The Breadth and Depth of the Term “Coercion”

Korean dictionaries define “coercion” as suppressing another person’s free will through power or force and compelling them to act against their will. Given the consistency of this definition across Korean dictionaries, there appears to be little disagreement over the dictionary meaning of “coercion.” However, reality is far more complex than the dictionary definition suggests. Whether the mobilization of colonial Koreans under the Japanese Empire’s total war system was coercive or voluntary remains a subject of controversy. It is also a major point of contention between the official narratives of the Korean and Japanese governments; between Korean activists working to preserve the memory of the Japanese military “Comfort Women” and Japanese far-right deniers; and between Korean left-wing nationalists and New Right nationalists.

Broadly speaking, two opposing arguments remain sharply at odds. One argues that the Japanese military “Comfort Women” and Korean laborers were subjected to forced labor because they were taken away against their will, while the other maintains that labor resulting from “recruitment,” “government placement,” or “conscription” does not constitute forced labor because it was not forced. As the debate has become increasingly polarized, the focus has shifted from forced labor to forcible recruitment and forced mobilization. In effect, forced labor has been reduced to a subordinate category of forced mobilization. The Special Act on Verification and Support for the Victims of Forced Mobilization under Japanese Colonialism in Korea, enacted in 2004, defines victims of forced mobilization as “those who were forcibly mobilized by the Japanese Empire during the period from the Manchurian Incident to the Pacific War and compelled to serve as soldiers, civilian personnel in the military service, laborers, or military ‘comfort women.’”^[1]

In contrast, the Japanese government denies the coercive nature of such labor mobilization, citing the International Labour Organization (ILO)’s Forced Labour Convention, 1930 (ratified by Japan in 1932), on the grounds that labor mobilization under the wartime mobilization system falls outside the scope of forced labor under the Convention. In response to a written inquiry submitted on April 16, 2021, by Nobuyuki Baba, a member of the House of Representatives affiliated with the far-right Japan Innovation Party (Ishin no Kai), asking whether Korean laborers could be said to have been forcibly recruited en masse, Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide stated that labor under “recruitment,” “government placement,” and “conscription” did not constitute forced labor, citing the ILO’s Forced Labour Convention, 1930, in support of his response. ^[2]

This was a typical application of the principle of intertemporal law, under which the matter should be judged by the international legal standards prevailing at the time. However, it is anachronistic to assume that the international standards concerning workers’ rights in 2020 were identical to those in 1930, nearly a century earlier. Even if, as proponents of denialism argue, conscription was entirely voluntary and there was no forced mobilization or forcible recruitment whatsoever, it does not automatically follow that such labor did not constitute forced labor.

As early as 1957, the ILO recognized the problems with exceptions relating to wartime mobilization and made clear that forced labor for political, economic, or punitive purposes was prohibited. In 1998, it explicitly affirmed that eliminating forced labor was a fundamental obligation of ILO member states. Exceptions such as wartime mobilization or military service could no longer simply be treated as falling outside the scope of forced labor. Furthermore, the Protocol of 2014 to the Forced Labour Convention, 1930, which may be regarded as the most comprehensive of the existing instruments, goes beyond the elimination of forced labor by establishing affirmative obligations for states to protect and support victims and punish perpetrators.^[3]

How Should We Understand the Structures and Memories Surrounding Harm and Responsibility?

The 2014 Protocol eliminated the exceptions included in the 1930 Convention and made it mandatory for member states to establish policies and action plans to eradicate all forms of forced labor. As a result, forced labor can no longer be treated as an exception. After World War II, human-rights consciousness concerning workers’ rights grew, and as human rights became a standard for remembering and judging the past in global memory culture, monitoring and sanctions against forced labor became more stringent. On the other hand, unlike Germany and Poland, which ratified the 2014 Protocol to the Forced Labour Convention, 1930, neither the Japanese nor the Korean government has yet ratified it, which presents another problem. Unless the Korean government ratifies the Protocol, I cannot say, given my limited knowledge of international law, how Korea’s claims concerning forced labor under Japanese colonial rule would be interpreted under international law. It would inevitably appear hypocritical if the Korean government responded so sensitively to forced labor under the Japanese Empire while failing to ratify the Convention itself. This is an issue that government bodies such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Justice, and the Ministry of the Interior and Safety will need to consider going forward.

In addition to the Forced Labour Convention, the German Bundestag passed the Law on the Creation of the Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future^[4] on July 6, 2000, and the law entered into force on August 12 of the same year. Before the ILO adopted the Protocol of 2014 to the Forced Labour Convention, 1930, Germany’s criteria for recognizing forced labor did not hinge on whether individuals had been forcibly recruited. In fact, during the Nazi occupation, quite a few Poles registered for work and went to farms or factories in Germany with the intention of earning money and starting a new life. Nazi propaganda posters encouraging Polish workers to go to Germany in search of a better life and greater economic security were displayed throughout occupied Poland.

Some young women also chose to go to Germany as a way of escaping patriarchal oppression at home. Photographs of young female workers smiling broadly in front of movie theaters in major German cities such as Berlin, wearing a “P” badge on their coats to identify them as Polish workers, illustrate the multilayered nature of forced labor. There were even Polish Jews who volunteered to go to Germany as contract workers in order to escape Nazi persecution. Because they had entered Nazi Germany “voluntarily,” they were able to avoid suspicion that they were Jewish, and many of them returned safely to Poland after the war. Immediately after the end of World War II, robberies and murders targeting workers returning from Germany with large suitcases were common near rural railway stations in Poland. The perpetrators targeted the valuable German goods packed in their suitcases as well as the cash savings they had accumulated.

The fact that these individuals volunteered to go to the Nazi “Third Reich” as migrant workers in order to earn money, or that they returned with enough money to become targets of robbery, does not constitute evidence against the existence of forced labor. The Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future, which administered compensation for forced laborers from Eastern Europe, defines forced labor as work performed under a contract that workers are not free to terminate, even if the contract was legally concluded. The German government takes the same position. These individuals were recognized as victims of forced labor because they were not guaranteed the freedom to renegotiate the terms of their contracts, terminate their contracts, or leave their jobs for other employment. This understanding was consistent with the broader postwar trend in which growing human-rights consciousness was accompanied by the ILO’s evolving definition of forced labor toward greater protection of workers’ rights.

Meanings That Emerge When Multilayeredness Is Acknowledged

As illustrated by the controversy surrounding the promotional poster for the film The Battleship Island, the nature of the forced labor performed by the “forced laborers” does not become apparent only by exaggerating their labor as slave labor. Conversely, the fact that they went to Japan as contract workers of their own free will does not automatically mean that their labor did not constitute forced labor. The conflict between presentism and contextualism is also evident in interpretations of the voluntary and coercive dimensions of the labor performed by these forced laborers. A contextualist interpretation might argue that, because the definition of forced labor established in 1930 was the prevailing international standard during Japan’s colonial rule and under its total war system, the labor mobilization in question did not constitute forced labor. From a presentist perspective, by contrast, one could argue that labor mobilization under the total war system should also be regarded as forced labor in light of the framework established by the Protocol of 2014 to the Forced Labour Convention, 1930. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stated in the House of Representatives on March 5, 2007, that while he denied “coercion in the narrow sense” in relation to the Japanese military “Comfort Women,” he acknowledged “coercion in the broad sense” by private brokers. This may also have been because he could not simply reject the increasingly stringent international human-rights standards that had emerged in the postwar period.^[5]

With regard to the issue of forced labor involving Korean workers at the Sado Mine, the counterarguments put forward by Japanese right-wing figures such as Tsutomu Nishioka—who ask, “In what country could workers have claimed the right to international labor standards during wartime labor mobilization?”—as well as the official position of the Japanese government, are not particularly forward-looking, insofar as their understanding of human rights remains rooted in the mindset of the 1930s. Although the ILO adopted the Protocol of 2014 to the Forced Labour Convention, 1930, insisting on the outdated 1930 Convention, which has already been superseded, can only be regarded as a retrogressive strategy of returning to the past in order to deny. It is also noteworthy that, since the mid-1990s, Korean researchers have increasingly replaced the term “forcible recruitment” with “wartime labor mobilization.” Whether this shift is desirable depends on whether the Protocol of 2014 to the Forced Labour Convention, 1930, is taken as the standard. If this shift is understood in relation to the 1930 Convention, it could ultimately be interpreted as endorsing the denialist argument that wartime mobilization did not constitute forced labor.

A moralistic backlash against the forced labor denialism of the Japanese government or far-right figures such as Nishioka only invites counterarguments that Korean nationalist historians are ignoring the facts. A more persuasive approach to understanding forced labor under Japanese colonial rule would be to maintain the intellectual tension between the contextualism of the time and human-rights-based presentism, while grounding that understanding in the universal standard of the human rights of workers here and now. Rescuing the history of forced labor from the nationalistic emotional conflict between Korea and Japan and turning it into an opportunity to advance the human rights of workers is precisely how the postwar generations of East Asia can remember their suffering responsibly. In Japan and Korea, where rapid population decline has made it necessary to welcome foreign workers and find ways to live together with them, it is an urgent task to examine whether foreign workers here and now are still exposed to the shadow of forced labor and to revisit the past from that perspective.

We can take a similar approach to the issue of the Japanese military “Comfort Women.” Among mainstream Korean nationalists, there is a tendency to reduce the issue to a symbol of national oppression while overlooking its dimension as a matter of women’s human rights. A chaste Korean girl who was forcibly taken away is remembered as an innocent victim whose human rights were violated, but if Korean society remembers the issue as though the human rights of a Japanese professional woman working under contract could be violated simply because she was not a “chaste” Korean girl, it would undermine the universal significance that the issue of the Japanese military “Comfort Women” has brought to global memory space. It is a well-known fact that the recruitment of Japanese military “Comfort Women” took place through various means, including regional quotas, forcible recruitment, recruitment fraud, and the exploitation of patriarchal collusion, and that the patriarchal system of colonial Korea acted as an accomplice in this process. There is also concern that, when the debate over the Japanese military “Comfort Women” is framed merely in nationalist terms, the patriarchy of colonial Korea and the gender inequality of postcolonial Korea that suppressed the memory of the Japanese military “Comfort Women” may be overlooked.

Denialism surrounding the Japanese military “Comfort Women” presents an even more serious problem. Even if, for the sake of argument, we assume that there was no “forcible recruitment” in which young Korean girls were taken away as “Comfort Women” through so-called “virgin hunting,” that the average age of the “Comfort Women” at a comfort station in Zhejiang Province, China, was 24.1, and that commercial practices, such as parents selling their daughters to brokers, were involved, the interpretations and arguments based on these claims would still be problematic. From the perspective of the ILO’s Protocol of 2014 to the Forced Labour Convention, 1930, it is overly simplistic to conclude that the absence of forcible recruitment means that there was no coercion in the case of the Japanese military “Comfort Women.” Denialism surrounding the Japanese military “Comfort Women” symbolizes the alignment of perpetrator ideologies at the intersection of the Japanese Empire’s fascist patriarchy, postwar patriarchal sexism, and post-Cold War neo-nationalism.^[6] Even setting feminism aside, a basic awareness of women’s human rights is enough to demonstrate that the simplistic logic advanced by “Comfort Women” deniers cannot be sustained.

Japanese Military “Comfort Women”: A Symbol of Feminist Solidarity Through the Memory of Transnational Oppression

In Japan’s current politics of memory, denialism surrounding the Japanese military “Comfort Women” is linked to a misogynistic backlash against the feminist #MeToo movement. In Japan, where male sexual violence continues to be tacitly condoned and perpetrators are allowed to go unpunished despite the #MeToo movement, Kazue Muta’s observation that the issue of the Japanese military “Comfort Women” is not a closed chapter of the past but remains an ongoing reality is significant.^[7] The issue of the Japanese military “Comfort Women” has become a symbol of transnational feminist solidarity because of the memory of the Japanese Empire’s transnational oppression. To borrow Carol Gluck’s words, “Just as the Holocaust became the global benchmark for genocide, the Japanese military ‘comfort women’ have become a touchstone for new international law concerning wartime violence against women. Rape, a form of violence as old as war itself, has now become a crime against humanity under international law.”^[8]

The memory of the Japanese military “Comfort Women” has now become a moral asset shared by all humanity in advancing women’s human rights. Lee Yong-soo’s resolute declaration that she is not a Japanese military “sex slave” but a “women’s human rights activist” will serve as a stinging rebuke to deniers in Japan and around the world who deny both the history of the Japanese military “Comfort Women” and the #MeToo movement.