Why We Must Listen to the Voices and Songs of the “Comfort Women” Survivors

I spread out these things gone by in front of me
Today I think of my sorrow
-Kim Soon-deok

Let’s play, let’s play, we’re young, so let’s play,
You get old, you get sick, and you can’t play no more. 
Life is one night’s dream of spring,
So we’ve got to play while we can
-Park Du-ri

What can we learn from listening to the songs and the voices of the “Comfort Women” survivors?

In early 2001, I was a doctoral student drifting around in the graduate library of the University of Chicago, with an interest in Korean women’s musical cultures. I came across a book. It was called True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women.^[1] It was a book of testimonies of Korean survivors of the Japanese military “Comfort Women” system, the first collection of its kind, and had been published in Korean in 1993 and in English a few years later.

The media representation of the “Comfort Women” at that time was vast. There were black-and-white photographs of girls and women during the wartime, and contemporary photographs—again typically black-and-white—in print media and books showing survivors in the present. The photographs showing women in the present generally depicted them living in poverty on the margins of empire, or protesting the injustices of which they have been the victims. Their postwar lives—at this point almost sixty years of life—were practically absent.

There were also printed books of published testimonies, in Korean, Japanese, and English, like the one I had found. The books included some such archetypal images. You could find transcripts of women speaking, but generally one’s encounters with the “Comfort Women” legacy and with survivors was based in silent interaction, unless you happened to be lucky enough to meet survivors or hear them speak on radio or television. Among the media devoted to the issue it was really only Byun Young-joo’s trilogy of films—Najeun moksori 1 (1995), 2 (1996) and 3 (1999), titled in English The Murmuring, Habitual Sadness, and My Own Breathing, that focused on survivor/victims as living, moving, breathing, speaking and singing human beings. Most of the rest of it focused on the past, and portrayed the living women as living remnants of colonial history. The iconography of the “Comfort Women” survivors has come a long way since then, towards fuller portraits of the women as human beings, activists, and teachers.

As I read True Stories of the Comfort Women I noticed that almost all of the women who testified in that book sang in the course of testimony, although they had not been asked to. I wondered why so many had sung. I decided to try and collect those songs and those voices, and to write my dissertation about them. I spent the next decade trying to answer that question.

I thought my chances of success were slim, that the gulfs of identity and experience that separated us were too many and too vast. But in 2002, I went to my first weekly Wednesday Protest at noon in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul. After the protest I found myself riding in a van with seven survivors on my way to the House of Sharing, a rest home for “Comfort Women” survivors and a center of activism for the movement. And when I asked people what their favorite songs were, and (of course) sang one myself first, the songs started flowing like water from a tap. It was a welcome question, rather different from the questions they were asked about the past every day.

I wasn’t recording yet, but if I remember right survivor Kim Soon-deok—the artist behind “Unblossomed Flower”—sang the colonial classic “Tears of Mokpo” (“Mokpo eui nunmul"). Park Ok-sun also sang, maybe “Rain on a Fall Evening” (“Bi naerineun gaeul bam”), one of her favorites. Bae Chun-hui, who had made her living as a singer for many decades in the postwar, was introduced to me by the staff as a professional singer; she sang one of her hundreds of songs, I can’t remember which.

I recorded around four hundred songs over the next year and a half from about forty different survivors; and I added to that collection over the next ten years of annual trips to the House of Sharing and elsewhere throughout South Korea. The survivors sang songs of their youth in Korean and Japanese, military and popular Japanese songs from the wartime, traditional and neo-traditional Korean folk songs, many with words of their own invention, and a massive repertoire of songs from the postwar from their time in China, Japan, Korea, and elsewhere.

There is a way of listening to these songs that treats them as documents—artefacts that prove the survivors’ presence in the “comfort stations,” for instance. Lee Yong-soo^[2] is well-known for the song of the Japanese kamikaze base where her “comfort station” was located, which you can listen to here. That is one value they have, that they add more to the trove of documentation that proves the “Comfort Women” system for the exploitation of girls and women existed.

But if we only listen to songs as documents we effectively reduce survivors to vessels or archives of historical experience, and this is another act of dehumanization. It is similar to much of the older iconography of the “Comfort Women,” in that it puts survivors and their victimization to use as instruments in the cause. But cause number one should be to put an end to the dehumanization these women have struggled against their entire lives. So we need other ways of listening as well.

On a summer night at the House of Sharing in 2002 I sat in a big circle with Lee Ok-sun, Park Du-ri, Kim Soon-deok, and a host of other survivors, staff and visitors in the large living room near Park Du-ri’s room. It was a party, and the tables were covered with beer and drinking snacks. Everyone was introducing themselves and singing one by one. Lee Ok-sun was talking.

“When I went to China at age fifteen, I crossed the Duman River [editor’s note: Tumen in Chinese], you know? I didn’t realize that, and only afterwards I learned that I had crossed it. So that “Duman River” song, if I forget it I won’t lose it, If I die I won’t forget it. Because I was dragged away by the Japanese across the Duman River…

In the blue waters of the Duman River
A boatman works the oars
In the flowed-away long ago a boat took my beloved
And left for somewhere

My beloved, for whom I long,
My beloved, for whom I long,
When will you come back?”

The listeners began to clap, assuming she would stop after verse one, as many people do in this sort of ‘song party.’ But Lee Ok-sun went on without pause to the final verse:

“On a moonlit night the river’s water
Catches in its throat, and it cries
This person who lost [her] beloved sighs.
… [the boat] left for somewhere…

My beloved, for whom I long,
My beloved, for whom I long,
When will you come back?”

Composer Lee Shiwoo wrote “Tear-drenched Duman River” (“Nunmul jeojeun Duman-gang”) in the late 1930s, when he was touring Southwestern Manchuria near the border with Korea, working for a theatrical company that was giving performances for the many Koreans in the region. The story goes that it records his encounter with a woman crying on the southern bank of the river, mourning for her lover who had crossed into Manchuria as an anti-colonial guerrilla fighter and been killed there. As Lee Ok-sun sang the song for us, she told us about being taken away across the Duman River, and the song became her own lament for the girl who had been taken away. And perhaps it had another meaning for her: after the war she remained abroad, in the Korean autonomous region of Northeast China, and waited ten years for her husband to return from fighting in the Chinese Civil War. He never came back. Lee Ok-sun continued to sing that song there, wondering if she would ever return, until she came back to Korea in 2000.

That is the song she sang for us that night. A well of past experiences and feelings so deep that the bottom could not be seen. And yet she sang it in her living, breathing voice, a testament to her survival, her immense vitality, and her wisdom in the present.

Some of the songs of Korean survivors of the “Comfort Women” system, like this one, are old, from the wartime and before. Almost all of their songs that highlighted in texts like True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women and throughout Korean popular culture are old. Only listening to this sort of material, we run the risk of consigning the women to the past. Because many of the songs of the Korean survivors are not old songs at all, and tell the story of women’s struggles to survive and belong through the long years of the postwar, before and after the “Comfort Women” movement broke in the 1990s. I collected popular songs with origins in each decade of the postwar period, some only a few years old.

Moon Pil-gi told me the history of her ever-changing favorite song. In the early postwar it had been “A Faithless Child Cries” (“Bulhyeoja neun umnida,” 1938); later she had moved on to “Cry, Guitar String” (“Ureora gitajura,” 1957); and in the early 2000s she was in transition to “Anyway the One Who Left” (“Eochapi ddeo-nan saram,” 1980), as sung by her new favorite singer Tae Jin-ah. She sometimes sang medleys of her past and present favorite songs.

After returning to Korea after the war, Moon Pil-gi moved around often, working in drinking houses (suljip) where female employees poured drinks, sang, and danced with customers. She was a fan of teuroteu (‘trot,’ from ‘foxtrot’), a genre of popular song with roots in the Japanese colonial era that dominated South Korean popular music until at least the 1970s. As she listened to teuroteu radio and televised song competitions she updated her repertoire, maintaining her literacy in the genre and sustaining an evolving connection to popular culture. The music helped her foster a sense of belonging to South Korean society, despite living a profoundly lonely life on the margins, and living in the void created by the transnational effort to erase her and other “Comfort Women” survivors from history. She often slept with the radio on, and told me that “songs are like friends.

These particular songs were her favorites because each had some connection to her life story and was useful to her in some way. Her oldest favorite was a song about a mother and daughter, and was forum for her to express her regrets and feelings about her relationship with her own mother, so radically traumatized when she was tricked into being a “Comfort Women” and taken off to Manchuria. In her more recent songs she sang of lost love. She told me often that “my body is unclean, but my heart is pure,” a way of thinking she was raised with based in a patriarchal duality between ‘pure’ and ‘defiled’ femininities. She rehearsed that purity in songs of the lover who continues to love a lost beloved, and she spoke of “keeping my heart for another.” I heard activists try to convince her there was nothing wrong with her body only with those who had abused her. But she had evolved this means of coping with traumatic experience, of reassembling a sense of wholeness; and she wasn’t going to relinquish easily. She was like many survivors who have over the years looked to all sorts of song genres in acts of reassembling the self. Park Du-ri had a folksong she sang every day, that gave her life a sense of continuity. Bae Chun-hui narrated her life in hundreds of songs that rewrote its tragedy into a glorious, cinematic, epic tale of music and survival.

In the book Hearts of Pine: Songs in the Lives of Three Korean Survivors of the Japanese “Comfort Women,” I wrote about some of these women and their many uses of song.^[3] When we listen to the “Comfort Women” survivors we hear not only songs as but rich practices of survival, self-expression, self-reconstruction, remembering and forgetting, and struggles for belonging. We hear the means by which they domesticated traumatic memory and emotion, and the forum in which they cultivated the voices they would later bring to political activism. In these songs we hear the “Comfort Women” survivors to be scholars and teachers of survival, if only we listen and listen well.

I began working with Korean survivors of the “Comfort Women” system in 2002, when the transnational memory of WWII and its fascism was stronger. As time passes and people from that time pass on this cultural memory grows weaker and more selective. Constant stimulation and the manipulation of media and propaganda have disoriented and anaesthetized many of us into an eternal present of precarity, consumption, and fear. The past must be fake. The future appears as a black hole of uncertainty, or as fire, flood, plague, war, apocalypse.

The authoritarian capitalism that is hoarding and eating the world is counting on our disorientation, our amnesia, and our dread so it can repeat the past. The rich and powerful cultivate misogyny and ethnonationalism to turn people against each other—people who, without scapegoats, would turn on the kleptocracy. And this produces new victims of gendered, racialized violence similar to the “Comfort Women” system every day all over the world (see Lee Dong-hwa’s recent article in Kyeol).

The “Comfort Women” survivors have much to teach us about the dangers of the present. The “Comfort Women” issue has never been an isolated one. It is both historically and structurally related to the global patterned exploitation of female sexual labor and victimization of women and children in militarized modernity. After the war, many of the survivors themselves were channelled into the sex industries set up around American, Korean, and other military bases throughout the Asia-Pacific, just to give one example of the historical connections. We can’t afford to forget. The victim-survivors of the “Comfort Women” system do not, and have never had the luxury of amnesia. The past is written upon survivors’ psyches and unfolds throughout life. So one more, perhaps the most important thing we can learn from listening to the “Comfort Women” survivors is how not to forget. If we listen, they may teach us too how to survive.

“Even if I die, I won’t forget it.”
--Lee Ok-sun