Will there ever be an end to the testimonies of the Japanese military “comfort women”?

How do the voices of testimonies spread? After reading Emily Jungmin Yoon’s collection of poems, “A Cruelty Special to Our Species” (Emily Jungmin Yoon, Translated by Han Yu-joo, Yolimwon, 2020)^[1], memories began to resurface from many years ago. I once finished a lecture on the represent of the Japanese military “comfort women” by watching with my audience a video of Joan Baez^[2] singing ‘Mary Hamilton’. After a year or so, this lecture inspired a long paper, which was slightly revised a couple of year later to be included in “Literature Breaking Literature” (Kwon Bodurae et al., Minumsa, 2018)^[3], compiled by the literary critic Oh Hye-jin, the organizer of the lecture. However, it failed to capture the spirit of the song I had played during the original lecture as if I was sharing it on behalf of the “comfort women” victims.

‘Mary Hamilton’ is well known to South Koreans as it was reinterpreted as ‘Beautiful Things’. “Do you know, wind? / Do you know, rain? / What will come for them, and where will they be taken to?” When I sang that verse even as a child, I vaguely felt the dread and sadness of what had really disappeared, and I felt as if I wanted to ask that question to the wind and rain. It was not until after the military dictatorship had finally ended that I belatedly learned it was a folk song that was used to resist the dictatorship of Park Chung-hee with its deep, transparent lyrics that made it impossible to pinpoint what the object of loss was^[4]. The original song is ‘Mary Hamilton’^[5], one of the Murder Ballads, which is a subgenre of traditional British and American ballads. Also, the lyrics originating from Scotland left a powerful impression on me when I began to think about the testimonies of the Japanese military “comfort women” victims and whether there was any closure to their testimonies. The poetic narrator is the soul of Mary Hamilton, who was a servant to a queen. She had to murder her son with her own hands because her baby was the king’s child. She was then hanged and killed. The ending of the song mentions that there were three other women named Mary besides herself. The soul that sang the song was not only talking about herself but also about the tragedy of the court ladies, who would have existed just as they did. 

When I was preparing for the lecture, I wanted the counting of the survivors of the Japanese military “comfort women” to cease, even if the counting was done to emphasize the urgency surrounding the breaking of the South Korea-Japan Agreement of December 2015 on the ‘Comfort Women’ between the Shinzo Abe and Park Geun-hye administrations. Does that mean things are over when they die? Was it acceptable to count the Japanese military “comfort women” in the first place and figure out how many were still alive? Moreover, testimonies have already taken place regarding the brutal and innumerable deaths that the survivors have witnessed. The song seemed to tell us that death was not the end to testimony or history. There is no ending to the testimonies and therefore it would be premature to close this aspect of history. Emily Jungmin Yoon’s collection of poems, “A Cruelty Special to Our Species”, is an attestation to that. The collection of poems, similar to ‘Mary Hamilton’ which pierced my soul several years ago, pervaded my innermost heart at once ever more strongly. That is because the poems embrace ‘Hwang Keum-ju’, ‘Jin Kyeong-pang’, ‘Kang Duk-kyung’, ‘Kim Sang-hi’, ‘Kim Yoon-sim’, ‘Park Kyeong-soon’, ‘Kim Soon-duk’. Also, there is ‘I’ who conveys their memories, pain, and testimonies.

The ‘Found poetry’ – Poetic transmission of testimony

I will postpone the opportunity to discuss Emily Jungmin Yoon’s “A Cruelty Special to Our Species” in the light of the genealogy of South Korean literature in America, which deals with postcolonial scars by linking the Japanese military “comfort women” to the diaspora identity, such as “Comfort Woman” (Translated by Park Eun-mi, Inbooker, 1997) by Nora Okja Keller, or in terms of the particular trend of literature and film texts that have gained momentum in recent years, as illustrated in “A Gesture Life” (Jung Young-mok, RH Korea, 2014) by Lee Chang-rae. Above all, this collection of poems can be said to be an intense poetic transmission of the Japanese military “comfort women’s” testimonies that make one’s body flinch. Unlike the narrative style that takes time to reveal the hidden truth – that focuses on the Japanese military “comfort women” - these poems appear in front of the listeners and tell them immediately that the narrator was one of the “comfort women”. This could be called a dramatic presence, but the effect was not intended to depict the illusion of directness, because these poems are ‘found poetry’. The author stated that these poems adopted “a technique for creating new forms or contents by partially using the existing texts, as in collage which is often used in visual art,” and that the texts used were recorded and translated as testimonies. The author also mentioned that “Instead of simply copying, the contents and language were selectively extracted and rearranged, and a little bit of my own language was incorporated to transform them into a form of poetry.”^[6] I would like to call this a poetic transmission of testimony. The production process of this collection of poems is not only an intellectual task requiring the digging up of archives and building historical images that were unknown, but it also demands a bodily performance essential for a transferor of traditional art. For Emily Jungmin Yoon, the process of transforming the language of a document archive into poetry equates to the exercise of voicing the words as they hit and roll inside her body.    

 I walked 
 I was alone and walked all the way to the 38^th parallel
 American soldiers sprayed me with so much DDT 
      All the lice fell off me 
 I was December 2^nd 
 I lost my uterus
      I am now 73 years old
         - Testimonies (Hwang Keum-ju) (43)^[7]

There are cross-reference texts to indicate what is intended by irregular line placements and spacing that appear to be long pauses. The most appropriate example would be the fourth book of testimony, “Forcibly Taken Korean Military ‘Comfort Women’ for History Rewritten Through Memories” (The Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, Testimony Team of the Korean Commission for The Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery in 2000, Pulbit, 2011). According to sociologist Kim Soo-jin, while preparing for the Korean Commission for The Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery in 2000, the testimony team reportedly wanted to convert the “testimonies into subaltern^[8] history” from the perspective that “positioned the testimony as data based on objective epistemology that supplemented the document data.” This illustrated the transition of oral methodology and rewriting that centered on oral speakers while relocating the oral recorders and researchers from the questioners to the listeners.^[9]  Similar to what the researchers considered in the fourth collection of testimonies, the line placement and long pauses in Emily Jungmin Yoon’s poems would be the mimesis^[10] for the testifiers’ persistent pain, long silence, faltering, and hesitation that are manifested through poetic deviation. However, the poetic testimonies, which became shorter than the testimony texts due to volume, condense the experience of sexual slavery and rape, which was the source of trauma, more directly than any other testimony texts, and also the abject life that followed, where the women had to evoke the internal pain of women-bodies even upon returning to South Korea after being liberated. As in the Testimonies mentioned above “I lost my uterus. I am now 73 years old”, it shows a life stuck to trauma, and how counting the days spent alive becomes meaningless. In these poems, neither the questioner nor the listener exists, so the “comfort women” victims, who are the subjects of the poems, seem to stand tall in the presence, emphasizing the courage and subjectivity of the testimonies.

However, this would not have been achieved if the poet had only dealt with the testimonies of the “comfort women” victims. The power of the poetic transmission of testimonies is not obtained through a comparison or the contrast of testimony texts that have undergone multiple mediations. This is not only because the poetry could not be written without them, but also because the power came from the transmitter. In other words, the transmitter created the power by contextualizing and juxtaposing her own life through the history that she realized with regards to why she wanted to pass on the testimonies. The poet puts herself at the forefront as a witness and testifier to the history and social life of the group she is involved in. The poet, who lived in South Korea as a child and then moved to the United States via Canada, says in her poems of testimonies that she existed as an Asian woman whose body was molded from  postcolonialism, Cold War history, and the history of Western imperialism that created racial hierarchy. “Which said ear wh‘en my ear said year” (‘Bell Theory’ (81)), and “I” (‘Hair’ (88)) with black straight hair and tanned skin, who is different from any white girl, intersects history and contemporary periods over her own body as a woman. The memory of historical trauma is evoked in “An Ordinary Misfortune” that persists today, and vice versa. In the meantime, for those who regard ‘I’ as a savage seducer in terms of the gendered stereotype of orientalism and seek to gain the authenticity of constantly regressing the self, she commands: “Do not touch me” (‘Do Not Touch Me’ (76~77))

“An Ordinary Misfortune”

In “A Cruelty Special to Our Species”, “An Ordinary Misfortune” is a theme that repeatedly appears as many as eight times. In an online radio broadcast^[11], the poet said, “I wanted to write about violence not only against the “comfort women” victims but also against bodies, especially women’s bodies, through the theme of ‘An Ordinary Misfortune’”. In a history book that mentioned Japanese military “comfort women”, she reportedly noticed that experiencing sexual exploitation was so frequent for those poor women that the phrase “ordinary misfortune" stuck in her head. So she began to write poems about it, and the expression was translated as ‘an ordinary misfortune’ through conversations with translator Han Yu-ju. It is said that she wanted to talk about ‘ordinary’ rather than ‘normal’ or ‘average’, and she wished to emphasize the ‘moment’ by choosing the translated word ‘misfortune’ over ‘unhappiness’. This reminded me of the murder of a woman at Gangnam Station in 2016.^[12] As the waves of procession and post-it notes from women gathered at Exit 10 of Gangnam Station demonstrate, it could have been you who was killed, not her, and the murder was structured misogynistic violence. What Emily Jungmin Yoon called “An Ordinary Misfortune” implies structured violence as such.

Mine is the jam-packed train. The too-weak cocktail. This statement by an American man at the bar: Your life in Korea would have been a whole lot different without the US. Meaning: be thankful. This question by a Canadian Girl, a friend: Why don’t you guys just get along? The guys: Japan and Korea. Meaning: move on. How do I answer that? Move on, move on, girls on the train. Destination: comfort stations…… (omitted) ‘An Ordinary Misfortune’ (25)

The first of ‘An Ordinary Misfortune’ from this collection of poems, as illustrated by “Mine is the jam-packed train.” and similarly to the sexual harassment that women often experience in public transportation, faces “girls on a train” heading to a destination called the comfort station as one returns to the past following the chain of daily misfortunes. The poem reveals that they were just the targets that had “condoms” and “Totsugeki Ichiban” being all shot at them, regardless of whether they were sick or dead. In another ‘An Ordinary Misfortune’, they were described as overused “trees” and hence “maruta” (‘An Ordinary Misfortune’, 35~36) that were cut down and thrown away.

In addition to this poem, many of Emily Jungmin Yoon’s poetry, which consist of intermittent chains of words and phrases that do not form complete syntactic sentences, may make the readers feel a little dizzy. I want to praise her gifted linguistic skills, but her intentions lie elsewhere. By putting contexts between words, she rather attracts the members of the interpretation community who read her poems. We stumble on some of those words. I urge the readers to reflect on themselves at the places where they slipped down. In letting us do so, she tells us to connect things that are separated in autonomous imagination. I hope that Emily Jungmin Yoon’s poetry will be pleasant piece of advice within the South Korean atmosphere where events like politics, movement, and history are exhausted in the political fervor and people are cynical about the reflection and solidarity of expanding political issues beyond their own environment. Of course, she notes that the members of her poetry’s interpretation community are urged to face the fact that human beings have a special characteristic of cruelty that other species lack. Poems like ‘The Transformation’ (127~132) which is about the violence of the Anthropocene against sperm whales that died in droves due to their stomachs being full of plastic indicate the extent of the political, ethical, and therefore truly literary world that Emily Jungmin Yoon has to deal with.