation.
The <a href="https://fpif.org/korean-americans-are-reclaiming-their-history-through-culture/">efforts</a> of these artists and scholars deserve support. Everyone is responsible to learn the heart-wrenching history behind the <a href="https://cup.columbia.edu/book/dmz-crossing/9780231164825">division</a> on the Korean peninsula. And everyone needs to refrain from asking a person of Korean descent whether his or her family is from the North or South with part-suspicion, part-fascination.
Because it is not so simple. Reckoning with the legacy of loss in North and South Korea requires dealing with present injustices.
An <a href="https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/north-korea-talks-sidelining-human-rights-un-rapporteur-10513326">alarming absence</a> of attention was paid to North Korea’s record of human rights violations during negotiations with the North. Earlier this summer the South Korean government <a href="https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2018/06/103_250653.html">closed</a> the office for a “state-run foundation for North Korea’s human rights.” South Korean <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-southkorea-rights/as-north-and-south-korea-cosy-up-human-rights-groups-struggle-for-cash-idUSKBN1JN0ON">activist groups for North Korean human rights</a> struggle to raise funds and face pressure to stop criticizing the North.
The Korean public and international community have a moral obligation to urge their respective political leaders to pressure the North to attend to <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/06/05/human-rights-north-korea">human rights violations</a> against its own people.
The work of reckoning with loss is multifaceted and continual. In dealing with North Korea and the legacies of division, war, and injustice on the Korean peninsula, the dreams of those who desire to cross and reconnect is inseparable from the responsibility of those of us who must relentlessly insist and remember.
As a Korean diasporic subject born in the U.S., I have inherited this history. My hope is that I can pass on a legacy of peace to my children.
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Crossing Memories: Reckoning with Loss Past and Present in North and South Korea

peace_statue_comfort_woman_statue_____3_22609310033

butterfly-fund-flyer

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/comfort-women-traveling-history-hope/"></div>Ten years ago, when I began my research on activism surrounding the history of <a href="http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/commission/country52/53-add1.htm">Japanese military sexual slavery</a>, I asked elderly Korean survivors of wartime sexual violence why they attended <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/09/south-korea-world-longest-protest-comfort-women-170908024721239.html">weekly protests</a> across from the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. One woman, Gil Won-Ok, explained that it was for the future. As a living witness, she believed that it was her responsibility to tell the world about her experiences and to fight for justice.
The issue of “comfort women” is more urgent than ever before; many of the women impacted have died; survivors are now in their late 80s and 90s. When the Korean government recently <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/09/world/asia/south-korea-japan-sex-slaves.html?emc=edit_tnt_20180109&amp;nlid=21453970&amp;tntemail0=y&amp;_r=0">announced</a> it would not renegotiate the 2015 <a href="https://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2015/12/28/full-text-japan-south-korea-statement-on-comfort-women/">agreement</a> with the Japanese government to resolve “finally and irreversibly” this issue, we witnessed again the failings of state efforts at redress.
Now as a professor at Northwestern University, my research has spanned protests and other contemporary performances that promote gender justice. In my <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Embodied-Reckonings-%C2%93Comfort-Performance-Transpacific/dp/0472037102/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1515553057&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=Embodied+Reckonings">book</a> I examine how Korean survivors and their supporters have utilized embodied practices like protests, tribunals, theatre, and memorial-building to reconceptualize an expansive view of redress that is legal, political, social, and cultural. It is time for us to join in stretching the social and cultural horizons of justice even wider.
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/08/world/asia/08japan.html">Gil Won-Ok</a>, born in 1928, was just a teenager in 1940 when she was deceived into sexually serving Japanese troops. The mostly Asian and Dutch so-called “comfort women” endured repeated rapes, physical torture, and verbal abuse. After the war, many journeyed back to their homes, but some, like Gil, were never able to see their families again. For almost five decades, public silence shrouded this history until Korean survivors began coming forward in the 1990s and galvanized the <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/south-korea-japan-comfort-stations">social movement</a> that emerged in South Korea.
The women have yet to receive adequate reparative measures from the Japanese government. In the 2015 “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/29/world/asia/comfort-women-south-korea-japan.html?_r=0">landmark agreement</a>,” the Japanese government <a href="https://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2015/12/28/full-text-japan-south-korea-statement-on-comfort-women/">offered</a> reparations alongside the barest trappings of an apology. Korean survivors and their supporters adamantly <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-southkorea-japan-comfortwomen/south-korean-comfort-women-protest-against-accord-with-japan-idUSKBN0UD0I520151230">rejected the deal</a>, questioning the sincerity of the apology and pointing out the absence of educational or commemorative initiatives and the refusal of the Japanese government to take full legal responsibility.
In April 2017, the Japanese government temporarily <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/03/world/asia/japan-ambassador-south-korea-comfort-woman.html">recalled</a> its ambassador and consul general in Busan because of a “comfort women” memorial installed near Busan’s Japanese consulate. Osaka decided to <a href="https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics-Economy/Policy-Politics/Osaka-in-bind-over-San-Francisco-comfort-women-row">end</a> sister-city ties with San Francisco over a “comfort women” memorial built in St. Mary’s Square. Rejections of these memorials are clear examples of attempts at foreclosing public remembrance. They want the “comfort women” issue to disappear.
The Korean government recently showed signs of <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/south-korean-report-renews-tensions-with-japan-over-forced-wartime-sex-work-1514377850">questioning</a> the 2015 agreement through a <a href="https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics-Economy/International-Relations/Japan-on-edge-as-South-Korea-reviews-comfort-women-deal">task force</a> that concluded the agreement <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/south-korean-report-renews-tensions-with-japan-over-forced-wartime-sex-work-1514377850">failed</a> to take into consideration survivors’ wishes. Undoubtedly survivors had <a href="https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2018/01/356_242236.html">hopes</a> of finally receiving the kind of acknowledgment and accountability they desired.
<a href="http://www.timothykeller.com/">Tim Keller</a>, founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York, invokes the metaphor of a fabric with its intricate interwovenness as a metaphor for <a href="http://byfaithonline.com/the-beauty-of-biblical-justice/">justice</a>. The work of justice is threading and attending to where the fabric unravels. The work of gender justice requires a multi-pronged approach for there are many threads. Not only do states need to be held accountable and future generations need to be taught this history, but we need to think about how to change conditions that make such violence even possible. How do we alter societal views of women’s bodies as being expendable especially during wartime? How do we change the hypermasculine culture of militarism? How do we open our ears to the testimony of rape victims and honor their words?
<a href="http://www.womenandwar.net/">Activists</a> in South Korea have already paved the way for a multi-pronged approach to justice. They have always advocated for official redress while opening up the possibilities for change, putting energy into well-being programs for survivors, educational campaigns, and memorialization projects. On the one hand, it should not matter that the Japanese government has not offered adequate redress because survivors and their supporters have shown us that justice is not solely in the hands of the state. Yet, an official apology and reparations do matter because those who are responsible must take full legal responsibility, publicly acknowledge their crimes, and foster education and memorialization.
Though the actualization of official redress seems unlikely, we can enlarge the horizons of justice by continuing the work of honoring these women’s experiences, teaching their history, and helping others to respect survivors of gender-based violence. Attending to the fabric of justice necessitates the participation of all of us: support memorialization projects in your city; attend a local protest in solidarity with the survivors; make a donation to the <a href="http://www.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_international/529353.html">Butterfly Fund</a>, started by Gil Won-Ok and Kim Bok-Dong to <a href="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/butterfly-fund-flyer.jpg">support other victims of sexual violence</a>; host a screening of films like Tiffany Hsiung’s award-winning <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Apology-Tiffany-Hsiung/dp/B073LWNH14">The Apology</a>; create an artistic work inspired by the women’s testimony; and learn about their history. Let’s not underestimate the importance of engaging, standing alongside, and remembering. These are the seeds to transform witnessing into structural change.
The Palestinian-born poet Suheir Hammad writes beautifully of the ongoing reckoning with social and political loss in “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/ZaatarDiva-Suheir-Hammad/dp/0981913105/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1515560502&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=ZaatarDiva">ZaatarDiva</a>.” In the poem “sawah,” she concludes her lamentation of lost love with, “we are poets each/ of us travelers between/ history and hope.” She captures how survival entails continual movement between the historical past and hope, of what is desired for the future and of what is yet to come. Like Gil Won-Ok and Kim Bok-Dong, Hammad’s words show the fight for justice is ongoing and that we are all called to join these women in traveling between history and hope.
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&#8220;Comfort Women&#8221;: Traveling Between History and Hope

Dr. Elizabeth W. Son is Associate Professor of Theatre at Northwestern University. She is the author of Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance, and Transpacific Redress (2018). You can follow her on Twitter @ElizabethWSon.