NEGOTIATING THE MASTER NARRATIVES OF PROSTITUTION, SLAVERY, AND RAPE IN THE TESTIMONIES BY AND REPRESENTATIONS OF KOREAN SEX SLAVES OF THE JAPANESE MILITARY (1932-1945)
A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics
By Karen S. Murph, M.S.
Washington, DC
August 29, 2008
Copyright 2008 by
0XUSK .DUHQ 6
All rights reserved
2009
Copyright 2008 by Karen S. Murph
All Rights Reserved
NEGOTIATING THE MASTER NARRATIVES OF PROSTITUTION, SLAVERY, AND RAPE IN THE TESTIMONIES BY AND REPRESENTATIONS OF KOREAN SEX SLAVES OF THE JAPANESE MILITARY (1932-1945)
Karen S. Murph, M.S.
Thesis Advisor: Heidi E. Hamilton, Ph.D.
ABSTRACT
In spite of the political and historical controversy surrounding the testimonies of the Korean women forced to be sex slaves of and by the Japanese Military during the Asia Pacific War (1932-1945), their testimonies and allies’ representations of them have not been analyzed from a sociolinguistic perspective. This study examines how the sex slave survivors, commonly referred to as “comfort women,” and their advocates negotiate the competing master narratives (Mishler 1995; Talbot et al. 1996; Bamberg and Andrews 2004) of prostitution, slavery, and rape as they interdiscursively construct them/selves as reliable narrators and credible, prototypical (Rosch 1978; Givon 1989; Violi 2000) victims of sex slavery while refuting the adversarial discourse that postions them as liars and prostitutes.
The primary data were six videotaped interviews conducted in Korean by the Washington Coalition for Comfort Women, Inc., and later translated into English and published in Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military (Schellstede 2000). I also examined representations of one of the interviewee’s testimony in English in public discourse. Using the interview data, I examine how one survivor constructs herself as a reliable narrator using negation and explanation and her story as credible using involvement and evaluation strategies, such as sound words and constructed dialogue. I apply Labov’s (2006) theory of narrative preconstruction to each survivor’s testimony and examine overlap between the initiating event and scripts of prostitution, slavery, and rape. I find that when a survivor’s testimony activates the prostitution script, she must explicitly refute it by denying she received payment. Finally, I show the ramifications of advocates’ mis/representations of the women in public discourse.
The findings can inform all victims of sex slavery and those who advocate on their behalf as they illuminate the penalties of nonconformity to the master discourse governing the narrow and oppressive range of what comprises an appropriate or prototypical victim. This study contributes to the understanding of the delicate balance of framing the survivor as both agentive (empowered) and as a prototypical victim who, in this case, deserves an apology and compensation from the government of Japan.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am especially grateful to my mentor Dr. Heidi Hamilton for staying with this study, even while she was on sabbatical and during all the time I spent “in the trees.” As a mentor, she was a model of keen intellect, enduring patience, and genuine kindness. Without her belief in this project, it would not have materialized.
There could not have been a more ideal committee than Dr. Heidi Hamilton, Dr. Deborah Schiffrin, and Dr. Deborah Tannen. Each has given generously of her time, and this study has been greatly improved by integrating their feedback. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to be their student over the years. Their collective scholarly works have challenged me to consider the real-life applications of my own work.
I thank the entire faculty of the Department of Linguistics, especially those in the Sociolinguistics concentration, for their ongoing mentoring and support. If it were not for Dr. Natalie Schilling-Estes putting my name forward for financial support during the fall 2008 semester, it would not have been possible for me to finish. I also wish to thank other Georgetown faculty members who assisted me with this project. Dr. Bonnie B.C. Oh, as I benefited from her expertise on the military sex slave issue, which helped me better understand the survivors and situate this study in its historical context. Knowing that learning a language is more than mastering its grammar, Dr. In Ku Kim-Marshall encouraged me to trust in my Korean cultural memory and to work with Korean data though my Korean was less than fluent.
There are many classmates and friends to thank at Georgetown University. In some way each contributed either directly or indirectly to moving this study forward. I thank Wilma Parker who was the first person who believed I could do this. I thank everyone in Dr. Hamilton’s mentee group, Sylvia Chou, Elisa Everts, Kim Kitae, and Ginny Wake for the useful discussion and comments on the earliest drafts of this work. To those in my study group, Sylvia Chou, Cynthia Gordon, Alla Yelyseiva Tovares, and Najama Al Zidjaly, thank you for accommodating my pace, and letting me off the hook when I needed to be let off it. Finally, it was as stroke of luck to work with Cecelia Castillo-Ayometzi on the Alzheimer’s Research Project; she has always had the gift of calling me at just the crucial moments.
I thank my Northern Virginia Community College colleagues in the Division of Languages and Literature, especially Dean Gerald Boyd for creating an environment conducive to my completing this study and those in the Department of ESL for picking up the slack in my absence. I also thank President Dr. Robert Templin and our Provost, Dr. Barbara Saperstone for their commitment to my professional development and approving my leave.
To my family at Kwangju University, Professors Wilma Parker, Cho Woohyun, Soh Kyunghee, Pai Moonsook, Kim Sun-mi, Kim Dongok, Jun Dae-soo, Yoo Jae-keun, Lee Young-suk, Chang Soon-real, Lee Young-seok, and Ahn Byung Kyu, now at Chonnom National University, I thank you for seeing my scholarly potential and gently nudging me towards it.
I am grateful to the Korea Foundation for a Language Fellowship award; it enabled me not only to study Korean at Yonsei University, but it also made it possible for me to conduct the ethnographic portion of this study. I thank the staff and my fellow advocates at the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan for all their assistance with my research. I am grateful to Dr. Soh Ok Cha, who sought me out after a Wednesday Demonstration in Seoul, and encouraged me upon my return to the States to volunteer at the Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues, Inc. (WCCW). This taught me much and it opened many doors, including meeting the WCCW founder, Dongwoo Lee Hahm, whom I am indebted for providing me with the original video-taped interviews, which serve as the primary data for this dissertation. I am also grateful to DaiSil Kim-Gibson, who shared her interview with Yun Turi, which sparked my inititial interest the grandmother’s life stories.
It was a privilege and an honor to meet the survivors, activists, and volunteers protesting at the Wednesday Demonstrations. I appreciate the opportunity I was given to volunteer and live at the House of Sharing, and I thank both the residents and staff for making me feel at home there. Thank you for opening your homes to me, for the meals, walks, conversations, stories, and times of worship we shared. I dedicate this work to you; you are models of human strength and perseverance. I honor the memory of Grandmothers Pak Du Ri, Kim Soon-Duk, Mun Pil-gi, and Kang Duk Kyung. I wish Grandmothers Bae Choon-Hee. Hahn Doe-Soon, Jee Dol-Ree, Kang, Il-Chul, Kim Koon-ja, Kim Soon-Oak, Lee Oak-Sun, Pak Oak-Ryun, Pak Oak Sun, and Yu. Duri continued health and peace.
My heartfelt thanks to Pop, one of my first teachers, who with his elementary school education, demonstrated what a person can do if they work hard. And to my Nan, whose “now you listen to your nana” still keeps me on the right track. To Vicki Jean, who is always loving me more from wherever she is in this world. And to my sister, and friend, Gail Anne, who stood beside me during the darkest times. I thank my parents, whose ceaseless prayers have under girded this endeavor from afar. Thank you for teaching me to “finish what you start” and for being patient all these years while I have done so. To my father, who at a particularly low point in this undertaking, told me that Einstein once said that “people love chopping wood. In this activity one immediately sees results” and reminded me, that “what you are trying to do is not chopping wood.” I thank Cindy too, who knows what it means to complete an advanced degree and so could support me in a different, but very important way. To Britta, Alex, Finn, and Teagan, who supported me the way only close family can and are glad that I am “finally” finished.
To the Poetry “grrls”.Lawrence Biemiller, Jen Daniels, Katherine Gekker, Michelle Mandolia, Mariah Burton Nelson, and Katherine Williams.my dear, dear friends, I thank you for embracing my tacit involvement style and sustaining me with your presence and poetry. I am grateful for you all and other friends and family for sharing their special places in Greensboro, Vermont, the Shenandoah Valley, and the Rehoboth, Bethany and Duck beaches. To Jen, who understands me and this feat best, I thank you for teaching me the importance of staying connected to people. I finished this work to honor the connection I made with the women of this study.
to the Grandmothers
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Prologue…...................................................................................................................................................1
Chapter 1: Introduction
1.1 Motivation.............................................................................................................................................7
1.2 Historical Background.........................................................................................................................11
1.2.1 The Term “Comfort Women”......................................................................................................11
1.2.2 Profiles of Women and Girls Forced into Sex Slavery by the Japanese Military.........................16
1.2.3 Profile of the Japanese Military Sex Slave System......................................................................20
1.2.4 Examination of Reasons for 40, 50, 60 Years of Silence.............................................................24
1.3 Contemporary Controversies: Testimonies and Responses................................................................32
1.4 Contemporary Connections: Sex Slavery Today................................................................................40
1.5 Plan of Dissertation.............................................................................................................................43
Chapter 2: Literature Review
2.1 Introduction .........................................................................................................................................46
2.2 Master Narratives ................................................................................................................................47
2.2.1 Master Narrative of Prostitution...................................................................................................52
2.2.2 Master Narrative of Slavery ........................................................................................................55
2.2.3 Master Narrative of Rape ............................................................................................................60
2.3 Positioning...........................................................................................................................................74
2.4 Frames, Schemas, and Scripts.............................................................................................................77
2.5 Constructing the Credible Self ............................................................................................................79
2.5.1 Negation.......................................................................................................................................80
2.5.2 Explanation ..................................................................................................................................85
2.6 Constructing a Credible Narrative: Involvement Strategies................................................................87
2.6.1 Sound Symbolism ........................................................................................................................94
2.6.2 Constructed Dialogue...................................................................................................................96
2.6.3 Repetition.....................................................................................................................................97
2.7 Intertextuality and Translation ............................................................................................................99
Chapter 3: Methodology
3.1 Introduction .......................................................................................................................................102
3.2 Ethnography......................................................................................................................................102
3.3 Description of the Data, Data Collection, Transcription, and Translation .......................................107
3.3.1 Data Set 1 -- Interview Data ......................................................................................................107
3.3.2 Data Set 2 -- Published Data......................................................................................................110
3.3.3 Data Transcription and Translation............................................................................................111
3.3.4 Issues in Translation...................................................................................................................115
3.4 Terms and Terminology ...................................................................................................................116
3.5 Conclusion.........................................................................................................................................118
Chapter 4: Reliable Narrator, Credible Experience - Navigating the Master Narratives of Prostitution, (Sex) Slavery, and Rape
4.1 Introduction ......................................................................................................................................120
4.2 Constructing the Reliable Narrator...................................................................................................122
4.2.1 Negation: I Was Not Dragged Away .........................................................................................122
4.2.2 Explanation: My Actual Age......................................................................................................132
4.2.3 Explanation: Unmarried at Nineteen..........................................................................................135
4.3 Creating a Direct and Credible Experience .....................................................................................142
4.3.1 Sound Symbolism as Involving Detail.......................................................................................143
4.3.2 Constructed Dialogue as Involving Detail ................................................................................161
4.4 Conclusion.........................................................................................................................................166
Chapter 5: Variations in Rejecting the Prostitution Frame
5.1 Introduction .....................................................................................................................................169
5.2 The Data............................................................................................................................................171
5.3 Negotiating the Master Narrative of Prostitution ..............................................................................172
5.3.1 No Prompt; No Mention of Money (Moon and Kim)................................................................175
5.3.2 No Prompt; Two Self-Initiated References to Money (Kang) ...................................................183
5.3.3 Prompted and Self-Initiated Mentions of Money (Pak and Yi) .................................................189
5.4 Conclusion.........................................................................................................................................210
Chapter 6: Navigating the Master Narratives of Prostitution, (Sex) Slavery, and Rape in Public Discourse
6.1 Introduction ......................................................................................................................................215
6.2 Effective Negotiation .......................................................................................................................215
6.2.1 Data Description.........................................................................................................................216
6.2.2 Linguistic Sanitizing to Construct a More Acceptable (Prototypical) Victim ..........................221
6.2.3 Shifting the Blame by Altering the Causal Agent .....................................................................224
6.2.4 Editing/Translation: Creating Coherence-Diminishing Particularity .......................................232
6.3 Misrepresentations in Public Discourse ...........................................................................................241
6.4 Conclusion.........................................................................................................................................250
Chapter 7: Conclusion
7.1 Introduction.......................................................................................................................................253
7.2 Summary of Findings........................................................................................................................255
7.2.1 Summary of Chapter 4: Reliable Narrator, Credible Experience - Navigating the Master Narratives of Prostitution, (Sex) Slavery, and Rape....................................................................................256
7.2.2 Summary of Chapter 5: Variations in Rejecting the Prostitution Frame....................................258
7.2.3 Summary of Chapter 6: Navigating the Master Narratives of Prostitution, (Sex) Slavery, and Rape in Public Discourse ....................................................................................................................260
7.3 Implications.......................................................................................................................................262
7.3.1 Applications...............................................................................................................................262
7.3.2 Methodology..............................................................................................................................267
7.3.3 Theory........................................................................................................................................269
7.4 Final Reflection.................................................................................................................................278
Bibliography............................................................................................................................................280
Tables
1-1 Prevalence of Terms............................................................................................................................15 2-1 Rape Myths (Burt 1980: 217-223) ......................................................................................................63 2-2 Category Labels for 19 Original Myth Categories (Payne et al. 1999) ..........................................64-65 3-1 Interviewees: Age at and Duration of Enslavement .........................................................................109 3-2 Keys to Transcription........................................................................................................................114 5-1 Where She Begins: Narrative Preconstruction..................................................................................173 5-2 Consent Continuum...........................................................................................................................211 6-1 Linguistic Sanitizing ........................................................................................................................221 6-2 Shifting the Causality by Altering the Causal Agent .................................................................229-230 6-3 Expunged Sound Symbolism............................................................................................................238 6-4 Lack of Parity in Titles......................................................................................................................242
Prologue
“Truth requires listeners as well as tellers”.Norma Field (1997: 36)
In Seoul, I left language class early to participate in the Wednesday Demonstrations with a group of mostly octogenarians protesting in front of the Japanese embassy. I had no idea what to expect. Worried that I might miss a bus connection or subway transfer, that I might not be able to locate the embassy, or that I would have to break through the riot police line, I arrived early. At about 11:45 a.m., a crowd started to form in the street in front of the embassy. The protest organizers and then the Halmoni (Grandmothers) began arriving one by one. The riot police.young men in their late teens, dressed in black Kevlar vests and helmets with steel mesh face-masks.flanked the hundred protestors assembled at both ends of the street. Their mission to contain the protest: They lined the embassy wall, standing at the ready with their banged up metal shields and wooden batons.
I positioned myself on the periphery, towards the back, but inch by inch, as more protestors joined in, I was pushed towards the middle; the press of people and the heat from the August sun suffocated me. Tall in this crowd, my light-colored hair and eyes attracted a steady snapping of shutters, television cameras; the eyes behind them unnerved me.
Then, from the northeast end of the street there was commotion: a horn incessantly honking, a van breaking through and coming to a screeching halt. The driver jumped out of the van, dashed around it, slid open the door, and the halmoni from the House of Sharing tumbled out, with a chorus of aigo juggessda aigo juggessda (Oh, I’m gonna die, oh, I’m gonna die). They had been cooped up in traffic for three hours. They pulled on their yellow smocks and took their places with the other grandmothers seated in the front row.
The demonstration proceeded peacefully. I fumbled along mimicking the chants, singing, and hoisting my placard when others did. When protestors began flying paper airplanes over the embassy wall, I was unsure of what to do, so I just watched, which is also what I did when the embassy gate opened and Grandmother Hwang Keum Joo threw herself down on the street to block a car from exiting the compound and was carried off, kicking and yelling, by riot police, as even the protest organizers were unable to persuade her to get up.
Each demonstration took on its own character, size, and sprit, shaped by the various sponsoring organizations, community leaders, politicians, celebrities, students, other protestors, and individual grandmothers in attendance. Some, I experienced as rallies, some as han-filled1 protests.others I would characterize as fiery sermons, while others were more meditative, like prayers. Turnout varied as well.sometimes the crowds were as small as thirty, and sometimes the protestors numbered in the thousands. All were, for the most part, peaceful.
1 Han tan (hahn tahn), abbreviated han, is defined by Korean sociologists as: “unrequited resentments.” According to DeMente (1998:92-93), han is anger and bitterness that wells up from the “depths of the soul” and has been passed on from one generation to the next. Scholars posit several specific types of han, all “spawned by the spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and physical oppression” (DeMente 1998: 93).
When first attending the demonstrations, I felt like an intruder.being an object of curiosity and scrutiny made me uncomfortable. After one demonstration, I was walking toward the subway wondering if I should return next week, when I felt a tug on my sleeve. I turned to see four-foot-five, Pak Ok-nyon’s jet-black hair. She took my hand and in it pressed a tiny piece of orange candy, folded my finger around it, turned and scurried away. Her gift encouraged me to come back and continue participating in the protests.
After each demonstration the halmoni, protest organizers, members of sponsoring organizations, and demo participants lunched together at a nearby restaurant. My foreign face was a fixture at the demonstrations for two months before I finally got a seat close enough to be invited to a seat nearer to the grandmothers. Sitting on the floor at short tables over steaming stews is how I met the halmoni I eventually got to know better and how I first met the ten halmoni residing at the House of Sharing, a housing cooperative in Kyungki Do, Kwangju City, at the foothills of the mountains southeast of Seoul. Primarily, women live at the House of Sharing not because their families can no longer care for them because many lack family altogether; often a combination of circumstances.such as the absence of a care-taker, their indigent state, and declining physical and mental health.contribute to their inability to live independently.
To spend more time with the grandmothers, I began volunteering at this cooperative on long weekends, holidays, and on longer breaks between quarters. Initially, as a high considerate style speaker (Tannen 1984; 1989), who was not completely fluent in Korean, especially in the dialects many of the grandmothers speak, and who was a novice at the negotiating the elder-younger hierarchy, I did not talk much. Consequently, building relationships took time but eventually developed during talk at the shared meals. At the pine-planked table, the halmoni began to engage me.“eat this,” they would say as they dropped some choice tidbit in my bowl. “You’re not eating enough,” they scolded.
After a brief interval of untethered observation, my role at the house solidified.my responsibilities primarily revolved around meals, their preparation and clean-up. Three times a day, I set and cleared the table, washed dishes.also known as “wasting all the hot water!”.and honed my proficiency at creating custom coffee and tea orders. My peeling and preparing fruit, the kitchen staff had observed, was futile.mercifully, I was relieved of this chore.
In time, I became the recipient of each grandmother’s gracious hospitality: when I visited their rooms, each insisted on sharing a pear, persimmon, sweet sticky rice with chestnuts and dates, crushed sesame and honey-filled crescent-shaped rice cakes, or citron, pumpkin, mugwort, and green plum teas (“to enhance my constitution”), and their wry observations.“look at the way you peel that pear, no wonder you’re not married!”
Many halmoni, like Lee Ok Sun Halmoni, have or are rediscovering their native Hangul and are newly literate. Unable to repatriate at the end of the war, Grandmother Lee lived in China for more than fifty years. Consequently, when she returned to Korea, she had to relearn to speak, read, and write Korean. With pride she guided me through her primers, and she appeared to relish reading scriptures. When I asked her about her hometown, growing up, her experience during the colonial period and the war, and her life in China, she snatched another book from her shelf, a collection of testimonies, and began reading hers.obviously this was also a sacred text to her.
At the House of Sharing, I participated in or observed Catholic, Protestant, and Buddhist religious services. My own faith was routinely tested on Sunday mornings when Kang Il Chul Halmoni would “catch” us a ride to church.half-crouching at rode-side, her zipped-up bible in hand, she would wait until an approaching car came around the bend and would leap out into the road to slow it. If it veered close enough, she would grab the handle, throw open the door, and leap in. catapulting me across the seat with her. Over time, I was able to determine from a distance those that knew Halmoni and purposely slowed to offer a ride, those who had been duped before and swerved away, and the uninitiated, stunned to see such an odd couple hurtling into their back seat.
With the grandmothers, I was often unsure of what constituted appropriate and respectful behavior on my part. Pak Du-ri Halmoni constantly challenged me in this respect. After visiting with her several times, on one visit to her room, she asked me to come back that evening to sleep in her room. I successfully dodged her request and successive invitations by pretending not to understand them; I believed it prudent to preserve impartiality, or at least the appearance of it, towards the grandmothers. I quickly learned they “talk” to each other.when asked “didn’t you bring my citron tea?” From then on I thought in tens and I got creative, and I never again brought any five pound jars of any kind of tea.
One evening, when I nudged my head in Grandmother Pak’s door to bid her goodnight, she narrowed her eyes and nodded her head toward the neatly prepared bed, she had placed at the foot of hers. Without words, she ended my resistance and established our evening ritual. On those nights, in her twelve by twelve room as the ondol heat bore into my back through my yo, I lay awake as her nettled breath raked the air and as she restlessly sleep-talked. Other nights, I woke to the smell of her ginseng scented cigarettes. The second I stirred, she lit one for me. Wordlessly we smoked, and I wondered, but never asked, what woke her.
On Monday at 4:30 a.m. my alarm announced my return to Seoul and language classes. I pried myself from the bed, methodically folded “my” yo and place it in the armoire. As I trudged to the shower, I saw her squatting in front of the refrigerator, stirring then sampling her shikhae (traditional sweet rice drink). When I returned to the room, she was stuffing my backpack with apples, pears, square kimchee, bachelor kimchee, petchu kimchee, enough food to feed a family of four for two weeks, though I would return in four days. During breakfast, I kept one eye on my pack, which I willed not to spring a leak as it had done previously, much to the amusement of my fellow Monday morning commuters.
The abundant gifts of food were not Grandmother Pak’s, or the other grandmother’s, only gifts to me. I learned much from them. At the House of Sharing, I gained a deeper understanding of their day to day lives and the dynamics of living in a communal space. I observed how they related to the staff, outsiders, family members, and each other, and gained insight into how their language, public, semi-private, and private is shaped by them and others.
Chapter 1 . Introduction
1.1 Motivation
Not quite two decades ago, in the mid-1990s, when I was teaching English at Kwangju University, a colleague, Cho Woohyun, lent me a copy of .........
....., True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women (Howard 1995).the first of six volumes of testimonies published by the Korean Council for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (hereafter Korean Council). This volume, the single one translated into English to date, is comprised of the testimonies of nineteen Korean women forced into sexual slavery during the Asia Pacific War (1932-1945). The women’s testimonies made a permanent impression on me.
In the spring of 2000, I attended a screening of the documentary Silence Broken, produced by Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. This documentary chronicles the life stories of six Korean women, including their experiences of sexual slavery. Portions of their stories are dramatized and interspersed with interviews with Japanese historians, war veterans, and civilians. The most poignant scene in the documentary for me is when Yun Turi, confined to a “comfort station” in Pusan for three years, returns to her hometown to find her widowed mother, with “a soiled white scarf on her head,” (Kim-Gibson 1999: 176) at the market selling wild parsley as her only means to support herself and Turi’s siblings. Gripped by her mother’s plight, Yun says she felt “like a tree caught in a hurricane,” and so she kicks the small metal bowl of parsley over and furiously stomps it into the mud.
I was stunned by this scene and what I learned from skimming Yun’s story in the book of interviews on which Kim-Gibson (1999) bases her documentary. I was familiar with Yun’s testimony as she tells it in True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women (1995). In this testimony Yun does not tell about her encounter with her mother at the market. In fact, the two accounts appeared disparate in other aspects but, in essence, seemed to be the same fundamental story. I found myself asking what Polyani (1981) asks.is it possible for the “same” story to be told twice? What exactly, made the two stories identifiable as “Yun Turi’s” story?
Afterward, at the reception, I approached the producer, Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, to inquire more about Yun. In the course of our conversation, I asked about the possibility of using Yun’s testimony for a class paper. She graciously lent me audio tapes of her interview with Yun. Delving into Yun’s testimony intensified my interest; I began considering a dissertation length study to analyze the oral testimonies of Korean women, such as Yun Turi, who were enslaved by the Japanese military. It seemed an intuitively fruitful endeavor to apply the theoretical frameworks of life stories and narratives and to analyze other micro-linguistic and intertextual features of the testimonies to better understand how these women construct their selves (Schiffrin 1993; 1996) as they talk about their wartime experiences. I also became interested in how the women’s interdiscursive productions of these selves are shaped by an array of institutional, historical, and cultural discourses, and how and to what end, others appropriate their words.
While researching the master narratives of rape that constrain the women’s testimonies, I read Susan Brownmiller’s (1975) groundbreaking work Against Our Will, Men, Women, and Rape. In her introduction, Brownmiller (1975: xi) describes her irritation at frequently being asked, “have you ever been raped?” While no one has ever asked me if I have been a sex slave, many of those with whom I have talked about the women forced to be military sex slaves ask me, what, other than my linguistic interests, compels me to focus on these women, or rather, what about such “grim,” “depressing,” “difficult,” and “horrific” subject matter interests me. I have spent considerable time thinking about these questions. While Brownmiller (1975: xi) says the “the matching up of author with subject is a mysterious process,” I am able to point to at least one factor that has personally motivated me to carry out this study, to go down this path, with these particular women.
I believe I have not and will never overcome my initial shock and revulsion at the enormity of this utterly indescribable atrocity; taking the most conservative figures, 125,000,000 rapes were committed in just five years. That is 100,000 rapes per day. In the course of a three-year imprisonment, a woman was raped 7,500 times (Parker, 1996). As a member of the human race, I feel a moral obligation to bear witness to these crimes, and I agree with Seifert (1993: 32) when she says that “bringing the violence back to the cultural consciousness and making it public is the sine qua non for change. Only when sexual violence is perceived as a political issue, when it is publicly discussed and analyzed, will it be possible to establish the causes and contexts and to envisage strategies to overcome this situation.” Additionally, the public discussion needs to shift from blaming the victim for the crime committed against her to supporting her and encouraging disclosure.
The women’s experience as sex slaves has tragically stigmatized them and has contributed to keeping them silent for sixty years. As Seifert (1993: 32) suggests, the silence “may be due to the lack of a discourse that allowed these women to articulate their experience in a way that preserved their dignity” or as Laub and Allard (1998: 808) advance, perhaps, these women “cannot articulate” their “trauma even to themselves” because, like survivors of the Holocaust, what happened to them is unprecedented in human history. It is beyond the scope of the human imagination. The women who have come forward to testify about their horrific sex slave experiences have been re-victimized by some conservative factions of the Japanese government. They have been verbally attacked.called liars and prostitutes. For these women to be able to tell their stories with dignity, they must refute these claims and battle the master narratives of rape and prostitution, which are inherently shaming.
The core question this study seeks to answer is how do women enslaved by the Japanese military and those who advocate on their behalf negotiate these competing (and paradoxical) master narratives? I hope that my analysis of how the survivors are constrained in their interdiscursive production of themselves by the master narratives of slavery, rape, and prostitution will, in some small way, contribute to the envisioning of strategies to end sexual violence. I further hope my work will contribute to the empowerment of those who come forward to testify with dignity and prosecute the crimes committed against them.
1.2 Historical Background
In this section, I present a basic overview of the history of Japanese military sex slavery for readers who want to place the analysis more deeply in its social, cultural, political, and historical contexts. First, I provide a synopsis of the relevant socio-historical background including information on the term “comfort woman,” the profile of the women forced to be sex slaves, and the establishment of the sex slavery system by the Japanese military. Included in these first sections are descriptions of the conditions these women endured at military brothels called “comfort stations” and the fate of these women at the end of the war. I then explore the reasons the survivors maintained their silence for forty to fifty years, which includes an analysis of the role of Confucian values and colonial interference, and their reasons for finally breaking that silence.
1.2.1 The Term “Comfort Women”
“Quotation marks are one of the most powerful markers of negation and of
passage to the order of the symbolic economy.” Pierre Bourdieu
The term “comfort women” is used to refer to predominantly Asian women and girls forced by the Japanese military into sexual slavery in state-run or supervised brothels in territories annexed and occupied by Japan during the Asia Pacific War (1932-1945). Use of the English compound noun “comfort women,” and its variant “military comfort women,” is a challenge because the term is politically charged. For this reason, the term is frequently encountered in quotations, intentionally modified, e.g., “so-called ‘comfort women,’” and or couched, mitigated, or qualified by lengthy explanation, as I, too, am obliged to provide.
“Comfort woman” is the English equivalent/translation of the Japanese word ianfu, also spelled wianfu, and the Korean word wianbu. The term ianfu is complicated in the ways it embodies gender, class, and colonial hierarchies. The term was originally applied by (male) leaders of a military institution belonging to a State (Japan) that colonized other States, who literally occupied female citizens of these States, prostituted them, and referred to them as ianfu. The term ianfu, used to label the young women forced into sex slavery, “was coined by the Japanese government, military officials, and sexual industry agents, all hoping to obscure the dreadful reality behind the term” (Watanabe 1994; ¶ 2). The compound noun jugun inafu or chonggun wianbu or “military comfort woman” is a narrowing of the euphemistic term; however, according to Soh (2001b: 76) jugun or chongun “has the connotation of ‘following’ the military,” which gives the impression that the women were, as they have been accused of being, “voluntary camp followers.”
The term inafu/wianbu/“comfort women” and its derivatives are problematic because the term is used to refer to multiple groups. Some use the term to refer to the sex slaves who were forced to serve the Japanese military. It is also used to refer to the 20,000 “licensed” Japanese prostitutes embedded with the Japanese military during World War II (1937 . September 2, 1945), who, theoretically, volunteered for service. Another use of the term wianbu.which dates from Korea’s liberation from Japan and its immediate occupation by the United States (1945) through the Korean War (1950-1953) and to the present.is to refer to prostitutes working in brothels on the perimeters of United States’ military bases located in Korea (ROK). Finally, the term has gained broader application in its more general use to refer to Seoul’s contemporary sex workers. In actuality, a woman should fall into one of two types: a woman who was or is engaged in prostitution of her own volition or a woman forced to carry out such services against her will.a sex slave; however, whether the woman gave consent or did not give consent, she can be called a inafu/wianbu/“comfort women.”
Because the term can be used to refer to consenting sex workers and sex slaves, the term is ripe for both unintended and malicious manipulation. Revisionist historians and Japanese politicians persist in using the term ianfu and in doing so intentionally invoke both its war-time as well as its contemporary associations with (voluntary) prostitution. They embrace the term for its innate ambiguity to advance their agenda.
In opposition to deliberate manipulation of the term, Korean activists have advocated for less euphemistic terms that more accurately convey the women’s lived experience, such as military sex slave (MSS) and Japanese Military Sex Slave (in Hangul/Hanja)
... .../日本軍性奴隸pronounced ilbongun seongno. In the pursuit of an
appropriate referential term, the advocates for the survivors have put forth ones as cumbersome as “The Korean Comfort Women Who Were Coercively Dragged Away for the Military” (Kangjero kk.lly.gan Ch.sunin kunwianb.l).
Use of the term “comfort woman/women” persists even among allies, though often in the modified form “military ‘comfort woman.’” As Yoshiaki (2000: 39) says, “many feel the stark contrast between the original meaning of the term ‘comfort’ and the coerced horror theses women experienced renders the term utterly unacceptable,” but “it is widely known and a more acceptable alternative has not appeared yet.” Other advocates, such as Kim-Gibson (1999: 1), opt to preserve the term “comfort woman” because the euphemism more fully characterizes the “chilling casualness” and the “dehumanizing brutality” with which the these crimes were perpetrated against the women. Additionally, some of the women forced to be sex slaves have used the term self-referentially, especially in their early testimonies. Unfortunately, when they use the term self-referentially, they make themselves vulnerable to being perceived as voluntary prostitutes.
There are also pragmatic reasons that use of the terms inafu/wianbu/“comfort women” endure. Since “comfort women” was widely used in the past, it is still the most familiar and prevalent term in use. The proactive campaign to shift to less euphemistic terms has transformed the way some talk about and refer to the “comfort women” or wianbu (...). However, use of the term has certainly not been eradicated, in fact, it is still the
term predominately used in both Korean and English to refer to the military sex slaves. In the table below, the search term is listed first in English and then in its Korean and Japanese equivalents.
Table 1-1: Prevalence of Terms
Search Term* Language Hits as of July 29, 2008
“comfort women” (“comfort woman”) English 314,000 (82,600)
“...” (..: 慰安婦) Hangul (Hanja ) 1,090,000
Wianbu Romanized Korean 1,408
“military comfort women” English 5,830
“.....” (..: 從軍慰安婦) Hangul (Hanja ) 130,000
“jungun wianbu” Romanized Korean 7
“Japanese military comfort women” English 751
“......” Hangul (Hanja ) 137,000
"ilbongun wianbu” Romanized Korean 66
“Japanese military sex slave” English 34
“......” (..: 日本軍性奴隸,) Hangul (Hanja ) 18,400
“ilbongun seongnoye” Romanized Korean 3
*Most of the search terms return some unrelated, and often pornographic, content.
When referring to individuals in this study, I use the individual names of the women. However, in this work dedicated to examining individual discourse and the discourse about the women as a collective, a term of reference that to refer to the group of these individuals is necessary. I do not wish to use terms inanfu, wianbu, and “comfort women” for the reasons described above. However, their occurrence in other academic works and in the data I examine necessitates their occasional appearance. When a noun is required to refer to the group of women known as the “comfort women,” I use the term sex slave or military sex slave (MSS). Occasionally, when I refer to the now elderly women, I use the respectful term of address, halmoni, or grandmother. In Korean, halmoni (grandmother) is used to address and refer to a woman who is the approximate age of one’s or one’s children’s grandmother, whether or not one is on intimate terms with her and whether or not she has children or grandchildren of her own.
I have made a conscious effort, when possible, to use verbs, and primarily the verb enslave, to describe the women’s experience. Use of a verb, as opposed to a noun, shifts the focus to what happened; it frames the women’s experience, rather than framing them. The noun “women” modified by the adjective “comfort” implies that the women’s identity revolves around the singular aspect of them being “comfort women.” The verb enslaved shifts the focus to the experience of slavery and does not impose a specific identity frame on the octogenarian women.
1.2.2 Profiles of Women and Girls Forced into Sex Slavery by the Japanese Military
While, according to Hicks (1994: 46), the first “comfort women” were Japanese prostitutes who were released from state run brothels to pursue the promise of high wages for providing services in combat zones, most of the women were sex slaves, and the women examined in this study were enslaved. The number of women forced into sex slavery, as estimated by Yoshiaki (2000), ranges from 50,000 to 200,000. Others have posited higher estimates, from 280,000 to 400,000 (Min 2003: 940; Morris-Suzuki 2007: ¶11). In part, the higher calculations reflect a burgeoning awareness on the part of historians and scholars of the extent that Chinese women were also enslaved.
Deliberate destruction and concealing of documents2 at the end of WWII is the principal reason the precise number of girls and women the Japanese military forced into sexual slavery is unknown. Approximately 80 percent of the women were from Korea (Oh 2001: 3). Women were also “drafted” and abducted in (British) Borneo, Brunei Burma, China, Guam, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, (French) Indochina, Japan, (Dutch) Indonesia Java, Sumatra, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and New Guinea.
In her seminal research, Professor Yun Chung Ok, the foremost Korean historian-advocate, asserts that the average age or the women at the time they were recruited was seventeen (Howard 1995: 17-18; Yoshiaki, 2000); a sizeable number of them were minors. Most of the women and girls were unmarried. Given the patriarchal cultural norms in the geographical region and the Confucian emphasis on chastity (Stetz and Oh 2001: 13, 20; Soh 2001b; Cummings 1997; Deuchler 1992, 2003), their unmarried martial status entailed their virginity (Yoneda 1998; Wantabe 1994). According to Nelson (2007) and the women’s own testimonies, some were premenstrual.
Min (2003), Soh (2001b), Oh (2001), and others have convincingly shown that the forces of class, gender, and colonialism combined to make young Korean women vulnerable to “recruitment” into sex slavery either through violence or deception. By
2 According to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE: 1948-11-01), Burning of Confidential Documents by Japanese Government, case no. 43, serial 2, International Prosecution Section Volume (Chapter 8; p. 1135), when it became apparent that Japan would be forced to surrender, an organized effort was made to burn or otherwise destroy all documents and other evidence of ill-treatment of prisoners of war and civilian internees. The Japanese Minister of War issued an order on 14 August 1945 to all Army headquarters that confidential documents should be destroyed by fire immediately. On the same day, the Commandant of the Kempetai sent out instructions to the various Kempetai Headquarters detailing the methods of burning large quantities of documents efficiently.
most accounts the women came from poor, working class families; most had received little formal education. They often felt a filial duty to earn money for their families or to be financially able to be married. Sometimes they were sold into debt slavery by their parents. Their families had fewer resources to protect them or to locate them after their capture. Yang (1997: 65) also notes that “in recruiting, the women’s lesser membership in the family and Korean society, as the first to sacrifice and the last to be benefited, helped push young Korean women into the project.” According to Min (2003: 954), reporting data from the Korean Council, “59 percent were mobilized to military brothels by false promise of jobs or going to school, 33 percent by one or another form of coercive means, and the remaining 8 percent were through sales by their own or adopted parents or husbands.”
The high percentage of Koreans is also accounted for by Korea’s proximity to Japan, its colonial status, and the Japanese view of Koreans as racially inferior (Yoshiaki 2000: 23; Yoneda 1998: 239, 246-249). The majority of the Korean women were recruited in Kyoungsang Province, the southeast region of the peninsula closest to Japan. Japan3 made Korea a “protectorate” in 1905 and its “official” colonial rule of the Korean peninsula spanned the years of 1910-1945. At this time, Koreans were considered
3 Under the Roosevelt Administration, United States Secretary of War, William Howard Taft and Japan´s Count Katsura signed the Taft Katsura agreement, on July 29, 1905, in which the United States agreed to Japanese presence on the Korean peninsula and Japan agreed to US presence in Hawaii and the Philippines. On August, 23, 1905, US President Roosevelt brokered the Treaty of Portsmouth to end the Russo-Japanese War, in which they were fighting in and over China and Korea (neutral territories). The treaty stipulated that Japan, not Russia, was to “protect” Korea. In November, 1905, Japan forced Korea under duress to sign the 1905 Japan-Korea Protectorate, which gave Japan the right to occupy and “protect” Korea. Hence, Japan’s official occupation, colonization, and annex of Korea ensued with British and US approval. Ironically, Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for brokering the Treaty of Portsmouth, which ended the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 but sacrificed Korea in the process.
Japanese nationals, albeit second class citizens, and their loyalty to the Empire was obligatory. The “appropriation” of Korea’s natural, agricultural, industrial, and human resources was absolute and violent. Japan attempted to eradicate the Korean national identity by prohibiting the speaking or writing of their native Hangul, so they were forced to speak Japanese and assume Japanese names. Since Koreans were considered Japanese nationals, their service in the Japanese armed forces was compulsory. Young Korean men were conscripted into the Japanese army, and women and men were impressed into factory work, often upaid. Millions of Koreans were recruited/drafted for labor in Japanese factories and mines and brothels (Min 2003; Soh 1996).
The methods of “recruitment” of the women varied. Many of them were conscripted as part of the teishintai, the ‘voluntary corps’ in Japanese, or jeongshindae or “voluntarily offered body corps” or “Volunteer Labor Corps” in Korean. The “mobilization” of Koreans was particularly intense in the last few years of WWII, 1943-45 (Yoshiaki 1995: 109). Service in the (yoja) jeongshindae, the (Women’s) Volunteer Labor Corps, became compulsory in 1944 for “all unmarried girls and women fourteen years of age and older” (Yoshiaki 2000: 109), though middle and upper class families often hid or married their daughters off to avoid this draft. For its focus on unmarried girls, it was sometimes referred to as the “virgin” or “girl” delivery.
Howard (1995: 19) reports four other methods of recruitment into sex slavery. They include “recruitment by violence, including threats of violence and the misuse of power, false promises of employment, abduction, [and] human traffic.” Some were seized off the streets, but the majority of women were tricked or deceived into going abroad for what they believed was factory or nursing or other work. A point seldom stressed, but discussed by Yoshiaki (2000) at length, is that women, especially from Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, could not have been amassed and transported without the cooperation of local police, who issued passports and travel visas, and citizens who served as “recruiters.”
1.2.3 Profile of the Japanese Military Sex Slave System
Japanese “comfort stations” or state-sponsored, regulated, and operated military brothels are not new or specific to WWII: the Japanese military took Japanese prostitutes with them on their campaign to Siberia in 1918 (Suzuki 1991, 1992, 1994). Nor is the link between prostitution and the army specific to Japan4. The Japanese military instituted the first “comfort stations” in Shanghai in 1932 after a report of 223 rapes perpetrated by military personal (Hicks 1994: 45). Reportedly after their inauguration, the rate of rapes of local women by soldiers dramatically declined but never ceased completely (Yoshiaki 2000). The “comfort stations” were also designed to prevent the contraction of STDs and opportunities for espionage that resulted when soldiers visited the civilian brothels in occupied territories. The system’s overtly stated but, Yoshiaki (2000: 72) argues, secondary function was to provide “sexual comfort” or recreation to the troops. Eventually, comfort stations were established in all Japanese-held territories.
4 According to Hicks (1994), while there is cultural variance in attitudes of acceptance and the practice of prostitution, it exists in virtually all cultures and has been a part of the war mechanism since the Roman Empire. He also discusses the American, British, French, German, Indian, Japanese, and Russian militaries’ involvement with prostitution.
Yoshiaki (2000: 30) estimates that, at a minimum, there were one thousand military brothels in Japanese held territories.
There were two types of “comfort stations”: those run by the military and those run by civilians and supervised by the military (Yoshiaki 2000: 131). How soldiers obtained entry and paid for “services” varied by location, but one consistency across “stations” was that soldiers were charged based on their rank. In some brothels, soldiers bought tickets that they gave to the women who turned them over to the brothel managers at the end of the day. The tickets were part of the accounting system that tracked the “work” the women did, but most women did not receive any actual payment (Coomaraswamy 1996: ¶36). Even Japanese officials admit that the “comfort women were not paid in accordance with what was actually stipulated in the regulations” (Howard 1994: 21).
What women endured at “comfort stations” is execrable and unpardonable. The length of their enslavement ranged from a few days to as many as eight years; on average, the period of enslavement was from three to five years. Women were raped by as many as twenty and thirty soldiers a day, and in more extreme cases by sixty soldiers a day (Yoshiaki 2000: 139). There was little time for rest and rarely a day off. As Yoshiaki (2000: 141-42) uncovered in the Japanese military regulations for the operation of the “comfort stations,” the “comfort women were forced to have intercourse from morning until late at night with enlisted men, noncommissioned officers, and officers, in that order.” When officers stayed overnight, the comfort women were completely restricted for twenty four hours a day. The women’s freedom movement was restricted as the “sites were usually surrounded by a barbed wire fence, well guarded and patrolled” (Coomaraswamy 1996: ¶33). Many of the survivors testify about their failed attempts to escape, for which they were severely beaten or otherwise punished.
The majority of women report that they “were regularly examined [for STDs], either at a clinic or by military surgeons who visited the comfort stations” (Chung 1995: 22). By many accounts, the examinations were an additional humiliation, painful and public. Despite regular check-ups, inevitably the women contracted innumerable STDs and conceived pregnancies for which they were given abortifacients. As Hwang Keum-ju, one of the Korean survivors whose testimony is examined in this study, describes, “the soldiers were ordered to wear condoms but often they didn’t and many women became pregnant. … While they were pregnant doctors gave them strong shots called 606 to treat them for venereal disease. …So the shots, 606, killed the babies inside and also prevented them from becoming pregnant again” (Kim-Gibson 1999: 24). While the venereal diseases were usually treated, Hicks (1995: 95) asserts that some women were “allowed to die untreated, or abandoned or even killed.”
The circumstances of daily life for the “comfort women” were deplorable. In addition to enduring the serial rapes, being subjected to physical violence, and being confined under the constant threat of violence, the women were forced to do all manner of labor.forage for food, prepare meals, do laundry, nurse the injured, and even haul ammunitions to the front lines (Tanaka 2002:59). Kim-Gibson (2001) recalls that one woman she interviewed said that of the most wretched tasks she endured was washing condoms for reuse. Survivors have described their squalid living conditions, scarcity of food, and inadequate nutrition; inevitably some died of starvation. In addition to the brutal conditions and treatment, the women endured other more subtle forms of oppression: speaking Korean was prohibited and the women were forced to use their Japanese names, often the name of a flower.
The women who survived had many lingering health problems from the physical and psychological trauma they endured. Many talk of their use of alcohol or drugs to cope with the trauma. Some were injected with morphine and other addictive drugs by the “comfort station” doctors. Frequently the women testify to their own attempts at and others’ suicides both during and after the war.
When Japan surrendered after the United States’ bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, untold numbers of sex slaves, no longer of value, were murdered by their brothel managers. Regarded as liabilities to the State, they were disposed of in “honor” killings and “honor” suicides by the same soldiers who had repeatedly raped them. Many were abandoned to fend for themselves in distant and unfamiliar countries without the money or legal documents necessary to corroborate their citizenship and facilitate their return to Korea5. Only the Japanese “comfort women” were repatriated with the Japanese armed forces (Yoshiaki 2000; Soh 2001b). During their attempts to repatriate, tens of thousands of Koreans mistaken for Japanese nationals were killed by Allied forces; others died of starvation and disease. The U.S. forces repatriated a total of 150 women (Yoshiaki 2000: 192). The UN reports (McDougall 1999: ¶7) that only twenty-five to thirty percent of the Korean women who survived were repatriated. Those who were able to successfully
5 In recent years some Korean women residing in China since the end of WWII have attempted to return to (South) Korea; the problem persists as they have no means by which to prove their Korean citizenship.
repatriate returned to a country devastated by the war and years of colonization.
1.2.4 Examination of Reasons for 40, 50, 60 Years of Silence
Why did the sex slave survivors who successfully repatriated not report their rapes and war-time captivity as soon as they could to the proper authorities? The critics of the survivors expect that they should have done so. They ask.why are the women just now coming forward fifty and sixty years after the fact? They commonly assert platitudes such as the past is in the past, let bygones be bygones and accuse the women of being prostitutes and war profiteers. To date, only 225 Korean women have registered with the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, some doing so anonymously. Figuring that Koreans accounted for eighty percent of an estimated 200,000 victims, less than two tenths of one percent (225/160,000 = .14%) of these women have come forward. Several repressive forces, including gender discrimination and post-war, post-colonial poverty and politics, contributed to the infeasibility of the women testifying to their rapes at the end of the war and these same forces continue to deter the survivors from coming forward.
It is difficult to underestimate the role gender discrimintation played in keeping the survivors from reporting the crimes perpetrated against them. The culturally-embedded Confucian-influenced beliefs of filial piety and chasteness promote female inferiority in the male-female hierarchy. These gender and sexuality norms are rigidly codified and dictate that a defiled (raped) female body, regardless of how it came to be in that condition, is to be reviled and rejected. The survivors are and were well aware of their potential status as pariahs if they disclosed the truth, and this discouraged the victims from coming forward at the end of the war and continues to dissuade them from coming forward now. Their fear is justifiable given the fierce re-victimization6 to which survivors who have publicly testified have been subjected. In fact, many women who served in the Jeongshindae Women’s Voluntary Corp but who worked in factories, for example, do not readily acknowledge their service because of the negative association with sex slavery.
1.2.4.1 Confucianism and the Erosion of Women’s Rights
In this section, I provide a synopsis of historical roots of filial piety and chastity to give a reader a more nuanced conception of the social processes that discursively produce Korean femaleness in the context of her Confucian infused culture. I begin by providing a brief synopsis of how Confucianism was introduced to Korea, how it evolved, how it came to have a radical impact on women’s rights, and how it came to bear on the women taken as sex slaves at the heart of this study.
6 In their study of the how delaying reporting of an incident of sexual harassment influences the perceptions of it, Balogh et al. (2003) find that victims who come forward immediately after the incident of harassment are perceived as more reliable narrators than those in which let more time elapse before reporting the harassment. The study participants evaluated the victims and their motives more positively, and evaluated the defendants more negatively and with higher culpability when the incident was immediately reported. This indicates an underlying expectation that victims are expected to come forward immediately after a harassment incident.
Agnate Confucian7 ideology designates distinct and separate spheres for men and women, the former being the “outer” public sphere, and the latter, the “inner” domestic realm. Over the course of the next five centuries, Confucian ideology came to dominate and laws were implemented, one after the other, that ultimately eradicated women’s rights. In the first two decades, primarily women’s movements were restricted: in 1400, upper-class women were banned from public streets during daylight hours (Deuchler 1992: 260) and in 1412, a new law dictated that when permitted in the public sector, a woman’s face and body must be covered (Haboush 1991). Additional subjugating measures followed: in 1413, wives (polygamy was common at the time) and their offspring were ranked, creating a hierarchy that destroyed the existing, more egalitarian system. In 1471, first sons were given preferentiality as heirs (Deuchler 1992: 143, 177). In the 1600s, women were stripped of their property and inheritance rights (Deuchler: 223), which deepened their dependence on their husbands in the increasingly agnatic system. This trend continued in 1750, as sons were recorded first and daughters second in genealogic registries (Haboush 1991: 107), and in 1800, when daughters were removed from family registers, save for a reference to what family she married into (Deuchler: 263). In the course of these five centuries, the rights of women were completely eroded.
According to historians Lee and de Bary (1997), filial piety is one of the most
7 For a more thorough discussion (in English, but with reference to the relevant Korean and Chinese texts) of the rise and influence of (neo/Confucianism) on Korea, see Martina Deuchler’s (1992) The Confucian Transformation of Korea: a Study of Society and Ideology; Bruce Cummings’s (1997; 2005) Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History; JaHyn Kim’s (1988) A Heritage of Kings: One Man’s Monarchy in the Confucian World; JaHyun Haboush’s (1991) “The Confucianization of Korean Society” in Gilbert Rozman’s Confucian Heritage and Its Modern Adaptation; and Peter H. Lee and Wm. Theodore de Bary’s (1997) Sources of Korean Tradition Volume One: From Early Times Through the Sixteenth Century.
important Confucian values. Lee (1986) states that under Confucian rule, “the basic unit of society was not an individual but the family, and its social order was ‘filial piety’” (234). According to DeMente (1988), Koreans have various uimu or duties; one is the uimu of children to parents and “the ‘original obligation’ of all Koreans is to their parents,” which includes “obeying all the dictates of Confucian-style filial piety” (411). The obedience of women to their parents in childhood, to their husband in marriage, and to their son later in life was absolute.
Before and after marriage, an integral component of filial piety is chastity. Koryo’s sixth monarch, King Songjong, in a manuscript on filial piety, similarly denotes the importance of chastity for women:
Recently I have dispatched officials to six provinces to spread instructions to help the old and weak who are starving and wandering, to rescue destitute widowers and orphans, and to look for and visit filial sons, obedient grandchildren, righteous husbands, and chaste women. (Koryosa 3:17a-18b translated and reprinted in Lee and de Bary 1997: 182)
In 1406, the chastity of women was such an important social issue that the Choson court established the Chanyoan, “Registries of Licentious Women.” According to Lee (1986), Confucian codes for women mandated that “women must keep their chastity and be obedient” (223). DeMente asserts that “female chastity was so sanctified that during the war women were expected to kill themselves rather than submit to rape8 by enemy soldiers.” According to Choi (1998: 13), “upper-class women often carried a small 8Following the 1592-1598 Japanese invasion of Korea, “so many Korean women, including wives and
daughters of gentry and nobles, had been dishonored by Japanese soldiers that the refusal of Korean men to marry them or keep them as wives became a national crisis, making it necessary for the government to issue an edict forcing men to marry the single women and stay married to wives who has been assaulted.” (DeMente 1998: 441)
dagger as a part of their attire as a reminder to them to take their own lives, if and when their bodies were violated by men other than their husbands, especially by invading forces.” Here we can see what Matoesion (1993) and Barry (1979) articulate as the paradox of rape: a virtuous woman cannot be raped because a virtuous woman would kill herself first or fight off her attacker to the point of death; therefore, the larger cultural assumption is that any woman who is raped is unvirtuous. In this context, the raped sex slaves who survived would be reviled.
When set in the context of these deep-rooted Confucian values, the proposal of girls and women working outside the home caused a social, if not moral dilemma, even during times of economic hardship imposed by the occupation. Though the offers of work in Japanese mines and factories were considerably attractive, paid work outside the home “countered the traditional Confucian mandates that a woman’s place is in the home.” Howard (1995: 5) asserts that the testimonies collected by the The Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery
make it clear that parents and elders remained reluctant to let daughters undertake paid work outside the home; this conflicted with the old sense of propriety. However, crisis of poverty and the low value place on daughters conspired to attract the young. Thus a theme runs through this text: many former comfort women say they felt burdened to earn money for their families.
After the war, the Confucian value of filial duty that may have led them to volunteer for work kept many of the women from returning home; the Confucian value on chastity made them feel they would shame their families (Wantanabe 1994; Soh 2001b; Min 2003). Some women did not return home because as Yang (1997: 65) points out, they had been “sold to the Japanese by their husbands and fathers. … [T]he Korean patriarchal family was not always a shelter to protect women.” Those who did return home could not tell their parents the truth of their wartime experience and often felt compelled to leave home again because their families tried to marry them off. Many of the women never married, and those who did often divorced because of infertility or abuse by their husbands about their pasts. Because the “traditional gender orientation in Korea at that time left women entirely dependent on their husbands for financial support,” (Min 2003: 949) most of the women suffered great economic hardship and did not have the resources or the family support to pursue legal action.
While Korea is transforming into a society that has advanced and is advancing women’s rights and gender equity, the above mentioned Confusion ideals were and are still embedded in the collective cultural memory. While laws have been repealed and records of licentious women are not kept, the halmoni fully realize the cruel consequences of violating tacit chastity norms. With the cultural notion of one’s worthiness based solely on one’s chasteness, there was very little, if anything, to gain, but everything to lose, by publicizing one’s state of defilement.
1.2.4.2 Colonial Issues and Other Interference
Even if the women had had the family, social, and financial support to pursue redress, the Japanese military or the advancing Allied army destroyed many of the documents that could prove the existence of state-run sex slavery. The documents that do exist and that have been examined by Yoshiaki (2000) in his seminal study on the Japanese Government’s involvement in the “comfort women system” were stored underground to protect them from U.S. air raids. The documents were scheduled to be destroyed but arrival of the Allied Forces prevented that. The documents were seized and brought to the
U.S. Eventually, they were returned to Japan’s Self-Defense Agency’s National Institute for Defense Studies Library.
One grossly under-examined party to the cover-up of the “comfort women” system is the United States and Allied forces. While an oversimplification, the United States’ primary concern was to rebuild Japan and secure a noncommunist ally in the region. The United State was concerned only with prosecuting war crimes committed against itself and its Allied forces, not those atrocities committed against the Asian countries on which Japan waged its fifteen year war of aggression. The 1952 Treaty of Peace (UST 3169) between the United States, forty-seven Allied powers, and Japan formally ended the Pacific War. Notable are Korea’s and China’s absence in this treaty. All war-related claims were to be resolved through intergovernmental-agreements. After all, as Hicks (1995: 168, 250) asserts, the United States did not want demands for war claims compensation to prevent Japan’s economic recovery and development into a reliable democratic ally against communism.
Korea’s sovereignty was usurped as the United States “encouraged” them to enter into treaties or entered into treaties on their behalf that did not benefit them, such as the 1965 normalization treaty between Korean and Japan. This treaty “foreclosed the Korean government from making any further claims for reparations for damages incurred during the colonial period” (Soh 1996: 1230) and did not address the issue of the millions of Koreans forced into slave labor, pressed into military service, or the 200,000 women and children forced into sexual slavery. No regard or care was given to these individuals; without their permission they were deprived of their human rights again, at the expense of the US’s interests.
The U.S., while well-aware of the “comfort women” system, did nothing to prosecute the perpetrators. A “comfort girl,” according to the Office of War Information, Japanese Prisoner of War Report 499 written by Officer Yorichi, “is nothing more than a prostitute or ‘professional camp follower’ attached to the Japanese Army for the benefit of the soldiers.” Regarding her personality the report claims
the average Korean "comfort girl" to be about twenty-five years old, uneducated, childish, and selfish. She is not pretty either by Japanese or Caucasian standards. She is inclined to be egotistical and likes to talk about herself. Her attitude in front of strangers is quiet and demure, but she "knows the wiles of a woman." She claims to dislike her "profession" and would rather not talk either about it or her family.
So while the comfort women were perceived on radar, they were in blips of inconsequence. The only war crimes trials for “forced prostitution” were held in 1948 Dutch Indonesia over the interned Dutch women who were forced to be “comfort women” (Hicks 1995: 168). Of the officers charged with organizing and running the military brothel in Dutch Indonesia, two committed suicide, one was executed, and eight others were sentenced to between seven and twenty years in prison (Hicks 1995: 169). In 1949, “Western Allies decided to terminate war trials … to concentrate on their Cold War strategy” (Hicks 1995: 168).
9 These are excerpts from Japanese Prisoner of War Interrogation Report No. 49, United States Office of War Information, Psychological Warfare Team, Attached to U.S. Army Forces, India-Burma Theater, APO 689, regarding “20 Korean Comfort Girls” captured in Burma.
The Korean government has shown indifference to the survivors of Japanese sexual slavery. There is reluctance to admit knowledge of, sanction of, and in some cases culpability in prostituting the nations’ women and children. Oh (2001: 14) argues that there was another “unspoken and underlying reason” for ignoring the issues: “it was not a subject for public discussion.” Additionally, she says, “in the atmosphere of dictatorial regimes under former generals, which lasted until 1987, no open grass-roots deliberation of any subject, let alone a taboo subject, could take place” (Oh 2001: 14). A fair assessment is that the Korean government has not exhausted all diplomatic or legal remedies on behalf of these women; rather, some would characterize their efforts as obstructionist, which is the clearest category in which to place recalcitrant Japan. The rationale behind the Republic of Korea’s10 inaction is complicated, but apparently, they too, are not immune from the growing global affliction whereby nation-states govern out of their national in/security. Economic interests dictate foreign and domestic policy in a system where capital gains are promoted at the expense of human rights.
Hence, an amalgamation of the factors, the obstruction of the US and Korean governments, the recalcitrant denials of Japan, and the still pervasive Confusion and patriarchal norms again forced those already forced into sexual slavery into a new kind of exile, a sixty year exile of silence.
1.3 Contemporary Controversies: Testimonies and Responses
10 North Korea (the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (or DPRK) has initiated its own dialogue regarding the “comfort women” issue with Japan.
Most of the women never had the choice to testify or not testify: many took their stories in silence to their graves. Others continue to live in silence. Yet others, registered, testified, but did so anonymously. Only a small number of women have chosen to publicly testify.
Professor Yun Chong Ok’s groundbreaking work on the connections between the chonsgindae and the contemporary sex trade in Korea, and “sex tourism” by Japanese men, led her to organize The Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (hereafter referred to as the Korean Council) in 1990. The Korean Council is one of the survivors’ strongest allies and has “been devoted to disclosing the truth about the Chongshindae.” It has been instrumental in collecting and preserving the survivors’ oral testimonies. The first Korean woman who was willing to tell her story publicly was Kim Hak-sun. After she testified at an August 14, 1991 press conference organized by the Korean Council, survivors began registering their stories (Min 2003: 949). Howard (1995: vii) points out the fact that so many of the testimonies were given under pseudonyms shows the social pressure on the women to remain silent. Many of the survivors cite Kim Hak-sun’s initial testimony as their inspiration for coming forward.
When diplomatic means failed to move Korean and Japanese politicians to address the “comfort women” issue in the early 1990s, activist groups began seeking a legal remedy. In December of 1991, three former “comfort women,” including Kim Hak-sun, joined a class action suit with other Koreans claiming that their human rights had been violated by the Japanese government while Korea was under colonial rule. In response, Japanese Diet Members11 claimed that the women were not taken forcefully or, if they were taken forcefully they were taken by private brokers. Additionally, other Diet members said the women were simply licensed prostitutes or did not exist at all. In response to these and other similar claims, the Korean Council has sent following six demands to each successive Japanese Prime Minister since 1991:
1.
Reveal the truth about the crime of military sexual slavery
2.
Acknowledge the commission of war crimes
3.
Make formal apologies
4.
Punish the war criminals
5.
Erect a memorial and establish a historical museum
6.
Pay reparations to the victims of the crime
7.
Record the crime in history texts (Korean Council 2000: 13).
Yoshimi Yoshiaki, professor of modern Japanese History at Chuo University in Tokyo, says Kim Hak-sun’s willingness to reveal her real name and her words inspired him to begin researching the “comfort woman” issue (Yoshiaki 2000: 33). In 1992, he discovered incriminating documents in the Japanese Library of the National Institute for Defense and made them public. This put pressure on the Japanese to launch an investigation. The government announced their findings on April 4, 1993, in a statement by Chief Cabinet Secretary Kono Yohei, often referred to as the “Kono Statement.” As summarized by Yoshiaki (2000: 36), the government acknowledged the following:
1.
The Japanese military was “directly or indirectly involved” in the establishment and management of the comfort stations and in the transfer of comfort women.
2.
As for the “recruitment” of comfort women, “in many cases they were recruited against their own will, through coaxing, coercion, etc.” and “at times administrative/military personnel directly took part in the recruitment.”
3.
“They lived in misery at comfort stations in a coercive atmosphere.”
4.
The “recruitment,” transfer, and control of comfort women born on the Korean Peninsula were conducted “generally against their will, through coaxing, coercion, etc.”
5.
The issue of military comfort women is “an act, with the involvement of the military authorities of the day, that severely injured the honor and dignity of many women.”
11 The specific comments by Japanese Diet Members can be found in the Korean Council’s Past Present and Future Activities to Solve the Japanese Military Sexual Slavery Issue, 2000.
6. To the former comfort women, “the government of Japan would like to take this opportunity once again to extend its sincere apologies (owabi) and regrets.” As Yoshiaki also notes, the government apologized but did not classify the acts against the women as war crimes or mention any form of compensation. The statement was carefully phrased to avoid legal responsibility. Even after the Kono Statement, the Korean government was unwilling to pursue the “comfort women issue” with Japan, perhaps in an attempt to “preserve the self-respect and national pride of Korea” (Soh 1996: 1235). Instead, the government of Korea raised private funds and pledged public funds to support the survivors. In 1994, under the leadership of Prime Minister Murayama, the Japanese government created the Asian Women’s Fund (AWF), a non-governmental organization supported mostly by privately raised fund, to compensate the survivors. With the funds, came a carefully worded apology (owabi). “The expression owabi in Japanese,” according to Yoshiaki (2000: 25), “denotes a sense of apology slightly more weighty than an “excuse me” offered when one bumps shoulders with someone on the subway.” Additionally, the English translation of the letter was phrased as expression the Prime Minster’s “personal feelings” (Yoshiaki 2000: 25). Finally, because the funds came from private organizations and not the
government of Japan and without any admission of legal responsibility, many of the survivors rejected the AWF’s offers of compensation. As Chung (1997: 243) says, “they will not accept what they see as ‘comfort money,’ saying that what they need is not money but recovery of their honor, and that this will not come from the financial compensation and condolences but from Japan’s admission of its crimes.”
From the Korean Council’s perspective, any acceptance of compensatory funds is contingent upon first receiving a sincere, unambiguous apology from the Japanese government. Then, and only then, can the survivors accept remuneration, and then only if it is paid to them by the Japanese government. The offer of private funds before the government’s legal admission of their war crimes and an unequivocal apology accentuates the monetary, rather than the apologetic, aspects of the action, thereby emphasizing the former and trivializing the later. The inherent symbolism of money, as it is tied to prostitution, is not lost on the women or those that advocate on their behalf. The sexual nature of the war crimes they experienced complicates the issue of compensation. The survivors and advocates want reparations for the war crimes, the serial rapes, not money that could be construed as the receipt of unpaid wages due for (sexual) “services provided.”
Frustrated by Japan’s refusal of legal responsibility and Korea’s unwillingness to pursue the issue, activists, including the Korean Council and the U.S. based Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues, Inc. (WCCW), raised the “comfort woman” issue with the United Nations and the United States government (Hahm 2001: 138-9). The UN responded by placing the issue on its official agenda for its August 1992 agenda and described the issue as “a crime against humanity” (Soh 1996: 1235). The UN Commission on Human Rights investigations resulted in two major reports: the January 1996 report by Special Rapporteur Radhika Coomaraswamy on the “issue of military sex slavery in war time” and the August 21, 1998 report by Special Rapporteur Gay McDougall, “An Analysis of the Legal Liability of the Government of Japan for ‘Comfort Women Stations’ Established During the Second World War. The first report recommends, among other steps, that the Government of Japan should “acknowledge that the system of comfort station set up … was a violation of its obligations under international law and accept legal responsibility”; “pay compensation to the individual victims”; “make a public apology in writing to individual women”; and “identify and punish, as far as possible, perpetrators involved in the recruitment and institutionalization of comfort stations” (Coomaraswamy 1996: ¶ 137). The second report “concludes that the Japanese Government remains liable for grave violations of human rights and humanitarian law, violations that amount in their totality to crimes against humanity” and that “anything less than full and unqualified acceptance by the Government of Japan of legal liability and the consequences that flow from such liability is wholly inadequate” (McDougall 1998: ¶ 68, 69).
Seven times, members of the United States House of Representatives have proposed congressional measures that reprimand of the Japanese government for its continued denial of its operation and involvement in sex slavery. The first six resolutions12 were
12 The first resolution was introduced in November 1993 by twenty-four House Representatives; it urged Japanese Prime Minister Hosokawa to investigate the sex slavery issue. In July 1997, Rep. William Lipinski (D-IL) introduced HR 126; it urged the Japanese government to formally apologize to all victims of WWII Japanese Imperial Military atrocities. Then in June 2000, Rep. Lane Evans (D-IL) and thirty cosponsors introduced HR 357 which called on the Japanese government to do the same. In July 2001, Rep. Evans introduced HR. 195 and in June 2003, he introduced HR 226. In Feb 2006, Rep. Evans and Rep. Christopher Smith (R-NJ) introduced HR 759, a bipartisan measure, to urge the Japanese government
not ratified. Silverstein (2006) explains how House Resolution 759 (HR 759) and prior legislative attempts were thwarted by the lobbying efforts of the Japanese government. As a result, HR 759, like its predecessors, failed to reach the House floor for a vote, despite being the first of such measures to have bi-partisan support from its inception.
In January 2007, Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA) introduced House Resolution 121 (HR 121), the first resolution to be passed out of committee and ratified on the House floor. At a February 15, 2007 hearing on HR 121 entitled “Protecting the Human Right of Comfort Women” before the U.S. House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific, and the Global Environment, Committee on Foreign Affairs,” three surviving sex slaves (Kun Ja Kim, Yong Soo Lee, and Jan Ruff O’Herne) testified. This nonbinding resolution states that
the Government of Japan should formally acknowledge, apologize, and accept historical responsibility in a clear and unequivocal manner for its Imperial Armed Force’s coercion of young women in sexual slavery, known to the world as “comfort women”, during its colonial and wartime occupation of Asia and the Pacific Islands from the 1930s through the duration of the World War II.
HR 121 was passed by the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific and the Global Environment on February 15, 2007. In June 2007, it was passed by the House Foreign Affairs Committee and advanced to the House, where it was passed on July 30, 2007.
Characteristically, the Japanese government responded aggressively. Prime Minister Abe, on March 1, claimed that there was “no evidence” that the government of Japan had
officially apologizes to the surviving sex slaves. HR 759 was unanimously passed by the International Foreign Affairs Committee, but it did not advance to the House floor for ratification. The WCCW supported all of the prior congressional resolutions as well as HR 121.
been “forcible in the narrow sense of the word” in its recruiting of women and girls for its wartime military brothel system (Morris-Suzuki 2007: ¶ 7). This claim diverged from his party’s stance, which had until then stood by the 1993 Kono Statement and vowed not to apologize to the women (again), even if the resolution passed.
The backlash of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s personal reaction and his Party’s (LDP) response to HR 121 reverberated for full year13. His defiance enraged the survivors, the Asian nations exploited by Japan’s colonial aggression, as well as the international community, and set off a public fury that quickly generated pressure that compelled him to recant his claims and reaffirm the Kono Statement. Eventually, Abe was forced to do what he vowed he would not, apologize (again).on March 26, 2007, at a parliamentary committee meeting, using the euphemism wianfu (‘comfort women’), Prime Minister Abe said "I express my sympathy toward the `comfort women' and apologize for the situation they found themselves in.” This he followed by "I apologize here and now as prime minister" (AP). However, when the broadcast is viewed online, one can see that the tone, pacing, facial expressions, and body language that accompanied his performance of the “apology” belied the sincerity of his words.
Despite Abe’s retreat, however, he continued to lose ground because members of his party continued issuing statements similar to his original claim. Just before Prime Minister Abe’s visit to the United States, several Japanese Diet members published a full page advertisement in The Washington Post, entitled “The Facts” (June 14, 2007), which reasserted the Prime Minister’s original claim that no women were coerced into sexual
13 Prime Mininister Shinzo Abe resigned on September 12, 2007.
slavery by the Japanese government. This advertisement was almost certainly published to rebut (as it references) the full-page advertisement (“The Truth About the ‘Comfort Women’”) placed a month earlier (April 26, 2007) by advocates to garner support for House Resolution 121. “The Facts” ad backfired; it was perceived to be a retraction of the Prime Minister’s retraction, and reignited the public fury. As Morris-Suzuki argues, this kind of “equivocation” highlighted “the reasons why Japanese politicians’ apologies for the war have been regarded with skepticism by Japan’s neighbors” and the world (2007: ¶ 25) and underscored the need for Japan to make an unambiguous apology supported by government funds.
Despite overwhelming evidence, Japan remains defiant, steadfastly denying their crimes. In addition to their defensive posturing, they have taken the offensive, attempting to humiliate the women, denouncing them as prostitutes who were seeking economic gain in war zones, instead of accepting full legal responsibility for their heinous crimes against humanity, showing genuine remorse, and offering proper legal remuneration to the women.
1.4 Contemporary Connections: Sex Slavery Today
While my research focuses on the Korean women and girls forced by the Japanese military into sexual slavery in state-run or supervised brothels in territories annexed and occupied by Japan during the Asia Pacific War (1932-1945), my findings have implications for all survivors of sex slavery. Unfortunately, sex slavery and rape as a weapon of war are contemporary and widespread practices. One need only be a casual reader of the newspaper to see this. Widely publicized and recent examples of the use of rape as a weapon of war include incidents in Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Iraq, Sudan, and Darfur. The July 16, 2003 front page of The New York Times read “Rape (and Silence About It) Haunt Baghdad.” The June 30, 2004 The Washington Post headline read, “We Want to Make a Light Baby: Arab Militiamen in Sudan Said to Use Rape as Weapon of Ethnic Cleansing.” On July 29, 2008, The Washington Post reports the sex slave experience of Catherine Ojok, who was abducted at age 12. At 15 she was forced to become one of 21 sex slaves kept by Gen. Raska Lukwiya, a senior commander of “The Lord’s Army, a rebel group waging an insurgency in northern Uganda” (de la Cruz, 2008: A11).
Sex slavery is not restricted to war zones, though research shows a strong correlation between military presence and forced prostitution. In December of 2002, in an article titled “Sex slaves and the U.S. military” in the Navy Times, William H. McMichael reports that
… the U.S. military supports a flourishing trade in sex slaves in South Korea. Hundreds of trafficked women, mostly from former Soviet bloc countries and the Philippines, are forced by local bar owners to work as prostitutes in bars that cater to American servicemen. The women are typically lured to Korea with promises of high-paying jobs but end up being held against their will and coerced into working as prostitutes in circumstances that both the State Department and the United Nations condemn as a form of sexual slavery.
The Pentagon conservatively estimates that 5,000 foreign women have been trafficked into South Korea since the mid-1990s to work as “entertainers.” In fact, they are “virtual prisoners,” forced to work as prostitutes in state regulated brothels. Moon (1997) examines how joint regulation of the approximately 32,500 prostitutes serving U.S. military personnel stationed in South Korea by both governments shapes U.S.-Korean foreign policies. Since the Korean War (1950-1953), she says that more “than one million Korean women have served as sex providers for the U.S. military” (35).
Clearly, the military brothel is an entrenched and thriving institution. In Enloe’s (1988: 85) examination of the dialogic and seemingly inextricable relationship of the prostitution and the military, she chillingly asserts, “none of these institutions. multilateral, bilateral alliances, foreign military assistance programmes.can achieve their militarizing objectives without controlling women for the sake of militarizing men.”
Women and children are being trafficked for sex slavery, and not only for the “sake of militarizing men.” According to the United Nations, “human trafficking is now the third most lucrative criminal enterprise in the world,” one worth “tens of billions of dollars” a year (Finnegan 2008:47). The United States State Department’s 2005 Annual Report on Trafficking estimates that 600,000 to 800,000 men, women, and children are trafficked each year. 80% of those are women and 50% are minors. The majority of women and minors, “hundreds of thousands” of these are used for “commercial sexual exploitation” and forced prostitution (USSD 2005).
Prosecuting the traffickers and pimps is extremely difficult. Not only does a woman have to overcome the physical and psychological trauma of sex slavery and then face what Finnegan describes as the “endless frustrations, humiliations, even terrors associated with trials” (2008: 52), but she must also face public skepticism of her claims. Finnegan describes a judge at a trafficking trail who said, “These young ladies are prostitutes, they go abroad and prostitute themselves, then they are not happy with the money they get, so upon their return, they complain they were trafficked” (2008: 52-3). The cultural pressures that silenced the sex slaves of the Japanese military persist. Until sex slavery and forced prostitution are treated in the courts as the heinous abuse of human rights that they are, survivors will not come forward to testify to their experiences. My research analyzes the competing narratives that survivors of sex slavery must negotiate to represent themselves as “credible” victims, not to reinforce the sexist constraints for appropriate behavior, but to call attention to them. We must be aware of what is restricting us before we can effectively challenge the restraints.
1.5 Plan of Dissertation
In this chapter, I have presented to the reader glimpses into the motivations that underpin this study. Additionally, to help the reader better contextualize the analysis, I have given an overview of the relevant socio-historical information related to Japanese military sex slaves: I discussed the historical evolution of the terms used to reference the survivors, gave profiles of the women and girls forced into sex slavery, and described the conditions they endured in the Japanese military sex slave system. I examined the reasons the women did not reveal their horrific experience in that system for over forty years, the reasons some of them finally decided to testify, and the political backlash against them. This chapter explored the tenets of Confucianism and the adversarial discourse perpetuated by some in the Japanese government, both of which contribute to the restrictive and competing master narratives that constrain the survivors. Finally, I explained why this study, which focuses on the discourse about events that occurred sixty years ago, is relevant now. Below, I provide an overview of each of the chapters to follow.
In Chapter 2 - Literature Review, I provide a review of relevant literature and propose how this study will contribute to it. I introduce in detail the master narratives of prostitution, slavery, and rape and their respective frameworks, and I demonstrate how these narratives compete/conflict with each other and can constrain the women’s individual testimonies.
In Chapter 3 - Methodology, I include a description of the data and its collection, including the rationale for the inclusion of an ethnographic component and a description of how it was carried out. Transcription methodologies, conventions, and translation issues will also be addressed and outlined.
In Chapter 4 . Reliable Narrator, Credible Experience, I examine the oral testimony of Hwang Keum-ju, which is widely used in public discourse, to explore how one survivor successfully constructs herself as a reliable narrator and her story as credible. Specifically, I examine how Hwang uses negation, explanation, detail in the form of sound symbolism, and constructed dialogue to reject the master narrative of prostitution and align with the master narratives of slavery and rape.
In Chapter 5 . Variations in Rejecting the Master Narrative of Prostitution, I examine the testimonies of Kang Duk-kyung, Kim Soon-duk, Moon Pil-gi, Pak Du-ri, and Yi Yong-nyo to explore how these survivors negotiate the master narrative of prostitution specifically as it relates to the issue of money and payment. I examine the connection between their narrative preconstruction (Labov 2006).where they begin their stories or what they posit as the initiating or causal event.and the need to reject explicitly the frame of prostitution by denying payment.
In Chapter 6 . (Mis)Representations in Public Discourse, I examine how other allied and advocacy organizations appropriating Hwang’s account are constrained in their representations by the master narratives of rape, sex slavery, and prostitution. I review a representation in which an advocacy organization skillfully negotiates the master narratives of sex slavery/rape and prostitution in a manner that supports the sex slave survivors’ redress movement. In contrast to this, I examine other public discourses in which advocates do not negotiate these master narratives as effectively.
In the Chapter 7 - Conclusion, I reiterate how my findings contribute to the under-represented application of discourse analysis to spoken Korean. I examine what we can learn from a micro-linguistic analysis of the impact of the master narratives of prostitution, slavery, and rape on sex slave survivors’ testimonies, and I assess what these findings can contribute to the growing body of research on master narratives and the discursive construction of identity.
Chapter 2: Literature Review
2.1 Introduction
Labov (1997: 407) has asserted that the “more reportable the events of a narrative, the more effort the narrator must devote to establishing credibility.” What Labov calls the “reportability paradox” is an obstacle of epic proportions for the former sex slaves as they give their testimonies. What happened to these women is inconceivable; Hwang, whose testimony I examine in Chapter 4, was confined for four years and over that time was raped an estimated 10,000 times14. The sheer scale of the war crimes committed against her is exceedingly reportable and, therefore, seemingly incredible. When survivor testify, they must construct themselves as reliable and their testimonies as credible, not only to make what happened to them real and believable to the listener but also to refute the adversarial discourse that accuses them of lying and being prostitutes.
Additionally, the former sex slaves are stigmatized by the fact that the crimes perpetrated against them were sex crimes. As each attempts to manage her stigmatized identity.what Goffman (1963) terms a spoiled identity, which is not her actual but is her virtual social identity.she is required to construct herself as an ideal victim of “real” rape (Estrich 1988) to posit herself as an appropriate victim, or in Rosch’s (1978), a prototypical victim of rape /sex slavery. Thus, in testifying, she must align with certain
14This figure is based on figures Karen Parker, a legal advisor to the United Nations Human Rights Commission quoted in her 1996 UNHCR report.
master narratives while refuting others. To construct herself as a reliable narrator who provides a credible testimony she must align with the master narratives of slavery and rape while carefully refuting the master narrative of prostitution. In Sections 2.2.1 . 2.2.4, I introduce the master narratives of prostitution, slavery, and rape to illuminate their incumbent structures (i.e., myths, explanatory theories, participant structure, and scripts). Now, I turn to a discussion of master narratives in general.
2.2 Master Narratives
Fairclough (1989: 3) asserts that language is the “primary medium of social control and power.” Bearing in mind, I ground the analysis in its social and historical (Wodak et al. 1999) and cultural contexts (Barth 1969), (Carbaugh 1999), (Moghaddam 1999), and in the interactional sociolinguistic tradition (Hamilton 1994, 1996, 1998; Schiffrin1987, 1988, 1993, 1994a, 1996, 2006; Tannen 1985, 1986, 2005b). I examine the range of publicly available narratives and how they function as framing mechanisms in the discourses by and about the sex slave survivors.
According to Talbot et al. (1996:225) “first-person accounts of personal experience and their claims regarding truth, knowledge, and values, are typically framed in terms of pre-existing Master narratives (Boje 1991; Mishler 1995), Culturally available narratives (Antaki 1994), Dominant discourses (Gee 1992; Gergen 1995), or Cultural texts (Denzin 1992).” These ways of framing personal experience overlap in areas, but diverge in others. According to Bamberg (2005 np), those in Critical Discourse Analysis, such as Fairclough (1992), “center on master narratives from a ‘macro’ perspective, analyzing the strength and coherence of such master narratives as well as their historical changes” and the power they exert on specific groups. Gee (1999: 17) uses the term ‘dominant discourse’ to mean the “socially accepted associations among ways of using language, of thinking, of valuing, acting, and interacting, in the ‘right’ place at the ‘right times with the ‘right’ objects.” Mishler (1995: 114) asserts that master narratives
define rights and duties and incorporate values of dominant social and political groups. Their unexamined taken-for-granted assumptions about how the world is and ought to be conceal patterns of domination and submission. Like all narratives, these are selective representations, excluding experiences and views of some sectors of society while including and privileging others. Their legitimating function may be revisited and subverted by counter narratives reflecting these excluded perspectives.
Mishler (1995: 114) reviews some of the macro and micro approaches in the areas of the dominant gender studies related to science and technology, legal storytelling, reasoning and arguments, and critical race theory in which scholars have explored various modes of exposing these excluded perspectives thereby challenging the “patterns of domination and submission.” In my examination of the survivors’ testimonies, I focus on revealing how they challenge these domination discourses.
Ochs (1993: 296) asserts “in any given actual situation, at any given actual moment” speakers are “actively constructing their social identities rather than passively living out some cultural prescription for social identity.” Schiffrin (1996: 170) discusses the three planes on which speakers work as they negotiate epistemic and agentive selves: “the form of our stories (their textual structure), the content of our stories (what we tell about), and our story-telling behavior (how we tell our stories) are all sensitive indices not just of our personal selves, but also our social and cultural identities.” Attuned to these three indices, Bamberg and others (Bamberg 1997; Tablot et al. 1996; Bamberg and Andrews 2004) have examined how master and counter narratives are discursively produced in moment-to-moment, face-to-to face interactions.
Bamberg and Andrews (2004: x) discuss the issue of how one goes about identifying what is master narrative and what is counter narrative. They (2004: x) assert that “counter narratives only make sense in relation to something else, that which they are countering.” Similarly, Fine et al. (2001: 3) posit that counter stories “expose the construction of the dominant story by suggesting how else it could be told. In providing an example of how it could be otherwise they disrupt the hegemony of the monolingual master narrative.” Bamberg (2005) and Talbot et al. (1996) point to Schiffrin’s (1996: 170) articulation of this in a slightly different way: “Telling a story allows us to create a 'story world' in which we can represent ourselves against a backdrop of cultural expectations about a typical course of action; our identities as social beings emerge as we construct our own individual experiences as a way to position ourselves in relation to social and cultural expectations.” Talbot et al. (1996: 225-226) advance the following explanation of master narratives. Master narratives
derive from tradition, and they typically constrain narratives of personal experience, because they hold the narrator to culturally given standards, to taken-for-granted notions of what is good and what is wrong. At the same time, because the propositions implicit in master narratives or dominant discourses are widely accepted as self-evident, narrators who cast their own account in terms deriving from such a discourse are free to present the personal story as a description of events that is isomorphic to "reality."
The sex slave survivors must grapple with the ways their own accounts deviate from the “self evident.” Of the potential resources for framing the women and their experiences, the salient frames that are utilized are the master narratives (Fairclough 1989; Talbot et al. 1996; Bamberg and Andrews 2004) of (sex) slavery, rape, and prostitution. The testimonies can best be understood through the lenses of competing constraints.the delicate balancing of the competing narratives by which the women’s experiences have been or can be framed.
The master narratives of rape, sex slavery, and prostitution invoke moral universes which the women must navigate. According to Talbot et al. (1996: 227) in her examination of the master narrative of pregnancy, there is “a moral domain in which agents must justify their conduct because they can influence and be held accountable for outcomes.” The “at risk” women in the study (Talbot et al. 1996: 227) must negotiate what they term the “moral universe,” and as such, they must account for any difficulties. Additionally, in their explanations, “narrators seek to refuse blame for these problems and vindicate themselves as moral agents.”
The relentless accusations and framing of the survivors’ experiences as prostitution and the survivors as prostitutes.who volunteered to work in lucrative war zones and who were not coerced to do so by the Japanese government.continually evoke the master narrative of prostitution. Even when claims are not made in moment-to-moment interactions or present in focus texts, the master narrative of prostitution threatens to envelope their framing of their lived experience as sex slaves who were serially raped. To posit what they consider to be their own stories, but also acceptable stories, the survivors must align with the master narratives of rape to construct themselves as ideal victims of the sex slavery system and, at the same time, refute the master narratives of prostitution. The competing frames may make their testimonies seem inconsistent to outsiders. When we examine their stories through these lenses, the apparent ambiguities make greater sense.
Claims that the “comfort women” were prostitutes and not sex slaves have been levied by conservative, right-wing politicians and revisionist historians/academics. A statement by Vice-Chairman of the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform and Professor of Education at Tokyo University, Nobukatsu Fujioka, highlights the adversarial discourse that frames the survivors experience as prostitution. Excerpt 1 comes from a lecture he delivered in Japanese at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan on February 25th, 1999:
Excerpt 1
1 "Comfort women" were not sexual slaves.
2 They were simply prostitutes, taken to war zones by private brokers.
3 In Korea, almost all the brokers were Korean.
4 The prostitutes, on the other hand, were about 40% Japanese, and 20%
Korean, according to Professor Hata's recent study.
5 Prostitution in itself is a tragedy,
6 but there is no evidence to indicate that the women were forced into it by the
Japanese military.15
Nobukatsu Fujioka frames the women as simply prostitutes taken to war zone by private brokers (line 2). The use of simply is dismissive; it trivializes the counterclaim that the women were sex slaves and posits that the “simple” truth is that they were really just
15 The Japanese Government has indeed uncovered evidence of coercion. See the discussion on the Kono Statement in the Ch. 2.
prostitutes. The verb taken clarifies that they were taken somewhere by someone, but whether force was used or not in their mobilization is indeterminate. He does, however, specify that they were taken by Korean, not Japanese brokers (lines 2-3), and that these brokers were private, thus rejecting the notion of Japanese State or military involvement. While he laments the tragedy of prostitution (line 5), he declares that there is no evidence to indicate that the women were forced into it by the Japanese military (line 6).
2.2.1 Master Narrative of Prostitution
Prostitution has a long, tangled, and controversial legacy, in part due to its sexual nature, which is taboo in some cultures. Much research has been devoted to the study of prostitution’s history, legality, ethics, and exploitive nature. Other research studies prostitution as a valid means of income, and how it impacts the economy and society.
As discussed by Brownmiller (1975) and others (Enloe 2007, 2004, 2002, 2000, 1993, 1990, 1988; 1983, 1980a, 1980b; Moon 2007, 2004, 2002, 2001, 1999, 1997; Hicks 1994), the intersection of the military and prostitution, both in times of peace and war, has it own institutional history and body of research devoted to it. According to Hicks (1994: 27), this history is a rather “inglorious” one. While cultures vary in attitudes of acceptance and the practice of prostitution, it exists in virtually all cultures and has been a part of the war mechanism since its inception. Hicks (1994: 31) reports the Roman Empire to be the first to record it use of camp followers, or military prostitutes. Records of the Spanish Armada indicated they were followed by ‘400 mounted whores and 800 on foot.’ He also discusses the American, British, French, German, Indian, Japanese, and Russian militaries’ involvement with prostitution. No kingdom, empire, or current nation-state’s army is without the “commodity” of sex, in the form of prostitutes.
Recently, a conflict has developed over whether prostitution is ever really “voluntary.” Some believe “that there can never be such thing as consensual prostitution and that the exploitation of individuals through prostitution in all its forms should be eliminated and the perpetrators punished,” while others believe “that only coerced or nonconsensual prostitution should be controlled and prevented by international standards and criminal law” (Bales 2005: 67). Those who believe that a woman would never choose to be a prostitute “point out that women are forced to become prostitutes because of a lack of money or other financial pressures” (Bales 2005: 67). These advocates broaden the meaning of the word forced beyond threats of violence, intimidation, or coercion, which are linked to other forms of slavery, to include lack of economic opportunity for women in a patriarchal society. In other words, this more inclusive definition of force precludes the possibility any woman would chose to be a prostitute if she had other more viable means of supporting herself.
Since some of the “comfort women” were professional prostitutes, I will work with the more narrow definition of forced to mean by violence or threat of violence. As anthropologist Chunghee Sarah Soh (2001b: 81) cautions,
the categorical representation of ‘comfort women’ as sex slaves denies.however unintentionally.the remarkable human agency exercised by women of the ‘comfort women’ against gendered oppression in their adverse social conditions. The life stories of some survivors clearly reveal their independent spirit and risk-taking actions in search of a better life, which unfortunately led them to the
‘comfort stations,’ but at the same time, which perhaps also contributed to their survival of the ordeal against many odds. I will not deny the agency of some women who may have chosen to become prostitutes; however, I note as Soh (2001b: 81) does, that “prostitution, by definition, includes payment for the sexual union, while slavery carries the notion of the social outcast, of being property, and of compulsory labor. The majority of the Korean survivors have testified that they were not paid for their sexual services to the Japanese soldiers.” Payment is irrelevant if a woman is enslaved, but as discussed below, payment is one of the key indicators of prostitution. Ultimately, while the Japanese “comfort system” may have begun as a system of officially regulated prostitution staffed by consenting prostitutes, “it evolved into a system of female sexual slavery, using mostly colonial [Korean] subjects drafted coercively by the state power and shipped even to the frontlines in remote foreign lands” (Soh 2001b: 82). When the war ended, the Japanese “comfort women” escaped with the Japanese soldiers, while the Korean women were either abandoned or executed, having been “reduced to expendable military supplies, too cumbersome to be taken along…” (Soh 2001b: 83). The above discussion illustrates that prostitution is characterized by its commercial nature as an economic transaction in which a body and its use for sexual acts are sold. By definition it involves payment of (customarily) money or other cultural currency for the goods or services rendered. The participatory roles of prostitution include pimps (managers), prostitutes (sellers), and johns (clients/buyers). The exchange of goods, the sex acts, routinely occurs in specified physical spaces devoted to the encounter, such as
houses of prostitution, houses of ill-repute, whore houses, brothels, etc. Sex acts unassociated with a monetary exchange are not, by definition, prostitution. Payment for performance of a sex act defines the practice as prostitution, and the performer is referred to as a prostitute. Because payment occupies such an integral role in defining prostitution, the subject of money and payment emerges in the discourses of and about prostitution. Payment is a critical factor in positing that a person is/was a prostitute, and as demonstrated in Chapter 5, the subject of payment and money frequently does occur, usually in the form of negation (I was not paid), in the discourse of, by, and about the “comfort women.”
2.2.2 Master Narrative of Slavery
Slavery is the narrative frame through which the advocates for the survivors consider the experience of the “comfort women.” Scholars of the “comfort women” system (Stetz and Oh 2001; Soh 2001a, 2001b) assert that its underpinning ideologies were colonialism, sexism, and racism or ethnic superiority, which are similar to ideological roots of slavery.racism, colonialism, and capitalism. The advocates frequently refer to the survivors as Military Sex Slaves (MSS), which is devoid of the euphemistic and ambiguous characteristics of “comfort women.” The word slave conveys the absence of corporal agency, as when another person/s or institution owns and thereby physically controls another. The slave is compelled to do the bidding of a master, often living under the constant threat of violence, abuse, and death. Thus, the term slave captures the women’s loss of physical agency, as well as the coercive nature of their capture and captivity. The adjective sex specifies the nature of the slavery: the prime objective of their capture was to provide sex for the (Japanese) military.
In his foundational work on the contemporary practice of slavery, Bales (2005: 52-54) asserts that the core characteristic of slavery is the loss of freedom: “freedom of movement and freedom to make decisions, as well as many other fundamental freedoms.” In his survey of the international conventions that define and prohibit slavery, he finds that these conventions “recognized as a central issue the concept of ownership, pursuant to which the enslaved individual loses all control over his or her own life and labor.” Additionally, Bales notes that “the economic exploitation and loss of free will that are inherent in slavery are often accomplished through the threat of violence and accompanied by ongoing abuse.” For this reason, violence is one of the key elements of slavery: “The use of intimidation, coercion, or force is frequently cited as a reason for categorizing particular forms of exploitation as slavery.” Not only is violence used to coerce individuals into exploitative situations, it prevents them from leaving those situations.
Conservative politicians and revisionist historians who reject the frame of slavery often do so because violence was not used against all the women. As Itagaki Tadashi, Secretary General of the Japanese Upper House, said to Kim SanKi, a (Korean) woman imprisoned in a Suzhou military brothel for eight years, “…it was not a fact that the Japanese military authorities took women by binding ropes around their necks” (as reported in Time Magazine by Spaeth 1996: 49). Itagaki denies use of such coercive recruiting measures, and he implies that any violence or coercion that is less than the physical binding and dragging away of women does not constitute slavery. According to his implied definition, the only way a woman could be a slave would be if she had been captured and dragged away. In fact, many of the women were violently abducted. Nevertheless, the following discussion of slavery will show that this violent “recruitment” is not necessarily a requirement of being a slave.
Bales (2005: 53) expands upon the international conventions of loss of freedom, economic exploitation, and violence when he says that to understand what “actually constitutes slavery,” the following three questions must be answered (bolding mine):
1.
Does an individual have freedom of movement and choice of work, and if not, what restrictions are placed on this freedom?
2.
Does an individual have control over his or her own reproductive capacity, personal belongings, and earnings?
3.
Has an individual given informed consent, and does this person have a full understanding of the nature of the relationship between him- or herself and the other person(s) involved?
Under this formulation, a woman is not required to be bound at the neck and dragged away to qualify as a slave; instead, if she went voluntarily but without a full understanding of the nature of the work required of her by the Japanese government and so could not give informed consent; if once there she did not have freedom to leave or to do other work; and if she did not have control over her own reproductive capacity or earnings, then she was a slave. The mode of her “recruitment” is irrelevant. A woman forced into prostitution has lost the elements of choice and control over her labor and this loss is enforced by violence, “whether the entity taking it is an individual or a state” (Bales 2005: 54); therefore, the forced prostitution endured by the survivors is a form of slavery, whether or not they were violently dragged away.
The above discussion illustrates that slavery is characterized by its exploitative nature in which the labor power of the enslaved (the slave) is appropriated by the enslaver (the master) through violence or the threat of violence and without the enslaved’s consent. The enslaved does not have the freedom to leave or change the situation. In such a situation, even if the enslaved is paid a portion of her “earnings,” she is still a slave because of her lack of control, choice, and consent.
2.2.2.1 Sexual Slavery or Forced Prostitution?
While “forced prostitution” might seem to better describe the experience of the women who did not consent to be part of Japan’s “comfort system,” these women are more accurately characterized as sex slaves. Forced prostitution and sexual slavery are both forms of slavery, but “forced prostitution is usually defined as when a person (normally a woman) is forced through violence or intimidation to engage in sexual acts in return for money or some other payment,” while sexual slavery does not entail “any direct financial gain”(Bales 2005: 62, 65). The “comfort system” was not a system designed primarily for the “direct financial gain” of the Japanese government. Yoshiaki (2000) has shown convincingly that it was developed to prevent the rape of local women in the occupied territories, to prevent the contraction of STDs, and to limit opportunities for espionage that resulted when soldiers visited the local civilian brothels. The system’s secondary function was to provide “sexual comfort” or recreation to the troops (Yoshiaki 2000: 72).
A second reason to classify what happened to the women as sexual slavery and not forced prostitution is to distinguish them more clearly from the professional sex workers, the voluntary wianbu/ianfu or “comfort women” and thus avoid activating the master narrative of prostitution.
2.2.2.2 Sex Slavery and Rape
Sex occurring under the conditions of slavery cannot be considered consensual on the part of the enslaved. In her seminal work on female sexual slavery, Barry (1979: 40) asserts “that female sexual slavery is present in all situations where women or girls cannot change the immediate conditions of their existence; where regardless of how they got into those conditions they cannot get out; and where they are subject to sexual violence and exploitation.” If a person is a slave then sexual intercourse is, by definition, rape. Consent and coercion are mutually exclusive. Bales (2005: 65) also notes, “since the slave is forced to provide a service that has economic value, this act might be seen to represent the theft of the labor power of the enslaved; but it is better conceptualized as an extended form of rape.”
Finally, while all slavery is “a harrowing and traumatizing experience, …the repeated sexual violation amounting to rape that characterizes forced prostitution brings tremendous psychological damage and requires intensive rebuilding of self-esteem and self-worth” (Bales 2005: 67). The narratives of the surviving women testify to this: some did not return home because of the shame, others concealed their experience from family and friends, and many suffered from “abiding psychological trauma” (Soh 2001a: 78).
2.2.3 Master Narrative of Rape
What we believe about the act of rape, and consequently, how we perceive and behave toward the raped and the rapists is profoundly influenced by the prevailing cultural narratives and myths we have been taught about it. Legal scholars have shown that a rape victim’s credibility is judged on the basis of her story’s “'fit with the stock of social knowledge' transmitted through narratives. The more closely a story corresponds with our perceptual map of how things are in the world the more likely that story (witness) will be deemed credible” (Burns 2002: para 2). In addition to managing other obligatory tasks when testifying, framing one’s experience as “rape” but also “not prostitution” is a delicate balancing act, and one which is not accomplished without careful attention. Micro-level analysis of what constitutes an acceptable account or narrative of the rape experience can help us understand what the narrative requirements are, not so that victims can comply with them, but so that we can continue the slow process of modifying these requirements.
Brownmiller’s (1975) groundbreaking work, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, brought the ideology, psychology, legality, and legacy of rape to mainstream attention16. Additionally, she articulated the hierarchical (dominant-submissive) power
constructs inherent to rape and the myths regarding rape, the rapist, and the victim. She
was the first to posit a female orientated definition of rape.“if a woman chooses not to
have intercourse with a specific man and the man chooses to proceed against her will,
that is a criminal act of rape” (Brownmiller 1975: 8). This definition stands in opposition
to the historical and legal treatment and definition of the rape of a woman as the violation
of the property rights of her “owner,” her father or her husband.
Rozee (1993: 449) examines thirty-five global communities to get a sense of the
range of “the cross-cultural variation of the incidence, definitions, and consequences of
rape.” She concludes that “once the definition of rape was broadened to include socially
condoned rapes” her findings support MacKinnon’s (1984) assertion that “rape-free”
cultures are virtually nonexistent (Rozee 1993: 449). She finds there is a global
tendency toward “regulating” rape via culturally specified institutionalized norms,
customs, rituals, and other social practices, rather than cultural practices dedicated to
16 Considering the legacy of rape in humankind’s history, the scarcity of the study and inquiry into rape is stunning. Brownmiller (1975) asserts that even the influential intellectuals engaged in the study of sexuality, sexual disorders, and psychology, such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Carl Jung, paid scant attention to the act of rape. Neither did Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their theorizing of “oppression” and “exploitation” explore the subject. According to Sayers (1991), Helene Deutsch, Karen Horney, Anna Freud, and Melanie Klein, considered the mothers of psychoanalysis, focused more on overcoming, subverting, or tempering “Freud’s emphasis on the significance of the father and the phallus in the construction of gender identity,” (543) than on the subject of rape; their collective inquiries scarcely scratched the surface.
August Babel first explored the socialist production of rape in Woman Under Socialism (1904). Following him, despite the vehement criticism he received, Wilhelm Reich (DeMeo 1979; 1986; 1998a; 1998b; Theirrie Cook, Jim Strick), connected the study of the body with that of the mind and was first to posit a “masculine ideology of rape” (in Brownmiller 1975:2) in The Sexual Revolution (Reich 1936). However, neither Babel nor Reich fully developed these concepts. Early interest in rape focused on the rapist’s psychology.what makes a rapist rape.rather than examining the ideologies and social practices that create an environment in which rape thrives and is trivialized, and for which the victim, not perpetrator is blamed and punished. After centuries of neglect, according to Brownmiller, the issue of rape finally emerged as matter of import, when it came under the purview of feminists in the nineteen seventies.
prohibiting it.
Before introducing the research on rape myths, I introduce the context in which Burt (1980), Gavey (1989; 1992), Chrenshaw (1991), Goldberg-Ambrose (1992), Wood and Rennie(1994), and Donat and D’Emilio (1992) insist they are rooted and in which they must be examined. Burt (1980: 229) asserts that “rape is the logical and psychological extension of a dominant-submissive, competitive, sex role stereotyped culture.” Gavey (1989; 1992: 135) too, stresses the value of viewing rape in the larger context of “coercive sexuality” in which “some forms of resistance.the lack of enjoyment and the giving of consent when not wishing to have sex.are seen as part of normal sex.” Under these norms, “a construction of rape cannot be justified on one or more of these grounds” (Gavey 1992: 135). For example, saying that sex was forced on you when you clearly communicated that you did not want to have sex cannot hold as a convincing claim of rape, because there is the (underlying) expectation, that a woman is supposed first to say “no” to protect her honor or to not appear “easy,” when she really means “yes.” So, on any given occasion, a woman saying “no” in the climate of adversarial sexual norms could mean “yes.” Wood and Rennie (1994) and Donat and D’Emilio (1992) describe how women’s choice and consent are twisted in legal proceedings, which demand the victims of rape prove nonconsent, and which in the adversarial climate of sexual norms, is virtually impossible.
In this adversarial climate, our beliefs and perceptions about the raped and rapists are influenced by the prevailing cultural narratives. These beliefs are known as rape myths, the concept of which was first introduced in the 1970s in the research of sociologists Schwendinger and Schwendinger (1974) and Field (1978), and feminists Brownmiller (1975) and Clark and Lewis (1977).
Merging feminist and social psychological approaches, Burt (1980) carried out the first empirical research on rape myths and contributed the Rape Measurement Acceptance Scale (RMAS). She defines rape myths “as prejudicial, stereotyped, or false beliefs about rape, rape victims, and rapists,” which create “a climate hostile to rape victims” (1980: 217). She finds that (American) belief in them is widespread and is shaped by and strongly correlated to an individual’s concepts of “sex role stereotyping,” “adversarial sexual beliefs,” and “acceptance of interpersonal violence” (1980: 229). Yamawaki and Tschanz (2005: 379) in their study on “rape perception differences between Japanese and American college students” found that the Japanese minimized the seriousness of rapes, blamed the victims, and excused the rapists more than their American counterparts.
Several rape myths identified by Burt (1980: 217-223) are listed in the following table:
Building on Burt’s work, Lonsway and Fitzgerald (1994; 1995) use a multi-disciplinary
approach to myths in general to posit a refined theory of rape myths, in which these myths are similar to stereotypes and are defined as “attitudes and beliefs that are generally false but are widely and persistently held, and that serve to deny and justify male sexual aggression against women” (1994:134).
Similarly, Payne et al., (1999) assert that “the significance of rape myths is in their overgeneralization and shared nature as well as their specified psychological and societal function” (1999: 30). They put forward the Illinois Rape Myth Acceptance (IRMA) scale, in which they further refine the rape myth construct by encompassing “characteristics and roles of the victim” (1999: 33) as Burt (1980) did, but also include societal attitudes about rape, as did Field (1978), as well as characteristics of the rapist. Payne et al., (1999) replicate and expand upon these. In Table 5-2, the rape myths Payne et al., (1999) identify, measure, and analyze are reproduced.
Table 2-2 Category Labels for 19 Original Myth Categories (Payne et al. 1999)
A = She asked for it by being sexy
B = She caused it by her own carelessness/stupidity
C = She deserved it
D = She lead him on
E = He didn’t really mean to
F = She really wanted it to happen
G = She enjoyed it
H = She didn’t fight back enough
I = There was no violence/weapon involved
J = She implicitly agreed to have sex
K = She miscommunicated
L = Rape is a trivial event
M = Rape is a sexual event
N = Rape is an inevitable, natural event
O = Only certain types of men rape
P = Only certain types of women are raped
Q = Rape only happens in very specific places/situations
R = Women lie about rape
S = He was entitled
Even a cursory examination of these rape myths reveals that they are heavily influenced by the pervasive coercive sexual norms that imply all sex is adversarial and that violence in sex is acceptable. The myths also play off gender and sex role stereotypes. The aggregate of which underlies the belief that women consent to rape (an oxymoron), so rape is a natural, inevitable, trivial, and sexual event. Our deep-rooted adherence to these myths has a categorically detrimental impact on how we, or rather, how we do not, humanely treat the victims of the dehumanizing experience of rape.
2.2.3.1 Constructing the “Real” Rape, “Ideal” Victim
Matoesian (1993:13) says that patriarchal rape myths “severely constrain” the “reporting of rape by blaming the victim, by limiting our perception of rape to ‘real’ rapes, that is, to the cultural stereotype of the rapist as a violent stranger jumping out of the bushes and attacking a woman.” Legal scholar Susan Estrich (1988: 4) says the courts distinguish between “aggravated” and “simple” rape. She uses Kalven and Zeisel’s definition of aggravated rape as one “with extrinsic violence (guns, knives, or beatings) or multiple assailants or no prior relationship between the victim and the defendant” (1988: 4). A simple rape in one in which none of these are present. Estrich found that “juries were four times as willing to convict in the aggravated rape as in the simple rape” (1988: 4). Furthermore, if there was any “contributory behavior” (see the previous discussion on rape myths) or prior relationship between the victim and the defendant, juries were highly unlikely to convict.
Legal scholar Catherine Burns (2002: para. 16 ) notes this same divide in Japanese culture and discourse and notes that the Japanese have words that articulate this concept explicitly: “This seeming paradox can be explained in terms of two types of rape stories: tsujo [normal] rape and fushizen [not natural] rape.” Furthermore, Japanese law, like
U.S. law, treats seriously the tsujo [normal] rape situations, in which a woman who appears to have not “provoked” the attack is “physically beaten with a considerable degree of force, possibly threatened with a weapon by at least one stranger in a public place” (Burns 2002: para 16). The fushizen [not natural] cases, in which the victim and rapist were acquainted, there was little evidence of force, or the woman’s actions were construed as “provocative,” were much less likely to be reported or successfully prosecuted (Burns 2002: para 16).
A woman trying to report a rape or prosecute a rapist must negotiate what Matoesion calls the “moral categorization work which trial participants employ to ‘discover,’ negotiate, and secure the victim’s incumbency in the categorical identity of ‘rapable/unvirtuous’ woman…or ‘unrapable/virtuous’ woman.” (1993: 24). In other words, she must negotiate the paradoxical rape myths that say that is if she was raped, she cannot be virtuous because truly virtuous women cannot be raped. According to Chrenshaw (1993:10), the legal definition of rape and the relevant evidentiary rules are discriminatory in that each raped woman is unfairly gauged “against a narrow norm of acceptable sexual conduct for women.” Her departure from these “idealized,” albeit discriminatory, sexual norms can disqualify her as a legitimate rape victim. Goldberg-Ambrose (in Rozee 1992: 500) has shown that jurors and others “consider extralegal factors in assessing consent (or choice), such as a victim’s marital status, living arrangements, drinking patterns, and conformity to conservative gender role behaviors.” Vachss (2002: B2) observed that jurors doubt the testimonies of rape victims who “are too emotional, or not emotional enough; angry, or sullen, or inarticulate; too young, or too old; too ugly, or too pretty; or the wrong gender, or any class other than middle class.” Wood and Rennie (1994: 45) conclude that each person’s rape account is judged on how well it emulates the “classic” rape in which the victim reports herself to be an acceptable victim and the rapist to be an acceptable villain. In other words, to produce a credible account of a real rape requires the production of ideal victims and villains.
Barry (1979: 41) articulates the paradox of the “ideal victim” of rape and the requirement of resistance:
When raped, a victim is expected to have escaped unharmed against overwhelming
odds that include fraud, deception, physical force and violence, manipulation, and
sheer terror. If she cannot extricate herself from the situation in which the rape takes
place, then it is assumed that she was to some degree complicit in the assault;
consequently it is no longer considered an assault and she is not truly a victim. Estrich (1988: 29) demonstrates convincingly in her book Real Rape that as a crime, rape is “unique” in that the “definition that has been given to nonconsent.one that has the required victims of rape, unlike victims of any other crime, to demonstrate their ‘wishes’ through physical resistance.” One is not required to physically resist a mugger to prove that one did not consent to being robbed. The crime of rape, however, has been “defined so as to require proof of actual physical resistance by the victim, as well as substantial force” by the perpetrator (Estrich 1988:5). Chrenshaw (1993: 10) states, too, “that historically, legal rules dictated, for example, that rape victims had to have resisted their assailants in order for their claims to be accepted. Any abatement of struggle was interpreted as the woman’s consent to the intercourse.” While, as she points out, the law no longer requires “utmost resistance,” the institutionalized logic “that a real rape victim would protect her honor virtually to the death” persists (Chrenshaw 1993: 10). Adhering to this logic, the only irrefutable proof that a woman is a real rape victim is her demise. Estrich (1988) also demonstrates that the more intimate or familiar with the rapist the victim is, the more she must demonstrate resistance. A woman raped by a stranger must not demonstrate as much resistance as a woman raped by her husband.
Wood and Rennie (1994) describe the dilemma the raped find themselves in as they are forced betwixt and between constructing victim and or non-victim identities, both of which entail negative associations. Located in the recursive loop of agent-nonagent.a woman who defines herself as an agent “in control,” negates the proposition that the act was rape. She is opposed by the myth that says “any healthy woman can successfully resist a rapist if she wants to” (Burt 1980: 223). If she posits herself as passive or “out of control,” she competes against the myth that “a woman should be able to point to resistance (struggling, saying ‘no’) as justification for calling an experience rape” (134). In producing the discourse of rape, nonconsent must be articulated and “proven” as one counters, negates, or otherwise cancels out the stated and unstated but understood rape myths.
2.2.3.2 Further Issues in the Discourse of Rape
Wood and Rennie (1994) explore the ways in which eight female victims of rape formulate rape in their discourse. They observe that victims of rape grapple with formulating or naming the event (Schegloff 1972), or what they experienced. The elision of the word rape is marked in that only one of the eight interviewees uses the word rape, which she further modifies as date rape to reference what happened to her.
Wood and Rennie (1994) find that some women use what they identify as avoidance
(133) in which women refer to the rape without naming it as such, or they use oblique terms of references such as my experience (133). The most frequently used device in naming avoidance is false deixis (Penelope 1990) in which the speaker uses deictic references in which the antecedent or referent, and consequently the act of rape, is indeterminable. Penelope (1990) asserts that false or dummy deictic reference frequently occurs in the discourse of sexual abuse; similarly, Wood and Rennie find the use of false deictics, such as the pronoun it commonly co-occurs with the verb ‘happen’ and non-agentive passives, such as it goes, it went, and it happen/s/ed. The elision of agent and the vagueness/elusiveness of the verb happen do not implicate the rapist or, through the use finite language, indicate that a rape occurred. The women also use mitigatory language, such as downtoners, like just and only and other hedges e.g., sort of.
Of the women in Wood and Rennie’s (1994: 134) study, all were teenagers, and all but one of them were virgins at the time they were raped. They describe themselves as having “relatively little experience with sex.” Similarly, the Korean girls, teenagers, and young women who were serially raped, and forcibly prostituted as “comfort” commodities, were like the women Wood and Rennie examine. At the time the rape/s occurred, they were temporarily without interpretative repertoires (Potter and Wetherell 1987: 140), the “recurrently used systems of terms for characterizing and evaluating actions, events and other phenomena.” As the words of South Korean Chang Jeum-dol demonstrate, “When I was first raped, I didn’t know what was happening. I was too young” (Amnesty International 2005: 10). The interpretive schemas and scripts needed to make sense of what happened to them as rape may have emerged long after the actual rape occurred, if at all.
Wood and Rennie (1994) observe that the women provide seemingly ambiguous and contradictory accounts in which they derive their understanding of the event based, in part, on how the perpetrator reacts and subsequently frames the event and his actions. In their research, Scully and Marolla (1984: 146) find that convicted rapists construct non-deviant identities in which they rationalize the rape and displace blame. The women, in their efforts to make sense of their rape and the rapist, incorporate these idealized constructs of the rapists, and they construct identities in which they blame themselves because they failed to take control.they should have done this or should not have done that. They scrutinize their behaviors to determine if they did anything whatsoever that could have been construed as consent.
The women who were enslaved and serially raped in the Japanese “comfort system” would seem to fit easily into the model of the “ideal victims” who experienced “real” or “aggravated” rapes: They were virgins violently raped by multiple strangers. However, as the following analytical chapters will demonstrate, the antagonistic discourse by some in the Japanese Government.which questions the women’s honesty and virtue and frames them as archetypal unvirtuous women, as whores.requires that the survivors not only prove their nonconsent and resistance as “acceptable” rape victims, but that they also demonstrate that they were not prostitutes. The negotiation of the competing frames of prostitution and rape requires their vigilance and the vigilance of those who advocate on their behalf, makes the task of testifying into a tedious endeavor, and subjects them to what is not unlike a second rape or revictimization.
2.2.3.3 The “Ideal” versus the “Prototypical”
Referencing a woman as an “ideal” or “not ideal” or “acceptable” or “unacceptable victim” and characterizing her rape/s as “real,” “simple,” or “aggravated” arguably stigmatizes her further. A way to avoid doing this is to adopt more neutral language to talk about victims of rape and their experience of rape. Rosch’s (1978) notion of prototype (I am grateful to my mentor, Heidi Hamilton, for this insight), has promising application here.
In an examination of the early work on prototype theory and its scholarly offshoots, Violi (2000) notes how “categorical prototypicality” and “semantic typicality” differ.
While her in depth discussion as it is understood in the field of lexical semantics is well outside the scope of this study (see Albertazzi 2000), her discussion of prototype theories is useful to touch on here.
Scholars such as Rosch (1973, 1978), Mervis and Rosch (1981), and Putman (1975) put forward prototype theory in reaction to the “classical” model of representation, “based on the assumption that linguistic meanings can be completely captured by a limited set of features which represent necessary and sufficient conditions for the definition of these meanings.” In her studies of human categorization, Rosch (1978: 36) defines prototypes as “the clearest cases of category membership defined operationally by people’s judgments of goodness of membership in the category.” Violi (2000: 105) carefully notes that Rosch stressed that “what is being actually referred to here are judgments as to the degree of protypicality.” Violi discusses Geeareart’s (1989) attempts to categorize the prototypical bird; however, it is Violi’s (2000: 108-109) discussion of Givon’s (1986: 79) schema that serves as a constructive explanatory model of how the prototypical victim of rape and the protypical rape can be more neutrally conceived.
Following Givon’s schema and the scholarship on rape outlined above, the available prototypical properties (which correspond to the Venn diagraph below) of rape include the following:
(a)
the rapist uses force (weapons e.g., knives, guns, ropes);
(b)
the victim resists the rapist to prove nonconsent;
(c)
the rapist is unknown to the victim;
(d)
the victim is a virgin and has not “contributed” to her attack (by not conforming
to traditional sex roles, being immodestly dressed, having been drinking, etc.).
Figure 2-1: Prototypical Properties of Rape
(a)
(c)
Following Givon (1978) each circle represents a property. The intersection (X) of the four properties (a, b, c and d) is the prototype, or as Violi (2000: 108) puts it, “the abstract entity composed of all the available prototypical properties. In this approach, according to Violi (2000: 108), the “prototype is not derived from real instances, but built up on the basis of properties.” Thus it is possible that in any given concrete instance no individual “satisfies all the abstract conditions, but only a limited number of them” (Violi 2000: 108). While Violi discusses this model to address other ends, its chief application to this study is that the meaning of what is prototypical is derived from regions of “salience”: “where more properties are satisfied, the prototype represents the instance of some better kind of appropriateness” (Violi 2000: 108-109). Conversely, the fewer properties satisfied, the less prototypical the instance. I assert that articulating rape in terms of what is more prototypical or less prototypical could be a way to avoid use of the stigmatized terminology discussed above. Use of this model, however, is not intended to give credence to what is currently determined to be the culturally “salient” prototypical properties of rape. Destigmatizing the discourse of rape is a step toward destigmatizing the raped and challenging the so-called “salient” properties.
2.3 Positioning
As mentioned, Bamberg and Andrews (2004: ix-x) assert that identifying what is dominant and what is resistant can be problematic as they are constantly in flux. They have dealt with this issue in their own work by applying the notion of positioning. As Schiffrin (1996: 169) asserts, “we verbally locate ourselves (and position ourselves, Davies and Harre 1990) in relation to discourse contexts, thereby defining ourselves through what we say, how we say it, and to whom we say it.” Schiffrin (1996: 169) also notes that in defining ourselves in relation to others, we discursively construct “who we are” in the stories we tell by creating a storyworld that we people with others and “ourselves against a backdrop of cultural expectations about a typical course of action; our identities as social beings emerge as we construct our own individual experiences as a way to position ourselves in relation to social and cultural expectations."
In the data I examine, the survivors attempt to construct themselves as credible,
prototypical victims of sex slavery and Japan as their enslaver, while they resist being positioned as prostitutes and liars. To be judged reliable narrators, the women must either comply with or counter the master narratives of rape, sex slavery, and prostitution. This puts multiple positioning demands on them as they balance these competing master narratives, so the women in turn take up multiple positions to construct themselves as prototypical victims/sex slaves. At the same time, they must negotiate their stigmatized identities and deny the claims that they are lying.
Davies and Harre (1990:48) define positioning as “the discursive process whereby selves are located in conversation as observably and subjectively coherent participants in jointly produced story lines.” They further posit that positions are potentially seen and interpreted by the participants “in terms of known roles (actual or metaphorical) or in terms of known characters in shared story lines, or they may be much more ephemeral and involve shifts in power, access, or blocking access, to certain features of claimed or desired identity, and so on” (49). They posit two types of positioning: interactive positioning, where “what one says positions another” (48) and reflexive positioning, “in which one positions oneself” (48).
VanLangenhove and Harre (1999) further delineate first and second order positioning: the former “refers to the way persons locate themselves and others within an essentially moral space by using several categories and storylines,” (20) while the latter, occurs when the first order positioning is not taken up, or rather is rejected or questioned and requires negotiation.
Extending Davies and Harre (1990), Talbot et al. (1996).in their analysis of interviews with two “at risk” pregnant women.apply three levels of positioning first identified by Bamberg (1997):
.
Positioning 1: the story figures are positioned in relation to one another within time and space of the recounted event;
.
Positioning 2: the narrator positions herself to the audience;
.
Positioning 3: the narrator displays particular notions of selves.
Talbot et al. (1996) assert that identity claims are made in the third order of positioning. Others such as Moghaddam (1999) also stress the dialogicality or mutually-influencing relationship between reflexive, interpersonal, and intergroup positioning and emphasizes that positioning does not occur in a cultural vacuum, nor is it isolated from “specific moral orders in which speakers are operating” (80). Carbaugh (1999: 160), in his discussion of positioning as display of cultural identity, develops the idea that
through primarily linguistic interaction, participants publicly constitute social standings (not necessarily ‘statuses’) as moral agents in society, on the assumption that various forms and meanings of personhood are discursively ‘positioned,’ and that these discursive constructions are historically grounded, culturally distinct, socially negotiated and individually applied.
Both Moghaddam (1999) and Carbaugh (1999) warn against transferring western ideologies and modes of analysis, i.e., tense variation, pronominalization, etc., to exuberant and deficient (Becker 1995; Ortega 1957,) translations of distant texts into English. See further discussion of translation issues in Chapters 3 and 6.
Positioning theory is relevant to discovering the discursive production of the self or identity. The positions one takes up in relation to master narratives are discoverable. In the testimonies I examine, it is possible to discover how each woman conceives of herself and others in both the story and story telling worlds. This provides a more comprehensive understanding of what Schiffrin (1996) posits is not really the self but rather the presentation of self.
Positioning was developed as a way of getting around the more static notion of role and Role Theory. Davies and Harre assert “that the dynamic concept of positioning oneself in a discourse in not reducible to adopting a frame though a frame may well come along with a position, nor is it reducible to a change of key, even though that one is positioned may be revealed in a change” (1990: 53). Bamberg (2005: np) asserts the theory of positioning “builds on the metaphors of place to characterize the subjective sense of location, suggesting that notions of ‘self’ and ‘identity’ entail ‘being in place.’” The metaphor of positioning, as opposed to footing (in a frame), seems a more intuitive match with the analysis carried out in this analysis. Though I utilize the notion of positioning, I still rely on the interpretive theories of frames, schema, and scripts; and I do not see them in conflict with positioning.
2.4 Frames, Schemas, and Scripts
In this section, I identify a few terms as they are used in the analysis and the foundational work as it relates to this study. As I adopt Tannen’s (1993a; See also Gordon 2003 and forthcoming) definition of frame and knowledge schemas, I provide a brief introduction as to the origins and evolution of the term as it applies to discourse analysis.
Informed by his observations of primates, anthropologist Bateson ([1955] 1972), introduced the concepts of frames and metamessages to account for how humans make sense of everyday activities. Meta-assertions or metamessages shape or set a frame and then this frame constrains how what is done or said is interpreted. Building on Bateson’s work, Goffman (1974, 1981) asserted that humans need to understand frames to effectively communicate. Goffman (1981: 128) introduced the concept of footings, which he defines as “the alignments we take up to ourselves and the others present as expressed in the way we manage the production or reception of an utterance.” Tannen (1984: 23) says that Goffman’s work demonstrates that “no message can be interpreted except by reference to a superordinate message about how the communication is intended” (Tannen 1984: 23). Tannen (1984; 1979; 1993a) brought framing to bear as an interpretive frameworks in the discourse analysis of face-to-face interactions.
This grew out of her earlier work on the structure of expectations. In their examination of videotaped pediatric examinations/interviews, Tannen and Wallat (1993: 59) demonstrate how frames and schemas “interact in and affect communication.” They redefine the term frame of interpretation in a Bateson sense so that frame means speakers have a “sense of what activity is being engaged in” (60); they adopt Goffman’s term for footing, as well as the linguistic cues and markers that signal changes in footing. They refer to knowledge structures as schemas which “refer to participants” expectations about people objects, events and setting in the world, as distinguished from alignments being negotiated in a particular interaction.” (60) Thus no utterance can be understood apart from its “pattern of prior knowledge” (60). Tannen and Wallat (1993) demonstrate how mismatched knowledge schemas can trigger frame changes which place additional burden on a speaker as she juggles the competing frames and their internal demands.
According to Chafe (1990: 80), the mind is both guided “and constrained by schemas: prepackaged expectations and ways of interpreting that are already available to it.” Though, as he asserts, such schemas are particular to individuals, “to a large extent, however, they will have been supplied by the society of minds of which that individual mind is a member” (Chafe 1990: 80). Our culture.including religions, ideologies, folklores, and systems of education.provides these prepackaged models and we apply them to new encounters. Similarly, Schiffrin (1996: 117) asserts “the way we tell our stories also reveals a self that exists within a cultural matrix of meanings, beliefs, and normative practices.”
2.5 Constructing the Credible Self
The survivors are held accountable for and blamed for what happened to them by the master narrative of rape and the adversarial discourse that puts forth the master narrative of prostitution. In addition to managing the competing master narratives, a survivor has the added burden of constructing herself as a reliable narrator and of creating a coherent, credible account. Shuman (2005: 57) asserts that while “all narratives create coherence out of fragmented events, trauma-survivors additionally recount the experiences that are not only fragmentary but also inexplicable; the stories are about things that should not have happened.” As discussed earlier, the survivors must grapple with what Labov (1997) calls the reportability paradox.
Blamed, accused, and stigmatized, a sex slave survivor must construct herself as a reliable narrator by accounting for what happened to her through negation and explanation. To create a credible story, she utilizes the involvement strategies of providing details in the form of sound symbolism, constructed dialogue, and repetition to create an “objective” experience for the listener (Tannen 1989). And finally as a way of making sense, she constructs her personal theory of causality, or the way she makes sense of why what happened to her happened. I examine the relevant literature in turn.
2.5.1 Negation
In the data I examine, Hwang and the other interviewees utilize negation as one means of evaluation. The grammatical means to negate an affirmative proposition is thought to exist in every spoken language (Horn 1989: xiii) and has been analyzed by scholars of syntax, morphology, semantics, and logic. For example, studies conducted by psycholinguistics in the sixties that found that “negative sentences are more difficult to comprehend than the corresponding affirmative sentence” have continued to be validated, “thus confirming the cognitively marked status of negation” (Horn 1989: xiii).
The pragmatic functions of negation, in the form of negative sentences and utterances as they serve to deny a proposition either explicitly or implicitly, has been explored by Labov (1972), Givon (1978; 1979a; 1979b; 2001), Leech (1981; 1983), Horn (1985; 1989), and others. Leech (1981: 297) focuses on the pragmatic function of negation as a denial. Givon’s (1978: 79) claim that “negative sentences in language are uttered in more complex presuppositional contexts” is still supported by recent work, i.e., Pagano (1991), Hwang (1992), and Yamada (2000).
In addressing the presuppositionality (see Yamada 2000, Chapter 2, for a discussion of Horn’s and Givon’s use of the term presupposition) of negation and the affirmative-negative opposition, Givon (1978: 85) asserts that a negative sentence is used in contexts “where the speaker believes that the hearer holds certain belief in the truth of the corresponding affirmative.” Most scholars of negation align with Yamada’s (2000: 68) assertion that “negation is the marked member of the affirmative-negative opposition.” According to Givon (1978: 79) in uttering and understanding negative assertions, interlocutors rely on and refer to knowledge from previous interactions (See Hamilton’s 1996 definition of intertextuality17). And, “this belief may have arisen as a result of the preceding discourse, though quite often it is grounded in the general knowledge of the pragmatics of what is or is not normative action” (Givon 1978: 85). Yamada (2000:46) asserts that both Givon and Horn concur that “the corresponding affirmative need not be actually mentioned: though this is one potential context.” Accordingly, Yamada (2000:46) asserts, “the essential point is the hearer’s ‘familiarity’ with the corresponding affirmative.” 17 In her examination of how she and an Alzheimer’s patient co-construct meaning across several interactions, Hamilton (1996:64) posits that “intertextuality” refers to “the ways in which speakers/writers use language to establish and maintain ties between the current linguistic interaction (i.e., conversation) and prior ones involving the same participants, as well as the ways in which listeners/readers identify and use these ties to help them (re)construct a (the speaker’s/writer’s?) meaning.”
Drawing on Givon (1978), Pagano (1991), and Hwang (1992), Yamada (2000: 165) in his study on negation in Japanese narratives claims that expectations are based on two sources: “(1) expectations may be derived from text-process information, or (2) they may also come from background information.” As he says, “negative utterances acting as implicit denials function to deny two different kinds of expectation, namely text-based expectation and background.” The first type are primarily “narrative-internal,” information made available in the story telling or story worlds, and the latter are “narrative-external,” which include knowledge of “cultural norms and on general human inclinations” (165). The background/narrative-external expectations are further delineating into three categories: “(1) denials of personal background expectation, (2) denials of cultural background expectation, and (3) denials of universal background expectation (214-215).” These break down along the lines of private versus public domains. Thus, he concludes “our background based expectations are closely linked to our uses of negation” (218).
In her examination of spoken and written discourse, Tottie (1991) posits a discourse-functional taxonomy of negative sentences. There are two types of denial: explicit and implicit. Accordingly, explicit denial denies “a proposition which has been explicitly asserted” (21), whereas implicit denial denies “a proposition which might have been expected, or which can be contextually inferred but which has not been asserted by anyone (21). Thus, what defines explicit versus implicit denials is the context in which it occurs, the linguistic text, and the extra-linguistic context, respectively (Yamada 2000: 140-141). Fairclough’s (1992: 121) assertion that “negative sentences carry special types of presupposition which also work intertextually, incorporating other texts only in order to contest and reject them” serves as summary for how these scholars are variously articulating and defining text and context as it relates to negative assertions. In his discussion of comparators, Labov (1972: 380) identifies negation as a type of evaluation that can work singularly or in conjunction with other comparators. He asks “what reason would the narrator have for telling us that something did not happen since he is in the business of telling us what did happen?” Accordingly, he (1972: 380-381) says that mentioning what did not happen, “expresses the defeat of an expectation that something would happen.” Tannen (1993: 23, 44) in her examination of surface evidence for underlying expectation or “structure of expectations,” shows how her approach aligns with Labov’s as she asserts that “the use of a negative statement is one of the most frequent indications that an expectation is not being met” and that generally, “a negative statement is made only when its affirmation was expected.”
As I examine Korean data in Chapters 4 and 5, a brief introduction to Korean negation is provided here; however, additional explanation is provided in the analysis where relevant. Hwang (1992) examined negative utterances in written Korean and English narratives and put forward the following five-pronged functional taxonomy.
(1)
Explanation (providing explanatory statements of more intensity than affirmative counterparts.)
(2)
Denial of expectation from the frame (showing a break from related items that normally exists together)
(3)
Denial of expectation from the script (presenting a break from normal sequence of events, often coupled with the conjunction but)
(4)
Turning point of a narrative (leading to a change in the plot structure)
(5) High tension point of a narrative (in a cluster, creating an atmosphere of high tension and help to mark the peak)
In Korean there are two morphemes that express negation: an (.) and mos (.).
These markers can occur in both pre- and post-verbal positions as follows (modified from Lee 1993:313).
(1) preverbal negation: an (.) / mos ( .) VERB
(2) postverbal negation: VERB.ci (.) an (.) / mos ( .) hata(..)
According to Lee (1993: 314), the co-occurrence restrictions for the two markers differ. “An can occur with any predicate (verb or adjective), but mos has some restrictions,” it does not occur in the preverbal position with stative predicates. In the two instances of negation examined below, the marker an (.) is used in the preverbal position. Lee
asserts that their distributional differences are semantically and pragmatically motivated. The two differ in the potential cause for the verb they modify. I provide Lee’s (1993: 316) example (11) to demonstrate how the two markers differ.
a. ... .. .....
kkomaka papul an meknunta The kid will not eat the rice.
b. ..........
kkomak papul mos mekmunta. The kid cannot eat the rice.
While both sentences imply the absence of action of eating, the cause for the absence
differs; one is internal and the other external. An (.) he says is an internal negation
marker, “the action can be determined by the agent himself, that is, internally by his will.” Alternatively, mos (.) implies the absence “of the action can be caused by external factors, such as lack of cooked rice, no time to eat, physical discomfort, etc.,” (316). Since the absence is caused “despite the agent’s desire, will or willingness to eat,”
(316), mos (.) is termed an external marker of negation. As shown above, when these morphemes are used in conjunction with action verbs they denote the absence of process, when used with stative verbs they indicate an absence of state. Though others have treated preverbal and postverbal negation in Korean as synonomous, Lee (1993: 327) argues that when their semantic and pragmatic behaviors are examined, they differ: “preverbal negation does not presuppose the speaker’s
assumption about the listener’s knowledge and awareness, whereas postverbal negation does” (327).
2.5.2 Explanation
As the survivors construct themselves as credible narrators they are called upon to explain or account for the ways in which their stories deviate from the master narratives. I reviewed Scott and Lyman’s (1968) accounts and Linde’s (1993) explanations and found Linde to be more applicable for the reasons explained below.
According to Scott and Lyman (1968:46-47), an account is “a statement made by a social actor to explain unanticipated or untoward behavior” and is different from an explanation, which is “about events where untoward action is not an issue.” An account “is a linguistic device employed whenever an action is subjected to valuative inquiry” and which bridges “the gap between action and expectation” (46). Accounts can be divided into two categories, excuses and justifications. When one offers a justification, one “accepts responsibility for the act in question, but denies the pejorative quality associated with it” (47). In contrast, when one offers an excuse, “one admits that the action in question is bad, wrong, or inappropriate but denies full responsibility (47). Scott and Lyman (1968: 47) assert that excuses are based on appeals to accidents, to defeasibility, or biological drives, and scapegoating. In the testimonies I examine, some of the survivors seem to be accounting for their unmarried and, by the Confucian standards of the time, deviant status by appealing to defeasibility. In an appeal to defeasibility, one argues that one was “not fully informed” or that one’s “‘will’ was not fully ‘free’” (48). They wanted to marry but were not able to for external reasons. The difficulty with excuses is that while the women are working against a larger cultural norm that they are “untoward” for not being married, they are not excusing some specific act.
The survivors seem cognizant of their deviation from the master narrative of marriage and are working to construct themselves as virtuous victims to align themselves with the master narratives of rape and slavery. Since they are not excusing a specific act, Linde’s (1993) idea of explanation seems to describe more accurately their efforts at repair. For Linde (1993: 90), an “explanation begins with a statement of some proposition to be proved and then follows it with a sequence of statements of reasons (often multiply embedded reasons) why the proposition should be believed,” what she says Schriffrin (1985) calls “position” and “support.” Since the statement is followed by the reasons it should be believed, the markers “because” and “so” are frequently used (Linde 1993: 91). Further, Linde asserts that explanations are used “to establish the truth of propositions about which the speakers themselves are uncomfortable, or to defend propositions whose validity they feel their addressee has in some way challenged.” Linde’s idea of explanation describes more aptly what the survivors are doing as they grapple with the master narratives that position them as deviant and unvirtuous. They construct explanations because they themselves are “uncomfortable” with their unmarried status or because they are defending their virtuousness, which has been challenged.
Orbuch (1997: np) asserts that recent work on accounts “still recognizes these verbal and written statements as social explanations of events, but it places far less emphasis on the construction of accounts to justify unexpected or disrupted social interaction.” She also notes that current scholars broaden the focus to consider "story-like" interpretations or explanations (Bruner 1990; Harvey et al.1990; Maines 1993; McAdams et al. 1996; Surra et al. 1995; Veroff et al. 1993). Linde’s idea of explanation remains most relevant to my discussion as the survivors are attempting to “justify unexpected or disrupted social interaction” (Orbuch 1997: np).
2.6 Constructing a Credible Narrative: Involvement Strategies
In the previous section, I examined the linguistic strategies the survivors use to construct themselves as reliable historians and narrators. In this section, I examine the work of primarily Chafe, Tannen, and Labov as it relates to how the narrator constructs her narrative as credible so she can more effectively refute the master narrative of prostitution and posit herself as a credible sex slave. I examine how she combats the “Reportability Paradox” as she transforms her subjective experience into an objective one for the listener to create a more direct, and thereby more credible, experience for the listener.
Chafe (1994) makes the distinction between two modes of consciousness. the “extroverted” consciousness, which is directly activated by the external environment, and "introverted" consciousness, which is based on remembering and imagining. The extroverted consciousness “has access to a wealth of detail” (Chafe 1994: 202) which is not characteristic of the displaced mode of remembering or imagining, which he describes as “island-like” (204); “extroverted consciousness is continuous,” however, is stream-like (204).
The narrator can use a number of devices, including specific detail, reported speech, shifts in verb tense to the historical present, or deictic shifts, to activate the audience’s extroverted consciousness as these devices bring “a quality of immediacy to a displaced experience” (Chafe 1994: 217). This brings the distal or remembered event into the proximity of the audience so that they feel as though they are experiencing the events. This experience seems less interpreted by the speaker and so can be evaluated more objectively by the listener.
As mentioned, the narrators in the data I examine are caught in Labov’s Reportability Paradox. Labov (1997) extends his earlier notion of reportability by introducing the notion of the most reportable event, which is defined as, “the event that is less common than any other in the narrative and has the greatest effect upon the needs and desires of the participants in the narrative (is evaluated most strongly)” (406). Labov (1997:407) states that “reportability is inversely correlated with credibility which means that as reportability increases, credibility decreases.” The narrator uses evaluation as a resource in constructing herself as credible. In his work on the evaluation in narrative, Labov says that evaluative clauses are those clauses in the narrative that serve as evaluation of the narrative event.
Labov (1972; 1997; 2006) draws a distinction between internal and external evaluation. Evaluation may be provided either externally or internally; in other words, the storyteller may provide evaluation externally in the storytelling world, or evaluation may be embedded by actors within the story world. In addressing objectivity, Labov (1997: 414) says that “those narratives that have the greatest impact upon audiences […] which seize the attention of listeners and allow them to share the experience of the narrator.are those that the use the most objective means of expression.” He aligns with Chafe (1994) and Tannen (1989) as he asserts that the evaluation embedded in the story is more immediate, and more involving, and therefore more objective.
He distinguishes between an objective event and a subjective event: “An objective event is one that became known to the narrator through sense experience. A subjective event is one that the narrator became aware of through memory, emotional reaction or internal sensation.” He suggests that while there is not yet empirical data to support it, “some experimental evidence supports the belief” that the more objectivly an event is represented, the more credible it is perceived to be. As Tannen (1983: 368) puts it, “internal evaluation is more effective because it allows hearers, guided by the invisible hand of internal evaluation, to draw the intended conclusions about characters and events, and thereby to feel (rather than be told) the point of the story.”
Tannen (1997) posits her theory of involvement in discourse, as “a reflection of the interactive nature of language” (138), a theory that parallels Bakhtin’s notion of dialogue. Her theory “grows out of a view that language is fundamentally interactive and grounded in context; of meaning as the result of interplay between novelty and fixity; and of meaning as created by listeners as well as speakers in response to prior text” (Tannen 1997: 141). She asserts that conversational rendering versus literary rendering of the same material/events is more involving and poetic. To demonstrate the theoretical positions stated above, she compares the conversational and fictional texts of the Greek novelist Lilika Nakos. In so doing, she demonstrates that more “involvement strategies” are at work in an author’s conversational rendition than in her literary representation of the same event. She also demonstrates that conversational genre is more poetic (Friedrich) than literary discourse by showing how the “rhythmic chunking (Chafe) [...] created by intonation and prosody” (Tannen 1997:144) works in tandem with repetition, tropes, figures of speech, and ellipsis to create poetics and involve the listener.
In earlier work on the concept of involvement, Tannen (1989) combines Gumperz’s notion for involvement, which “describes observable, active participation in conversation" (11), with Chafe’s notion, in which he “describes a more psychological, internal state which shows itself in observable linguistic phenomena” (11). She also adopts (1) Kristeva’s idea of intertextuality and joint production, as well as Bakhtin and Volsohinov’s theory that all language is dialogic, (2) Becker’s aesthetic response, and (3) the conversational analysis approach to discourse as interactional achievement.
Tannen (1989) examines the various ways involvement strategies work to create meaning in discourse. Through sound and rhythm, for example, participants become rhythmic or musical, and through sense patterns they “become meaningfully, mythically involved” (17), as music together with scenes triggers emotion. Next, she discusses a range of involvement strategies. Repetition (as discussed below) is found at all levels of discourse: phonemes, morphemes, phrases, sentences, and longer discourse segments. Also, numerous types of figures of speech are used creatively by speakers. As participants in sense making, speakers/writers use indirectness, ellipsis, and silence which require the listeners/readers to work out unstated meaning. Similarly, tropes such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony are ways to say one thing but mean another. Constructed dialogue (also discussed below) in narrative and non-narrative conversation is yet another way to create involvement. Similarly, imagery and details are used to invoke scenes: “Images combine with dialogue to create scenes; dialogue combines with repetition to create rhythm” (Tannen 1989: 29). All of these work together to create an emotional response in the listener/reader, which “is a significant source of the language’s power.its ability to fire the individual imagination” (Tannen 1989:32). Finally, “part of the impact of dialogue, and of details and images, is their particularity” (Tannen 1989: 34).
In the data I examine, the women use details as a way of involving the listener and creating a more direct experience for the listener. Though they also use metaphors, I focus on Hwang’s use of figurative language in the form of sounds symbolism as a strategy to involve the listener and create a more credible and direct experience.
Tannen (1989: 135) “explores how details create images, images create scenes, and scenes spark emotions, making possible both understanding and involvement” in both oral and written discourse. She outlines a number of examples that demonstrate how details are used to create images in conversation and suggests that images “are more convincing and more memorable than abstract propositions” (Tannen 1989:137). Because they are often more persuasive and thus more involving, they may also serve as internal evaluation. She points out that details are prevalent in narratives, not only contributing to the story, but often constituting it. They also, as mentioned above, create images which set a scene that can reinforce the authenticity of the narrative, contribute to its point, or aid the speaker in the presentation of self. Details in narratives are often found in the orientation, the most reportable event (climax), or in descriptively rich segments, and are associated with naming and listing strategies. In the forthcoming analysis (in Chapter 6), I examine the narrator’s use of details to form a list, other sensory details and sound symbolism.
The survivors’ use of details in their testimonies may reflect, as Johnstone (1990) asserts, the local norms of what constitutes a story and why one is told. In her examination of Midwestern narratives, Johnstone (1990: 91) identifies two distinct types of orientation detail, “thematic,” and “extrathematic.” Extrathematic orientation details index precise location and time of action; they inject the narratives with a sense of factuality, but do not directly contribute to the point of the narrative as they have “no crucial bearing on the story’s outcome” (202). Additionally, “extrathematic orientation constitutes new information for the story’s audience” (Johnstone 1990: 202). Johnstone (1990) found that the narrators used “orientational details which, for the purposes for setting a story’s scene, seem overly-specified” (200). Because of the relative high value that Fort Wayner’s place on factuality in recounting personal experiences, narrators conform to the local story telling norms by making their stories “sound factual” (Johnstone 1990: 208). The extrathematic details may be interspersed, due to variation of what counts as a good story. Hwang, whose testimony I examine in Chapter 6, may or may not be by Korean standards a “good” storyteller, but she tells a believable story, by including many details that lend to the factuality and credibility of her story.
Two other scholars who connect details to involvement and whose work supports Johnstone’s (1990) findings, include Gonzalez (2001) and Cots (2003). Cots (2003) demonstrates how Catalan narrators use involvement strategies in conversational stories told to resolve interpersonal conflicts. These strategies include details, imagery (including figurative language), hyperbole constructed with repetition, external evaluation, and discourse markers. According to Cots (2003: 13-14), in Gonzalez’s (2001) contrastive study of Catalan and English oral narratives, she found “that Catalan stories contain a greater amount of description than English stories.” She concludes that “it is possible, therefore, to hypothesize that there is a link between the provision of details and imagery in a story and the narrator’s cultural style” (Cots 2003: 13-14).
2.6.1 Sound Symbolism
In the forthcoming analysis I focus on a narrator’s use of sound symbolism. In their
edited volume, Hinton, Nichols, and Ohala (1994) assert “that sound symbolism plays a
larger role in language than scholarship has hitherto recognized” (1994:1). Ohala’s
(1984) Frequency Code, as summarized in Hinton, Nichoils, and Ohala (1994: 10; 2006),
states that
high tones, vowels with high formants (notably /i/), and high frequency consonants are associated with high-frequency sounds, small size, sharpness, and rapid movement; low tone, vowels with low second formants (notably /u/), and low-frequency consonants are associated with low-frequency sounds, large size, softness, and heavy, slow movements.
However, Diffloth’s (1994) study of Mon Khmer sound-symbolic vowels, in that same
volume, asserts a reversal of this Frequency Code.
The semantic and pragmatics fields of sound-symbolic vocabulary as delineated in
Hinton et al. (1994: 10) include the following categories:
(1)
mimicry of environmental and internal sounds;
(2)
expression of internal states of being, both physical and emotional;
(3)
expression of social relationships (as in diminutive forms and vocatives and imperatives); also the expression of opprobrium and stigma;
(4)
salient characteristics of objects and activities, such as movement, size, shape, color, and texture;
(5)
grammatical and discourse indicators, such as intonational markers of discourse and sentence structure, and distinctions between parts of speech;
(6)
expression of the evaluative and affective relationship of the speaker to the subject being discussed.
Categories 1-3 are believed to represent “the non-human animal world” and not be
characteristic of human communication; only Categories 5-6 are thought to be “(almost) uniquely human of human language” and “thought to be largely represented by arbitrary linguistic forms” (Hiniton et al 1994: 10-11).
Despite this knowledge, few studies have focused on the function of sound symbolism in naturally occurring conversations, and fewer have examined the role of sound symbolism in narratives. Tannen (1983; 1989) and Nuckolls (1996) both examine the function of sound symbolism in narratives and are relevant to the data I examine. In her study of Greek women’s narratives of molestation, Tannen (1983; 1989) examines the narrators’ use of sound symbolism or what she calls “sound non-words” (in addition to other linguistic features) as involving detail. In the data I analyze, the narrator also uses mimetic details in conjunction with other sensory details to draw the listener more deeply into the scene and involve her.
One other comprehensive study is Nuckolls (1996: 3); following Tannen, she examines the “sounds of sound" in Quechua and asserts that sound symbolism “is central to [Quechuan] peoples' discursive practice” as it “pervades the architecture of the language, providing speakers with a rich inventory of expressive possibilities.” They use sound symbolism to create a sense of “concrete movement, rhythm, or process unfolding in time” (3), as they simulate the surrounding natural world. Similar to Tannen (1983; 1989), Nuckolls asserts that Quechuans use sounds symbolism as an involvement device.
In the chapter Nuckolls (1996) devotes to sound symbolism involvement, she asserts that a speaker's performative foregrounding of a sound-symbolic form simulates the salient qualities of an action, event, or process and thereby invites a listener to project herself into an experience. A listener projects into a sound-symbolic performance in a way that is analogous to a viewer's projection into a cinematic image. A cinematic image "is not presented as an evoking of a past reality, but as a fiction the subject is in the process of living" (Kristeva 1989: 315). Sound-symbolic descriptions give both speaker and listener alike an opportunity to share, even if only for a moment, their cognitive focus on the sensory qualities of an action, event, or process. Nuckoll (1996: 3) claims that sound symbolism works as iconic imagery as it “establishes a direct connection between a sign and an object” and as such is ideal as an involving device.
In Chapter 6, I provide an introduction to sounds symbolism and give more detail on Tannen’s (1983; 1989) examination of the Greek women’s narratives of molestation and other relevant literature.
2.6.2 Constructed Dialogue
Another involvement device utilized by the women in this study is their use of constructed dialogue as an involving device. Tannen (1989) proposes that speech conventionally called reported speech in conversational discourse is, in fact, constructed dialogue. She maintains that direct quotes are not as “clear cut” as assumed and are “primarily the creation of the speaker rather than the party quoted” (99). By drawing short examples from several conversations, she proposes ten types of constructed dialogue that have traditionally been classified as reported speech and consider the function of reported speech in narratives: “The representation of speech in dialogue is a narrative act, not the inevitable result of the occurrence of speech in the episode. By setting up a little play, a speaker portrays motivations and other subtle evaluations internally-from within the play.rather than externally” (125).
Chafe (1994) contends that “by far the most common motivation for direct speech is to introduce evaluative information associated with an earlier speech event” (217). In this way, “the distal event is remembered as one that communicated affect through exclamations, repetitions, colloquial vocabulary, or prosody” (217). He asserts the direct speech is used in conjunction with the historical present are devices the narrator can use to “bring immediacy to displaced experience” (217) in narratives. He also emphasizes the special case that direct speech can be used with “when the verbatim language itself has some special relevance” (217).
2.6.3 Repetition
The narrators in the data I examine use repetition as an involvement device to construct a credible experience for the listener. I provide a brief summary of Tannen’s (1989, Chapter 3) comprehensive overview of her own and others’ approach to repetition’s function as an involvement strategy. Tannen first addresses the theoretical implications of repetition. Hymes, Bolinger, and Becker suggest that all discourse is more or less prepatterned. Tannen asserts that repetition is found at all levels of discourse: phonemes, morphemes, phrases, sentences, and longer discourse segments, and that prepatterning, idiomaticity, and formulaicity are all resources for creativity. She (1989: 37) states, “it is the play between fixity and novelty that makes possible the creation of meaning” (37). Prepatterning in discourse ranges from frozen or maximally prepatterned, i.e., from situational formulas, such as greetings, to idioms and prepatterned expressions which are less highly-fixed. It is the altering, decomposing, reconstructing, or fusing of these formulas that attests to the fact that “fixity of expression can be as source of rather than an impediment to creativity” (42).
Tannen also identifies four functions of repetition: it enables speakers to produce language in a more economical manner; it facilitates comprehension, as there is a lighter semantic load for interlocutors to carry; it functions as a cohesive device, both between old and new discourse; and it shows how ideas in discourse are related to each other. Finally, “repetition also functions on the interactional level of talk: accomplishing social goals or managing the business of the conversation” (51). She asserts that the over-arching function of repetition is to create interpersonal involvement by sending the meta-message of involvement. Despite the common belief that repetition is undesirable, she finds that repetition is pervasive, functional, and often automatic. She analyzes several examples to demonstrate the range of functions that it serves. It can, for example, demonstrate participation, be used to stall or slow down the discourse to enable a non-substantive response, or even to make it possible to savor the story. Repetition can be used to expand on another’s discourse. Through repetition, evaluation can be demonstrated by patterned rhythm. Repetition can also serve to bind episodes within the discourse. Tannen presents an example that demonstrates the range of repetition that can occur, such as verse structure, lexical and phonemic repetition, repetition of pronouns and discourse markers. She suggests that there may in fact be some culturally patterned strategies of repetition. The narrators in the data I examine use repetition, in conjunction with constructed dialogue and sound symbolism to create a more direct and therefore more credible experience for the audience.
2.7 Intertextuality and Translation
Inherent in the claim that dominant discourses or master narratives are countered or subverted is the notion of dialogicality; these texts mutually, discursively re/produce each other. As the women in this study refute the master narratives of prostitution, and comply with the master narratives of rape and slavery, their discourse, like all discourse is looking forward but also looking back; it is intertextual. I bring up the notion of intertextuality only to address its relevance in the context of this study. (The complexity of Bakhtin’s work and the scholars of his work are beyond the scope of this study. See Bakhtin [1952-53] 1986, [1975] 1981; Kristeva [1974] 1984, 1989; Todorov 1984; Morson and Emerson 1990; Holquist 1990; Tannen 1989, 1997; Gordon 2003; and Tovares 2005.) The forthcoming discussion of negation and involvement strategies (as discussed above) are rooted in the notion of intertextuality, whether this term is used or not.
In the examination of the testimonies, I draw on Becker’s (1995) extension of Ortega’s (1959) axioms that every utterance is deficient and that every utterance is exuberant, and his notions of languaging and prior texts (see Ch. 3: Methodology). I also rely on Tannen’s (1989; 1997) theory of involvement. Tannen asserts that her “notion of involvement is analogous to Bakhtin’s notion of dialogue; it grows out of a view of language as fundamentally interactive and grounded in context; of meaning as the result of interplay between novelty and fixity; and of meaning as created by listeners as well as speakers in response to prior text” (Tannen 1997:147).
According to Morson and Emerson (1990:4), the term “intertextuality,” commonly thought to be Bahktin’s term, originated with Kristeva (1974). Drawing on Bakhtin’s concept of dialogue she uses the term to mean that that all texts are informed by other texts; she does not restrict her notion of text to utterances and sentences.
Becker advocates for a “truly interpretive linguistics, a linguistics of particularity” (1995:73). Accordingly, language cannot be reduced to one level, and is seen as having two constraints: species-wide and individual. His emphasis on esthetics refers to how “we are appropriated by an event, integrated with it” (301). Becker posits that using language requires the integration of making sounds, building structures, evoking prior text, interacting with others, and referring to the world (302). As such he offers the notion of languaging, which “combines shaping, storing, retrieving, and communicating knowledge into one open-ended process” (1995:9). He says (1995:15) “languaging is inherited not as grammatical rules or patterned lexicons but particularly, in particular memories of particular instances of languaging,” and what he calls prior texts. “Languaging is shaping old texts into new contexts. It is done at the level of particularity” (1995:9) and as such, all discourse “is of necessity the study of particularity.” Becker uses translation of distant texts to demonstrate a larger point. Our ultimate challenge is to contextualize every text, not just distant ones as we often encounter foreignness or distance even in texts of our own language.
Chapter 3: Methodology
3.1 Introduction
In this chapter, I provide an introduction to the ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in the process of procuring the data examined in this study. I provide the rationale for specific choices I made in selecting this data and the background on various sources of the data. I tell how it was collected and provide information on the interviewees, interview dynamics and participatory frameworks. I then turn to describing the process of transcribing and translation and provide specific notes on translation mechanics and terminology used in the text. I also touch on the recurring tensions or issues I grappled with during the process of the translation.
3.2 Ethnography
The analysis undertaken in this study has a strong ethnographic underpinning. According to Agar, “ethnography is neither subjective nor objective; it is interpretive, mediating two worlds through a third” (1986:19). In this fieldwork, as I have taken up the role of mediator, there have been several vital considerations. First, to participate in the former Korean sex slave speech community (Gumperz 1961; Hymes 1972; Saville-Troike 1982), I had to negotiate various roles. As a non-Korean and a non-native speaker of Korean, my access to the speech community was limited. However, de-emphasizing my “researcher” status and emphasizing my role as “learner” in this speech community seemed to enhance my eventual acceptance. Certainly, my outsider status hindered my efforts to mitigate the observer’s paradox (Labov 1972; Milroy 1987), as the potential disturbance I created impacted the communicative norms I hoped to observe. Nonetheless, as Burton (1978:169-9) argues, my extensive participation in this speech community gradually lessened the impact that my status as researcher imposed.
Agar (1986:21) equips ethnographers with an ethnographic language to “propose their work, discuss it as it progresses, or evaluate its results” (11). This language includes a number of terms/concepts that facilitate the process of doing and describing ethnography. Agar describes the following process. First, when a schema is applied to a script and our “expectations are not met” (21), a breakdown occurs. When a breakdown occurs, the ethnographer must make inferences to eliminate or incorporate the breakdown into a revised schema through a process of resolution. This newly resolved and coherent schema must be readily applicable to subsequent scripts. While doing a six-month ethnography in South Korea, I encountered many situations that defied my expectations and went through the process of breakdown and resolution. Understanding Agar’s process beforehand made incorporating those breakdowns easier.
To give a brief synopsis, I went to the Republic of Korea (a.k.a. South Korea) from June to December of 2001 with the aim of collecting my dissertation data. A Korea Foundation language fellowship allowed me to take Korean classes at Yonsei University and get involved in the community of sex slave survivors. As described in the prologue, I began attending the weekly Wednesday protests to learn more about the redress movement and to meet some of the halmoni. I also volunteered at the Korean Council and, eventually, volunteered and lived at the House of Sharing.
The women and their allies, particularly those organized by the Korean Council, have been protesting almost two decades. They held their first demonstration on January 12, 1992, in response to Japan’s unwillingness to take up the matter of its wartime sex slave system. The women have protested for the past 828 (as of August 27, 2008) consecutive Wednesdays to oppose Japan’s recalcitrant refusal, even in the face the irrefutable proof, to acknowledge, apologize for, and provide legal remuneration for the crimes against humanity the Japanese military perpetrated against them.
Initially, I felt out of place, like an intruder, at the Wednesday “demos.” As an unfamiliar, non-Asian face, my presence seemed to be newsworthy. I quickly tired of having my picture taken, having microphones thrust at me, and having to deny requests for interviews. It was an introvert’s nightmare; it took me a while to find my place and negotiate comfortably my pseudo-celebrity status. The experience of being objectified led me to be introspective about my motives and how the halmoni must grapple with the frequent demands for interviews. I discuss this more fully below.
Despite my discomfort, I persisted in the weekly Wednesday protests. After the demonstrations, the grandmothers, Korean Council members, and other attendees lunched at nearby restaurants. One afternoon, Korean Council members asked me to join them, and from that time on, I attended these lunches. The Council members, a notably younger crowd, closer to my age, were eager to sit by me, but what I really wanted was a seat near the grandmothers.a breakdown (Agar 1986); however, I sat with those who invited me, the Council members. This was frustrating at first because I was eager to converse with the grandmothers. Only later was there resolution, as I came to appreciate that this seeming obstacle was actually the most direct route to contact with the grandmothers.
Though anticipated, the initially guarded response of the Council activists and other insiders associated was intimidating. While dozens of churches and academic, women’s, student, political, and social organizations are in some way affiliated with the Council, the Council itself is by far the most visible in all public, political, and educational aspects regarding the grandmothers and their redress movement. Additionally, they are intimately involved in the day-to-day lives of the grandmothers, resolving housing problems and transporting them to medical appointments. Their almost daily interactions over the course of the last two decades, no doubt, contributes to the close-knit relationship Council members have with the grandmothers. Consequently, I first had to prove my legitimacy, usefulness, and sincerity to the Council.
From the beginning, I had positioned myself as a willing volunteer. Eventually, this led to a small translation project and then to helping out with odd jobs at the Council’s office. They gradually began to accept me as a student-researcher and co-advocate. Our working together led to more openness. Eventually the face-saving tensions dissolved, and I could say with ease at lunch on demonstration days, “I was hoping to talk with Grandmother Pak today.”
Through my active participation in the demonstrations and attendance at the lunches, I was able to meet many grandmothers. I had the opportunity to visit some of their homes. And as I have described in the prologue, I eventually had the opportunity to volunteer and live at the House of Sharing. Of course my presence in the community impacted what I was there to observe and study, but I believe that the relationships I developed there help me ground my analysis in its larger linguistic, social, and human contexts. As I experimented with different identities, negotiating my role and quasi-membership in their speech community, I gained insight as to how other members of the community do the same.
The more time I spent with the grandmothers and Council members, the more I came to understand the Council’s protective role of gatekeeper. The members form a protective barrier around the grandmothers, quite literally at times. During my time there, I observed various protective countermeasures deployed by Council members and the grandmothers to against outsiders’ unbecoming attempts to access their community. Sometimes, there were more cameras at the demonstrations than there were protesters. All too frequently, researchers or reporters brusquely pressed for interviews during meals. At all times of the day, one might race up in a taxi to the House of Sharing and insist on an interview. Since at the House of Sharing compound the history museum is less than thirty paces from women’s dormitories, the grandmothers were constantly on call.
Everyone wanted an interview, but not everyone was respectful of the women’s right to privacy. I witnessed the grandmothers’ pained, purpose-driven, and polite responses to the relentless requests. In observing the grandmothers after an interview was given, I became attuned to the toll these interactions took: some became physically ill, others visibly depressed. I began to question the ethical parameters of conducting my own interviews. This dilemma or breakdown is profoundly and woefully carved into my consciousness: I could not justify asking the grandmothers to submit to another round of interviews. My resolution to this breakdown was to analyze a very different kind of data than I originally intended. Though in time, many of the women shared stories with me, I did not collect the data for this dissertation at the House of Sharing. In the next section, I describe the data I obtained elsewhere.
3.3 Description of the Data, Data Collection, Transcription, and Translation
3.3.1 Data Set 1 . Interview Data
My time in Korea did lead to the “collection” of the data examined in this dissertation. At one Wednesday demonstration, I met Professor Soh Ok Cha, the president of the Washington Area Coalition for Comfort Women Issues, Inc., (WCCW). Knowing I would soon return to the Washington, DC, area after my field study ended, she gave me her contact information. Indeed, upon arriving home, I contacted her, and soon thereafter, I began volunteering for the Coalition. This is how I met Dongwoo Lee Hahm, the founder of the WCCW. She had conducted interviews in the early nineties that were published in Comfort Women Speak. After a series of meetings with Hahm, I asked her to consider allowing me to use her videotaped interviews as data for my dissertation. Graciously, she allowed me to do so and provided me with six of the nineteen interviews I had requested. Five of the six women I had met and spent time with while in Korea.
In the early 1990s, Hahm traveled to the Korean Peninsula to elicit oral testimonies in an effort to document the historical record of mostly South Korean military sex slaves. Hahm, recognized as an American activist pioneer, was assisted in arranging these interviews by her Korean counterpart, trusted scholar-advocate Professor Yun Chung-ok of Ewha Womans University. Professor Yun has been researching the sex slave issue since the 1980s and has had a long standing relationship with the grandmothers.she is truly a community insider. The Washington Coalition transcribed and translated into English nineteen of these interviews and published them in Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese (Schellstede 2000).
The data for this dissertation consists of six of these videotaped interviews, namely, (in keeping with the Korean last-name-first convention) the testimonies of Grandmothers Hwang Keum-ju, Kang Duk-kyung, Kim Soon-duk, Moon Pil-gi, Pak Du-ri, and Yi Yong-nyo. The table below gives their ages at the time of enslavement and the approximate18 duration of their enslavement. The details of their testimonies are discussed more fully in Chapters 4, 5, and 6.
18 The following ages are from the Comfort Women Speak (Schellstede 2000). The duration of enslavement is either as directly stated by the individual survivor in her testimony or a calculation based on her age at the time of enslavement and the year she indicates her enslavement ended, which for most of the women in this data set coincides with the end of WWII. Kim Soon-duk was freed before the war ended and does not indicate the length of her imprisonment in her testimony.
Table 3-1. Interviewees: Age at and Duration of Enslavement
Interviewees Age at Enslavement Approximate Duration of Enslavement
Hwang Keum-ju 18 4 years 1941-1945
Kang Duk-kyang 13 3 years 1942-1945
Kim Soon-duk 16 ? 1938-?
Moon Pil-gi 15 1 year 1944-1945
Pak Du-ri 16 6 years 1939-1945
Yi Yong-nyo 16 3 years 1942-1945
My initial rationale for working with these testimonies was that the 1994 interviews were relatively early (The first public testimony was given 1991 by Kim HakSun). I had hoped, somewhat naively, that the earlier interviews would be less shaped by the adversarial discourse. A clear advantage these interviews offered to any I might have elicited is that they were conducted by a Korean woman close to the age of the interviewees, who is also a native speaker of Korean. Hahm was introduced to the grandmothers via community insider, Professor Yun. Consequently, she gained methodological data collection advantages that I could not, but from which I now benefit. Finally, these interviews had already been done, so I did not have to subject the aged grandmothers to another round of questioning.
Five of the six interviews were conducted on November 2, 1994, at the House of Sharing, which was then located in Seoul, Korea. Grandmother Moon Pil-gi was interviewed a month later at her apartment, also in Seoul. The interviews examined in this study are comparable in length, approximately thirty minutes each, with the exception of Moon Pil-gi’s interview, which is nearly an hour long, and Pak Du-ri’s, which is only eighteen minutes long. The interview participants include Mrs. Dongwoo Lee Hahm, the interviewer, and at the onset and close of each interview, the videotographer, Doochan Hahm (the interviewer’s husband). There is also a representative of the Korean Council present for the duration of the interview; she intervenes rarely. I am not certain, but I believe this representative to be Professor Yun Chong Ok, historian and head of the Korean “Comfort Women” Issue Resolution Council. For the duration of the interview, each grandmother is seated on a cushion on the floor; a stationary camera focuses on her. Her entire body is visible: it fills the frame. As such, her non-verbal contributions, such as her gestures, gaze, and facial expressions are visible, but those of the other participants are not.
3.3.2 Data Set 2 . Published Data
Data Set 2 refers to the published data examined in this study. The published data are the written and published texts (books, newspaper articles, websites) examined in Chapter 6 only, are derived from four sources and are described in the order in which they are analyzed.
First, I examine the written representation of Hwang Keum-Ju’s interview published on pages 3-9 of Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military (Schellstede 2000) by the Washington Coalition for Comfort Women, Inc (WCCW). This representation is based on the interview conducted by DongWoo Lee-Hahm, described in detail in Data Set 1 above (the same interview I examine in Chapters 4 and 5). In Chapter 6, aspects of these two texts.the interview and the published.are examined.
Second, I examine the title of True Stories of the Comfort Women (Howard 1995). This is the first and only English translation of the six collections of testimonies collected and published by the Korean Council. The original Korean volume, entitled Kangjero kk.lly.gan Chos.nin kunwianbud.l [The Korean Military Comfort Women Who Were Coercively Dragged Away for the Military] was published in 1993.
Third, I examine excerpts from a June 6, 2003, article entitled “Korea-Japan Summit: Nightmare Never Ends for ‘Comfort Women,’” published in The Korea Times on the occasion of South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun’s first state visit to Japan. The brief excerpt examined includes the reported speech of Hwang Keum-ju.
The fourth and final published text is an excerpt from an autobiographical representation of Hwang Keum-ju’s wartime experience on Amnesty International’s webpage, “Stop Violence Against Women.” The excerpt I examine is a brief first-person account attributed to Hwang.
3.3.3 Data Transcription and Translation
The videotaped interviews of Data Set 1 were meticulously transcribed by Mr. Bek Seok-Jae, a graduate student in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. His linguistic expertise and his fluency in some of the grandmothers’ dialects aided in the precision of the transcription of the interview. I translated the interviews but relied on native speaker verification of my translations from Mr. Bek and Ms. Choi Eun Hee, a Korean language specialist working for the United States Department of Defense. To better ground the analysis and present a written representation (Ochs 1979; Preston 1985; Mischler 1991; Edwards 1993) of the face-to-face interaction in a format that preserves, to the extent it is possible, the co-constructed dimensions of the moment-to-moment interaction on which it is based, I repeatedly returned to the videotaped interaction to remind myself of its nonverbal aspects.
To enhance the reader’s understanding of the interactions, I provide notes on the transcription and translation conventions used in this chapter. In the transcripts and in much of the prose, I refer to the interviewer, Mrs. Dongwoo Lee Hahm, as the “interviewer,” due to the length of her full name and deferential title. I also opt to use interviewer, as opposed her surname to preclude potential confusion due to the similarity of her name with Hwang, the interviewee on whom I spend the most time. In the English transcripts and in the exposition, I refer to the grandmothers by their surnames or other appropriate pronominal reference.
As I strive to treat the text with integrity, to acknowledge the exuberances and deficiencies (Becker 1995) that invariably arise when representing one language in terms of another, I reproduce the Hangul (Korean language) to be transparent in my translations. A cursory introduction to Hangul will better equip the reader to decipher the transcripts. Hangul word order (SOV) differs from basic English syntax (SVO). The reader will observe, too, that pronominal and subject elision is common in Korean. To compose a more intelligible idiomatic English gloss, parentheticals are used to enclose and indicate inserted words; these typically include unverbalized subjects and or pronominal references, elided but understood from the context. Unlike English, Korean does not have an article system; therefore, articles are inserted to enhance the comprehensibility of the English gloss.
I utilize two styles to present the data. First, to prevent the reader from having to flip back-and-forth between the data and its exposition and to constrain the data segments to a manageable length, I format the data in the following manner. I place the Hangul unit of analysis first and follow it with the idiomatic English gloss. Style 1 is illustrated below.
1 ...: ........(...) ...
2 ... : ., ...........?
3 ... : ..
1 Moon: At the age of sixteen I was dragged away.
2 Interviewer: Ah, {you} were dragged away at age sixteen?
3 Moon: Yes.
For shorter excerpts or when the sound of the word in Korean is important (as in the section on the use of sound words), I include the romanized Korean below the Hangul and above the English translation. Style 2 is illustrated below.
2 ........ .., ** ...2 geunde budaebbuniya. budae, ** budae. 2 And nothing there but military troops. Military, ** military.
In the exposition, when I refer back to the data, I italicize English excerpts and enclose the Hangul [.] in brackets. The Romanization of Korean and Sino-
Korean (Chinese-derived Korean words) used in this study is newly Revised Romanization instituted by the Korean government in 2000.
Table 3-2: Keys to Transcription19
* Unintelligible utterances; each asterisk stands for one syllable
(?) Utterance sounds like X but mostly unintelligible
, Marks phrase-final intonation
. Marks sentence ending
? Marks sentence ending with rising intonation
! Marks sentence ending with emphatic stress
. . . Noticeable pause
Underline Grammar structure in discussion
Italics 1. Romanized Korean 2. Untranslatable Korean expressions in English translations
{X} X is a reconstructed expression in translation from Korean to English (e.g., elliptical subject in Korean).
[ ] Researcher’s comments and notes (e.g., non-verbal behaviors, etc)
( ) Phonological variations or word equivalents of spoken dialect on standard Hangul20
As I consulted native speakers to verify and validate my translations, I discovered that different individuals interpret the characters in different ways. In such cases, the different interpretations are included. Though I strive to treat the text with integrity, it would be remiss not to acknowledge the exuberances and deficiencies (Becker 1995) that invariably arise when translating from one
19 Adapted from Kim (2006) and Tannen (1984).
20 Attempts to represent the survivors’ dialects in the English translation would result in eye-dialect (Preston 1985) and other subjective word substitutions; these variations are not pertinent to the analysis.
language to another.
3.3.4 Issues in Translation
Luborsky (1990: 4) asserts that an underlying challenge for anthropologists and others collecting life stories is that “the situations in which life histories are elicited, as well as the motivations, and concepts of the researcher, insidiously enter what we listen for, and later represent to others about the person being studied.” Certainly individual and cultural filters influence both our own and the informant’s perceptions. Therefore, the relationship between the interviewer and interviewee is an important issue in all types of sociolinguistic data collection. Moreover, the participants’ level of shared knowledge is also an important issue. I attempt in this brief discussion to articulate my awareness of the constraints under which I have carried out the analysis.
While attending a reading at the 2004 Dodge Poetry Festival, I heard the Israeli poet Peter Cole, in an introduction of a poem by Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali, say, “you will now hear two poems, two different poems, but two poems related in spirit.” I thought Cole was referring to Ali’s original poem and his (Coles’s) translation of it. As it turns out, they read two completely different poems. My confusion aside, I believe he aptly described the dilemma of translation: the end result is two texts, two different texts that are “related in spirit.”
As Becker (1995) says, the process of translation is describing one language in terms of another. As he asserts, “the aim of philologists, is not to achieve more and more accurate translations of everything into English. Rather, the goal is reciprocity, or in Derrida’s unfairly maligned term, deconstruction of a translation, a movement toward the source, which entails further deconstruction of the source into its many sources” (430-31). Becker, building upon Ortega (1957), urges us to “use translation as a starting point--but then to move beyond translation by cutting back exuberances and filling in deficiencies in all dimensions of meaning” (309). By so doing, a truer version of the original emerges. He argues that all we need to know about a language is not found in its formal representation. He claims that one of the most difficult tasks of translating is to “hear the individual voice” (299), that is, to distinguish what is stereotypical and what is individual or idiosyncratic. In this study, I try to make this distinction so as to be faithful to each individual grandmother’s voice.
Often, I have observed the problem Field (1997) describes in her examination of Japan’s “apologies” to other Asian nations, including those to the “comfort women”: these texts frequently “become known to the world outside of East Asia in awkward English, a mechanical factor with real consequences21 (1997: 35). While I attempt to represent Korean data in accessible English, I also attempt to make the relationship of the two texts as transparent as possible.
3.4 Terms and Terminology
As discussed at length in Chapter 1, the Korean term wianbu (ianfu/wianfu in 21 Examples of these kinds of consequences are examined in Chapter 6.
Japanese) is a euphemism that is translated into English as “comfort woman” and used to refer to the women unwillingly conscripted by the Japanese military during WWII and forced into sex slavery. I have adopted the less euphemistic term, military sex slaves (MSS), when referring to the survivors as a group and the verb enslaved to refer to their experience. When possible, however, I refer to the women by their full or last names or use the respectful term of address, grandmother or halmoni.
Referral by name is not as straightforward as one might think: three Romanization systems were in use when many of the primary sources for this study were published. For example, Hwang Keum-ju’s name has also been Romanized as Hwang Keum Ju, Hwang Keum-joo, and Hwang Keum Joo. To limit confusion and facilitate searches for original sources, I have maintained names as found in their original publications for both the interview data and the published data of this study.
The Korean kinship system of address and reference is highly variegated. As in other systems, some of the kinship terms are regularly extended to non-kin in non-familial settings. In Korean, it is appropriate for a person to address and refer to a woman who is the approximate age of one’s own or one’s children’s grandmother with the term halmoni (grandmother), whether on intimate terms with her or not. If more formality and respect are imposed by a social context and one knows the grandmother’s family name, one should refer to or address her with her family and/or her full name if know and with the title halmoni and the optional honorific, nim (honorable): the Honorable Grandmother Hwang Keum-ju. However, I will refer to the grandmothers with their “family names” only to minimize the unwieldiness of repeating such a lengthy term. No disrespect is intended by the use of this less deferential reference.
Another matter related to terminology is my use of the word prostitute. I am aware of the controversial, political, and moral debate over the terms prostitution versus sex work, and prostitutes versus sex workers. Though sex work and sex worker are more neutral terms (See Cameron’s (1995: 146-147) discussion of Hoggart (1993)), I have elected to use the term prostitute because of its explicit negative associations. Adversaries of the sex slaves have accused them of being prostitutes, not sex workers.
3.5 Conclusion
In this study, I examined six videotaped interviews of Grandmothers Hwang Keum-ju, Kang Duk-kyung, Kim Soon-duk, Moon Pil-gi, Pak Du-ri, and Yi Yong-nyo that were conducted by Dongwoo Lee Hahm for the advocacy organization WCCW in 1994. The interviews were conducted in Korean and transcribed by a native speaker. I translated the transcripts with the assistance of native speakers. I have attempted to minimize the exuberances and deficiencies and to represent Korean data in accessible English, while making the relationship of the two texts as transparent as possible.
Since I did not conduct, nor was I co-present at, the interviews I analyze in this study, there are facets of the interaction to which I am not privy. Consequently, I rely on the verbal and accessible non-verbal linguistic artifacts of the video-taped interaction to ascertain how the talk of the interviewer, interviewee, and the other participants is discursively produced in their turn by turn talk, to better understand how their talk is framed by their un/shared understanding of what they think they are doing, i.e., interviewing, testifying, telling a story to be published in a book, etc.
Chapter 4: Reliable Narrator, Credible Experience - Navigating the Master Narratives of Prostitution, (Sex) Slavery, and Rape
4. 1 Introduction
In this chapter, I examine how one woman, Hwang Keum-ju, negotiates the master narratives of prostitution, slavery, and rape and counters the claim that she is a liar and a prostitute by constructing herself as a reliable narrator and her experience as credible. As discussed in Chapter 1, the Japanese government’s denial of its military’s sex slave system began in the summer of 1990 as soon as the issue was raised and witness-survivors began coming forward. In the past two decades the oppositional discourse has shifted from that of denial and defensiveness to accusatory and increasingly adversarial. Claims that the sex slaves are lying about their experience have primarily been propagated by members of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party. Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s statement that the women were not coerced or forced “in the narrow sense of the word” (Morris-Suzuki 2007: ¶ 7) into Japan’s military wartime brothels is an example of a more recent claim.
In her study of oral histories of Holocaust survivors, Schiffrin (2006: 204) asserts that survivors must balance the need to posit factual, historical accounts of their experiences with cognizance of the larger audience (e.g., that their testimony might be included in a documentary) and with their efforts to verbally reproduce their own personal trauma.
Quoting Portelli (1997:6), Schiffrin (2006: 204) notes that oral histories are affected by “the shifting balance between the personal and the social, between biography and history.” In constructing their oral histories, survivors must negotiate social and autobiographical expectations, which can include the need to incorporate retrospective knowledge, survivor myths, and icons of collective experience (Schiffrin 2006: 204-205). The sex slave survivors are required to balance similar demands. They have the added burden of proving they are not liars or prostitutes while providing credible testimony that authenticates their sex slave experience.
In Section 4.2, I examine how Hwang constructs her self as a reliable narrator, dedicated to providing a meticulous, factual account of her experience in which she is an appropriate or prototypical (Rosch 1978; Givon 1986; Violi 2000) victim of the Japanese sex slave system. To construct her self as reliable, she must negotiate the oppositional discourse that attempts to frame her as a prostitute and the interviewer’s attempts to frame her as the iconic or prototypical victim (a young virginal girl forcibly dragged away). More specifically, I first examine how Hwang uses negation to remain reliable by rejecting the interviewer’s false assertion that she was dragged away and, instead, posits herself as an officially drafted sex slave. Next, I examine how Hwang uses explanation to reject the prostitution frame and establishes herself as a reliable historian. Finally, I examine how Hwang provides an explanation for why she was unmarried at nineteen that emphasizes her reliability.
In Section 4.3, I examine how Hwang uses details in the form of sound symbolism and constructed dialogue in the storyworld to draw the listener more deeply into the story’s action, and in doing so, creates a direct, more credible experience for the listeners. She draws the audience’s attention to evidence of the Japanese military’s involvement in conscripting and trafficking her and the degraded conditions under which she is held to support her claim that she was a slave who was raped and not a prostitute. In Section 4.4, I provide a summary of the chapter findings and their implications.
4.2 Constructing the Reliable Narrator
As discussed in Chapter 2, Hwang and the other women enslaved by the Japanese military are also accused by members of a conservative faction of the Japanese government of being ahistoric or, more crudely put, of being liars who are claiming that they were sex slaves but who were simply prostitutes. The accusation that they are liars underlies and is overtly addresssed in many of the survivors’ testimonies (see Chapter 6); each woman is well aware that accurately reporting biographical information, dates, times, places, names, and other details is integral in constructing a historically accurate testimony and establishing herself as a reliable historian.
4.2.1 Negation: I Was Not Dragged Away
In the forthcoming analysis, Hwang uses negation to refute both the master narrative of prostitution and the interviewer’s insistence on the prototypical slave narrative. As she denies being dragged away and asserts instead that she was conscripted by the Japanese government, Hwang constructs herself as a reliable narrator who makes subtle and valid distinctions. Denials and other negative statements are common when the speaker understands that she cannot meet the interlocuter’s expectations. As Labov (1972: 380-81) notes, mentioning what did not happen, “expresses the defeat of an expectation that something would happen.” Tannen (1993b: 23, 44) asserts that “the use of a negative statement is one of the most frequent indications that an expectation is not being met” and that generally, “a negative statement is made only when its affirmation was expected.” While she rebuffs the interviewer’s attempts to frame her inaccurately, she asserts that she was a victim of Japan’s military sex slavery, even though she was not forcibly seized by the military. By establishing this sex slave frame, she cancels out any obligation to overtly deny that she was a prostitute and is not compelled to address the issue of payment (or lack thereof).
At the beginning of the interview, the interviewer broaches the topic of Hwang’s wartime experience circuitously, leaving an opening for Hwang to define her experience. She uses the noun phrase that time (line 3), utilizing false diexis, a common device in naming avoidance (Wood and Rennie 1994; Penelope 1990) to elicit Hwang’s testimony, but not reference it directly or specifically label it. The interviewer, however, contradicts her neutral stance and tries to elicit a specific storyline of Hwang being “dragged away” (line 9) and presumably forced into prostitution, as seen in Excerpt 1.
Excerpt 1
...: 1 ., ..., ., ...
2 ... .. ... ... . ... . ....
3 ... ... .. ... ....
4 .. ... ....... ..
5 ...... . ..........
6 ..
7 .. .. ... .. . ... . ... ... ...
8 .... ... ...... . .,
9 ., . .. ......?
....: 10 .... . ... ...,
11 .. ... ....
[…] [Intervening Dialogue]
....: 12 ...
... : 13 ... ....? ..
14 . .., . .. ... . .?
.... 15 .. ..
... : 16 . .. .. .. ..
17 ... ., .... ... ....?
.... 18 ....
... : 19 ...?
....: 20 ... . ..., ....., . .., .. ......
21 .........
Interviewer Yes, and so, yes, there.
Today if I ask you a question please answer it.
And because of how very much you went though at that time.
Just, words for {the} measure of wounds {you} sustained
for what seems like digging up the past {I’m} deeply sorry.
okay
Just, today then when I, uh, ask you a question please reply and
124
8 so, Grandmother HwangKeumJu that time of that happening
9 uh, at what age were {you} dragged away?
Hwang: 10 so if {I} am going to tell that story,
11 {I} will start from our father’s time.
[…] [Intervening Dialogue]
Hwang: 12 Seoul.
Interviewer: 13 You came to Seoul? Yes.
14 At that time, at that time how, what was your age?
Hwang: 15 Twelve.
Interviewer: 16 At the time {you} were twelve. Yes.
17 And so, uh, that is when {you} were seized (kidnapped) in Seoul?
Hwang: 18 No.
Interviewer: 19 It is not?
Hwang: 20 And so at that house, it was a gisaeng house, that gisaeng house, it
was the mistress’s house,
21 was the second wife’s house.
In line 9, the interviewer asks Hwang at what age were {you} dragged away. Hwang bypasses this question and articulates the terms under which she will tell her story.she says if she is going to tell that story (line 10), she must start from her father’s time (line 11). These stipulations redirect the interview, as Hwang posits an agenda that differs from the interviewer’s.that she, the interviewer, will ask the questions and Hwang will answer them (line 7). In the intervening dialogue, Hwang provides background information on her family and how, at the age of twelve, she became a domestic servant. Next, the interviewer requests clarification of Hwang’s age and the place she was living (lines 13-14), which Hwang says are Seoul and age twelve, respectively. The interviewer (line 16) ratifies Hwang’s words by repeating them.
In her next questions, the interviewer reasserts, with slight variation from the script she introduced before (that Hwang was “dragged away”) as she asks and so, uh, that is when {you} were seized (kidnapped) in Seoul? (line 17). Hwang answers no [...-
aniyo] (line 18) without further clarification. The interviewer signals her surprise as she asks with rising intonation, it is not? [... -anijyo] (line 20) and uses the conjugational
verb ending Vst . (.) . Vst ji(yo) in its contracted form . (jyo) to express her strong
conviction of disbelief. According to Ihm et al (2001: 236), a speaker can use the conjugational verb ending Vst . (.) . Vst ji(yo) when a speaker believes that she and
the addressee have shared knowledge of the proposition under consideration. In other words, the interviewer’s yes-no question in the form of an assertion reveals the interviewer’s expected response is a positive response; Hwang, however, goes against this.
Further, Hwang dismisses the interviewer’s follow-up request for clarification and resumes describing her foster family’s housing accommodations. Several minutes later, as shown in Excerpt 2, Hwang introduces her own script (which goes against the interviewer’s expected response) that of the official conscript: After fours years of domestic service, when she was nineteen, the government issued an official conscription order for unmarried women, which required the compliance of one daughter from each household. According to Hwang, she felt she owed her foster family a debt, and because her foster sisters were both engaged in scholarly pursuits, she volunteered to comply with the draft notice.
Excerpt 2
....: 1 . .. ... : 2 ., . .. .....
3 ... .., .....
....: 4 .. .. ... .. ..
... : 5 .. .. ...
6 ..
....: 7 . .. .. .. ..,
[… ] [Intervening Dialogue]
....: 8 .., ..., .. ....
9 ... .. .....
... : 10 ., ..
11 ... .. ... .. 性..
....: 12 ... . . ... .. ... ....
... : 13 ., .. .. ....
14 . .. 性. . .. . .. ....
.... : 15 . . .. ...
Excerpt 2
Hwang: 1 Four years. Interviewer: 2 Yes, {you} were there four years. 3 At the age of nineteen, and so. Hwang: 4 {An} official written order regarding unmarried women was issued. Interviewer: 5 {An} official written order regarding unmarried women. 6 Yes. Hwang: 7 Who in that household going to do it {I} asked. […] [Intervening Dialogue] Hwang: 8 And so, because there was a quota, I had to go. 9 And so I decided to go. Interviewer: 10 Yes, yes. 11 And so, right, this is when {you} were seized. Hwang: 12 {I} was not seized an official written government order was issued. Interviewer: 13 Right, the government order was issued. 14 Please tell me a little about the circumstances {you} went through. The time the conscripted women {virgins} went22.
22 This was commonly referred to as the virgin delivery as girls fourteen and older were being drafted. Hwang describes how each household was obliged to meet the quota of delivering one virgin to the State (Japan) for its war cause. In Chapter 7, see Kang Duk-kyung’s use of this term in constructing herself as virginal.
In line 3, the interviewer affirms Hwang’s age as nineteen and says and so, [....-geuleonigga] perhaps to nudge Hwang to not belabor her point and to provide the details as to how she became a sex slave. This is exactly what Hwang does in line 4, when she says an official written order regarding unmarried women was issued, which the interviewer appears to ratify with repetition of Hwang’s exact phrasing, followed by yes (line 6). Several minutes elapse as Hwang legitimizes her status as a “daughter” in her foster family, which, though the interviewer appears not to realize, is directly and causally related to how Hwang is conscripted.
Despite the considerable effort Hwang exerts to explain the quota and that she has told the interviewer twice before that she was not dragged away or seized, the interviewer attempts a third time to impose her script, when she says and so, right, this is when {you} were seized (line 11). Hwang issues her reply in the form of postverbal negation, in which she clearly demonstrates that the interviewer’s “expectation is not being met” (Tannen 1993a: 23). According to Lee (1993: 327) preverbal and postverbal negation differ: “preverbal negation does not presuppose the speaker’s assumption about the listener’s knowledge and awareness, whereas postverbal negation does.” (See Chapter 2 for a more detailed explanation of negation in Korean.) Hwang’s postverbal negation (Line 12 of Excerpt 2) is repeated here for ease of exposition.
....: 12 ... . . ... .. ... ....
Hwang: 12 (I) was not seized an official written government order was
issued.
At the interviewer’s third insistence of the “dragged away” script, Hwang directly rejects this script when she says (I) was not seized, an official written government order was issued (line 12). Hwang use the postverbal negation pattern Lee (1993:326) asserts “is used in contexts where the corresponding affirmative has been mentioned, or seemed likely, or where the speaker assumes that the listener.sometimes erroneously.holds a belief in the truth of that affirmative.” Indeed, Hwang uses the postverbal morpheme an (.) in conjunction with the stronger verb ita (..) to produce anita (...) as opposed
to using the weaker hata(..). Anita (...) denotes the strong degree of Hwang’s
certainty in opposition to the interviewer’s “firm belief in the truth” (Lee 1993: 326) of her assertion that Hwang was ‘dragged away.’
Hwang not only denies what “might have happened, but which did not” (Labov 1972: 381), but she also asserts what did happen. When Hwang unambiguously denies the interviewer’s assertion that she was a prototypical victim; she asserts her own script, the interviewer ratifies it, right, the order was issued (line 13) and she does not again challenge Hwang’s framing of her account of the events. Hwang, however, continues to reiterate the conscription script when she repeats the term of reference “the women who received the conscription notice”23 five times to refer to herself and the other women on the train and at the military base.
23 Hwang also uses the term of reference ceonyeo (..), unmarried woman (as discussed in Chapter 6) to refer to herself or a group in which she includes herself.
In sum, the first time the interviewer asks Hwang when she was dragged away, Hwang ignores her question and introduces her family background. The second time the interviewer asks her was it in Seoul where she was seized, Hwang says no without further clarification, though the interviewer asks for it. On the interviewer’s third attempt to impose the seized script, Hwang explicitly rejects this framing of her experience and asserts her own script, that she was conscripted.
As Hwang adopts the sex slave frame, she implicitly rejects the prostitution frame. she was not a prostitute, she was a conscripted sex slave. The interviewer’s repeated attempts to establish that Hwang was physically forced away indicate that, perhaps, the interviewer is focused on advancing the master narrative of rape in which proof of coercion and force are integral to constructing oneself as an prototypical rape victim. The interviewer’s assertion of the rape script and Hwang’s assertion of the draft script appear to be in conflict, working at cross-purposes. As a result, Hwang is burdened with the additional task of rejecting the interviewer’s frame to construct herself as a reliable narrator.
Interestingly, in the published representation of Hwang’s testimony (Schellstede 2000: 4) based on the interaction examined above, Hwang’s speech as ascribed to her is “so I went. I wasn’t kidnapped, I was officially drafted.” First she negates the kidnapped script and then asserts that she was officially drafted. It is impossible to know if Hwang would have prefaced her account using negation, if the interviewer had not repeatedly framed her experience as being seized.
Because Hwang eventually establishes herself as a conscripted sex slave, she is not obliged to deny explicitly that she was a prostitute; she is able to refute that accusation implicitly. In the following excerpt from Kim-Gibson’s interview with Hwang for the documentary Silence Broken (1999:31), Hwang reveals her rationale for insisting that she was conscripted. Hwang says,
Listen, if you are going to make a film, do it right, not like some other ones already made. You have to do your research right. For instance, in my case, you must stress that I went with an official drafted notice. This is important because it means Japan’s deceit was official and systematic.the draft notice was from the government just like an army draft. With some other women, it is not always clear how they went. Don’t make a film that will bring shame to you, you understand?
In this reported speech, Hwang clearly articulates the importance of establishing she was officially drafted by the government and she does not use negation do so. In the interview data examined above, Hwang achieves this point more indirectly by negating the interviewer’s “dragged away” scripts and establishing that she was conscripted. That Hwang notes that she went with an official draft notice and her concern that it is not always clear how some of the other women went reveals that she believes her story of conscription to be the ideal or prototypical one.
In the data examined in this section, the interviewer does not readily ratify Hwang’s personal story as it diverges from the master narrative of the sex slave-rape: Hwang does not posit herself as a prototypical rape victim, in that she is not dragged away against her will by a stranger. The interviewer’s insistence on the “dragged away” frame substantiates the presence and pervasiveness of an iconic collective sex slave experience (See Schiffrin 2006: 204 and Schiff et al. 2001a and 2001b on collective/iconic survivor experience) and delimits, in part, this ideal, from which Hwang, from the interviewer’s perspective, has deviated. This example illuminates how entwined the master narratives of rape, prostitution, and sex slavery are and how the participants’ unshared understanding of which master narrative or script is being managed and can encumber the survivor with additional interactional constraints. This is similar to Tannen and Wallat’s (1993) observation of how a mismatch in knowledge schemas can do the same.
Hwang reveals that she believes her story of being conscripted is the exemplar narrative because Japan is unambiguously indexed as the enslaver. That Hwang constructs herself as an officially conscripted sex slave means that she does not have to explicitly reject the claim that she was a prostitute. While she still has the burden of constructing herself as a protypical victim, she does not have to take a defensive stance, which may be another reason why Hwang’s testimony is so often used by advocate organizations.
4.2.2 Explanation: My Actual Age
Discrepancies of one’s age are frequently touted to defraud a testimony even though such inconsistencies are irrelevant or can be quite easily and logically explained, as Hwang’s example demonstrates. In all the interviews examined in this study, the interviewer asks each woman her current age and her age when drafted, abducted, trafficked, etc., to establish a factual chronology of events. Predictably, the first question the interviewer poses to Hwang requests her (current) age. Asking after one’s age, outside of any marked context, is a straight-forward question requiring a semi-automatic reply of a number. However, in her response to the interviewer’s first question, Hwang qualifies her reply. This occasions (Sacks et al. 1974) the interviewer’s request for clarification, which in turn, opens a slot for Hwang to posit an explanation about her age. The explanation does the work of clarifying, but Hwang also uses it to establish herself as a reliable, truth-telling narrator, dedicated to providing a factual account of her experience. She may be cognizant of the consequences that presenting contradictory information, such as “two” ages, could potentially create, so she provides exact dates, times, places, and accurate biographical information to evince veracity.
In Excerpt 3, Hwang replies to the question about her age, and when prompted, explains the discrepancy of the year of her birth as registered, and her actual age.
Excerpt 3 Interviewer: 1 Yes, I know {your} name, Grandmother HwangKeumJu
1 ...: ., .. ... .., ... ....
2 .. ... ..., ...?
3 ....: . ... .......
4 ... : . ...?
5 ....: ., .., .... .. ..,
6 . .... .. .., . ...,
7 . .... .. .. .. ....
8 ... : ., .. ... ....
9 .性.. ... ..?
10 ....: .性., . ... .. . .., .. ... ...
11 . ... . ., . .. ....
12 .... .., . .性 ... ....,
13 ... : ......
14 ...., ... ....?
2 This year {currently} what is your age?
Hwang: 3 {My} actual age is seventy-four.
Inteviewer: 4 Actual age?
Hwang: 5 Uh, okay, years ago {my} younger sibling was born,
6 {I} went together with that sibling, {the} two births,
7 {I} was registered together with {my} younger sibling.
Interviewer: 8 Ah, because {your} birth was registered late.
9 How were {you} registered?
Hwang: 10 {My} registered age then uh is late and, {my} the registration of
{my} birth is late and.
11 {my} Actual age is three, four years older.
12 And so now, {my} actual registered age is sixty-nine,
Interviewer: 13 Age sixty-nine.
14 And so then, where is your hometown {place of birth}?
Following the ritual greetings, the interviewer asks Hwang the first question.this year
{currently} what is your age? (line 8). In her reply, {my} actual age is seventy-four [.
.........] (line 9), Hwang stresses the word actual. It is not customary in
Korea24 to qualify one’s age as actual [.-weon] (lines 8-9). The interviewer
substantiates the markedness of Hwang saying actual age as she asks Hwang with rising
intonation {your} actual age? [..../ weon naineun] (line 4).
Arguably, Hwang intentionally marks her age as “actual” to occasion an explanation
to neutralize would-be challenges posited by hostile factions who scrutinize her every
24 The date reported in the Comfort Women Speak (Schellstede 2000) is one year off from the year I record here, probably because the writer’s accounted for the one year difference in western versus Korean age calculations. When Koreans account for their age when interacting with non-Koreans, they routinely provide an explanation telling their age because of the confusion that arises because in the Korean system of noting age: Koreans consider themselves to be one year old on the actual day of their birth. Age discrepancies can also be caused by calculating one’s age according to the lunar calendar, as opposed to the solar calendar. These variations can amount to a 2 year difference in one’s Korean versus her non-Korean age. In Hwang’s case, however, the discrepancy is five years because her birth was registered late.
word and seize upon any inconsistency, however minor, to discredit her and her testimony. Linde (1993: 94) states, an “explanation is a remedy that we employ once things have gone wrong in some way.” Though nothing has gone wrong within the interview itself, perhaps it could or has in the past, as mentioned above. Thus, effectively, Hwang occasions this explanation, and preemptively cancels any such challenges (see Schegloff et al. (1977) and Schegloff (2000) for the preference of self-correction, and dispreference for other initiated repairs and Schiffrin (2006) on variation of repairs).
The explanation Hwang gives does more than provide a factual account of her age, it may also be an intertextual reference to prior accusatory discourses, those that claim the women are liars. In her first ratified turn, she sets the foundation for the entire testimony, as she establishes herself as a narrator committed to providing a precise, factual account of her experience. Hwang’s use of this self initiated repair serves the interactional end of constructing herself as a credible narrator. She effectively defuses the claim that if she lies about her age, she also lies about not being a prostitute. In other words, she demonstrates that she is telling the truth, not just about her age but about everything.
4.2.3 Explanation: Unmarried at Nineteen
As examined above, in her first turn in the interview Hwang uses explanation to construct herself as a truth-teller. She also resists the interviewer’s attempts to frame her as the prototypical victim (the young virginal girl forcibly dragged away) and uses negation and explanation to establish herself as a reliable historian dedicated to providing a factual account of her wartime experiences. In this section, I focus on how Hwang posits herself as the prototypical rape victim by using explanation to address the fact that she is still a virgin though she is beyond the customary age of marriage, fifteen. Hwang continues to construct herself as a reliable narrator by being precise in her answers.
In Excerpt 4, Hwang provides an explanation in response to the interviewer’s question. Just prior to this, she talks about her first night’s sleep, or lack thereof, in the Kilim barracks. She then describes the officer’s quarters to which she is taken. Before she discusses the actual rape, Hwang likens herself to a blooming flower and she describes her long braided hair. Braided hair, as Hwang explains, is a marker of one’s unmarried status. It is an iconic symbol of virginity. The interviewer asks, with rising intonation signaling her surprise, if at that time, Hwang still had her hair braided. In response to what she may perceive as a challenge, Hwang provides an explanation as to why her hair, even at the age of nineteen, was still braided.
Excerpt 4
....: 1 ... . ... ... .....(....) .....
2 ..... ... ..(?).. .. ....
...: 3 .. ... .. ....?
4 ..?
....: 5 .... .. .. ** .. . ....
6 .., ... .., ... .. ... ....
Hwang: 1 I was nineteen at the time that was the very thing that
2 A blooming flower my hair was braided in front and so why.
Interviewer:3 Did {you} still have your hair braided?
4 At that time?
Hwang: 5 Of course. In that day we ** we couldn’t cut {our} hair.
6 young unmarried women, accordingly then cut {their} hair after
getting married.
In line 2 Hwang calls herself a blooming flower, a metaphor which represents her youth, innocence, and virginity. Next, the interviewer asks, did {you} still have your hair braided (line 3) followed by at that time (line 4). The interjection of still [..ajig] (line
3) implies that interviewer has encountered information that counters her expectation. The interviewer further narrows her query, at that time, (line 4) meaning then. The antecedent then could refer to the year, the colonial period, the war, or Hwang’s age. However, as Hwang has just mentioned her age and that her hair is still braided, I argue the question the interviewer actually poses is.did you still have your hair braided at age nineteen, as it was also customary for women aged nineteen to be married? Hwang’s response indicates that she understands the interviewer’s underlying question.
In line 5, Hwang says, Of course. In that day we ** we couldn’t cut {our} hair. She continues, young unmarried women, accordingly then cut {their} hair after getting married (line 6). Of course signals that the information the interviewer asks for is assumed and perhaps is also knowledge shared by both participants and so should be obvious. Since Hwang does understand that her age that is in question because her hairstyle is that of a younger woman, she elaborates by providing an account as to why she has not married at age nineteen. She does this in Excerpt 5.
Excerpt 5
... : 1 .. ... ... ., ....
2 .. .. . .. ...
3 .. ..., .. ..., ...(?) ..., ... ....
4 .., ... ... . .. ...
5 ..., .... (..), . . .. ..., .., ...., ..( ..)
.., .. .. ....
6 ... .. . ....
7 ... ... ... .?
.. .. ... 8 .. . .. .. . ... ....
9 ..
...: 10 .. .....
11 .. ... . ... ... ... ....
... : 12 .. ..., .., .. .. .... .. …
Hwang: 1 Now where did {the} unmarried women go, marriage. 2 Then there was no where for {the} unmarried to go. 3 Soldiers entered, drafted, occupational forces, entered, entered as
student soldiers. 4 Unmarried women, unmarried women were not able to get married.
5 The disabled, hunchbacks, unable to speak, mute, the blind, epileptics/insane, tuberculosis patients, like that, that was all there was.
6 There was not even one, they all left.
7 And so, how could {we} marry? Pak25: 8 And so {we} could not manage to marry. Huhuhu. Hwang: 9 mmh. Interviewer 10 Yes. I see.
25 I believe this speaker to be Pak Du-ri.
Hwang: 11 And so that is why I could not {marry} at the age of nineteen. 12 and that is why, go and, tonight what …
In lines 1 and 4, Hwang uses an older expression for marriage, ..(.―) sijib,
literally, the husband’s home. This is why she uses the expression of going and no where to go; to marry means to go literally to the groom’s family’s home. In saying there was no where for her to go, she is referring to the scarcity of eligible suitors.
In response to the interviewer’s questions, Hwang posits a rhetorical question.now where did {the} unmarried women go, marriage (line 1). Her use of this rhetorical question works as a positioning question (Kim 1998; 2001a); quoting Givon (1982), Kim asserts that such questions are “non-challengeable” as a response is not anticipated, and though a question is technically posed, the conversational floor is preemptively returned to the narrator. He finds that the narrator frequently uses these types of questions to position herself as noncompliant with the prevailing master narratives. The narrator also utilizes these positioning questions to invite the listener to her position, or point of view, and thereby more deeply involving the audience in the storyworld. In her response to the interviewer’s query about her unmarried status at the advanced age of nineteen, Hwang uses the positioning question to explain her noncompliance with the prevailing master narrative of marriage.
In answering her own question, where did the unmarried women go (line 1), Hwang provides two lists. In the first, she lists the eligible suitors, but they are absent: they are all drafted and serving in the armed forces.hence, the impossibility of marriage.
Building on this list she begins a second one in which she lists potential suitors that are unacceptable (to her). These two lists are as follows.
List 1 List 2
Soldiers entered, The disabled,
drafted, hunchbacks,
labor forces, unable to speak,
entered, entered as student soldiers. mute,
the blind,
epileptics/insane,
tuberculosis patients,
like that, that was all there was.
There was not even one,
they all left.
Hwang’s lists work in tandem to accentuate the dearth of acceptable suitors and ultimately explain why, at the age of nineteen, she has not married and consequently why her hair is still braided.
In her examination of lists, Schiffrin (1994b; 2006) examines how the structure of lists (fundamentally descriptive) differs from the structure of narratives (evaluative and temporal). She (1994b: 380) adopts Rosch’s (1978:3) definition of a list as “a number of objects that are considered equivalent,” but adds that a list also presents a series of items “that can be classified as ‘the same’ in some ways, but ‘different’ in others (380-381). Schiffrin (1994b) asserts that while the internal structure of lists is not inherently evaluative in the way that narratives are (Labov 1972, 1997, 2006; Polanyi 1985), a list “can be used to make a point.” She concludes that “just as narratives may be said to discursively construct experience, so too, lists may be seen as texts whose relationship with what they seem to represent (conceptual knowledge about categories in and of the world) can be seen through a relatively constructivists lens” (396). Tannen (1989, 2007) examines how lists and the details that comprise them are utilized in oral and written texts as involvement strategies. She finds that lists can be aesthetically satisfying, but they can also bore or intimidate (1989: 147). The evaluative function that a list can serve interactionally is to create the impression that there is more of “X,” X being what is listed in the series, than is actually verbalized or named.
Hwang uses these lists in her account to make an evaluative point (Schiffrin 1994b) and also, as Tannen (1989, 2007) asserts, to give the impression that the list of unsuitable suitors is even longer than she has verbalized. And the fewer suitors, the less opportunity there is for her to marry. Instead of just saying there was no one to marry, she uses internal evaluation (Labov 1997) to more objectively show this to be the case. When she provides the explanation as to why she is unmarried and repairs the potential threat to her face, she posits that her deficient (unmarried) status is of no fault of her own; she is clearly marriageable. Hwang is not the only women in this data set who accounts for her unmarried status. In Chapter 6, I examine how Pak makes a similar “appeal to defeasibility” (Scott and Lyman 1968: 4). In response to Hwang’s reissue of the rhetorical question and so, how could {we} marry (line 7), it is Pak who replies and so {we} could not manage to marry. Huhuhu (line 8). Both women account for their noncompliance with the prevailing master narrative of marriage. While Hwang makes the case that it was not feasible for her to be married because there were no appropriate suitors, Pak asserts that she was unable to marry because her family did not have the necessary financial means.
Hwang does not provide a preemptive explanation for her unmarried status as she does for the discrepancies in her age. While Hwang treats the interviewer’s query as a challenge, it could be argued the interviewer asks the follow-up question because she thinks an explanation as to why Hwang is not married is necessary and provides her with the opportunity to give one. As she recounts objective detail (Labov 1997), Hwang is able to construct herself as a reliable narrator. Alternatively, or additionally, she expands the talk on this topic to allow Hwang to stress her unmarried, and consequently her pure, innocent, and virginal status, which is required for Hwang to construct herself as the prototypical victim, and which sets the appropriate scene for the impending rape.
4.3 Creating a Direct and Credible Experience
In Section 4.3, I examine how Hwang uses details in the form of sound symbolism and constructed dialogue in the storyworld to draw the listener more deeply into the story action, and in doing so, creates a direct, more credible experience for the listener.
4.3.1 Sound Symbolism as Involving Detail
Of the six women whose discourse I examine, Hwang utilizes sound words the most liberally. She uses twelve different mimetic adverbs, thirteen times. In the forthcoming analysis, I examine how Hwang uses sounds words to urge “the hearer to recreate the action represented by the sound” (Tannen 1989: 128, 1983). With her use of sound words and other linguistic resources, Hwang creates a storyworld into which she draws her listeners, one populated with words, shapes, and sounds.tactile voices with poetic intensity, in their own right. The listener steps into this storyworld and is transformed (Labov 1972) by Hwang’s experience. Before I begin the specific analysis of Hwang’s use of sound words, I provide a brief introduction to sound symbolism. Then, I provide the relevant literature on languages rich in sound symbolism, specifically Korean, and finally I introduce the small body of relevant examination of the pragmatic functions of sound words in discourse.
Syntactic, semantic, morphological, and lexical behaviors and constraints of sound symbolism have long been of interest to linguists. Sound symbolism, according to Nuckolls (1996) as cited in Lowrey (2007: 82), is “when a sound unit such as a phoneme, syllable, feature, or tone is said to go beyond its linguistic function as a contrastive, non-meaning-bearing unit, to directly express some kind of meaning.” Philologists, anthropologists, and linguists have used a variety of terms for sound symbolism. Ideophone (Doke 1935), expressives (Diffloth 1972), and onomatopeoteics (Emeneau 1969) are terms commonly used to express this notion. Harrison (2004) includes the terms sound mimesis, borrowed from ethnomusicology (Levin 1999), phonaesthesia, phonetic symbolism, and imitative sound symbolism (Hinton et al. 1994: 3).
The ononmatopoeic words, those that mimic actual linguistic sounds, called phonomimes, are found in most languages. Phenomimes and psychomimes, however, are rarer, but found in relative abundance in Bantu (Doke 1935, Newman 1968, Madan 1911, Samarin 1971), Cantonese (Bodomo 2006, Wong, 2005.), Chichewa (Kulemeka 1997), Dagaar (Bodomo 2006), Ewe (Schlegel 1857; 1858; Ameka 2001), Greek (Tannen 1983, 1989), Japanese (Asano 1978; Hamano 1998; Ivanova 2006; Kita 1997; Martin 1975), Korean (Lee 1993; 1997; Martin 1975; Ihm et al. 2001; Sohn 1994, 2006; Kim-Renaud 1976), and Turkish (Bamberg and Damrad-Frye 1991). Korean, for example, has thousands of mimetic words; Japanese (Baba 2001) has approximately 1,200, while English has barely three hundred.
When translated to English and other languages in which they are rare, ideophones do not translate well because they lose their musical, poetic, textual, and emotive attributes. Sohn’s (1994:98) example (#8) of the adverb used to modify how the wind blows can be used to demonstrate the richness of sound words and the difficulties of translating them. The richness and subtleties of wind-speed, motion, and shape that are conveyed by sal-sal, the gentlest, sol-sol, the more moderate, and swul-swul, the swiftest, are lost in the translation to English as softly.
Example (8) in Sohn (1994; 2006: 98)
palam i sal sal/sol-sol/swul-swul pul-e-yo.
wind-NM softly blow-POL
The wind blows softly.
The wind blows softly, the wind blows gently, or the wind blows swiftly are deficient, in the very sense in which Becker (1995) speaks of what can be lost in the process of translation.
In Korean and Japanese (Kakehi and Tamori 1993), the largest category of mimesis is adverbs, and they linguistically manifest themselves in a manner similar to other languages rich in sound symbolism. In the forthcoming analysis, I adopt a taxonomy for Korean sound symbolism as described by linguists of Korean Ihm et al. (2001), Sohn (1994), Lee (1993; 1997), Lee and Ramsey (2000), and Kim-Renaud (1998) Three distinct categories of mimetic words have been identified in Korean. As mentioned, phonomimes mimic actual sounds, often the “sounds of animals and the physical environment.” (Ihm et al. 2001) Phenomimes approximate attributes “of the external world,” “visual/textual properties,” or the “sounds of actions or attitudes” (Ihm et al. 2001: 137). According to Martin (1975:1024), they “describe the manner or look of a situation.” Psychomimes depict mental conditions, states, sensations, internal experiences, or express inner thoughts, feelings, or physiological reactions (Martin 1975:1025).
Sohn (1994) further refines the phonomime and phenomime taxonomies of Korean sound symbolism. The . . . -uyseng-e (phonomimes) are classified as (a) animal-
related forms, (b) solid-related forms, (c) or liquid-related forms. ... [言] uythay-e (phenomimes) include (a) animates: manner of action or movement, (b) animates: state,
appearance, feeling, (c) inanimates: manner or movement, and (d) inanimates: shape, appearance, property.
Recently, more attention is being paid to the pragmatic functions of sound words in discourse. According to Nakamura (1993: Table 1), the research of Peterson and McCabe (1983) and Umiker-Sebeok (1979) demonstrates that children “as young as three use evaluative expressions, including onomatopoeia.” In her examination of the use of onomatopoeia in Japanese, English, and Turkish speaking children, she finds that the Japanese children use more mimetic devices than do their peers. She finds as children age and acquire the evaluative and linguistic devices that adults use in storytelling, their “usage of onomatopoeia/mimesis decreases” (Nakamura 1993: Table 1).
In her study of how Greek women use sound words or “sound non-words” in telling narratives about molestation, Tannen (1983: 367; 1989) demonstrates how the women use sound non-words as a resource “to represent action which is not otherwise described.” The women’s use of sound words in the context of constructed dialogue (Tannen 1989: 128) forces “the hearer to recreate the action represented by the sound.” Their words work in concert with their non-words to create a deeper sense of involvement and immediacy for co-participants in the story telling world, a more direct, and therefore objective, credible experience (Labov 1997). Similarly, in her examination of mimetic words in monologues and role play, Baba (2001:8) concludes that the pragmatic functions of mimesis in emotive discourse are most frequently used in narratives and that psychomimes create more vivid and intensified expressions to fuel the liveliness of the personal conversation in role-play.”
Sound words are one type of detail that speakers can utilize as an involvement strategy. Tannen (1989: 135) “explores how details create images, images create scenes, and scenes spark emotions, making possible both understanding and involvement.” She outlines a number of examples that demonstrate how details are used to create images in conversation and suggests that images “are more convincing and more memorable than abstract propositions” (137) because they are often more persuasive, thus more involving, and may also serve as internal evaluation. She points out that details are prevalent in narratives, not only contributing to the story, but also often constituting it. They also, as mentioned above, create images which set a scene that can reinforce the authenticity of the narrative, contribute to its point, or aid the speaker in the presentation of self.
In forthcoming analysis, I first focus on three examples in which Hwang uses sound symbolism to align with the master narrative of (sex) slavery: she stresses sensory details in the storyworld that not only draw the listener more deeply into the scene, but also draw the listener’s attention as they index evidence that indicts the Japanese military as the conscriptor and trafficker. I then turn to instances of how she uses sound words to establish the harsh, slavery-like conditions to which she was subjected. Finally, I examine how she uses sound words to establish her rape as a prototypical rape to conform to the master narrative of rape.
4.3.1.1 Sounds Words as Details Indicting the Japanese Military
The first example in which Hwang uses sound words to stress sensory details appears in Excerpt 6. Here, the interviewer asks Hwang the ethnicity of the women on the train with her. Hwang confirms that all the women who received the official order were Korean. In this first example, Hwang uses the sound word .. (ddol ddol), which is the
sound paper makes when being scrolled.
Excerpt 6: Scrolling Roster
1 1 ...: Interviewer: . .., .. ......?All Korean, were {they} Korean women?
2 2 ....:Hwang: ... .. .. .. .. ...... Right, the young unmarried women who received the official order.
3 3 .. ..., And so went,
4 4 .. .. ... ... ... . .. ... .. . . At Hamhung Station, {the solider} accounted for us, and scrolled the roster like ddol ddol
When Hwang produces the sound word .. (ddol ddol), she draws the audience into the scene, where peeking out from the tarpapered train window, the listener sees and hears ddol ddol, ddol ddol, ddol ddol, a soldier scrolling the roster. The auditory detail augments the visual image, activate the listener’s extroverted consciousness (Chafe 1994), bringing the roster into the speaker’s immediate proximity. The unscrolled roster contains the names of the women who are being shipped to the base and “accounted for” like military supplies, and, as such is proof of the Japanese military’s role in recruiting and trafficking women into their sexual slavery system. Using the sound word enlivens the scene and it brings both the listener’s eyes and ears to focus on the roster.a critical piece of evidence.which contributes to Hwang’s aligning with the master narrative of slavery.
In Excerpt 7, Hwang uses sound words and repetition to create a vivid experience for the listener in which, after a long train ride and her arrival to Kilim, China, the listener finds herself crammed in the back of a truck with nineteen other girls. Just prior to Excerpt 7, Hwang has been describing the rough gravel road. She now describes how tightly the girls are crowded into the truck, which is banging down the road.
Excerpt 7: Banging and Clanging
1 .. ...(..).. . ...(..). . .. .. ... . ... .. ..
1 geuleon dolangggu teuleog)eda han dolangggu(teuleog)e han isib myeongssig sileoseo han daeyeoseos sigan ga.
1 In a truck like that, in one truck loaded twenty people for about five or six hours.
2 .......
2 deolkeo deong geoli go.
2 Banging {and} clanging and
3 ..., .. ... .. ... .... ...
3 imankeum, caga imankeum doemyeon salami imankeumssig doeyo.
3 This much, the truck this much space, this much space per person.
In line 2, Hwang uses the sound word ......(deolkeo deong geoli go) to
describe both the motion and the banging, clanging, clattering sounds the truck makes as it travels down the gravel road. Gesturing with her hands, three times, she repeats the phrase this much [...imankeum] (line 3) to describe the minute space into which each
one of the girls is crammed. The musical phonomimes deolkeodeonggeoligo with the repetition of the bright and high vowel sound . [i], followed by the dark and back ah and
ooh in the trice repeated this much, this much, this much [imankeum, imankuem, imankuem] reinforces both the teeniness of the space, but also the rhythm of the truck’s bumping on the road. Hwang uses verbal repetition and gestures to aurally and visually simulate the tiny space, but she also pulls the listener inside the overcrowded truck to experience the sound and motion of it bumping and banging along the gravel road. As she does this, she shifts the listener’s active consciousness from introverted to extroverted (Chafe 1994), thereby making the distal event immediate so the listener may experience and evaluate it for herself. As she did in the scrolling example, Hwang draws the audience’s focus to another aspect of her enslavement.being trafficked by the Japanese military.as she aligns with the master narrative of (sex) slavery.
In Excerpt 8, Hwang alights from the truck and discovers that she is in the middle of a Manchurian field. She uses sound words and repetition to vividly portray the sights and sounds of the surrounding scene.
Excerpt 8: Crawling, Crawling with Soldiers
1 ... ... . .. .....
1 naelyeoseo bonigga mag manju beolpaniya.
1 When got off we saw that we were in an open field in Manchuria.
2 .. ...... .., ** ...
2 geunde budaebbuniya. budae, ** budae.
2 And nothing there but military troops. Military, ** military.
3 ..... ., ., .. ... .,
3 budaebbuninde mal, ca, geuleon geosdeulman a,
3 Nothing but military troops, horses, vehicles, lot of things like that,
4 ....(....) .. .... ....
4 eogeul eogeul (beogeul beogeul) hago gunindeulman issneunde.
4 Crawling crawling with, everywhere with just soldiers.
5 ‘..’.. ... .. . ...
5 ‘goya’lago isseo. waejeong ddae goya.
5 Called ‘goya’. Colonial period goya.
In line 4, Hwang uses the sound word .... . eogeul eogeul. It is a dialectal26
variation of .... . beogeul beogeul, a mimetic adverb (Ihm et al. 2001: 137) derived
from the verb ..-ggeulhda, to boil, and .... ..-bugeul bugeul ggeulhda, to
simmer. It is used figuratively to indicate the sense of crawling, swarming, or teeming with. Using the sounds word crawling crawling .... -eogeuleogeul, she conveys to
the listener a revulsive sense of the place, teeming with soldiers which she likens to insects. This sound word metaphor and her repetition of the adjective ..-budae
(military) four times (lines 2-3) underscore that in addition to being docketed and trafficked by the military, she has been transported to a very active military base, which portends the horror to come.
26 My transcriber, a native speaker of Hwang’s dialect suggested that .... [pronounced eogeuleogeul] is
a dialectal variation of .... [beogeulbeogeul]. I note here, too, the phonemic closeness of .... [pronounced eogeuleogeul] and .... [pronounced ugeulugeul], which literally means to swarm with as in ................ [sseulegitongeneun gudeogiga . haessda], the garbage can was crawling with maggots.
4.3.1.2 Sound Words as Details Invoking the Conditions of Slavery
The previous section on sounds words focuses on sounds draw attention to the details (the official roster, the base crawling with Japanese soldiers, and the transport by the military of the women) that indict the Japanese military as conscriptor and trafficker of the women into their sex slave system. She utilizes these details she construct a testimony that clearly aligns with the master narrative of slavery. In the forthcoming section, Hwang uses sound words to establish the harsh conditions of slavery to which she and the others were subjected, such as inadequate provisions, including insufficient bedding, food, and shelter.
In Excerpt 9, Hwang uses a sound word ....-deumun deumun, roughly translated
thinly thinly, in conjunction with other sensory details to describe the texture and condition of the threadbare military issue blanket, under which she and the other girls huddle for warmth.
Excerpt 9: Thinly, Thinly (A Threadbare Blanket)
1 . . ..(..) .. .., .. . . .. ....
1 geu da ggwejyeo(hejyeo) ganeun damyo, ilbon geu ddo ibul issjanha.1 the blanket, all but threadbare blanket, it was also a Japanese quilt.
2 .... .. ., ... .....
2 deumundeumun nubin geos, gugbangsaeg gwangmogeulo.
2 {a} thinly thinly quilted, camoflauge color made of cotton.
3 ... .. ... . .. ...
3 naemsaega naseo eoddeohge hal suga eobseo.
3 it could not be used the smell was so bad.
Hwang describes the source of the blanket in great detail. She indicates that it was Japanese (line 1), and that it was government issue as she identifies as it as .. (國防) -
gugbang, literally national defense, and . -saeg, color, translated here (line 2) as
camouflage. Most, but not all, of the Japanese WWII military colors were more of a mustard yellow rather than the mottled green associated other types of camouflage. Hwang further describes that the quilt is threadbare, made of cotton, and uses the
adverbial mimetic ....,pronounced deumun deumun, derived from the verb ...
(deumulda), which means sparse, or few and far between. When she describes the tattered blanket’s visual details, that it is thin, quilted, cotton, and camouflage in color, she creates an image for the listener’s eyes to focus on. When Hwang notes the nauseating odor (line 3), the listener’s sense of smell is activated. Finally, when she describes the sound .... [deumun deumun] of the blanket, the listener’s ears discern
its shape, its texture. The visual, olfactory, and auditory details Hwang provides creates a vivid image of the inhumane conditions to which she is subjected. As in the earlier examples, the listener becomes more deeply involved as Hwang “attempts to re-create the same evaluative quality by imitating” (Chafe 1994) the distal event, creating a more direct, and therefore, objective and credible experience (Labov 1997) as Hwang construct a testimony that aligns with the master narrative of slavery.
In Excerpt 10, Hwang has left the barracks, or the Goya (a Japanese word, which indexes Japan as the enslaver, once again), and gone to the canteen. She is hungry but so filthy, fatigued, and freezing cold that she is unable to eat what meager food is provided.
Excerpt 10: Slurpily, Slurpily and Tremblingly, Tremblingly
1 .. . ... . .. .... . ...,
1 So even though I was hungry, because {I} was cold, just the soup broth,
2 . .. ... .. ... .. . .. .. .....
2 Just the miso soup broth of the {I} slurp, slurp but {I} couldn’t eat the rice
so {I} just put it back.
3 .... .. .... ...,
3 Put it back, this evening {I} sleep and,
4 . ..., . ... ....
4 {I} will get a good sleep, and return to the goya.
5 ... ....., .... ... .. ....,
5 {I} returned to the goya, how {I} was trembling when I sat down,
6 .. . .... ... . ... .. ..., **
6 jap bastard that soldier came in with an armful {of blankets}, **
With the repetition of the noun phrase just the soup broth [. ...], pronounuced geu
gug mul man, in lines 1 and 2, Hwang emphasizes her physical exhaustion.despite her hunger, she can only drink the broth of the miso soup.she is too weak to eat her rice. She applies the mimetic adverb, slurpily, slurpily [.. pronounced hul hul] a . . .-
uyseng-e, a phonomime relating to liquid forms. Slurpily, slurpily is an inadequate translation in that it implies drinking a liquid noisily, loudly, even sloppily, which ..
[hul hul] does not suggest. Rather, derived from the verb ....[hul hul hada] to {be} watery or soft, or even to flutter, it indicates a smooth texture. While the verb carries a broader range of denotations than these, in this instance, it is used to emphasize the thinness of the broth, its wateriness, and perhaps works as an apt metaphor for Hwang’s fragile physical condition (she is so tired she can barely sip the broth).
In line 5, Hwang recounts her plan for the evening.to return to the barracks and get a good night of sleep. She uses the mimetic adverb ... pronounced beol beol beol and
means tremblingly, shiveringly, or shakingly to modify the verb ..(ddeolda) to tremble/shake/shiver. It is not clear if Hwang means for the listener to understand that she is cold, scared, or both since the verb ..(ddeolda) can denote to shake from fear
........(museoweoseo beolbeol ddeolda), and to shake from the cold .....
.. (cuweoseo beolbeol ddeolda). Given that she has mentioned that she is too cold to
eat, the mimetic adverb conveys that she is physically .. (beolbeol) cold.that is, she is tremblingly, shiveringly, or shakingly cold.but does not rule out that she is also scared, trembling from fear, as a soldier has just abruptly entered the barracks. Just a minute later, Hwang tells how she and the others huddle under a blanket for warmth so they can sleep and says as if her teeth are chattering jada jada mos jaseo c[h]uweoseo [.. .. .
.. ...] sleep, sleep, {we} could not sleep it was so cold; this provides additional evidence that Hwang is literally physically cold as she creates immediacy with this repetition of sounds.
In these examples, the mimetic adverbs in conjunction with the other vivid details used by Hwang provide the audience with sounds that invite them to step more deeply into the storyworld in closer proximity to Hwang to observe firsthand the watery “soup” and her shivering and shaking body, which is a result of being fatigued and famished and to, perhaps, glimpse into her trembling state of mind. With these details she provides internal evaluation, which Tannen asserts (1983: 368) “is more effective because it allows hearers, guided by the invisible hand of internal evaluation, to draw the intended conclusions about characters and events, and thereby to feel (rather than be told) the point of the story.” Hwang effectively uses sounds words to create an objective storyworld in which she convincingly positions herself as enslaved.
4.3.1.3 Sound Words as Details Constructing a “Real” (Prototypical) Rape
In this final section on sound words, I examine how Hwang uses mimetic adverbs to emphasize further the conditions of sex slavery by demonstrating that she was raped; she was not a prostitute who consented to sex as part of a business transaction. The examples examined here demonstrate how Hwang uses sound symbolism as evidence of the violence slavery entails to demonstrate that her rape was a “real” rape (Estrich 1988). Hwang’s description of her rape closely aligns to the prototypical (Rosch 1978; Givon 1989; Violi 2000) rape. To satisfy the prototype, there must be the use of force and its requisite violence, and ideally, a weapon will be produced as a threat. An integral aspect of constructing oneself as a prototypical aggravated rape victim is demonstrating that force was used and that the victim fought this force with all her strength, even to the point of death (Estrich 1988). The sound words emphasize the force used against her, which ultimately implies her nonconsent and resistance, thus satisfying another aspect of the prototypical rape.
In Excerpt 11, Hwang reports in constructed dialogue how an officer orders her to follow him to his quarters, and once there, proceeds to throw off his clothes. Hwang uses a mimetic adverb to convey the force with which he does this.
Excerpt 11: Threw off His Clothes with a Bang
Officer: 1 1 1 “.. .. ...” “geunyang nohgo olae.” “Just put {it [her bundle of belongings]} down and come.”
Hwang: 2 2 2 .. ... . ...., geulae gassdeoni geu janggyonomi And so {I} went with that bastard officer,
3 3 3 .. .. .. .... .. . ... ******** aga waseo bodeon janggyonomi oseul ddag beoseoseo ******** {The} bastard officer that had just come in and looked27 {at us} before threw off all {his} clothes with a bang ********
27 When Hwang says he looked as us, she is referring to when the officer came into their barracks (earlier) and assigned each girl a number.
The sound word . [ddag] means with a bang, a smash, a smack, a crash. This sound
exemplifies the strength, violence, and swiftness with which the officer threw off his clothes. Ddag [.] is perhaps the most difficult sound word Hwang uses for me to translate; when I think in English, words like bang, smash, crash, do not seem applicable
to how one might throw one’s clothes off. These translations trivialize or comedicize the violence of what is happening. When I imagine this scene in Korean, the sound ddag seems more organic. This is the difficulty that Becker (1995) says is inherent in the process of representing distant texts in term of other (texts). Perhaps these issues are why Tannen (1983: 366-367; 1989: 126-128) in her study of sound non-words that Greek women use in narratives of molestation does not “translate” them; she represents the sound in Greek, for example “DAK” with its sound corresponding sound in English “DOK.” Ddag [.] is a particularly salient example of how translation can be deficient.
When spoken in Korean .[ddag] conveys a sharp, severe, even stark violence that draws the listener into the scene that Hwang creates with this detail.
As she continues the narrative, the violence escalates. In Excerpt 12, she uses two additional sound words to convey the soldier’s violence and use of force, which works towards establishing her nonconsent, which in turn contributes to her evincing herself as a prototypical rape victim.
Excerpt 12: Swiftly Drawn Sword and Literally Ripped Skirt
Hwang: 1 1 1 . .. . .* ..., geu kaleul ssag bbae* bbaedeoni, he suddenly swiftly drew * drew it,
2 2 2 . .... .... . .. ... ... geu cimahago paentihago jjwag jijeo beolineun geoya. literally ripped off {my} skirt and underwear.
3 3 3 ...jjwagjjwag. literally literally.
4 4 4 . .. .. . ....geu hollang beosneun geo aninya. striped naked, no entirely.
5 5 5 ...! eomeona! Oh my god!
6 6 6 . .... ....geu daeumeneun mollasseo. {I} don’t know what happened next.
In line 1, Hwang reproduces the sound .[ssag]; this is the sound of something occurring abruptly; in this instance, the sound created is the soldier swiftly drawing his sword from its scabbard. This sound draws the listener into the chaotic scene and her eyes and ears to the weapon itself, the display of which contributes to her construction of a prototypical rape, as the presence of a weapon is the preferred method of demonstrating that one was forced, of constructing one’s nonconsent. Next, she uses the sound word .
[jjwag], which means literally when she say literally ripped off {my} skirt and underwear (line 2). This sound is to be understood as the literal or audible sound made as the soldier rips and tears off her underwear and skirt. She repeats the adverbial mimetic word ..
[jjwag jjwag], in line 3, reproducing only the sound of the ripping, which leaves her stripped naked.
As demonstrated in the three examples above, Hwang uses sound words as details in her rape narrative to reproduce the violence of the encounter. Reproducing this violence constructs the soldier’s use of force and establishes that Hwang did not consent, thereby evincing a prototypical rape. Hwang effectively employs these sound words to bring the violence of the displaced event to the immediacy of the listener so that the story participants may experience it more directly.
4.3.1.4 Conclusion on Sound Words
Hwang convincingly aligns with the master narrative of (sex) slavery by using sound words together with repetition and other sensory details as a resource to draw the listener’s attention to evidence to indict the Japanese military of conscripting, trafficking, and enslaving her by showing the slavery-like conditions to which she was subjected. Likewise, she demonstrates that she was a “real” (Estrich 1988) or prototypical (Rosch 1978, Givon 1986, and Violi 2000) victim of rape. She does so by showing, not telling, what some (Toolan 1988: 126) call mimesis28 versus diegesis. As Tannen says (1983: 276) specifically of sound words, they force “the hearer to recreate the action represented by the sound” (367), which more deeply involves her by bringing the immediacy of the distal events remembered from fifty years ago into the proximity of the listener by activating her extroverted consciousness (Chafe 1994). By persuasively transforming her subjective experience into an objective (Labov 1997) one for the listener, she contributes to her discursive construction of herself as a more credible, and thus a more reliable, historian. She is better able to refute the master narrative of prostitution and align with the master narrative of rape by proving she was a sex slave and a prototypical victim of rape.
4.3.2 Constructed Dialogue as Involving Detail
In the previous section, I examined how Hwang utilized sound words as an involving strategy to construct herself as a reliable narrator and her experience as credible. In this section, I examine how she uses reported speech, or what Tannen (1989) calls constructed dialogue to do the same. Chafe (1994: 217) asserts that “by far the most common motivation for direct speech is to introduce evaluative information associated with an earlier speech event.” This is achieved as a distal event is brought into the
28Toolan (1988: 126) speaks of the function of free indirect discourse, but this also applies to sound words, which some refer to as mimesis as well. Toolan (1988: 126) says that “mimesis ‘presents everything that happened’ in one sense, but really only everything as it would be revealed to a witness within the scene.” This differs from how I interpret Labov’s (1972) transformation of experience through narrative. I believe that Hwang’s use of sound words and other involving details create a scene in which the listener becomes a participant, not only a witness.
listener’s proximity. As Tannen (1989: 25-26) asserts, constructed dialogue serves as a way to create involvement as “the creation of voices occasion the imagination of a scene in which characters speak in those voices,” which as Chafe (1994: 217) asserts brings “immediacy to displaced experience.”
The speech being reported is of a Japanese military officer. Hwang’s use of this authority figure’s speech conforms to Chafe’s (1994: 218) assertion that “direct speech is used to convey the wording of an earlier speech event when that wording had some official or instructional significance.” Hwang uses this direct speech to provide evidence of Japan’s official role in the sex slavery system. The speech she reports is particularly callous and chilling and precedes her initial rape. I examine a metaphor as reported in constructed dialogue used by Hwang’s rapist, in which he likens her, and by association, the other women imprisoned at the raping center, to factory workers.
Just prior to Excerpt 13, Hwang reports the five rules the officer tells her she must obey under penalty of death. Next, he orders her to take off her clothes, and she begins to plead with him to send her to the factory to do the work for which she was sent, but the officer rapes her. Hwang loses consciousness and after ten days in recovery, the officer sends for her again and asks her if she is now prepared to follow the rules. In Excerpt 13, Hwang asks the officer about what type of rules he is talking.
Excerpt 13
.... 1 2 3 ... .. .., . .. ... .., .. .. ..., .... ... .. .... ..... .... ....
4 ‘..... (?)’, .....
5 ‘..... (?)’, ... .. ...
6 .... .. .. .. ... . . ... .... .. ...***.
7 .... ‘........(?) ’, ... .... ....
8 ...., ... .. .. .... ...,
9 ‘........(?)’, . ... .... ....
10 ..., .... .. ... ..., ..
Hwang: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 And so what is this, what is this military rule, a military rule like this, So I asked what sort of factory is this? Don’t {you} know he asked. {He} said don’t {you} know ‘Kankanakano.’ ‘Kokowanannae (?)’, sent to a factory {I} said. If you send {me} to a factory, {I} will do any kind of work, {I } said send me to a factory. And so ‘Kokokakoshiodako’, This here is {the} factory. This is {a/the} factory, so what kind of factory is this {I} asked, ‘Kodomonokoshiodo’, this is a baby making factory. I said oh my God! {I} fainted and almost died, the virgin{s}, hmm.
As Excerpt 13 resumes, Hwang uses constructed dialogue (Tannen 1989) to replay the interaction she has with the officer. In response to his query if she is now prepared to abide by the five rules he informed her of at their previous encounter, Hwang posits the rhetorical question and so what is this, what is this military rule, a military rule like this, and then asks the officer directly what sort of factory is this (line 2). He asks her don’t you know (line 3) don’t you know ‘Kankanakano’ (line 4). The phrase Kankanakano is Japanese and difficult to discern; this is possibly due to an accent and disfluency with which Hwang speaks Japanese. When Hwang speaks Japanese in the story telling world, and when she puts Japanese in the mouth of the officer and to some extent herself in the storyworld, she achieves several ends. By speaking Japanese in both the storytelling and story worlds, she casts herself as educated. In the historical context, being literate was a marker of not necessarily affluence, but of the reputation of one’s family and even one’s Yangban class. While speaking Japanese is unfamiliar to some listeners, Hwang draws them into a more authentic storyworld, a storyworld in which the interaction probably took place, in part, in Japanese.
At their initial meeting, the officer asks her where she is from. Her hometown, Hamheung, was called Kanko during the colonial period. So in line 4, probably sarcastically, the officer asks Hwang, don’t you know Kanko (your hometown), which at the time it was said, likely confused Hwang, which she indicates as she repeats what he says this is Kanko, sent to a factory (line 5).
In line 6, Hwang pleads, if you send me to a factory, I’ll do any kind of work, she repeats, send me to a factory to which the officer responds in Japanese, this is (the) Kanko Factory. Hwang repeats, this is a factory (line 8) and asks so what kind of factory is this (line 8). The officer repeats this is (the) Kanko Factory and further specifies its purpose, this is a baby making factory (line 9).
As this narrative advances, the officer tells Hwang she is to work in a baby making factory (line 9). A factory is a metaphor for the military brothel in respect to mass production.the thousands of soldiers over the course of the next four years who will rape Hwang. His euphemistic metaphor, a baby making factory (line 9), obscures the reprehensive nature of her “work.” It does not imply rape, nor does it imply that this factory is really a rape center. The euphemism indirectly conjures the sex act, but because of the circuitous manner in which sex is talked about, sex is only alluded to. Outside of its current context, the euphemism is derogatory in that reduces a woman’s identity to her reproductive capabilities. In fact, women impregnated at this factory were forced to undergo abortions; it belies the fact that the women’s purpose was to mass produce babies. The crueler irony is that many of the women enslaved in these “factories” yearned to bear children later in life but were incapable of doing so because of how their bodies were damaged.
When the officer tells her she will work in a baby making factory, Hwang exclaims her shock, oh my god (line 10) and then says (I) I fainted and almost died, the virgin(s), hmm (line 10) which might be as little more fluidly translated as I couldn’t believe what I heard and fainted. She reminds the listener to whom this machinery metaphor applies; it is the (the) virgins (line 10) who are being used in this “factory” for the purpose of providing assembly line sex and who are being serially raped. While she constructs her story to align with the master narrative of (sex) slavery, she effectively posits herself and the others as virgins, which is integral to her constructing herself as a prototypical victim of rape.
The use of the factory metaphor by the story figure (rapist) works on several planes. He likens the women to apparatuses, cogs in the larger war machine. In this purported factory the women are forced to provide sexual “services.” In service to the empire they are reduced to receptacles (See Yoshiaki (2000:199) and Soh (2001b) for further background on the women being referred to as public toilets). The factory metaphor commercializes the women’s experience. At the same time, the Japanese officer discloses the mercantile and methodical implementation of the Japanese military’s brothel system, revealing its scale. This shifts the focus away from the individual rapes to the mass rapes, from blaming the individual rapist to identifying the culprit of the war crime as the Japanese military under direct control of the Japanese empire.
In the factory metaphor just examined, the women are likened to machines, gears in the larger war machine in service to the Imperial Military. When the soldier calls the raping center a baby-making factory, Hwang’s individual experience of rape is euphemized and trivialized. Yet, in positing the factory metaphor, the officer self-indicts, and more appreciably, incriminates the Japanese State. The commercialization, implementation, and sheer scale of the sex slave system are disclosed, even flouted.
4.4 Conclusion
Charon (1993)29 asserts that narrators can be accused of being ahistoric or unreliable historians when in the view of the listener their narrative is deemed overly subjective. Hwang, however avoids the potential of subjectivity leaking into her testimony. She uses explanation, negation, sound symbolism, and constructed dialogue to establish herself as a reliable historian as she rejects the master narrative of prostitution and establishes herself as an official and credible conscript of Japan’s military sex slavery system.
29 Charon (1993) was studying clinical narratives. She found that mismatches regarding truth explain why some doctors characterize patients as unreliable historians when they subjectively color their narratives in the clinical setting.
In Section 4.2.1, I examine how she uses explanation to establish herself as a reliable historian and not a liar and a prostitute as has been allege as she conscientiously provides precise factual information and appropriately accounts for any so-called deviance from the master narrative of marriage. In accounting for her unmarried state, she complies with the master narrative of rape as she asserts her virginal status, thereby positing herself as a prototypical rape victim. In Section 4.2.2, Hwang rejects the interviewer’s script that she was dragged away, by negating it. Labov (1972: 381) says “negatives statements provide a way of evaluating events by placing them against the background of other events which might have happened, but which did not.” With her use of negation, she refutes the alternative reality that the interviewer proposes, and instead firmly establishes the events that did occur.she was officially conscripted as a sex slave. In Section 4.3, Hwang uses details in the form of sound symbolism to indict the Japanese military in their roles of sex slave conscriptor and trafficker and positions herself as an officially conscripted sex slave who was raped, thereby implicitly rejecting the prostitution narrative and aligning with the master narratives of (sex) slavery and rape. Though the veracity of the survivors’ testimonies has been challenged, Hwang transforms her subjective experience with the use of internal evaluation in the form of sounds words and constructed dialogue to construct her experience of rape as credible and prototypical.
With Hwang’s interdiscursive approach as a backdrop, I examine how the other women in this data set negotiate the master narratives of prostitution, (sex) slavery, and rape. Because Hwang is able to construct herself as reliable and as enslaved by Japan and construct her story as objective, she effectively neutralizes the prostitution script.
This may be why she, unlike some of the women examined in Chapter 5, is not compelled by herself or the interviewer to introduce the issue of money or payment. Additionally, that she does not need to directly refute the prostitution script may be one of the reasons her story is so widely used by activist and advocate organizations, as examined in Chapter 6.
Chapter 5: Variations in Rejecting the Prostitution Frame
5.1 Introduction
I first became interested in how the women account for money when I saw Yun Do Ri’s homecoming narrative in Kim-Gibson’s documentary Silence Broken (described in Chapter 1) and then examined a small portion of the transcript on which the film is based. In the homecoming narrative, Yun provides a lengthy account of why she has money at the end of the war even before she mentions the money itself. Upon arriving home and seeing her family’s desperate circumstances, Yun decides that suicide is the best solution for her, her mother, and her siblings, and begins plotting it. She abruptly interrupts her talk of suicide, shifts out of the story world, and speaks about a specific soldier to provide an account (Scott and Lyman 1968) as to how she legitimately obtained money to buy lye for the suicide. She says that when she was in the Jeongsindae there was a Japanese naval soldier born of Korean parents who visited her but with whom she did not have a physical relationship. This soldier gave her a portion of his wages. The only time she spent some of this money was in a failed escape attempt. The rest, she has brought home.
When I first encountered her homecoming narrative, I wondered why she would interrupt the suspense of the suicide plot to explain where the money came from, so when I began working with my current data, I wanted to understand how and why these women accounted for money. After examining their narratives, I believe Yun is refuting the master narrative of prostitution by establishing her platonic relationship with this soldier and, thus, her chastity. Thus, when he gives her with a portion of his weekly wages as a gift, she may accept it. This money cannot be construed as payment because she did not provide services in exchange for it. In her account, she exonerates herself of any “unvirtuous” mode of amassing the money, exercises wisdom in saving it, and returns home with it. Because she provides the account before she mentions the money, she is preempting the master narrative of prostitution that adversaries of the sex slaves have imposed.
In Chapter 4, I examined how Hwang Keum Ju navigated the master narratives of (sex) slavery, rape, and prostitution in her oral testimony. The interviewer’s insistence on the “dragged away” script revealed the preferred or archetypal account, which holds that the appropriate victim of sexual slavery is dragged away, snatched, or seized. Nevertheless, because Hwang so convincingly establishes that she was officially conscripted and indicts the Japanese military as her enslaver, she does not need to refute the prostitution narrative as explicitly as some of the other women in this data set do.
In this chapter, with Hwang’s testimony as a backdrop, I examine some of the more complex interactional maneuvers the women must undertake in their interdiscursive production of themselves as appropriate, prototypical victims of sex slavery, as they refute the allegation that they were simply prostitutes. These complexities are salient in how the survivors negotiate the topic of money/payment in their testimonies. As discussed in Chapter 2, money is inherently tied to the master narrative of prostitution, as payment is a constitutive element. According to Bales (2005: 53), money is also connected to the master narrative of slavery as the enslaved does not have control over her labor or earnings. Additionally, many of the survivors directly link their impoverished circumstances to how they become victims of sex slavery. As discussed in Chapter 1, many women and girls responded to work opportunities out of their filial duty to alleviate their families’ financial burdens and some women were sold into debt slavery by their families.
To provide a sense of how powerful the prostitution master narrative is, I examine if, when, and why each woman references money or payment in her testimony. As the data will demonstrate, even when a survivor’s account aligns with the prototypical sex slave/rape script.that she is snatched off the street by a stranger.she may still be compelled to account for money or deny that she was paid any money to refute the master narrative of prostitution.
5.2 The Data
As discussed more fully in Chapter 3, the data examined in this chapter are comprised of five videotaped interviews that the WCCW transcribed, translated, and published in Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military (Schellstede 2000). The interviews were conducted by Mrs. Dongwoo Lee Hahm in her capacity as director of the WCCW. The interviewees include Grandmothers Kang Duk-kyung, Kim Soon-duk, Moon Pil-gi, Pak Du-ri, and Yi Yong-nyo. Moon Pil-gi was interviewed in her home on October 30, 1994, but the others were interviewed at the House of Sharing on November 2, 1994. Hwang Keum-ju’s testimony as described in Chapter 4 is a part of this same interview set. This aspect of her testimony is explored in Chapter 6 and is not analyzed in this chapter; however, she is included in Table 1 and as a point of reference throughout.
5.3 Negotiating the Master Narrative of Prostitution
To construct themselves interdiscursively as appropriate victims of sex slavery, the women in this data set must refute the allegation that they were simply prostitutes. Some of the women do this implicitly but others explicitly address the prostitution script, particularly the issue of payment. In the forthcoming analysis, I examine the references to money made by the women in their testimonies as they attempt to refute the master narrative of prostitution. The salience of money is connected to how each woman accounts for becoming a sex slave or answers the narrative preconstruction question, where should I begin (Labov 2006).
In Table 5-1, where each woman begins her story and accounts for becoming a sex slave is briefly described in column one; a summary of this account is provided in column two. Columns three and four note the presence of interviewer prompts regarding money/payment and unprompted mentions money by the interviewee, respectively.
Table 5-1 Where She Begins: Narrative Preconstruction Account Summary Interview Prompt Self-Initiated Mention
Hwang Kuem-ju .Her father makes a mistake and contracts and illness. .He spends the family’s money attempting to cure his illness. .She is sent to a foster family. .She is conscripted. Conscripted & Deceived No prompt No mention
Moon Pil-gi .She follows a neighborhood man to enquire about opportunities to study and work. .She is forced into a truck. Seized No prompt No mention
Kim Soon-duk . She complies with the draft order to work in a military hospital out of filial duty (to spare her mother). Conscripted & Deceived No prompt No mention
Kang Dukkyung .She is recruited by her teacher to work in a factory. .She runs away from the factory. .She is seized off the street. Volunteers & Seized No prompt Mention
Pak Du-ri .She is living in abject poverty. .She applies for work in a factory against her parents’ wishes because she needs money to marry. Volunteers & Deceived Prompt Mention
Yi Yong-nyo .She is living in abject poverty. .She is sent to work as a maid .She is encouraged/asked by employer to work in Japan Volunteers & Deceived Prompt Mention
To summarize Table 5-1, of the six women, two were conscripted and deceived about the kind of work they would do; two others were seized outright, though one volunteered to work in a factory first; and the remaining two volunteered for jobs but were transported to military brothels instead. Of the four women with whom the interviewer does not introduce the topic of money, only one mentions money. The two interviewees who are prompted to mention money do so.
In the forthcoming analysis, I build an argument as to why some women are asked about being paid, while others are not. I postulate a reason why some women might mention money even when not prompted to do so. As I examine how each woman addresses money in her interview, I also examine how she interdiscursively answers the question, how did you become a sex slave? This how question underlies each woman’s experience and the way she talks about it. Perhaps the fundamental question that every survivor grapples with is why did this happen to me? In the interviews examined here, no woman begins with, or is prompted to begin with, her sex slave experience at the brothel; each tells what led up to this reportable event. Each woman must construct adequate causality, what Linde (1993:127) defines as an acceptable “reason for some particular event or sequence of events.”
In examining each woman’s causal event chain, I apply Labov’s (2006) notion of narrative preconstruction to reveal each woman’s answer to the question, where should I begin. Labov (2006: 30) proposes that opposed to our conventional approach to narrative.which begins with orientation and proceeds “forward through the complicating action to the most reportable event, the resolution and the coda”.narrative preconstruction flows “backward from the most reportable event” toward the event that requires no explanation. He (2006: 39) asserts that all narrators ask, be it un/consciously, “where should I begin” before telling a story and that “no narrative can be told before pre-construction answers this question.” This is, of course, based on the premise that the event is reportable in the first place.
As I analyzed the women’s testimonies, I noticed a variation on Labov’s schema of preconstruction, perhaps created by the interview frame and, specifically, the interviewer’s questions. The women did not always begin with an event that required no explanation (Labov 2006: 30). They often began with what they perceived to be underlying, ultimate cause, what Labov calls the “initiating event” (2006: 41) of their eventual sex slavery.
In the forthcoming analysis, I examine the causal chain of events each woman posits to ascertain where she begins her story and how the answer to the where should I begin might be correlated to how she addresses the topic of money in her testimony. I examine the women’s stories in the order they appear in Table 5-1, excluding Hwang, in the following groupings: the two women who are not prompted and do not mention money, the one woman who is not prompted but nonetheless mentions money, and the two women who self-prompt and are prompted by the interviewer to address of payment.
5.3.1 No Prompt; No Mention of Money (Moon and Kim)
In turn, I examine the testimonies of Moon Pil-gi and Kim Soon-duk; they do not mention money nor are they prompted by the interviewer to do so. First, I examine Moon Pil-gi’s account of how she becomes a sex slave. At the onset of the interview, the interviewer elicits Moon’s biographical information. In the back and forth over Moon’s age, the interviewer asks for her birth year. Moon responds with the following in Excerpt
1: In this instance, unlike in the Hwang interview, Moon introduces the “dragged away” script, not the interviewer. Twice more, Moon frames her experience as being literally dragged away; in response, the interviewer adopts Moon’s phrasing and uses it thrice more to frame Moon’s capture.
Excerpt 1
1 ...: .. ... . ..(...) ...
2 ... : ., ... .. ......?
3 ... : ..
1 Moon: At the age of sixteen I was dragged away.
2 Interviewer: Ah, {you} were dragged away at age sixteen?
3 Moon: Yes.
Framing how she becomes a sex slave as being “dragged away” functions as an abstract to Moon’s capture narrative. As she describes her capture in more detail, she reveals her answer to where should I begin. She begins with how her family, despite the colonial pressures, does relatively well owing to the remote location of their village and the fact that they owned land. Her father was a seafood trader, her mother a shopkeeper, and her maternal relatives were farmers, so unlike many, they always had food to eat. Just prior to Excerpt 2, Moon describes the neighboring village in which she was dragged away. In this exchange, Moon tells how a neighborhood man approaches her while her parents are elsewhere.
Excerpt 2
1 . .. . ... ... . .. ..
2 ., .. ... .... ‘., ., .... .... .. .. ...
.. . ..’ ......
3 ... : ...?
4 ... : . ... .....
5 ... : .. ....... ..
6 ... : .., .. ... .. ....
7 ..(..) ...... .. .. .. .... ...(...).
8 ... . .. ... . ... ...,
9 .. .. ..(..) ... ......(.. ... ..) ....
10 ., .. ... ..., . .. ... .. . .. .. ...
.....
(2)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Moon: Interviewer: Moon: Interviewer: Moon: {My mother} wasn’t home because {she} had gone to the market. Ah, uh uh, {this} neighborhood man said, “Hey, you, if {you} want to study I have something good to tell {you.}” Who? That neighborhood man. Right. {That} neighborhood man. Okay. Uh uh. If my father found out {about it} {he} would be angry. {He} told {me} not to tell your father a word about this. And so {I} did not say anything about what {he} told me, At that time if I would to anything to go and get to study. Uh, I would even go to a textile factory, I was willing to go and work {in a factory} so I could study in the evenings.
In line 2, she reports the direct speech of this neighborhood man who approaches her while parents are away: He said “Hey, you, if you want to study I have something good to tell you.” This is the single instance of directly reported speech in Moon’s testimony. It serves.as Tannen (1989:133) asserts constructed dialogue can.as internal evaluation of what, for Moon, may be the answer to where should I begin. If my father found out [about it] {he} would be angry (line 6), she says, not only because she has talked to a stranger but also because she has talked about studying, which she has already said is a forbidden topic in her household. Accordingly, she didn’t tell her father about this conversation. The man offers Moon what she wants most, but what she has been denied: an opportunity to study. Moon’s response to this man sets off a chain of events, which she relays in Excerpt 3
Excerpt 3
1 ...: ., .... ....., . . . .. .. . ....?
2 ..: ... .. ..
3 ....(...) .. ......(... ....).
4 .. .. .. . . ... . ....(....),
5 . .... ... .. .. ... ... ... ....
6 .... .. .. .. .. .... ......
7 ..(...) ... ....
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Moon: Interviewer: Moon: Ah, {I} went up to the neighboring village, a car, the uh there was a cargo truck. {A} truck. Yes. Yes. there {he} kept telling me to get in there. Whew, {I} didn’t want to get in like that. That man repeatedly kept pushing me and then grabbed me and put me on [the truck]. And so they put me on they took me away to Pusan. And nobody at home knew [what had happened to me]
Moon is literally grabbed off the street despite her physical struggle with the neighborhood man. Despite her protests, she is thrown into the truck and driven to Pusan.
In (4) below, I summarize the events which precede the most reportable event in Moon’s story. Labov’s (2006: 38-39) conventions for narrative preconstruction are as follows.
e0 the most reportable event
e-1, e-2… the events preceding in this process recursively
e-n where n is the number of causally linked events in the narrative
chain and e-n is the unreportable terminating event
(4) Moon’s Causal Chain of Events
e-6 Moon’s family is doing well despite the Colonial hardships.
e-5 Moon has been denied the opportunity to study.
e-4 While her parents are away, a neighborhood man approaches her and offers her an
opportunity to study.
e-3 She follows this man to the neighboring village to find out more about this
opportunity.
e-2 She gets thrown into the back of a truck.
e-1 She is transported to a military brothel in Pusan.
e0 Moon is enslaved a military brothel.
In preconstructing (Labov 2006) the causal chain of events in her capture narrative, Moon clearly posits her zeal to study as where she begins.
In Moon’s interview, the interviewer does not introduce the topic of money nor does Moon mention money. I assert this is because, early on, Moon frames how she becomes a sex slave as being seized. Captured in this way, her account aligns with the scripts of sex slavery and rape, as she is forcibly dragged away by a stranger. Furthermore, she firmly establishes the direct cause of her entrapment to be her zeal to study, not to make money.
Next, I examine Kim Soon-duk’s account of becoming a sex slave. She also does not mention money, nor does the interviewer prompt her to. The interviewer, however, does posit a frame for Kim’s account, as evidenced in the questions in Excerpt 5.
Excerpt 5
1 ...: .. .. .. ... . . .. ... ... ... .. .
. ., . .... ...?
1 1 Interviewer: geuleom inje geuleom halmeoni geu myeoc sale jeongsindae munjee hyisaengi doesin ge myeoc nyeon, myeoc salisyeosseul ddaeeyo? Right, now, now Grandmother that- what was your age when you became a sacrifice of the JeongSinDae trouble/matter/issue, how old were you at that time?
2 ... : .... ..
2 2 Kim: yeolilgobsal ddae. I was seventeen then.
In Excerpt 5, the interviewer asks Kim how old she was when she became a sacrifice
(... .. .-hyisaengi doesin ge). The term ..hyisaeng or (a) sacrifice connotes being scapegoated or preyed upon. The interviewer also uses the term preferred by some Korean activist organizations, ...Jeongsindae, voluntarily submitting-body corps
(Soh 2001b:75) into which women were “voluntarily” recruited and mobilized for Japan’s war effort. Thus, the interviewer asks Kim at what age she became a sacrifice of the Jeongsindae issue. The interviewer does not propose a “dragged away” script but introduces one that entails state coercion as she positions Kim as a victim of the draft, which Kim does not reject.
However, as Kim explains how she becomes a sex slave, she specifies that she was drafted through the .. .., ceonyeo gongcul, translated variously as girl/virgin/maiden/women delivery and or quota (discussed in Chapter 2). Under colonial rule, Korean households were required to deliver a rice quota to the Japanese government; the virgin quota worked similarly. According to Kim, when word of the “virgin quota” began circulating in her village, her mother sent her to hide in her elder sister’s home. Kim became alarmed, however, by subsequent talk that her mother would be taken in her place, so she volunteered to comply with the draft order. The interviewer’s understanding of Kim’s account is evidenced in her summary of it in Excerpt 6.
Excerpt 6
...: 1 .., .. ... .., .. .... .... .. .. .... .... .... .... .. .. . ..., ... ......
Interviewer: 1 1 gongcul, ceonyeo gongcule gada, gaji anheumyeoneun eomeoniga daesin ggeullyeo galtenigga eomeoniga geullyeoganeun geobodaneun naega ganeun ge nasgessda, geulaeseo naseosyeossgunyo.{The} quota, comply with the virgin quota, if {you} did not comply {your} mother would be taken away instead, rather than let your mother be taken, you went instead, right, so you went.
...: Kim: 2 2 2 .. ... .., […] ye. geulaeseo geuleom, […] For that reason, right, […]
The interviewer’s summary of Kim’s account (line 1) serves as coda to Kim’s draft narrative; it demonstrates the point of Kim’s narrative (as the interviewer understands it) to be that Kim only complied with the “virgin quota” so that the authorities would not take her mother. Kim ratifies the interviewer’s characterization of her account with yes (line 2). The causal event chain posited by Kim is presented in (7).
(7) Kim’s Causal Chain of Events
e-5 A draft order, know as the “virgin delivery” is issued.
e-4 Kim’s parents hide her from the authorities in her elder sister’s house.
e-3 Kim hears that if a family does not comply with the order by sending their
daughter, the authorities will take the mother instead.
e-2 Because Kim is a filial daughter she voluntarily registers for the draft.
e-1 As a draftee she is sent to a military brothel.
e0 Kim is enslaved.
In her extended draft narrative, Kim returns to the family home, complies with the order, is apprised that she will be working as a nurse in a military hospital, and reports for this duty. The interviewer positions Kim as a victim of the (Japanese) state’s mobilization policies, but Kim specifies that the draft she is conscripted though is the “virgin delivery,” and in so doing, positions herself as virginal. Though hidden by her parents, she sacrifices herself to spare her mother and so evinces herself as a dutiful daughter and a heroine, effectively neutralizing the prostitution frame. As with Moon, the interviewer does not reference money nor does Kim.
Moon and Kim, discussed above, and Hwang, discussed in Chapters 4 and 6, effectively establish themselves as prototypical victims of slavery and rape. Moon establishes herself as an prototypical victim who is taken by force; Kim establishes herself as a dutiful, virginal daughter who is conscripted through the virgin delivery; and Hwang positions herself as a dutiful daughter who volunteers to comply with the draft order to spare her two foster sisters. Though their cases differ in how they were initially recruited, all three were deceived. Their answers to the where should I begin question. Moon was striving to study, Kim and Hwang were performing their uimi (filial duty; See Chapter 1 for a discussion of the Confucian standards for filial piety) ..are wholly divorced from any monetary motivation. This may be why Moon, Kim, and Hwang do not feel compelled, and are not pressed by the interviewer, to introduce the topic of money or payment. They effectively neutralize the master narrative of prostitution and its attendant requirement to account for money that one might have earned while engaged in prostitution.
5.3.2 No Prompt; Two Self-Initiated References to Money (Kang)
The next case, Kang Duk-kyung’s, is a hybrid30 of sorts. While the interviewer does not introduce the topic of money, Kang mentions it twice. Originally, Kang is recruited by her teacher into the Jeongsindae to work at a factory. Only later is she seized and taken to a military brothel. In Excerpt 8, Kang recounts how her teacher came to her house to recruit her for factory work.
30 Kang Duk-kyung’s testimony in True Stories of the Comfort Women, (Howard 1995) entitled “From the Women’s Volunteer Labour Corps to a Comfort Station” illustrates this hybridity.
Excerpt 8
1 ..... ..., .. .., .. .. ... .. .. ........(... ....).
1 How would {you} like, on behalf of his Majesty the Emperor of Japan, go to Japan, go to Japan to work in a factory, {he} asked.
2 ... . ... ., .. ... ..,..... .. . .... .
2 And so in those days uh, of course even now, never-, nevertheless in the former, in those days, uh,
3 .... . ...., . ... .. . .. ... ... .. ......
3 {we} were taught by the teachers, uh what, {we} didn’t even ask questions, without reservation/unconditionally {we} just sat still/silently.
4 ‘..’ .. ... ...
4 {We} only answered ‘hai’ [‘yes’ in Japanese].
In Excerpt 8, Kang reports how her teacher visits her home to “ask” her how would {you} like, on behalf of his Majesty the Emperor of Japan, go to Japan, go to Japan to work in a factory (line 1). Kang mimics her teacher’s performance of this utterance as she shifts into the courtly register and utters “on behalf of his Majesty the Emperor of Japan.” When she conjures the imperial voice in the storyworld, the listener can hear this voice more directly and therefore more clearly grasp both the official capacity in which Kang’s teacher visits her and her duty to comply with his request.
As Chafe (1994: 217) asserts, Kang’s use of “direct speech” here draws attention to “some authoritative speech act in which the language that was actually used has some importance because of its authoritativeness.” Teachers in those days (line 2), Kang relates, were authority figures who were not challenged. The teacher-student relationship was governed by a strict hierarchy and clear code of conduct. In lines 2-3, Kang explains that her position in this hierarchy required her to listen silently without reservation/unconditionally (line 3) and answer her teacher only with “hai” (line 4). So while Kang’s teacher technically asks her a question, she clearly understands the illocutionary force of his words and responds appropriately.“yes.”
On the appointed day, Kang and the other recruits gather on the school grounds and are transported to Pusan where they attend a ceremony with hundreds of other conscripts. The valedictorian of Kang’s class delivers a speech in which she utters an exact repetition of the teacher’s officialese while adding the phrase on behalf of the Japanese military. In a manner similar to how she mimicked her teacher’s ceremonial tone, Kang shifts registers and recasts her classmate’s proclamation: We on behalf of the His Majesty the Emperor of Japan, uh on behalf of the Japanese military, uh on behalf of Japan we have to go to factory in Japan to work. [..........., ........, .......
...............]. This instance of intratextual (Hamilton 1996) repetition of official discourse, first uttered by Kang’s teacher and then again in the ceremonial send off speech, reinforces the teacher’s and the state’s role in drafting and mobilizing women into the Jeongsindae for their Imperial missions. Additionally, the use of the direct speech of the teacher and Kang’s fellow student “bring[s] the qualities of the extroverted experience to the introverted experience” and conveys “a quality of immediacy” (Chafe 1994: 218), which involves the listener more deeply in the story and, ultimately, makes the story more credible.
As mentioned, Kang’s case is a hybrid: she is drafted and seized. As she continues to narrate, she explains that she is taken to an iron works factory in Doyamaki, Japan, where subhuman working and living conditions compel her to run away. She escapes but is swiftly captured, returned to the factory, and punished.her wages are docked for two months. Kang’s first mention of money refers to this punishment. She reports for two months {I} could not see a much as a cent [. .. .. . . .. ... . ..]. The
conditions continue to deteriorate; some workers starve to death and others go insane. Kang escapes again, this time with a friend. In Excerpt 9, she recounts her capture.
Excerpt 9
1 .. ... .. .. ..., 2 **. .. . ... ... . ....... 3 ... . ... ....,
1 and then {we} were standing there for a few minutes,
2 **and standing there and a truck came by right away.
3 grabbed hold of {me} and threw {me} into the truck with a thud.
In Excerpt 9, Kang reports how she is literally grabbed off the street and thrown into the back of a truck and taken to military brothel. So though she was originally recruited by her teacher and “volunteered” as a conscript to work in a factory, in her second runaway attempt she is seized. The dual nature of where Kang’s story begins, how she becomes a sex slave, is directly connected to her next reference to money. Prior to Excerpt 10, Kang tells the interviewer that occasionally some older women visit her room and speak Korean with her. Though she does not say so directly, she implies that these women, who are kind to her and share their food with her, are prostitutes. In Excerpt 10, she reports what one of these women tells her about getting paid.
Excerpt 10
1 . ..... 2 .., . .. ... ... .. .. .. . .. .. ... ... 3 ... . ... .. ... ..... 4 . .. ... .. .... 5 . .... .. . ., . .... ... .. ..... .....
6 .. ..... .. ... .., 7 .. ... .... ..,
1 One more thing
2 there is a rumor that, you, uh, because you were brought in by the military police
you can’t receive any money,
3 and so what she was talking about, {I} did not know about that.
4 I remember that like that.
5 at that time you cannot be pa-, I knew nothing about what she was saying that
{I} could not be paid.
6 I did not know anything I just cried a lot and 7 {I} was in a constant state of distress then,
Kang reports the direct speech of the woman who tells her there is a rumor that, you, uh, because you were brought in by the military police you can’t receive any money (line 2). With this reported speech, Kang is positioned, in contrast to the speaker (a prostitute), as being held there against her will, as a sex slave. Kang positions herself as confused and unable to understand what she’s been told. She says that what she was talking about (line 3) {I} did not know about that (line 3). Her use of the marker of negation mos, which emphasizes her lack of agency, serves to contrast her reality of not knowing anything with an alternative reality where she understands the rumor and the situation fully. She utters three variations of the negative phrase I did not know about that (lines 3, 5, and 6); the force of this repetition is evaluative as she positions herself as uncomprehending and unknowing and, therefore, innocent. Using just and a lot in I just cried a lot (line 6), she provides internal evaluation of her mental state and provides external evaluation of this state as she is in a constant state of distress (line 7). She positions herself as the prototypical rape victim, young and innocent, because she is without the interpretative repertoires (Potter and Wetherell 1987: 140) needed to make sense of the situation.
She effectively demonstrates that she does not understand the prostitution script as a service encounter in which a sex worker earns money. Or, if she does understand this script, she does not conceive of herself in the subject position of sex worker in this script. She reveals this by saying that she was confused when she was told that she would not be paid.she had no expectation of being paid. Her lack of understanding reveals that she did not conceive of herself, nor did others legitimately employed at the brothel conceive of her, as “employed” there.
Owing to the complexity of her case, Kang’s answer to where should I begin is necessarily involved. This is demonstrated in the chain of causality in posits in her narrative preconstruction.
(11) Kang’s Narrative Preconstruction Causality Chain
e-10 She’s attending school. e-9 Her teacher visits her house to suggest that she “volunteer” on behalf of the Japanese emperor to work in a factory. e-8 Because she is a student she cannot refuse her teacher’s request and registers for
the draft.
e-7 She is taken to work in a factory in Japan.
e-6 The working and living conditions at the factory are intolerable.
e-5 She runs away from the factory
e-4 She is captured and returned to the factory
e-3 Because the living and working conditions worsen and they are withholding her
pay, she escapes again.
e-2 She is abducted off the street
e-1 She is taken to a military brothel
e0 Kang is enslaved at the military brothel.
Kang does not say she was motivated by money to apply for Jeongsindae service or
posit that she was guaranteed a good wage; however, she was apparently earning a wage
at the factory. Perhaps she feels compelled to make the distinction that though was
employed and received a wage while in the Jeongsindae, she was not employed at the
military brothel. Both of Kang’s references to money contribute to her interdiscursive
construction of herself as enslaved. In the first instance, she is a forced laborer whose
wages are withheld, and in the second instance she is enslaved in a military brothel,
where wages are not relevant to her. Kang clearly refutes the prostitution narrative as she
constructs herself as the innocent, dutiful, prototypical victim of sex slavery and rape.
5.3.3 Prompted and Self-Initiated Mentions of Money (Pak and Yi)
In this next section, I examine Pak Du-ri’s and Yi Yong-nyo’s testimonies. They both introduce the topic of money themselves, and the interviewer asks them specifically about payment. Out of abject poverty, Pak responds to recruiters and volunteers for work with the Jeongsihdae for the expressed purpose of earning a wage. Yi was sent to work as a maid because of her family’s financial difficulties and is subsequently “encouraged” by her employer to apply for a job in Japan. In turn, I examine how each woman answers the where should I begin question and how their answers intersect with their references to money and payment. First I examine Pak’s testimony and then I examine Yi’s.
At the onset of the interview, as she does with all the women, the interviewer elicits Pak’s biographical information. Imbedded in the question she asks in Excerpt 12 is the presumed script for Pak’s sex slave experience, that she was drafted.
Excerpt 12
1 ... : .. .., ... ., ......
2 ..., .....
3 ... . . . ..., ...
4 ... : . . .. .....
5 ... : .....
1 2 3 4 5 Interviewer: Pak: Interviewer: Yeah. Okay, there, Yes, I know. Grandmother, GeongSangBug Province Okay, Grandmother at what age were {you}, {the} Bodily Service Corps? I, that time I was in SamLangJin. In SamLangJin.
In the question the interviewer poses to Pak about her age.Okay, Grandmother at what age were (you), (the) Jeongsindae [Bodily Service Corps] (line 3).the interviewer presumes that Pak’s experience aligns with the draft script. In her reply, Pak does not confirm or deny this script; instead of providing her age as requested, she provides a location. At the onset of this interview, both participants appear to have trouble understanding one another, but this issue subsides after a few minutes. Once the two
clear up the issue of Pak’s age, Pak posits her own script in Excerpt 13, in which she
volunteers for work.
Excerpt 13
1 .. . .. .. ... . ...
2 .. .... .... ... ....
3 .. ..(..) ..(..) . .. ...(...) .... ...
..(..).
4 ... .(..) ... ...... ...(...) ..(..).
5 ..(..)...
6 .. ...(.. ....) ..(..),
7 ... ., .... ... .,
8 ... .. ....(... ....).
9 . ..... . .(.).. ...,
10 .(.) ...(...) .. .. ... .. . ....(....).
11 .... ... ., ... ... .. ....(....). ...
12 ... ... .(.)..)
13 .. ... .... ....(.. ....)
14 .. ...(.....) .. . .. ... ...
15 .. .. .... ... .. ....(......)
16 ... ..(....) .. .. ... .. . **(..)...
17 ... .. .. . ... . .. .. ..,
18 .. .. .. ... ..* .. .....
19 ... .., .. ......(.... .. ..).
20 .. ... ...,
21 .. .... .(.) ...(..) .. ........(.... ....).
22 .. . .. .., . ..(... ....) ....(.....).
23 ...(...) ..(..) . ..(...) .....
24 ... .. .. .... ...(....
1 Okay, at the time I went, there was a Japanese person and. 2 And so, now, from that time {they} recruited unmarried women
191
3 I was not captured and dragged away they recruited the unmarried women.
4 They gathered all the unmarried women to work in factories.
5 in {the} village
6 and so, those who were about to be married
7 ten of us, were seventeen years old.
8 The marriageable age was fifteen.
9 Our family had nothing to live on and,
10 {They} had nothing to live on so, I was a little on the late side in getting married.
11 at that time {one was} married at age fifteen or sixteen. Right.
12 And so my family had nothing to live on.
13 from the time I turned seventeen they planned for me to marry.
14 And so, from that time, the issue was to get me married.
15 At that time at the age of seventeen I was like a little child.
16 {We} had nothing, after that {age seventeen} the situation was I had to marry.
17 And so I decided to go to Japan to make {a} little money and return.
18 I intended to save [money], return and marry.
19 And so I, I decided to go and do that.
20 Even though {my} mother and father,
21 Even though {my} mother and father didn’t want me to go, I decided to go.
22 Go, save money, return after a little while and get married.
23 And so, I don’t know what I was thinking at the time
24 Then, I boarded a boat to leave. A ferryboat.
When Pak says I was not captured and dragged away they recruited the unmarried
women (line 3), she does not rule out that she was recruited through the JeongSinDae as
the interviewer suggests. She tells the interviewer that a Japanese person was involved in
her recruitment, but she rejects the “dragged away” script.
She continues to explain that all the unmarried women in her village were recruited
for factory work (lines 6-8). Pak then provides an account (Scott and Lyman 1968) as to
why she has not yet married. According to Scott and Lyman (1968: 46), an account “is a
linguistic device employed whenever an action is subjected to valuative inquiry.” It is “a
statement made by a social actor to explain unanticipated or untoward behavior” (Scott and Lyman 1968: 46). An excuse, they (1968: 47) assert, is an account subtype “in which one admits that the act in question is bad, wrong, or inappropriate but denies full responsibility” for it. Pak has deviated from the Confucian norms and so she provides an account to bridge the gap between her action, being unmarried at age seventeen, and the expectation that she should be. As she specifies, the appropriate age to marry is fifteen (line 8). In Excerpt 13 above, Pak posits her family’s abject poverty as the reason she is not married. For ease of exposition, lines 9, 11, 12, and 16 of Excerpt 13 are reproduced below in Excerpt 14.
Excerpt 14
9 Our family had nothing to live on and,
11 {They} had nothing to live on so, I was a little on the late side in getting
married.
12 And so my family had nothing to live on.
16 We had nothing, after I turned seventeen the situation was I had to marry.
Pak says her inability to marry is a direct consequence of the family’s poverty. When she says (they) had nothing to live on so, I was a little on the late side in getting married (line 10), she creates a causal link between her family’s poverty and her unmarried status. In constructing her excuse, Pak makes an “appeal to defeasiblity” (Scott and Lyman 1968: 48) when she repeats a variation of the phrase had nothing (to live on) three additional times. She had the will but not the means to marry. This repetition works evaluatively (Tannen 1989: 50). Each successive nothing she utters conveys a deeper sense of her family’s poverty; the nothingness is intensified. Arguably, the repetition serves as an evaluative section or a wave evaluation (Labov 1972: 369-370; 1997) to intensify the assertion but also suspends the action leading up to the most reportable event: why Pak registered for a factory job.
Pak provides this account as a remedial move (Goffman 1971), a repair of sorts, to address the stigma of being unmarried. Pak, however, does not account for being unmarried for the singular purpose of restoring her image. Pak’s unmarried status is not the most reportable event; her family’s inability to remedy this “deviant” status is, and it is the reason she decides to take a job in Japan. In preconstructing (Labov 2006) the causal chain of events Pak clearly posits her family’s poverty as where she begins and views earning a wage as a way to remedy her situation. Pak’s causal event chain is shown in (15).
(15) Pak’s Narrative Preconstruction Causality Chain
e-5 Because her family is poor, Pak is unmarried at seventeen.
e-4 Because she is unmarried at age seventeen, she is vulnerable to the draft.
e-3 Because she is vulnerable to the draft, she is recruited.
e-2 Because she wants money to marry, she willingly participates in the draft.
e-1 Because the recruiters have deceived her, she becomes a sex slave.
e0 Pak is enslaved at a military brothel.
Pak is not married at the age of seventeen because her family does not have the financial wherewithal to marry her off (e-5). Because money is required for her to marry, she applies for factory work against her parents’ wishes. Pak positions herself as like a little child (line 15), but she underscores that she made the decision to go; she says even though (my) mother and father didn’t want me to go to Japan to make (a little) money and return (line 21) and repeats the phrase I decided to go (lines 17, 19, and 21) thrice. This repetition contributes to her interdiscursive construction of herself as agentive. Her retrospective comment I don’t know what I was thinking at the time (line 23) serves as a coda to the narrative and provides external evaluation of her regrettable decision.
Had she not needed money to marry, she would have been married and disqualified from the draft. Had she been disqualified from the draft, she would not have become a sex slave. I assert that Pak’s guilt, or more precisely her presumed guilt,31 lies in the underlying adversarial claim that the women were not sex slaves but prostitutes who willingly went to work in lucrative war zones. Because Pak acknowledged that she went willingly and explains that her purpose was to earn money, her script shares some of aspects of the prostitution script. To refute the prostitution narrative and assert the sex slavery narrative, Pak must demonstrate how her going willingly to earn money differs from a prostitute’s going willingly to earn money. Prior to Excerpt 16, Pak tells the interviewer how she becomes ill on the ship during the sea voyage.
Excerpt 16
1 ... .....(.....).
2 ... ....
3 ... .....(.....) ... ...(...)
31 One could argue that the chain of causality reaches even further backwards. The family needed money to marry Pak off, and she had to be married off because she was female. At that time, daughters were considered liabilities not assets, so being born female is her “original sin.” This is a viable chain of causality considering the prevailing Confucian norms that promoted female inferiority (see Chapter 1).
4 . ...(..., ...) ...(.....). 5 ... ...(...). 6 .. ... . .. . ...., 7 .. ..... ...
1 {I} was forced to get treatment.
2 Taken to the hospital and.
3 I was forced to get treatment, not go to the factory and
4 Uh {they} did this perverse thing {to me}.
5 it was not a factory.
6 I was a person who went to earn money at a factory,
7 All of us unmarried women were.
In lines 1-3, Pak tells how she is hospitalized and forced to undergo treatment for an undescribed illness. She then reiterates the type of work she was promised and from which she expected to be earning her wage. In line 5, she uses the preverbal marker of negation an (.) in conjunction with ida (..), the verb meaning to be or exist, to form
anida... or not, as in it was not a factory [... ...(...-gongjangi aigo
(anigo)]. She uses negation to contrast her reality, this perverse thing (line 4) they are doing to her, with what her reality is not, the factory job she was promised. She uses the term a person who went to earn money at a factory (line 6) self referentially32 to reject the subject position of prostitute/sex worker. In contrasting what she is supposed to being doing with what she is forced to do, she illustrates how her script and the prostitution script clearly diverge; she clearly did not give her consent for the manner in which was being perversely treated.
32 See Schiffrin (2006) for how referring terms are used in narratives in Holocaust discourse.
Pak uses another referring term to illustrate how her script and the prostitution script diverge. In Excerpt 16 (line 7) and previously in Excerpt 13 (lines 2, 3, 4), Pak uses the term agassideul . ....(in which .deul is the plural marker for people).to refer to
herself and the other women with her. The term agassi is variously translated as young lady, girl, maiden, and unmarried woman; it is also used as a term of address for non-kin perceived to be below the marriageable age, something akin to “miss.” Here, Pak33 uses it to stress her unmarried status, which indirectly but positively posits her as virtuous, as unmarried entails virginity.
Pak’s final reference to money is elicited by a question from the interviewer. In Excerpt 17, Pak is asked if the soldiers brought something like tickets with them.
Excerpt 17
1 ... : . .. ., ..., . .. . .. ...? ...?
2 ... : ., .., .. ...(....).
3 .. .. .. .. .... .. ...,
4 .. ....... ...(...).
5 . .. .. ..., .. ...
6 .. .. . . .. ... ...
7 ... .... . ..,
8 . ... ... ..(..) .... .. .. .. ..
.. .. .., . .....(... ....).
9 ...(....) .. .. . ... . .. ... .. . .. .
.....
33 In Chapter 6, I examine how Hwang uses a different term of reference to similar ends. 197
Excerpt 17
1 Interviewer Those tickets, or what were so called, {they} came with tickets
or something like that? How?
2 Pak: Yes. Those things, tickets or whatever {they were}
3 When the unmarried women/girls like us sit there {waiting},
4 By the way there are {these} women managers
5 Those people who get the money and take it, not the owners.
6 Not the owners, but these are people taking the money.
7 When guest/customers come in, the military,
8 It seemed that they gave {the money} to this one and that one, and
this one and that one when the soldiers came and went.
9 And so we never saw a cent, we did not.
In line 1, the interviewer asks Pak if the soldiers brought tickets with them. Introducing the topic of tickets is an indirect way of asking Pak if she received payment from the soldiers. Additionally, the interviewer may be asking Pak, and later, Yi, if she received tickets to corroborate information recorded in surviving war documents that indicated that soldiers purchase tickets in some military brothels. (Chung 1995: 21; UNHRC 1996: ¶36; Hicks 1995: Ch. 4). Clearly Pak understands that were you paid is the interviewer’s underlying question. In lines 2-8, Pak explains how she understood the exchange of money worked where she was confined. She specifies women managers. who may also be those people, who are not the owners.handled the money. As she describes the scene using repetition of the phrase to this one and that one.when she says the money went to this one and that one, and this one and that one when the soldier came and went (line 8).Pak creates a chaotic scene in which she loses track of where the money went in the confusion of the soldiers coming and going. She declares she never saw a cent (line 9), emphatically rejecting any notion that she was paid.
Some of the language Pak uses activates the prostitution script and is counterproductive to her interdiscursive construction of herself as a sex slave. For example, in line 3 when she says the women/girls like us sit there (waiting), she implies they were complicit or consenting. Also problematic is her reference to the soldiers as guests/customers (line 7). Because she actives the prostitution script at the same time she addresses the interviewer’s question about payment, the two scripts are competing. Incidentally, the language that does not align with the sex slave script is elided in Schellstede’s (2000: 69-71) published representation of Pak’s testimony.
Pak is one of the two women examined in this study whom the interviewer asks about tickets/payment. Perhaps this is because Pak has already introduced the topic of money and has emphasized the integral role that money, or the lack thereof, played in her becoming a sex slave and thus has activated the prostitution script. The interviewer may be aware that once the master narrative of prostitution has been activated, it must be refuted or it can compromise the credibility of the speaker.
In this next section, I examine where the one other woman the interviewer asks about payment, Yi Yong-nyo, begins her story, and how money is mentioned in her interview. Early on, Yi, not the interviewer, first introduces the topic of money. However, at approximately the midpoint, the interviewer raises the topic of payment. Before I turn to her references to money, I discuss Yi’s response to the where should I begin question.
The interviewer embeds the “dragged away” script, or a variation of it, in three questions she poses in quick succession to Yi to elicit her biographical information. She does not ask Yi if she was dragged away, but her questions presuppose this. In these questions, the interviewer requests Yi’s Japanese name, her age, and where she was living at the time she was dragged away. These three questions are displayed in Excerpt
18. Just prior to the first question (Q1), the interviewer verifies that Yi has provided her age in Korean, not Japanese, reckoning.
Excerpt 18
(Q1) .., .~ ... ..... ., . . .. .., .. .. . .... .....?
(Q2) ..., . .. .. ...., ......?
(Q3) . . . ..... 性. ... .. ...., ... . .., . ... . ... .....?
Excerpt 18
(Q1) Do you happen to, the time when you were dragged away into the Jeongsihdae, at that time did you have a Japanese name?
(Q2) And so, Grandmother, what was your age when you were dragged away?
(Q3) Where were you living at the time, the time you were dragged away, were you living your family, tell me about your circumstances at that time?
In response to Q1, Q2, and Q3, Yi supplies her Japanese name, her age, and the city in which she lived. She answers the questions directly put to her; she does not address or reject the interviewer’s presuppositions that she was “dragged away.” In addition to providing the locale as Seoul in response to Q3, Yi talks about her family. Next, the interviewer asks Yi directly: In Seoul at the age of twelve, uh, how were you dragged away (line 1). In her response shown in Excerpt 19, Yi reveals where she begins her story.
Excerpt 19
...: .. .... .. ... . ., ., ... ......?
...: .., ....
...: .. ...., ... .......
...: ... . ....
...: ..
...: ... ......
...: .. ..
...: .. .. .... .. ...
...: ..
Excerpt 19
1 Interviewer: Yes. In Seoul at the age of twelve, uh, how were you dragged
away? 2 Yi: Let me see… tha-… 3 Interviewer: Were you attending school, or if you weren’t, 4 Yi: … {I} was not attending school. 5 Interviewer: okay. 6 Yi: Because we had nothing we couldn’t survive. 7 Interviewer: Right. Right. 8 Yi: We were constantly on the verge of starving. 9 Interviewer: Mhm.
In response to the interviewer’s direct request, how were you dragged away (line 1), Yi
replies with an elongated let me see (..-geulsse), then starts tha-, trails off, and pauses
three seconds. Perhaps the hesitation, pausing, and the false start are deliberate as they
provide Yi a few more seconds to formulate her response to the interviewer’s question,
which is complicated by the fact that it entails an inaccurate assertion.that she was
dragged away.
But before Yi answers, the interviewer proposes were you attending school (line 3),
and opens two potential slots with if you weren’t (line 3). Yi can either confirm that she
was indeed attending school or, if she was not, she can provide an alternative. Three
seconds elapse and then Yi says I was not attending school (line 4), which the interviewer
acknowledges. Then Yi begins her story; she tells how her family had nothing (line 6):
They were barely getting by and constantly on the verge of starving to death (line 8).
Following Excerpt 19, she tells how they lost their home and income because of the
Japanese colonization. Yet the interviewer does not perceive this to be a satisfactory
answer to her question, so she reissues it in Excerpt 20.
Excerpt 20
1 ...: .., ..., .. .. .. .. .. ....?
2 ...: .. .. . ..., .. . . ...., ...
3 ...: ..
4 ...: . .. ... .. . ...
5 ...: ..., ... .. .. ....., ... ......
6 .. .....? ..., ...
7 ...: . .. .., .~, .. . .. ....,
8 ...: ..
9 ...: .. . .. ... ...., .., .., .. ....
....., .. .. .. .. .... ....,
10 ...: ..
[…]
11 ...: .. .... ..... .....
12 ...: ..
Excerpt 20
1 Interviewer: So, then, where were {you} when {you} were captured/grabbed
and taken away?
2 Yi: Nobody did that, I had gone {there} to work as a maid.
3 Interviewer: Yes.
4 Yi: {I} went to a large house to work as a maid.
5 Interviewer: went, and so who came and took {you} there, if not then…
6 Do {you} happen to remember which day, that day.
7 Yi: Who took {me}, uh, {I} was not taken there,
8 Interviewer: Yes.
9 Yi: I just lived at that Japanese house, there, our father was having
difficulties, because the produce trade was in a slump.
10 Interviewer: Yes.
[Intervening discussion an incidence of food allergy/poisoning.]
11 Yi: Our/my father sent {me} to the Japanese house.
12 Interviewer: Yes,
Though Yi identifies her family’s poverty as the starting point, in response to the
interviewer’s fifth indirect assertion that she was forced away, she specifies that nobody
did that (line 2); instead, she says she had gone to work as a maid (lines 2 and 4).
Though the interviewer relents with if not then, she insinuates that Yi was forced when
she says so who came and took you there (line 5). Yi again explains that she was not
taken there (line 7) but that she was living and working as a maid there because her
father’s business wasn’t doing well. After a lengthy explanation about the vegetable
trade and a food allergy/poisoning attack that she experienced and subsequent dietary
restrictions that may be why her father sends her to the Japanese house (line 11), she
returns to the topic of her job as a maid and reiterates that she was not taken from the
house by force.
Though Yi has certainly accentuated the centrality that the lack of money, housing, and food plays in where she begins her story, she has yet to mention the word money. Her first direct reference to money comes up in her reporting of her interaction with her employer shortly after she is employed, as seen in Excerpt 21.
Excerpt 21
1 ...: ... . ....,
2 ...: ..
3 ...: .. . ... .. ...., .. .. ... ....,
4 ...: .
5 ...: ...., ...... . ... ......,
6 ...: ..
7 ...: ...., .. ... ...., . ... ..., . .., .
.., . ... ... .. ..,
8 ...: ..
9 ...: ., .. .... .. ..,
10 ...: ..
11 ...: ..... ...., ... ...., .. .. ..,
12 ...: ..
13 ...: ..(...) ... ...., .... .. .......
...,
14 ...: ., . .. .. .. .....?
15 ...: ... . ...
Excerpt 21
1 Yi: {so} I went to [a] Japanese house/family to live {in/with}.
2 Interviewer: Yes.
3 Yi: and the Japanese house/family, by the way since my family was in
{financial} difficulty/distress,
4 Interviewer: Right.
5 Yi: Hanajjang-TOP, they called {me} Hanajjang at that house,
6 Interviewer: Mhm.
7 Yi: Hanajjang, {your} family is in {financial} distress, so {you’ll} have to make money, so why don’t {you} go to a place where {you} can make money, eat well, and be well-clothed,
8 Interviewer: Mhm. 9 Yi: {He said} Mmm, many other people have, 10 Interviewer: Mhm. 11 Yi: {He} asked me if I would go, so {I said I} will if it is where {I}
can earn money and live comfortably, 12 Interviewer: Mhm. 13 Yi: {I} asked where {I} would go, and {he} said {I would} to Japan.
So, 14 Interviewer: Yes, do you [happen to] remember the name of that Japanese person? 15 Yi: I don’t remember.
In lines 1-3, Yi reiterates that she went to work at this Japanese household because of
her family’s financial difficulties. Next, she replays the conversation in which she
directly reports the speech of her employer. Her employer addresses her, Hananjjang, her
Japanese name, and says {your} family is in {financial} distress so {you} will have to
make money (line 7). Though presumably he is providing for her, he suggests, why don’t
{you} go to a place where {you} can make money, eat well, and be well-clothed (line 7).
He reminds Yi of her filial duty, but he does not simply suggest that she should assist her
family. When he tells her that she will have to make money (line 7), he uses the modal
eoya (..), which means should or ought to (do) or must or have to (do); that she will do
so is a foregone conclusion.
Here is another case of the directly reported speech of an authority figure, which is
important because of its “authoritativeness” (Chafe1994: 217). In this interaction, her
employer, the one up in the employer-employee hierarchy, invokes the voice of Confucianism as he positions her as a dutiful daughter bound to earn money for her family. He notes the additional benefit that she will eat and dress well. He tells her many other people have (line 9) gone, reassuring her of the normalcy and even the popularity of what he has “suggested” and what he asks her next. She says that {He} asked me if I would go (line 11), and that she agreed to go under the condition that she could earn money and live comfortably (line 11). Again, Yi’s lack of the most basic provisions, food, shelter, and clothing, and her filial uimu (similar to Moon and Hwang’s cases discussed in above) are links in the causal chain of events leading to her enslavement.
In her next mention of money, Yi refers back to the interaction she had with her employer (Excerpt 21). At this juncture in the storyworld, Yi is recounting the leg of her voyage by boat when the interviewer asks her if she and the women on the boat with her knew where they were going. This exchange follows in Excerpt 22.
Excerpt 22
1 ...: ..... .. . .... ...... ....?
2 ...: .... . ..
3 ... ...... *****
4 ... . .. .... ... .... . ...
5 6 . ... .... .... .. ... . ... ......
Excerpt 22
1 2 3 Interviewer: Yi: And there [on the boat] didn’t the women {with you} know where they were going/headed? None of us knew. Not a single one of us knew.
4 We happily went like that because we were told that we would go
{to Japan} to earn money.
5 {We} were happy because {we} were eating well.
6 Because {we} heard {we} would eat well and
The interviewer’s question about Yi’s foreknowledge of her destination works as it does in other interviews examined in this study; it elicits information that demonstrates that Yi and the other women did not give their informed consent, and it frames them as slaves and not prostitutes. Yi confirms that none of us knew (line 2) and adds not a single one of us knew (line 3). She specifies that the only knowledge they had is what they were told, that [they] would go {to Japan} to earn money (line 4). Thus, they went happily (line 4) and were happy because (line 5) they were indeed eating well as had been promised.
Though she focuses here and throughout on being well-fed, she clearly reiterates that she was also promised she would be earning money and that this was part of her motivation for going. She needs the money to eat in a way that accommodates the dietary restrictions that may have led her to becoming a maid in the first place. Yi’s answer to the narrative preconstruction question where should I begin is summarized in (23).
(23) Yi’s Narrative Preconstruction Causality Chain
e-6 Because her family had nothing (no shelter, no income, inadequate food) they could not provide for Yi. e-5 Because they could not provide for her, they sent her to work as a maid where she would be provided with food and shelter. e-4 Because she is working as a maid, she is under the supervision and control of her employer.
e-3 He suggests/ask/encourages her to get another job so she can earn money to assist her family and eat well. e-2 Because she is a dutiful daughter and would like to eat well, she agrees to work in
Japan. e-1 The recruiters have deceived her and take her to a military brothel. e0 Yi is enslaved at the military brothel.
Though Yi refers to money twice more, only one of these references is examined here, as the other is garbled. This incomprehensible passage is also elided in the published version of Yi’s testimony (Schellstede 2000: 95-97). Yi’s final mention of money, or rather payment, is introduced when the interviewer asks Yi if she received tickets from the soldiers in Excerpt 24.
Excerpt 24
1 ...: .... . .... . .. . .. ..., ... ... . .. .
2 ...: . .. ... . .....
3 ...: .. .. .....
4 ...: ..
5 ...:.. .... . .. ......?
6 ...: .... .....
7 ...: ..
8 ...: .... .. . .... .. .. ... . ..
9 ...: ..
10 ...: . ... ... ...., 11 ... . .... .... ... . .. . .. ... ......12 ...: .. .. 13 ...: ... ... ... ... .. ...., ... 14 ...: .. ... .. ....... 15 ...:... ... .. . ... . .. ...
Excerpt 24
1 Interviewer: And then when the soldiers came in, say, did they come in
without anything, or with something like a ticket
2 Yi: {They} bring a ticket. They get a ticket and give it {to me.}
3 Interviewer: They gave you a ticket.
4 Yi: Yes.
5 Interviewer: Then what did you do with the ticket{s}?
6 Yi: {I} returned them to the office.
7 Interviewer: Mhmhm.
8 Yi: Therefore, I could not get let alone even see any money or
anything like that and
9 Interviewer: Sure.
10 Yi: {They} ask/tell me to return the tickets to the office,
11 And then it seems that the office clerks keep a record of how many
{tickets} one gets.
12 Interviewer: Right. Right.
13 Yi: Anyways, I was frequently so sick, so {I didn’t know} what
14 Interviewer: Sure. You were frequently sick there indeed.
15 Yi: I didn’t know what was going on, what happened to the money
16 Just like that just time {went by}.
As shown in line 1, the interviewer asks Yi (as she did with Pak) if when the soldiers
came did they come in without anything? Ths implys the opposite.that they came in
with something, which she suggests is something like a ticket. Yi verifies this and says
{they} bring a ticket. They get a ticket and give it {to me} (line 2). The interviewer
confirms that they gave Yi a ticket and asks her what she did it. Yi says she returned
them to the office (line 6) and therefore, she couldn’t get, let alone even see any money or
anything like that. (line 8). Yi could use either postverbal negation marker an or mos; she
uses mos (line 8). In contrasting these two markers of negation, Lee (1993: 318) asserts
that “an is used when the absence of action or activity is thought to be caused by internal
factors, and mos by external factors.” This implies not only that she did not (an), but that she could not (mos) receive let alone see, any money or anything like money (line 8), as this was not under her control. She continues to explain that the tickets were for accounting purposes, but she notes that she was frequently so sick (line 13), that she didn’t know what was going on, or what happened to the money (line 14).
As also observed in Excerpt 17 of Pak’s interview, the interviewer’s inquiry about the receipt of tickets is an oblique way to introduce the topic of payment without actually mentioning the words money or payment or to baldly ask were you paid. Both Yi and Pak indicate that they understand the underlying question when they describe their inability to receive, or even see.they both use this expression.any money. Arguably, the question about tickets/payment is asked and answered for the purpose of explicitly refuting the master narrative of prostitution. This burden is imposed on the women by adversarial discourse that has positioned them as prostitutes, and in part, by the overlapping elements between these women’s testimonies and the prostitution script: in both, the social actor goes and does her work willingly and for money. Had the sex slave survivors not been assailed with claims that they were simply prostitutes, the need to address payment would evaporate.
5.4 Conclusion
In the analysis above, I examine how five women account for how and why they became sex slaves and how their accounts intersect with their mentions of money in their testimonies. In this data set, when it is clear that a woman was seized or drafted and did not go for the expressed purpose of earning a wage, she is not required by the interviewer to address money/payment in her testimony. In other words, the closer her testimony aligns with the sex slavery and rape narratives, the less interactional accounting she must do to refute the master narrative of prostitution.
The first woman, Moon, is motivated by her zeal to study and is seized. The second
woman, Kim, is a dutiful daughter who complies with the “virgin delivery” draft to save her mother. And Hwang, whose chain of causality is examined in Chapter 6, clearly establishes she was officially drafted. These three women’s stories do not align with the master narrative of prostitution: Moon is seized, Kim is a filial sacrifice, and Hwang is drafted. Notably, none leave home for the sole purpose of earning a wage. As such, they do not mention money, nor does the interviewer raise the specter of payment with them.
In the next three women’s testimonies, once money is mentioned, the issue of payment is addressed. In Kang’s case, her teacher, an authority figure whom she cannot defy, recruits her to work in a factory. In an escape attempt from the factory, she is seized off the street and taken to a military brothel. Though her account of being seized aligns well with the sex slavery/rape script, it does not preclude her having to refute specifically the prostitution narrative by saying she was not paid. The interviewer does not raise the topic of money, but once Kang mentions that she earned money at her factory job, she must expressly state she was not paid for her work in the brothel to neutralize the prostitution narrative. Interestingly, Yun’s story, discussed in the opening of this chapter.although her testimony is not in this data set.is similar to Kang’s. She is already working outside her home in a Korean factory when she is seized, and she preemptively addresses the issue of money, making clear that the money she had at the end of the war did not come from sex work.
Finally, those who went willingly to earn a wage are treated with more suspicion. Both Pak and Yi both volunteer for the Jeongsindae expressly for the purpose of earning money, and both women, as well as the interviewer, address the issue of payment. In fact, Pak and Yi are the only women with whom the interviewer raises the issue of money or payment. In this data set, when a woman’s testimony overlaps with aspects of the prostitution script, by suggesting that she went willingly to earn a wage, she must explicitly refute the master narrative of prostitution.
The women who activate the prostitution script by having volunteered for well paying jobs are in similar situations to rape victims who are perceived as “contributing” to their rape (dressed “provocatively,” knew their rapist, etc. See Chapter 5 for more on rape myths.) The same paradox applies: The women, because they have been raped, are assumed to be unvirtuous because truly virtuous women are unrapable (DeMente 1998; Choi 1998; Barry 1979; Matoesian 1993). Furthermore, women who went to work for money are seen as contributing to their rape/sex slavery because they violated Confucian norms by working outside the home, even though these same norms are the ones that required their filial piety and propelled them to take jobs and sacrifice themselves for their families and their nation. These women must do more repair work to present themselves as credible victims, which is an additional interactional burden imposed on those who were deceived into thinking that they were taking a job to earn money.
Though the preferred script involves the woman’s being seized, and women were violently abducted, volunteering and subsequently being deceived represents the more common method of recruitment (Howard 1995: 18-20; Yoshiaki 2000). Min estimates that 59% were “drafted through false promises of well paying jobs” (2003: 951). Yoshiaki (2000:29) cautions that “if too much emphasis is placed on extreme cases in which officials used violence to gather women, the much larger number of cases of deception and viciousness will be overlooked.” Deception and trickery are coercion, even if some in the Japanese government, such as former Prime Minister Abe, argue they are not equivalent to “being forced [to be sex slaves] in the narrow sense of the word” (Morris-Suzuki 2007: ¶7).
Additionally, too much emphasis on how any victim of sex slavery or trafficking fits the prototypical script narrows the acceptable or credible range of experience and will continue to silence the victims of the Japanese sex slavery system who do not fit this narrow range. This would include sex workers and Japanese women, who may or may not have volunteered to serve, and men victimized in the rape camps (see Klein’s August 10, 2002 interview with Walter Dempster, a.k.a Walterina Markova, whose experience as a sex slave is told in the film Markova: Comfort Gay).
We must make room in the master discourse of rape for all survivors and not continue to categorize and delimit victims and treat those who do not conform to the dominant heterosexual model of rape as not fully human. The same forces, particularly the crushing poverty, that made young Korean women vulnerable to deceptive offers of well-paying work fuel the international trafficking in human beings for sex slavery today. Ultimately, gender, payment, and the mode of recruitment (seized or deceived) is irrelevant: If a person forced into prostitution received some money but did not give informed consent to the kind of work she or he would be doing and cannot change the conditions of or leave the employment, she or he is a slave who is being raped.
Chapter 6: Navigating the Master Narratives of Prostitution, (Sex) Slavery, and Rape in Public Discourse
6.1 Introduction
In Chapter 4, I examine in detail how one woman, Hwang Keum-ju, navigates the master narratives of (sex) slavery, rape and prostitution. In Chapter 5, I examine how other women negotiate these same frames. In this chapter, I examine how presentations of primarily Hwang’s testimony and other public discourses about her and attributed to her are shaped by allied organizations as they negotiate the competing master narratives. In Section 6.2, I review a published representation in which an advocacy organization skillfully negotiates the master narratives of (sex) slavery, rape, and prostitution in a manner that supports the sex slave survivors’ redress movement. In contrast to this, in Section 6.3, I examine other public discourses in which advocates do not negotiate these master narratives as effectively.
6.2 Effective Negotiation
In this first section, I examine the Washington Coalition of Comfort Women Issues, Inc.’s (WCCW’s) careful crafting of the representation of Hwang Keum-ju’s testimony as a skillful negotiation of the inherent constraints of the master narrative of (sex) slavery and rape, specifically the sexist standards to which the prototypical or “ideal” victim must comply to be credible. Though the WCCW avoids, unlike other advocates, accidentally activating the prostitution frame, there are consequences of their conformity to these master narratives. Initially, I describe how potentially abrasive aspects of her speech are elided so that a more appropriate “objective” (Labov 1997) victim is presented. Next, I examine how modifying the causal agent changes the causal chain of events and shifts who or what is to blame for what happens to Hwang. Finally, I examine how Hwang’s account is flattened while the case against Japan is strengthened by editorial elisions and exuberances and deficiencies in translation (Ortega 1957; Becker 1995).
Before I present the analysis, in which I examine the lack of parity in the published version of Hwang’s testimony and the version I translate, I provide a description of the data.
6.2.1 Data Description
As described in the Methodology, (Chapter 3) the videotaped testimony I use as data for the forthcoming analysis was published in Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military (Schellstede 2000) by the WCCW. In this section, I consider two texts. They are both written representations based on the same speech event: an interview conducted by the founder of and current advisor to the WCCW, Ms. DongWoo Lee-Hahm on November 2, 1994, in which Hwang Keum-ju provides an oral testimony about her experience as a sex slave. The first text is the transcribed, translated, and edited version of this testimony as published (in autobiographical form) on pages 3-9 of Comfort Women Speak, referred to hereafter as the published testimony. The testimonies are organized in alphabetical order, and Hwang’s appears first among the other eighteen testimonies that are published in this collection.
The second text is a written transcript of the same video-taped interview on which the published testimony is based. This second text will be referred to as the interview transcript. Both texts are based on the same speech event, a triadic34 interaction, in which Hwang, the interviewee; Hahm, the interviewer; and an unnamed grandmother participate. Both texts are written representations of the moment by moment oral interaction and as such miscarry in their characterization of the original interaction (Preston 1985; Mishler 1991).
In fact, the proposed function of the two texts is simultaneously similar and radically dissimilar. Both texts aim to raise public awareness of the war crimes (crimes against humanity) perpetrated on Korean women by the Japanese Imperial Military Forces before and during WWI. Unlike the published testimony, the written transcript is not a historical document; instead, it is ‘data’ examined in an academic work of linguistic analysis focusing on how the master narratives of (sex) slavery, rape, and prostitution are navigated by the military sex slaves and others who represent them.
To further ground the analysis, I provide additional context for the published testimony. The editor’s remarks in Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of
34 As noted in Chapter 3: Methodology, the interview is technically quadratic when counting the Korean Council representative; though she did not make verbal contributions, her presence had a certain but unknown impact on the interview. The video-photographer was also present a few minutes at the beginning and end of the interview.
the Japanese Military (Schellstede 2000: ix) describe the process of collecting, transcribing, translating, editing, and publishing the testimonies: “In the spring of 1996, the Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues began transcribing the taped interviews of surviving ‘comfort women’ in order to publish a collection of testimonies in English, the first of its kind in the United States.” After describing where the testimonies were recorded, Schellstede (2000: ix) says,
Then began the arduous, time-consuming task of transcribing the testimonies in
Korean, made difficult by heavy regional accents, and then translating them into
English. The translations were edited to be understandable in English, keeping
very close to the original text. It took us more than a year to bring the manuscript
to a satisfactory level with a great deal of help from devoted volunteers.
As can be seen above, the editor stresses that great care was taken in the translations, which were kept “very close to the original text.”
Before explicating specific examples from the data, I describe the impetus driving the analysis comprising this section and the rationale for including it here. As in the previous chapters, I strive to treat the analysis with integrity and to carefully describe and provide a rigorous exposition of data. I consider myself an ally to the WCCW’s mission35. I have deep admiration for the individuals that comprise this NGO and other organizations whose members, for years, have indefatigably supported the women’s efforts to bring
35 Their mission as stated on the WCCW website is as follows: “The Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues (WCCW) was founded in December 1992 to promote research and education pertaining to crimes against Comfort Women during World War II. It is an independent, non-profit educational organization that welcomes persons of every nationality. The WCCW believes that the Japanese government must clearly acknowledge its responsibility for crimes against Comfort Women. The Japanese government should officially apologize to these victims, provide redress from government sources, not from the so-called Private Fund, and open all government records regarding its involvement in these heinous crimes. Until these steps are taken, the WCCW believes that Japan should not be permitted a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council” (http://www.comfort-women.org/)”
their experiences of enslavement to public consciousness and a legal resolution. Each individual/researcher/activist who approaches this issue, the women, and their stories, as noble as her intentions may be, is human and therefore fallible. Within these limits, I situate the following analysis.
As a non-Korean and non-native speaker of Korean, I lack the depth of cultural memory a Korean native speaker could bring to the analysis of these texts. I do not wish to nor can I compete in a comparative analysis of translations. Instead, I draw on Becker’s (1995: 71-87) application of Ortega’s (1957; 1959) axioms for a new philology:
(1) that every utterance is deficient, and (2) every utterance is exuberant, which Becker (1995:71-87) applies to distant texts in the process of what he calls back-translation (72). In doing the languaging of the interview data, I faced the evil twins of translation, exuberance and deficiency (Becker 1995:80) and the tension every translator faces when deciding what to omit and what to add as she strives to represent what she understands to be the original contextualized meaning. During this process, I increasingly observed inconsistencies between my translation of Hwang’s testimony and the published version of her testimony in Comfort Women Speak (Schellstede 2000). My first inclination was to dismiss the differences the two transcripts revealed, as I anticipated a certain degree of variation given the disparate genres of the two texts: However, examining a translation’s exuberances and deficiencies (Becker 1995:80) exposes the salient ways in which it differs from the original text.
A number of these disparities are clearly the consequence of the inherent exuberances and deficiencies that always characterize representing one language in terms of another, such as untranslatable words, sounds, and culture-specific concepts. However, even when allowing for individual styles of translation, word choice, formality, etc., a cluster of these divergences appeared to stretch beyond the realm of expected variation. In scrutinizing the inconsistencies more thoroughly, I begin to observe a consistent patterning of differences. In the forthcoming analysis, I compare portions of the two texts introduced above to demonstrate their lack of parity. Before doing so, I provide a brief introduction to the two different genres the texts represent.
The validity of the autobiographic monologue genre is not challenged here. The typical reader of an autobiography un/consciously makes the following assumptions. She presumes that the words on the page ‘belong’ to the writer and that “I,” the animator, author, and principal (Goffman 1981) are synonymous. While she understands that the story is edited, she assumes that the content of the autobiography, unless categorized as fiction, is true or factual36.
The interview, in its oral form, is ubiquitous in popular culture; however, written representations of interviews in their raw form appeal to a much narrower audience. On one level, these two genres are hardly comparable; however, examining a few of the ways in which the two texts vary in their representations is constructive and shows how Hwang’s testimony is shaped for specific political advocacy reasons.
36 The public outcry over fabrications discovered in James Frey’s “memoir” A Million Little Pieces (2003) is illustrative of how violating the public’s frame of expectations in terms of fiction and nonfiction reveals what those norms, in fact, are.
6.2.2 Linguistic Sanitizing to Construct a More Acceptable (Prototypical) Victim
In this section, I describe a category of de-selections, a group of artifacts that are expunged from the published testimony of Hwang’s testimony. Based on my observations of both texts, it appears that in the published testimony of Hwang’s testimony, some potentially abrasive aspects of her speech that do not contribute to the factual spine of her testimony are elided. To be specific, expletives and ethnic slurs Hwang utters in the interview are not ascribed to her in the published testimony. In Table 6-1, the following examples are provided.
Table 6-1: Linguistic Sanitizing
Written Transcript Published Testimony
1 A jap that bastard soldier came into what an armful (of blankets) came in, ** […she provides a very detailed description of the blankets (discussed in Chapter 6)] After that, a Japanese soldier brought us tattered blankets.
2 The Japanese bastards sent an official written order. And so who is going to go? When the Japanese sent us a draft notice for girls, who was going to go?
In example 1, Hwang uses a slur, close to Jap, and also the expletive bastard to modify the story figure, a soldier. In example 2, she uses the expletive bastard to modify the Japanese, which she specifies as plural; given the context of the official order she is probably referencing Japan the State. The transparency of the de-selection process is not evidenced in the editor’s report that “the translations were edited … keeping very close to the original text” (Schellstede 2000: ix).
I can hypothesize but not determine why the indecorous is omitted in Hwang’s testimony. To be clear, this process is not unique to her, the other five women’s testimonies I examine are also sanitized. I postulate that the editorial decisions arise out of the extant pressure that the advocacy organization (the WCCW) is under to present an “appropriate” victim. Expletives, ethnic slurs, or any other aspects of speech that could be construed as offensive, impolite, or overly subjective (Labov 1997) must be neutralized. They may understand, as Labov (1997) asserts, that a narrator will be viewed as more credible when she is able to represent her subjective experience in an objective manner. The reality of the adversarial climate the advocates must navigate obliges them to present a seemingly objective (Labov 1997) and appropriately dutiful and feminine woman; any unseemly aspects are linguistically sanitized in their effort to present Hwang as an acceptable, prototypical victim. Perhaps this is why a modulated Hwang is presented.
In her examination of how the competing narratives of rape and romance unfold in a Japanese rape trial, Burns (2002: ¶36-37) discusses a similar kind of sanitization process. Because of the proclivity towards victim-blame in social and legal contexts, to construct herself as an appropriate, prototypical victim of rape, the victim must recount “what actually happened [...] in such a way that grey areas are white-washed” and any potentially blameworthy aspects are removed. This white-washing process can “result in contradictions, ambiguities and proposals which may be interpreted as implausible or absurd” (¶37) and diminish the victim’s credibility. Even when this sanitization process does not result in contradictions, it does reinforce the narrow range of acceptable and restrictive behaviors for women. The inherently masculinist construction of rape and its attendant notion of the ideal rape victim dictate that the victim prove she is “virtuous” (Matoesian 1993).
In the earliest study of gender and language, Language and Woman's Place,37 Robin Tolmach Lakoff (1975: 10) writes that “we tend to excuse a show of temper by a man where we would not excuse an identical tirade from a woman: women are allowed to fuss and complain, but only a man can bellow in rage.” Lakoff examines the way expletives and coarse language in women’s speech are dispreferred. She asserts that “the ‘stronger’ expletives are reserved for men, and the ‘weaker’ ones for women” (1975: 10). (See also Bailey and Timm 1976; Frank 1978). Granted, Lakoff and the other studies mentioned focus on American English and so such norms do not necessarily apply to speakers of Korean. The instances of sanitizing in Hwang’s and the other women’s representations examined in this study imply that expletives are dispreferred by the editors or others involved in the process of transforming the interviews into published testimonies for an English-speaking audience. Only six instances are examined and no comparable representations of male speech are examined, so it is not possible to generalize whether gendered norms of expletive use exist or govern their use.
37 Lakoff’s (1975) seminal work inspired an entire body of scholarly work in the nexus of gender and discourse (See Tannen 1990; 1993b; 1994; Eckert 1990; Maltz and Borker 1982; Phillips et al. 1987; Cameron 1995), which is beyond the scope of this analysis.
6.2.3 Shifting the Blame by Altering the Causal Agent
In this section, I look at a specific instance in which modification of the causality shifts the overall allocation of blame. More specifically, I examine how the published testimony differs from the written transcript in how causality is constructed, which ultimately shifts the emphasis on the causal agents and, therefore, alters how Hwang posits allocation of blame in the story world. In this case, causality at the sentence level is altered not by modifying the causal lexical device (because) or the sequential clauses (Labov 1997) but by altering the causal agents. This in turn shifts the broader, more global causality that Hwang is constructing and her more specific interactional aim in the testimony to provide an account as to how she became enslaved. The modification subtly shifts the blame away from larger aspects of gender discrimination and the role her father plays in her becoming a sex slave to concentrate the attribution of blame on Japan as the exploitive agent.
According to Linde (1993: 127), adequate causality is defined “as a chain of causality that is acceptable by addressees as a good reason for some particular event or sequence of events” (1993: 127). In contrasting the two causal event chains, it is useful to apply Labov’s (2006) notion of narrative preconstruction to reveal Hwang’s answer to the question, where should I begin. (See Chapter 5 for more on narrative preconstruction). I examine the causal chains of both texts to ascertain where Hwang begins in each. Before examining the two texts side-by-side, I present how causality at the sentence and clausal level is constructed in the written transcript.
As discussed elsewhere (Chapter 4), Hwang has a very definite idea of where she wishes to begin her story. After the interviewer obtains Hwang’s biographical information and apologizes for the imposition of the interview, she asks Hwang, in Excerpt 1, how old she was when she was dragged away.
Excerpt 1
...: 1 …., . .. ......?
....: 2 .... . ... ...,
3 .. ... ....
4 .. .... ... .. ..
Interviewer: 1 …uh, at what age were {you} dragged away?
Hwang: 2 so if {I} am going to tell that story,
3 {I} will start from our father’s time.
4 my father a long time ago, during the Japanese occupation.
When Hwang says so if {I} am going to tell that story, {I} will start from our father’s time (lines 11-12), she addresses the preconstruction prerequisite question, where should I begin. As discussed in Chapter 4 and in Excerpt 1 above, Hwang does not answer the interviewer’s question directly. Hwang will eventually reject the interviewer’s script that she was dragged away; instead, she posits that she was officially conscripted by the Japanese government. From Hwang’s perception, to do this, she must begin with her father. For several minutes, she provides orientation.her grandfathers’ betrothal of her parents before their births, her parents’ marriage, and her father’s studies at MyungJi University in Japan. In Excerpt 2, Hwang shifts from providing unreportable information to reporting events that she causally links to her conscription.
Excerpt 2
1 .. ..... . ... .. ...
2 ..
3 .. ..., .. .... ... .. ... ....
4 ..., . ....., ..., . .. ...,
5 ... ... ..., .. ... .. ...
6 ... .. ... ... .. .. .,
7 .... .... . .....,
8 ..., . .... . .....,
9 .. .. . . .. .. . .... ...
10 .. . .....
(2)
Hwang 1 {He} began to study at our mother’s family home.
Interviewer: 2 Yes.
Hwang: 3 And then, our father went to MyungJi University in Japan.
4 at the outset, uh, political science and, even at that time,
{he} went and,
5 There he made a mistake and, caught a disease and came
home.
6 so because of my father at the age of twelve,
7 to a fault {my} father squandered everything,
8 squandered everything to cure that {disease},
9 When I was twelve I went to live in another house as {a}
foster daughter
10 To another house as {a} foster daughter
In line 5, Hwang says there he made a mistake and, caught a disease and came home,
which perhaps only becomes reportable when linked causally to what happens next to
Hwang. She unambiguously demonstrates that her father’s mistake initiates the
following chain of events:
e-4 the father went to MyungJi University in Japan e-3 the father makes a mistake, e-2 because of the mistake, he catches an illness,e-1 he squanders the family’s money trying to cure his illness, e-0 because he squanders the money, Hwang becomes a foster38 daughter.
Lines 5-10 of Excerpt 2 are repeated below in more detail to show the sentence level
causality that Hwang posits.
Excerpt 3
5 ...... ..., .. ... .. ...
5 there [pm] mistake made [conj and] disease [OM] contracted and come out 5 There he made a mistake and, caught a disease and came home.
6 ... .. ... ... .. .. .,
6 so my father because of I [SM] twelve age,
6 so because of my father at the age of twelve,
7 .... .... . .....
7 excessively father [SM] everything squander
7 to a fault {my} father squandered everything,
8 ..., ..... ......,
8 the property [OM] that cure and everything squander
8 the property, squandered everything to cure that and,
38 The term “foster” child as used here does not have the same meaning as the current, legal definition used in the U.S or the ROK. Hwang is more like an indentured servant or one sold into debt slavery than a contemporary “foster child.” In her life story as told to filmmaker Kim-Gibson (1999), Hwang says her biological family was paid 100 Yuan for her.
9 .. .. . . .. .. .
9 I [SM] twelve age time I [SM] .. .. ... unrelated person [POS] house
9 foster daughter as went and. When I was twelve I went to live in another house as {a} foster daughter
10 .. . .....
10 unrelated person [POSS] house foster daughter as go
10 to another house as a foster daughter In line 5, Hwang establishes a connection between the mistake her father makes and his catching the disease as she joins the noun mistake (.. jalmos) with the auxiliary verb do (..) and uses the causal conjunction and (... gajida) to join make [a] mistake to catching (...geollyeoseo) the disease (. byeong), the reason for which the father returns home. Gajida [-. (., .) ...] is a retentive auxiliary verb. It co-occurs with the connective ending . (go), which in this case means and [then] (Ihm 2001: 248-249). Gajigo (...) is a combination of ... (gajida) plus . (go). This structure, according to Ihm (2001: 354), “indicates that the subject finishes [the] preceding action and then, maintaining that result, carries on, continues or makes a transition to the next action. Thus, this pattern can indicate temporally linked actions or else indicate that the preceding clause is the reason or cause for the following clause.” In this case, the preceding action, the father’s mistake, is the reason he catches the disease. This line of causality differs from how it is represented in the published testimony, unfortunately he
contracted an incurable disease while in Japan (as shown in line 2 of Table 2 below), in which the father passively and unfortunately contracts the disease.
However, in line 6, of (3) above, Hwang connects what happens to her, becoming a foster daughter, directly to her father and his mistake when she uses the conjunctive adverb ...(geulaeseo), which “is used when the preceding sentence is a reason or cause for the following sentence” (Ihm 2001: 132). She says ...-abeoji , or father, and ... . ddaemune, which means because of to mean because of my father (line 6). In this way she causally links her father to the reason (his mistake) she at the age of twelve becomes a foster daughter.
In Table 6-2, I compare the two texts to demonstrate the lack of parity in the posited cause of Hwang becoming a foster daughter.
Table 6-2: Shifting the Causality by Altering the Causal Agent
Written Transcript Published Testimony
Interviewer …uh, at what age were (you) dragged away? N/A
.so if (I) am going to tell that story, will start from our father’s time. .my father a long time ago, during the Japanese occupation. N/A
Introduce Family Background 1. (He) begin to study at our mother’s family home. 2. Yes. 3. And then, our father went to MyungJi University in Japan. 4. at the outset, uh, political science and, even at that time, (he) went and, 5. There he made a mistake and, caught a disease and came home. 6. so because of my father at the age of twelve, Introduces Family Background 1. …to study political science at Meiji University with the support of his parents (sic)-in-law. 2. Unfortunately he contracted an incurable disease while in Japan. 3. He soon returned to Korea and spent all his money trying to cure it.
7. to a fault (my) father squandered everything, 4. When I was 11 years old, I had to leave home
8. the property, squandered everything to cure because my family was very poor. that,
5. I was sent to be the foster daughter of a man in
9. When I was twelve I went to live in another Hamheung. house as (a) foster daughter
10. To another house as (a) foster daughter
In line 7 of the written transcript and line 3 of the published testimony, Hwang provides detail as to how her father’s mistake and resultant illness are related to her being sent to a foster home. In line 7, she says, neomuneomu . ...., too much too much,
commonly translated as to a fault, or excessively when used to modify a negative action.
(Her) father squandered everything, she says; she uses the verb teoleomeogda -....which literally means to eat through, or to squander, run through or spend all. Given the aspirated force and increased volume with which she says this and the prefacing of it with the evaluative neomuneomu ...., I translated the verb teoleomeogda -.... as
squander. In the published testimony the verb teoleomeogda -....is translated more neutrally as spent, as in he spent all his money (line 3). At first Hwang does not specify that her father squandered only material possessions, she says he squandered everything, which she may mean to include her. She does specify that he squandered everything (line 8), including the property (line 8) to cure his disease.
In the published testimony, Hwang says the reason she has to leave home as a foster daughter is because my family was very poor (line 4). This change in causality from what has been posited by the narrator in the interview ostensibly shifts the allocation of blame in the story world and, possibly, what Hwang may be positing as the explanatory theory
of how she became enslaved. In this representation, the Hwang’s where should I begin (Labov 1997) is changed from her particular beginning (her father’s mistake) to fit the more generic experience of the sex slaves, poverty.
Hwang does not say directly in this interview as she does in her interview with Kim-Gibson (1999:15) and elsewhere, “I didn’t know then but now I can guess. What he had was a venereal disease. While he was doing odd jobs in Japan, he came in contact with, you know, those women, prostitutes, who gave him that! Japanese women! Speaking of irony….” In the interview I examine, Hwang indirectly implies that her father had a sexually transmitted disease by causally linking what she calls her father’s “mistake” to his contracting the disease (line 5).
In the published testimony, the causal link, the trace that directly connects her father’s irresponsibility to her misfortune in the interactional data is all but obliterated; the reader is apprised that the father returned to Korea and spent all his money trying to cure it [his disease] (line 3), but the reader is not apprised that the incurable disease is causally linked to a “mistake” the father has made. This is similar to Labov’s (2001: 81) analysis of underlying event structure in the testimonies given to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission whereby Labov demonstrates how the alleged murderer “transformed his account of events to minimize his own assignment of guilt.” Labov (2001: 81-82) asserts that while a “clean result” is not produced and that certainty is not absolute, “the interlocking and overlapping of linguistic structures across sentence boundaries leaves traces that point to the nature of the deleted material.” While there is a logical causal link, there is not an explicit textual connection linking the family’s poverty with the father’s spending the money on a cure and Hwang becoming a foster daughter.
The shift in causality casts the net of blame in a different direction. In the written transcript, Hwang unequivocally links her father’s mistake to her becoming a foster daughter. However, in the autobiographical account these links are tenuous. This transfers the responsibility away from the father and onto the Japanese government which supports the WCCW’s redress agenda, indicting the Japanese government as the enslaver. An alternative reason for this shift could be a culturally specific constraint on the filial daughter: Hwang must be dutiful and blaming her father goes against this expectation; in other words, the causal shift could be an additional sanitizing strategy.
6.2.4 Editing/Translation: Creating Coherence-Diminishing Particularity
It is expected, given the genre of autobiography in which Hwang and the other women’s testimonies are represented in Comfort Women Speak (Schellstede 2000), that the testimonies are edited as a matter of practicality to ensure cohesion of the story as a unit and to produce a readable, publishable text. As discussed above, “the translations were edited to be understandable in English” (Schellstede 2000; ix). Reasonably, events that were not necessarily recounted chronologically are reordered for the sake of presenting a sequentially coherent text. Though details were produced in a stream of-consciousness manner and interspersed across the interview in time, they are integrated in logical grouping that create continuity of the text as a whole. To eliminate redundancy, repeated references not contributing new or relevant information are omitted. In addition to the obvious benefits of editing and translation, there are costs: what is lost and gained in the process is examined in turn.
In Figure 1, a few of the ramifications of the editing process are examined. Prior to the excerpt examined, the interviewer asked Hwang if she still had her hair braided at the age of nineteen, which is an indirect way of inquiring if Hwang was still unmarried at the time. In her response, Hwang provides an account (see discussion in Chapter 4) of why she is unmarried. This account is reproduced in Column 1 and the published testimony of it is shown in Column 2.
Figure 6-1: Editing/Translation
Written Transcript
Now where did (the) unmarried
women go, get married (line 1).
There was no where for (the)
unmarried to go then (line 2).
Soldiers entered, drafted,
occupation (?) entered, entered
as student soldiers (line 3).
Unmarried women, unmarried women were not able to get
married (line 4).
The disabled, hunchbacks, unable to speak, mute, the blind, epileptics/insane, tuberculosis patients, like that, that was all there was (line 5). There was not even one, they all left (line 6). And so, how could (we) marry? (line 7).
[…] (line 8)
[…] (line 9)
[…] (line 10)
That is why I could not at the age of nineteen (line 11).
Published Testimony
There were few Korean men to marry at that time because they had all been drafted for labor into the Japanese army (line 1). Only the disabled and the
retarded were left behind in
Korea (line 2).
That was the reason I was still not married at eighteen (line 3).
To create a more coherent, streamlined testimony that focuses on Japan’s role as the enslaver of young women, several aspects of Hwang’s speech are elided: her self repetition, the rhetorical questions she poses and her responses to them, and the extended list she embeds in her account. These elisions weaken the evaluative force the written transcript carries. The evaluative function of repetition (Labov 1972) and how this repetition contributes to involvement (Tannen 1989) is well established.
The repetition is elided even when Hwang is negotiating the master narrative of rape by positioning herself as an innocent virgin. In lines 1, 2 and 4 of the written transcript, Hwang repeats the noun phrase unmarried women (.. -ceonyeo) four times. Ceonyeo
(..) is variously translated as virgin, maiden, or girl and is used to form the word
virginity. There is not an English word or phrase that fits this context, that denotes that one is unmarried but also subtly connotes virginity. Maiden connotes notions of class and culture that are irrelevant. Also, in English, one’s unmarried status does not entail one’s virginity, but the term virgin too explicitly indexes one state of virginity. In the context of the Confucian norms, ceonyeo (.. ) is more nuanced: when one says one is
ceonyeo (unmarried), this entails that one is a virgin. Hwang repeats ceonyeo (..), I
assert, to interdiscursively posit herself as virtuous.a virgin.despite her “advanced” age of nineteen39. (See the discussion of Pak’s similar use of agassi in Chapter 5) This aspect of her identity is lost in the published testimony. Hwang uses this term at total nineteen times in her testimony.
To keep the focus on the master narrative of (sex) slavery, Hwang’s use of rhetorical questions to frame her account is also abandoned. She offers the question, in line 1, now
39 The discrepancy between the age Hwang gives in the written transcript and the age attributed to her in the published testimony results from the difference in Korean and Western reckonings. In Korea, a person is said to be one year old at birth.
where did (the) unmarried women go, get married and posits an answer there was no where for (the) unmarried to go then (line 2). After she provides the reason she (and the other women) did not marry, she asks again, and so, how could (we) marry? (line 7). These rhetorical questions serve as positioning questions (Kim 1998; 2001). They do not elicit a response from the audience, but they invite the listener to enter the storyline from the narrator’s viewpoint to understand her dilemma, how her story diverges from the master narrative. In this case and the case that Kim (1998) examines, the narrator’s noncompliance with the master narrative of marriage is negotiated. Once again, evaluative and involving characteristics that contribute to the testimony’s credibility but that might distract from the role of Japan as the enslaver are lost in the published testimony.
One additional casualty of the editing process is the modification of a list Hwang provides in the interview to account for why she is not married at age nineteen. The list and its modification first show in Figure 6-1 are reproduced in Figure 6-2.
Figure 6-2
Written transcript Published testimony
The disabled,
hunchbacks,
unable to speak,
mute,
Only the disabled and
the blind, the retarded were left behind in
epileptics/insane, Korea (line 2).
tuberculosis patients,
like that, that was all there was (line 5).
There was not even one,
they all left (line 6).
The list Hwang recites in the interview is examined in greater detail in Chapter 4; the point here is to illustrate how her list of seven types of ineligible suitors is collapsed to just two, the disabled and the retarded, if two qualifies as a list (Schiffrin 1994b). This contraction stymies the evaluative force a list can convey (Tannen 1989) and which Hwang uses to justify why she is not yet married at the age of nineteen: there was no one to marry.
In addition to the deficiencies just discussed, a resultant exuberance is observable in the comparison of line 3 of the written transcript to line 1 of the published testimony. These lines are reproduced in Figure 6-3 for ease of exposition. Figure 6-3
Written transcriptPublished testimony
There were few Korean men to
Soldiers entered, drafted,
occupation (?) entered, entered marry at that time because they had all been drafted for labor as student soldiers (line 2). into the Japanese army (line 1).
In line 1, the disfluencies in the written transcripts are eliminated so that the reader may make sense of what Hwang has said. The additions in the published testimony include the ethnic origins and or nationalities as the potential male suitors are specified as Korean, and the army is specified as Japanese. This sets up an us versus them dichotomy (DeFina et al. 2006), as the fact that the Korean nationals were drafted by Japanese nationals into their (Japanese) army for the purpose of “labor” is explicitly stated. As such, this political statement which clearly aligns with the WCCW redress agenda of emphasizing Japan’s responsibility is injected in the published testimony of Hwang’s account.
Similar deficiencies and exuberances can be seen in the translation (or lack thereof) of sound words. Given the trouble of translating the Korean sound symbolism into English, the majority of onomatopoeic details are expunged in the published testimony. In Table 6-3, examples of these losses are illustrated; the sound words are highlighted. In the interview, just prior to the excerpt examined, Hwang has reported the three hour transport by truck.
Table 6-3: Expunged Sound Symbolism
Written Transcript Published Testimony
1 And so we went, where the sun was sinking 1 But when the guards finally let us off the
sinking, and it was getting darker and truck, we saw only Japanese soldiers on
darker. horses and motor vehicles in a vast
2 Just before the sun went completely down. Manchurian field.
3 And so (we) got off at that time.
4 And so when (we) got off (we) were
freezing and starving to death.
5 When (we) got off saw that (we) were in an
open field in Manchuria.
6 That it was a military base. Military, **
military.
7 So military soldiers on horse, vehicles,
there were a lot of those.
8 with just soldiers crawling crawling
everywhere.
In the written transcript there are three (highlighted) instances of sound symbolism that are not present in the published testimony. In line 1, there are two: ....
(neomsilneomsil), which is the sound of water overflowing, brimming over, translated here as sinking (another possible translation is the sky is flooding with darkness) and ..
(keomkeom), literally to darken, and figuratively, to dim insidiously. In line 8, Hwang uses the sound word .... (beogeulbeogeul), or crawling, crawling to describe the
scene upon her arrival at the military base teeming with soldiers. The immediacy Hwang conveys with these scenes in the interview is displaced (Chafe 1994) as these vivid details are expunged along with their evaluative force and involving functions (Tannen 1989).
In addition to these losses, there are clear exuberances illustrated in this side-by-side excerpt. Line 1 of Table 2 is reproduced for ease of exposition as Excerpt 4. Excerpt 4
But when the guards finally let us off the truck, we saw only Japanese soldiers on
horses and motor vehicles in a vast Manchurian field.
Additions to the published scene include the appearance of guards, actors who restrict Hwang’s movement and finally let her off the truck, implying she was under their control for some length. These actors and their actions are absent or only implied when Hwang thrice mentions (when) (we) got off (lines 3, 4, and 5). Being let off a truck by guards implies a much more restrictive control of her movement and transport than does getting off. The former is clearly constitutive of trafficking into slavery (Bales 2005) so complies with the master narrative of slavery, while the other does not. Additionally, in the published testimony, Hwang indexes the nationality/ethnicity of the base soldiers as only Japanese. This stipulates that Hwang was trafficked to a Japanese military base. Elsewhere Hwang does explicitly identify the Japanese military as blameworthy, so to whom blame is assigned does not shift per se, but these politically charged additions, as they contribute to the interdiscursive construction of the Japanese military as the enslaver, have a cumulative impact.
The side-by-side comparison of the written transcript and the published testimony offer a glimpse into the text shaping process. Though obligatory, the edits take a toll on the end product: the evaluative aspects of repetition (Tannen 1989: Chapter 3) are lost, and the lyric qualities of the sound symbolism are diluted and their role as integral detail is weakened. It is lamentable that the something someone (Hwang) wanted to say to someone that was particular (Becker 1995: 71-87; 229) is irretrievable and that some of the individual qualities (Johnstone 1996; Johnstone and Bean 1997) that characterize Hwang’s testimony as distinctively hers are diminished. Alternatively, the impact of the exuberances is indeterminable as the transformation in which they are constructed is opaque. The additions examined in the autobiographical texts appear to contribute to Hwang being constructed more explicitly as a Korean slave-subject of the Japanese State that is occupying the Korean State and its citizenry. This advances the agenda of the WCCW, and arguably the aim of the women seeking redress, and is one of the ways in which the WCCW negotiates effectively the conflicting master narratives of slavery and prostitution. While the WCCW avoids activating the prostitution frame they do so at the cost of reinforcing certain restrictive norms for an “appropriate” or prototypical victim. The profanity and other potentially offensive language and the more complicated reality, that her father played a role in her becoming a sex slave, are elided in lieu of the more politically useful argument.
6.3 Misrepresentations in Public Discourse
In this section, I examine what happens when advocates mismanage the competing frames of prostitution and rape. Advocates occasionally and unwittingly use language that, counter to redress agenda, inadvertently positions Hwang and the other women as prostitutes or liars rather than sex slaves and or “appropriate” victims of rape. Before I examine how Hwang is positioned by others, I examine how missteps in translating a book title or changes to that title fundamentally alter how the sex slave survivors are framed or represented
The Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (hereafter referred to as the Korean Council) is one of the survivors’ strongest allies and has been instrumental in collecting and preserving the survivors’ oral testimonies, including Hwang’s. They have sponsored legal, political, and humanitarian remedies, advocating for commensurate reparations by working with hundreds of domestic activist agencies and international organizations, including Amnesty International (AI), The United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC), and the International Labor Organization (ILO). Additionally, they continue to pressure the Japanese government to acknowledge their war crimes as crimes against humanity, provide a clear and sincere apology to the women they victimized, open all government documents, and accurately record their war atrocities in national textbooks.
The Korean Council has published six volumes of former MSS survivors’ testimonies. The first volume, entitled Kangjero kk.lly.gan Chos.nin kunwianbud.l [The Korean Military Comfort Women Who Were Coercively Dragged Away for the Military], was published in 1993. The English edition of this volume, edited by Keith Howard, was published two years later in 1995 under the title of True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women. The differences between the Korean and English book titles are noteworthy. In the forthcoming analysis, I examine their lack of parity. In Table 6-4, the titles are provided with the necessary Romanization, translation, and glosses.
Table 6-4: Lack of Parity in Titles
1 Korean edition ... ... ... . ... .
2 40Romanization Kangjero Kk.lly.gan Chos.nin kun wianbu d.l
3 Translation by force dragged away Korean military wianbu persons
4 Idiomatic Korean Comfort Women who were Coercively Dragged Away by the Military
5 English Title True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women
In the Korean edition, (lines 1-4), the women are framed as Korean “comfort women” who were forcibly dragged away by the military. The English edition book title (line 5) clearly departs from this manner of framing the book’s contents, and, by association, the women and their testimonies.
If the English title is a translation, it is a loose one. In the English edition title, the 40 This Romanization is consistent with the McCune-Reischauer System which was officially replaced with the Revised Romanized System introduced in 2000. For ease of exposition, I maintain the system used in the original text.
word stories appears; this word is exuberant.the word stories does not occur in the Korean title. Moreover, the term stories connotes that the book’s contents are the vernacular genre of stories, possibly even that iconic, sensationalized genre of “true crime stories,” and not oral testimonies or oral histories.
Additionally, these stories are qualified as true stories. The word true constitutes an additional exuberance; the Korean volume is void of such qualifiers. Marking the stories as true flouts the Gricean (1975) maxim of quality because what is added creates the condition that it be supported. It suggests that why these stories are reportable (Labov 1972: 390) is because they are true as opposed to not true and that evaluating them as true creates an entailment that is not present in the original Korean. When these stories are declared true, it suggests that there are untrue stories being told by some other “comfort women,” which implies that some “comfort women” could be liars, tellers of “untrue” stories, which has been claimed by sex slave adversaries.
As Davis (1988: 145, 164) asserts, stories are not necessarily “factual accountings” though the events recounted “may have actually happened as, for example, in a True Story,” which she says is “so designated, when the events in question are so terrible (shocking, bizarre, etc.) that the recipient is inclined to doubt whether they actually could have happened” (164). While the lived experience of the women enslaved by the Japanese military as sex slaves was “so terrible” that the editors may have felt some readers might not believe the testimonies, the framing of the stories as “true” inadvertently, and ironically, positions the women as potential liars and prostitutes.
In addition to these exuberances, there are two deficiencies present in the English edition title. First, the issue of force is missing; that (some of) the women were forcibly dragged away [......] is not mentioned. Second, who dragged them away, the
military [.], is not specified. The actors, the Korean “comfort women,” are present, but
the agent who forcibly dragged [them] away, the military, is omitted. And while, as discussed in earlier chapters, not all the women were “dragged away” by the military, these elisions deemphasize the use of force and entirely obliterate the (sex) slavery frame
How the title of the English edition41 was selected is unclear: whether it was the decision of the Korean Council, the volume editor, the publisher Cassell, marketing agents, or some configuration of these is unknown. Publishers do take liberties in advertising books, and qualifying these as true stories as opposed to oral histories may well be a marketing strategy: it does sensationalize the contents by setting up the true versus untrue dichotomy.
Alternatively, the title changes, specifically the “true stories” qualification, could be an intertextual reference to prior public discourse framing the “comfort women” as liars and prostitutes. In the intervening two years between the Korean and English publishing dates, 1993 and 1995, respectively, the women who had come forward to testify to their enslavement in Japan’s sexual slavery system were publicly attacked: they were accused of being prostitutes who volunteered to ‘work’ in war zones because doing so was such a lucrative proposition but who were now crying rape, with the greedy aim of more
41 Similarly, Soh (2001b: 84-85) notes but cannot account for the two versions of the subtitles of George Hick’s (1995) book, The Comfort Women: “The Australian edition contains the phrase “sex slaves” while the American edition contains the phrase “enforced prostitution.” The American edition was published in 1995, while the Australian edition was published in 1994.
monetary gain through compensation. This adversarial framing has impacted the discourse of the survivors and their advocates. They have been pushed into a defensive posture: these testimonies are “true,” not lies as has been claimed. Unfortunately, in their zealousness to defend the women as truth-tellers, they potentially represent them as liars and prostitutes and in so doing compromise their mission.to attain legal justice for the sex slave survivors.
In the previous example, I examined missteps in translation, ill-chosen words, and other unknown factors that compromise the well-meaning advocates’ representation of the sex slave survivors. In forthcoming analysis I examine some instances in which Hwang’s is misrepresented in two different kinds of public discourse: a major Korean English language newspaper, The Korea Times, and an international human rights organization, Amnesty International.
As discussed in Chapter 2, the defining difference between a sex slave and a prostitute/sex worker who contracted to work in a military brothel is consent: a slave does not choose to go and once there may not leave. Theoretically, a prostitute goes willingly, stays of her own volition, and may leave when her contract expires. Allies and advocates who speak on behalf of the former military sex slaves must select their words very carefully to avoid implying consent when none was given. In the following two examples, allies use verbs and coordinating conjunctions that seem to attribute agency or consent to Hwang and thus imply that she may have chosen to be a prostitute.
The data examined in Excerpt 5 are excerpts from the June 6, 2003, article “Korea-Japan Summit: Nightmare Never Ends for ‘Comfort Women,’” published in The Korea Times on the occasion of South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun’s first State visit to Japan. MSS advocates frequently take advantage of high level bilateral meetings to apply pressure on Korean politicians to raise the “comfort women” issue with their Japanese counterparts. The newspaper’s supportive stance on the issue is indicated in the article title by the use of quotation marks for the reference term ‘comfort women,’ which qualifies it as a euphemism. Further, the women’s experience is framed as a nightmare, which never ends. The forthcoming analysis of Hwang’s reported speech reveals the competing frames of the master narratives of (sex) slavery, rape and prostitution at work.
In Excerpt 5, Hwang’s speech is reported as she describes her duties during her captivity. This article was published in English only; as Hwang does not speak English, I assume the following speech attributed to her is a translation.
Excerpt 5
1 “As I was able to speak Japanese, 2 I used to translate for the Japanese during the day and then provide sexual services for the soldiers at night,” Hwang said.
In line 1, Hwang references her education and indirectly her elite class, as she mentions her proficiency in Japanese. One could argue that she indexes a different facet of her identity, her Japanese nationality, as proficiency of Japanese implies. However, she rejects this designation as she translates for the Japanese (line 2), thereby excluding herself as Japanese (line 2). More plausibly, her Japanese proficiency is an artifact of Korea’s colonization by Japan and its attempt to exterminate Hangul, the Korean language. In (7), the juxtaposition of the introductory clause, as I was able to speak Japanese (line 1) and the ensuing coordinated independent clause sets up casual relationship that links the speaker’s ability to speak Japanese with her dual roles as translator and provider of “sexual services.” Presumably, Hwang does not intend the causality implied by this coordination. Given how the women are framed sympathetically, the reporter/editors do not intend this causality either. It is an exuberance (Becker 1995) precipitated by the translation process. Though unintentional, it creates minor confusion as to the causality.because Hwang was able to speak Japanese, she could translate and provide sexual services (line 2).
More injurious, however, is the use of the verb provide in provide sexual services for the soldiers at night (line 2). Void of qualification, provide connotes giving, offering, or freely making available. As the I (line 2), Hwang offers sexual services, indicating she possesses agency in the matter. Moreover, the plural noun services invokes a service encounter, in which consenting parties exchange goods/services for money. However unwittingly, when Hwang (reportedly) says provide sexual services (line 2) the prostitution frame is activated and she casts herself as a prostitute. This is an exuberance of colossal consequence. Alternatively, provide sexual services (line 2) could be a euphemistic, positive, face-saving measure Hwang uses in lieu of a more graphic description of the brutal rapes she endured. Based on my ethnographic observations and personal interactions with Hwang, such obliqueness would be uncharacteristic of her.
In the previous example, miscoordinated clauses introduce confusing or illogical causal relations, and the verb provide unduly attributes consent when Hwang gave none.
The addition of the ill-chosen term “services” in conjunction with “provide” in “provide sexual services” activates the prostitution frame and compromises the construction of the sex slave frame. In the next example, an international human rights advocacy organization steps into a similar pitfall.
As stated on their webpage, Amnesty International (AI) “is a worldwide movement of people who campaign for internationally recognized human rights.” Their primary objective is to protect human rights, irrespective of political, governmental, economic, or religious ideologies. In fact, it does not “support or oppose the views of the victims whose rights it seeks to protect.” On its sub-page “Stop Violence Against Women,” there is an informational page on the “comfort women.” They include a two-paragraph account of Hwang’s wartime experience.
In the opening paragraph, a third person narrative orients the reader with Hwang and her wartime experience. This orientation is followed by a first person account, which is not examined here, in which Hwang describes her experience as a sex slave, her return to Korea at the end of the war, and her eventual decision to break her silence. In Excerpt 6, the third person narrative is recounted.
Excerpt 6
1 After graduating from a private school at the age of 19, Hwang Keum-joo was
forced by the Japanese army to leave her family and was told she was going to
work in a military hospital for two years translating for Korean patients.
2 She was transported to China with a large group of girls.
3 She stayed in a building near the hospital, which turned out to be a "comfort
station", for six years. [¶ break in original]
This third person account in (6) orients the reader to Hwang’s circumstances as they led up to her sex slave experience; the recounted events culminate in Hwang’s arrival at the “comfort station.” These events are advanced with the verbs was forced, was told, and was transported (lines 1-2), which characterize Hwang as a patient rather, than an agent. These verbs explicitly index the sex slave frame and the constitutive conditions of slavery posited by Bales (2005: 53): she does not give informed consent, she was forced by the Japanese army to leave her family (line 1); she did not have choice of work, she was told (line 2) what she was going to do; and she did not “have freedom of movement,” she was transported (line 2).
As the third person account continues, however, there is a marked departure from the sex slavery frame as we learn she stayed in a building near the hospital, which turned out to be a "comfort station", for six years (line 3). The verb stay means to remain, often in a single place, but it does not imply that Hwang could not leave. It can be reasonably surmised given the ambiguity of stay that Hwang stayed there on her own accord for six years (line 3) when she could have left.
That the building turned out to be a “comfort station” (line 3) instead of a military hospital, which Hwang was told she was going to work in, implies deception and trickery, and therefore Hwang’s lack of informed consent. However, the phrase turned out to be implies that the building’s being a military brothel, instead of a hospital, was coincidental. It just happened to be a military brothel and she happened to stay there six years. This happenstance detracts from the Japanese military’s premeditation and execution of their military brothel system.
Acquainted with this one account of Hwang’s experience and its apparent contradictions, one could come away with the unintended message that the only thing Hwang was forced to do was to leave her home, she was not forced to remain in the building that turned out to be a“comfort station” (line 3).
In the examples above, the advocacy organizations’ grammatical choices activate the prostitution frame, but the women are the ones who bear the consequences in that they are undermined as reliable narrators. Ultimately these grammatical oversights are counterproductive to the women’s redress movement and the advocacy organizations’ missions.
6.4 Conclusion
In Section 6.2, I examined the WCCW’s skillful navigation of the master narratives of (sex) slavery and rape as they avoid activating the prostitution frame in their representation of Hwang. They streamline her account and set up an “us versus them dichotomy” (Defina et al. 2006) to keep the focus on Japan’s role as the enslaver of Korean women. I analyze the role of repetition (Labov 1972; Tannen 1989), lists (Schiffrin 1994b; Tannen 1989), rhetorical questions (Kim 1998), and sound words (Tannen 1989) and the effect of their elision on the published testimony. Lost to edits and the process of translation (Becker 1995) are the evaluative aspects of repetition (Tannen 1989) and the involving details of sound symbolism (Tannen 1989), which create immediacy (Chafe 1994). Additionally, potentially offensive language, (i.e.
profanity, ethnic slurs, and other indecorous references) has been expunged. Drawing on Labov’s (1997) notion of narrative preconstruction, Linde’s (1993) definition of adequate causality, and Ihm’s (2001) understanding of the causality indicated by the Korean verb endings, I show how Hwang’s account for how she became a sex slave is altered, even while “traces” (Labov 2001) of the deleted material remain: These changes transform the representation of her and reveal the narrow and often masculinist expectations to which an appropriate or prototypical rape victim is required to adhere. While these restrictions on what is “acceptable” discourse for rape victims should be challenged, the reality of their existence must be acknowledged.
By contrast, in Section 6.3, I examined less skillful navigations of the master narratives by allied organizations, including exuberances/deficiencies in translation (Becker 1995), ill-chosen words, and shifts in causality. These missteps compromise the well-meaning advocates’ representation of the sex slave survivors by activating the master narrative of prostitution, which negatively impact the redress movement.
It is unfortunate that the allied organizations who support the redress movement and represent the sex slave survivors must “sanitize” and revise their testimonies to fit the narrow norms of the master narratives of rape and (sex) slavery; however, it is worse when the allies are not careful and inadvertently activate the master narrative of prostitution because the women are made vulnerable to claims that they are liars, which jeopardizes their redress movement.
Anyone working on behalf of women who have been trafficked into sex slavery needs to understand the competing narratives of (sex) slavery, rape, and prostitution in such a comprehensive way that they do not activate the prostitution frame. Sex slavery is not a historical issue unique to the WWII: “according to the United Nations, human trafficking is now the third most lucrative criminal enterprise in the world, after weapons and narcotics” (Finnegan 2008: 47). A sizable percentage of human trafficking is for the purposes of sex slavery. Finnegan (2008: 50) notes that there is great “public skepticism about the gullibility and true intentions of the young women who become victims” of the sex slave trade. He says, “over time this stigma, or merely the mentally oppressive threat of it, inclines some victims to leave home again, and risk retrafficking. It also helps discourage them from pursuing criminal charges against their traffickers.” To aid the current generation of victims of sex slavery, advocates must be mindful of the competing narratives of (sex) slavery, rape, and prostitution to manage them effectively.
Chapter 7: Conclusion
7.1 Introduction
The misnomer “comfort women” refers, predominantly, to Asian women and girls, eighty percent of whom were Korean (Oh 2001: 3), forced by the Japanese military into sex slavery in state-run or supervised brothels in territories annexed and occupied by Japan during the Asia Pacific War (1932-1945). The number of women forced into sex slavery ranges, as conservatively estimated by Yoshiaki (2000), from 50,000 to 200,000; higher estimates, reflecting emerging research on the extent of Japanese military sex slavery in China and other countries, range from 280,000 to 400,000 (Min 2003: 940; Morris-Suzuki 2007: ¶11). In the course of a three-year imprisonment, a woman was raped an estimated 7,500 times (Parker 1996). In the 1990s, when the aged survivors began testifying to the wartime atrocities committed against them, they were met with scorn and counterclaims by the Japanese government that they were liars, mercenaries, and prostitutes. The survivors, many of whom are infirm, are still waiting for an appropriate response from the government of Japan, one that acknowledges the horrors of the thousands of rapes and the countless other human rights abuses they endured.
To date, this is the first sociolinguistic analysis of testimonies given by Korean women forced to be sex slaves of and by the Japanese Military and of their allies’ representations of them. The core question this study sought to answer was how the survivors and those who advocate on their behalf negotiate the adversarial discourse that framed the survivors as liars and prostitutes. It brought together work on master narratives (Mishler 1995; Talbot et al. 1996; Bamberg and Andrews 2004) and the discourse of rape (Barry 1979; Estrich 1988; Chrenshaw 1991; Matoesian 1993; Wood and Rennie 1994; Burns 2002; Payne et al.1999) to examine how the survivors and those who advocate on their behalf negotiated the competing master narratives of prostitution, slavery (Barry 1979; Bales 2005), and rape as they interdiscursively constructed them/selves as reliable narrators and credible, prototypical (Rosch 1978; Givon 1989; Violi 2000) victims of sex slavery.
The primary data were six videotaped interviews conducted in Korean by the Washington Coalition for Comfort Women, Inc. (WCCW), in 1994, with Grandmothers Hwang Keum-ju, Kang Duk-kyung, Kim Soon-duk, Moon Pil-gi, Pak Du-ri, and Yi Yong-nyo, which were later translated into English and published in Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military (Schellstede 2000). I decided to work with these interviews as they were conducted relatively soon after survivors first started speaking out publicly. I had hoped that these early testimonies might be less shaped by the adversarial discourse. Additionally, I saw an advantage in using interviews conducted by a Korean woman closer to the age of the interviewees, who was a native speaker of Korean, and was introduced to the grandmothers by a community insider. The final, and the most important consideration, was that these interviews had already been done, so I did not subject the aged grandmothers to another round of questioning. In addition to examining the videotaped interviews, I also examined instances of one of the interviewee’s, Grandmother Hwang Keum-ju’s, testimony as represented in public discourse by advocacy organizations. The analysis of this data was guided by a six-month ethnographic study of the Korean sex slave survivors’ participation in the weekly Wednesday Demonstrations in Seoul, Korea, as well as my experience of living and volunteering at the House of Sharing, a cooperative at which many of the women whose discourse I examined resided.
In this chapter, I address the following: In section 7.2, I summarize my findings; In 7.3, I discuss the implications of this study for (1) applications for sex slavery and rape survivors and their advocates, (2) the methodology of future studies of the discourse of survivors of sex slavery and rape, and (3) linguistic theory; in 7.4, I conclude with a final reflection.
7.2 Summary of Findings
In spite of the political and historical controversy surrounding the testimonies of the Korean women forced to be sex slaves of and by the Japanese Military during the Asia Pacific War (1932-1945), their testimonies and allies’ representations of them have not been analyzed from an interactional sociolinguistic perspective. In my examination of if and how the testimonies and representations were shaped by the adversarial discourse, I found that the competing master narratives of (sex) slavery, rape, and prostitution influenced and constrained the survivors and their advocates.
In the following summary of the analysis chapters, I recount how one survivor, Grandmother Hwang Keum-ju, successfully negotiated the competing master narratives by constructing herself as a reliable narrator and her story as credible. I then summarize my application of Labov’s (2006) theory of narrative preconstruction to the five other survivors’ testimonies and my examination of the overlap between their initiating events and the scripts of prostitution, slavery, and rape. Finally, I summarize the findings of my analysis of allies’ negotiations of these same master narratives in their (mis)representations of Hwang Keum-ju and other survivors in public discourse.
7.2.1 Summary of Chapter 4: Reliable Narrator, Credible Experience . Navigating the Master Narratives of Prostitution, (Sex) Slavery, and Rape
In examining the testimony of Hwang Keum-ju in Chapter 4, I found she successfully navigated the competing narratives of prostitution, slavery, and rape by constructing herself as a reliable narrator while indexing Japan as her enslaver and herself a prototypical victim of rape and slavery. To construct herself as reliable, Hwang had to first negate the interviewer’s expectation that her narrative would begin with her being “dragged away” or “seized”.that is, that her story would align with the expected, prototypical slavery and rape scripts of a violent abduction. In place of the expected response, Hwang gave what she perceived to be the exemplar initiating event (Labov 2006): she was drafted and enslaved by the Japanese government.
To establish herself as a reliable historian, she prospectively and retrospectively anticipated challenges to her veracity and was careful to explain a discrepancy between her actual age and recorded age. Additionally, when prompted by the interviewer, she accounted for why she was not married when she was beyond the customary age for marriage; that is, she explained a potential deviancy and thus made herself seem more “normal” and reliable (Bamberg 2004: 352; Talbot et al. 1996). As she accounted for why she was not married, she also constructed herself as virginal; thus, she conformed to the rape victim prototype. Moreover, she demonstrated herself to be in alignment with the (Korean) Confucian norms for chastity (Choi 1998; Deuchler 2003). I found that Hwang positioned herself as “complicit” (Bamberg 2004) with the master narrative of rape that to be “rapable,” one must also be “virtuous” (Barry 1979; Matoesian 1993). She did this to establish herself as a prototypical rape victim and thereby refute the master narrative of prostitution.
Of the women examined in this data set, Hwang most frequently used sound words, constructed dialogue, and metaphors (examined only in the context of the constructed dialogue). Her use of these involvement strategies (Tannen 1989, 2007) to create a compelling, seemingly “objective” story helped her construct a credible one (Labov 1997, 2006). Additionally, she used sound words to index Japan as her enslaver and to align with the master narrative of (sex) slavery and not prostitution. The sound words (Tannen 1983, 1989) created a sensory, concrete experience in which the listener could see the isolated military base crawling with soldiers; smell and feel the stinking, threadbare blanket; or feel the bone-deep cold and fear as the speaker trembles. These details worked as internal evaluation (Labov 1972, 1997) to convey the distal event from fifty years ago to the listeners’ extroverted consciousness (Chafe 1994) and allow them to more directly experience and thus more objectively evaluate it. The constructed dialogue (Tannen 1989) functioned the same way, allowing the audience to hear the “official” words of the Japanese officer who first raped Hwang.
Because Hwang was able to construct herself as reliable, her initiating event as conscription, her enslaver as the Japanese military, and her story as “objective,” she was not compelled by herself or the interviewer to address the issue of money or payment. She effectively neutralized the prostitution script. Other survivors did not negotiate the competing master narratives as skillfully. To understand why Hwang did not account for money while many of the other women did, I examined the five other survivors’ testimonies. The findings are summarized below.
7.2.2 Summary of Chapter 5: Variations in Rejecting the Prostitution Frame
To understand how a survivor’s testimony might activate the prostitution script, I applied Labov’s schema for narrative preconstruction (2006) to the testimonies of Kang Duk-kyung, Kim Soon-duk, Moon Pil-gi, Pak Du-ri, and Yi Yong-nyo and examined the connection between each woman’s initiating event (how she explains or accounts for how she became a sex slave) and later mentions of money. I found that if a survivor’s initiating event overlapped with elements from the prostitution script, she addressed and was prompted to address by the interviewer the issue of money and payment. I found that the adversarial discourse that framed the women as prostitutes and the association of payment with prostitution was so strong that, in the data I examined, once money was mentioned in any form (a wage, a payment), it was accounted for. Additionally, the more a woman’s testimony seemed to overlap with the prostitution script, the more accounting she did.
Pak Du-ri’s and Yi Yong-nyo’s testimonies most overlapped with the prostitution script: both volunteered for work because they wanted or needed to make money. Their consenting to go to Japan for the express purpose of earning a wage made them more vulnerable to the claims that they were, indeed, prostitutes, since prostitutes also went voluntarily to earn a wage. To refute the prostitution script, they initiated a discussion of money and the interviewer subsequently provided them with an opportunity to deny explicitly that they were paid.
In contrast, if a survivor’s initiating event aligned with the slavery and prototypical rape scripts (“dragged away”) or she complied with the draft or virgin delivery for reasons other than monetary gain, she did not address the issue of payment and was not prompted by the interviewer to do so unless money was mentioned in some other form. Moon Pil-gi was kidnapped and, like Hwang Keum-ju, Kang Duk-kyung complied with the draft out of filial duty. Kim Soon-duk was recruited into the Jeongshindae for factory work by her teacher and did not mention money as a motivator for complying with the draft; however, her wages were docked for two months because she ran away from the factory. Because the conditions worsened she ran away again, was seized off the street, and was taken to a military brothel. She was careful to deny that she was employed in the brothel by explaining that she was not paid though some of the other women were. Though Kim’s initiating event did not overlap with the prostitution script, the earlier mention of wages and the association of wages with prostitution activated the prostitution script and so had to be addressed.
No matter how well a particular survivor’s experience might have conformed to the master narratives of rape and slavery and not to the master narrative of prostitution, I found that seemingly small linguistic choices (the selection of one word over another) activated the prostitution script and worked against the best interest of the survivors. In the following section, I summarize the findings of my analysis of public representations of Hwang Keum-ju by allied organizations.
7.2.3 Summary of Chapter 6: Navigating the Master Narratives of Prostitution, (Sex) Slavery, and Rape in Public Discourse
Chapter 6, I examined how representations of, primarily, Hwang’s testimony and other public discourses about her and attributed to her were shaped by allied organizations as they negotiated the competing master narratives. First, I reviewed a published representation in which an advocacy organization, the WCCW, skillfully negotiated the master narratives of (sex) slavery, rape and prostitution. Then, I examined other public discourses.a book title, an article from The Korea Times, and an Amnesty International webpage.in which allies did not negotiate these master narratives as effectively.
When I applied Labov’s (2006) schema of narrative preconstruction to Hwang’s interview transcript and also to her published testimony in Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military (Schellstede 2000), I was surprised by the discrepancies between the two. In the interview transcript, even though Hwang took great care to frame herself as a conscript who complied with the draft out of filial duty and then was enslaved by the Japanese military, her narrative preconstruction revealed a more complicated initiating event. In answering the question, where should I begin (Labov 2006), Hwang began with her father who she said squandered everything to cure a disease he caught when he made a mistake while studying in Japan. Because of her father, she became a “foster daughter” to another family and then volunteered to comply with the draft so the family’s other biological daughters did not have to. This more complicated beginning, which could be construed as indexing her father as contributing to her ultimate conscription, was elided from the published testimony. The elision kept the focus solely on Japan as the conscriptor and enslaver and did not jeopardize Hwang’s construction of herself as a dutiful daughter.
As convincing and credible as Hwang’s testimony was, the WCCW in their published representation of it still seemed compelled by the adversarial discourse and the restrictive norms placed on “appropriate” or prototypical rape victims to sanitize her discourse and make other changes to focus the blame on Japan even more explicitly than Hwang already did. In doing so, they reduced some of the particularities of her testimony and simplified the complex narrative preconstruction she posited. The WCCW, however, successfully negotiated the competing master narratives and did not activate the prostitution frame as some of the other allied organizations examined in Chapter 6 did.
I found that some advocates and allied organization accidentally activated the prostitution frame, which could have potentially compromised the redress movement. As demonstrated, an ill-chosen word, such as “stayed” as used by Amnesty International, or an exuberance or deficiency in translation (Becker 1995; Ortega 1957), such as the “provided services” used by The Korea Times, activated the prostitution frame by implying agency when there was none. I found that while shaping the texts for advocacy reasons was politically necessary and expedient, advocates needed to be wary of how their representations of survivors could not only activate the prostitution frame but also reinforce the narrow norms of acceptable behavior for sex slave survivors. The implications of conforming to and countering the master narratives of (sex) slavery, rape, and prostitution will be explored in the following section.
7.3 Implications
This study has implications for (1) applications for sex slavery and rape survivors and their advocates, (2) the methodology of future studies of the discourse of survivors of sex slavery and rape, and (3) linguistic theory. These areas will be addressed in turn.
7.3.1 Applications
While this study focused on Korean women and girls forced by the Japanese military into sex slavery, my findings have implications not only for these women but for all survivors of sex slavery and rape. Tragically, sex slavery is a contemporary and common practice. The United States State Department’s 2005 Annual Report on Trafficking estimates that 600,000 to 800,000 men, women, and children are trafficked each year. Of those, eighty percent (80%) are women and fifty percent (50%) are minors, the majority of whom are used for “commercial sexual exploitation” and forced prostitution (USSD 2005). First, I will discuss the implications for sex slavery and rape survivors and those who advocate for them, legally or politically. I will then discuss the applications specific to the redress movement for the former Japanese military sex slaves.
Understanding the competing demands of the master narratives of (sex) slavery, rape, and prostitution could help survivors of sex slavery and or rape, their lawyers, and others working on their behalf avoid potential linguistic pitfalls, so they may better advocate for, rather than inadvertently undermine, them/selves. Research on victims of rape and domestic violence has found that those who do not tell acceptable stories when deposed do not get the support and protective services they need and cannot extract themselves from dangerous and sometimes fatal situations or successfully prosecute the perpetrators (Campbell et al. 2001). This is an issue for those trafficked into sex slavery as well (Finnegan 2008). To speak out and attempt to prosecute a pimp or trafficker, one must not only overcome the physical and psychological trauma of sex slavery but also face public and often judicial skepticism of his or her claims. Anyone working on behalf of those who have been trafficked into sex slavery needs to understand the competing narratives of (sex) slavery, rape, and prostitution in such a comprehensive way that they do not activate the prostitution frame and undermine a survivor’s credibility.
As this study showed, the narrow constraints and biased norms of what constitutes a prototypical rape or victim of rape and what counts as an acceptable narrative of the rape experience were (and are) so narrow that the majority of rape victims did not (and do not) fit the prototype. In Chapter 4, the iconic or prototypical rape/sex slavery script was exposed when the interviewer insisted on a ‘dragged’ away script and Hwang carefully and skillfully constructed herself as virginal. Consequently, that there was an ideal way one should testify to one’s trauma was also revealed as both women shaped the discourse to comply with the master narrative of rape. Though the “preferred” rape/sex slavery script was the virgin being seized by a stranger, and girls were violently abducted, volunteering for nursing or factory work and subsequently being deceived was the more common method of recruitment (Howard 1995: 18-20; Yoshiaki 2000). In fact, fifty-nine percent (59%) were “drafted through false promises of well paying jobs” (Min 2003: 951). The same forces, particularly the crushing poverty, that made young Korean women vulnerable to deceptive offers of well-paying work fuel the international trafficking in women and children for sex slavery today. Astutely, Yoshiaki (2000:29) cautioned that “if too much emphasis is placed on extreme cases in which officials used violence to gather women, the much larger number of cases of deception and viciousness will be overlooked.” Deception and trickery were (and are) forms of coercion and should be treated as such. Ultimately, payment and the mode of recruitment (seized or deceived) was (and still is) irrelevant: if a woman forced into prostitution received some money but did not give her informed consent to the kind of work she would be doing and could not change the conditions of or leave her “employment,” she was a slave who was being raped. Legal scholars and human rights advocates must continue to challenge the narrow norms that delimit the prototypical rape to disrupt the pernicious cycle of victim-blame and remove this additional penalty/disincentive for testifying.
The use of prototype (Rosch 1978; Givon 1989; Violi 2000) as applied in this study is a constructive way to shift away from judgmental language that reflects and reinforces the narrow norms to which victims of rape are expected to conform. Descriptors such as “appropriate” or “ideal” when applied to rape victims entail judgments that stigmatize those who do not meet them. While replacing these descriptors does not change the underlying properties of the prototypical rape and rape victim, it at least does not reinforce them as “appropriate” or “ideal.” As theories of prototype evolve (Violi 2000), a more extensive exploration of their relevance to the discourse of rape could prove useful.
Additionally, space on the interactional floor needs to be made for every victim of rape and sex slavery, not just those who fit the narrow (unrealistic, inequitable, masculinist, and heterosexist) norms of what constitutes an acceptable or prototypical victim. Even the survivors themselves have imposed narrow norms of “appropriateness” to their fellow victims. As examined in Chapter 4, when Hwang told an interviewer (Kim-Gibson 1999: 31), “in my case, you must stress that I went with an official drafted notice. […] With some other women, it is not always clear how they went,” she substantiated the presence and pervasiveness of an iconic/collective sex slave experience, as she judged others’ testimonies to be substandard. Space must be extended to encompass the actual experiences of Japanese Military sex slave survivors, including those that are “messier” and overlap with the prostitution frame or challenge Japan’s nationalist discourse. This might include the experiences of sex workers who volunteered for service; Japanese women.who may or may not have “volunteered” to serve (only one former sex slave from Japan has made her testimony public); and survivors who were sex workers after the war ended. Women who volunteered but then found they had no control over the conditions of their work and were unable to leave it were also slaves and victims of the dehumanizing “comfort system.” Women who were sex workers after the war should be acknowledged and their experiences as sex slaves treated as valid as any other survivors’. Recently, male survivors of the military sex slave system, whose experiences are negated by the very term “comfort women,” have begun testifying. Klein’s (2002) interview with Walter Dempster, a.k.a Walterina Markova, whose experience as a sex slave is told in the film Markova: Comfort Gay, revealed the underlying assumption that sex acts are inherently heterosexual, which effectively negates the potential for male-male or female-female rape. We must make room in the discourse of rape for all survivors. Linguists can contribute by being more inclusive by examining the discourse of individuals from these marginalized groups.
The final application of this study is to add my voice to those calling upon the government of Japan to disclose fully the atrocities, unambiguously apologize to the survivors, and take legal responsibility to compensate them. It is a cruel irony that compensation, to which the victims of the Japanese Military sex slavery system have a rightful claim, is entangled with the charge that the women were simply prostitutes, war profiteers. Additionally, the survivors who were employed as sex workers under the licensed and legal prostitution system and who were embedded with the Japanese military.the Japanese government has confirmed there were 20,000.are entitled to their rightful claims to unpaid wages and compensation. Finally, women who were recruited through the Jeongshindae and became slave laborers in factories and mines but who are reluctant to pursue the issue of unpaid wages because of the Jeongshindae’s association with sex slavery should be found and compensated. Until sex slavery and forced prostitution are seriously treated in the courts as the heinous abuse of human rights that they are, survivors will not come forward to testify to their experiences. While the United Nations and other international human rights organizations have made progress by defining sex slavery and rape in war as crimes against humanity, until the government of Japan takes legal and moral responsibility, a critical and dangerous precedent remains.
7.3.2 Methodology
This study has two methodological implications related to the understanding of the competing master narratives of rape, (sex) slavery, and prostitution: the first is for interview questions used in the collection of life stories or testimonies of sex slavery and rape survivors; and the second is for translation of the testimonies of sex slavery and rape survivors. I discuss these in turn.
Understanding how the master narratives of rape, (sex) slavery, and prostitution compete and conflict has methodological implications for interview questions used in the collection of life stories or testimonies of sex slavery and rape survivors. The interview structure itself, the asymmetrical nature of the interviewer-interviewee relationship, and the specific role questions play in shaping the discourse of the interview have been extensively explored (West 1984; Phillips 1983; Mishler 1984, 1986; Briggs 1986; Agar 1985; Hamilton 1994; Chou 2004); however, an area for further investigation is how master narratives systematically shape the interview agenda, and subsequently, the questions that are posed and the resulting discourse.
In my investigation of Hwang’s interview, I observed that the interviewer asked questions that elicited details that directly supported the construction of a prototypical rape. Some questions were clearly directive as they elicited detail concerning the story figure’s experiences that aligned with the master narratives of (sex) slavery and rape. More specifically, the elicited details established Hwang as virginal, and therefore, as a prototypical victim of rape. Whether the interviewer’s questions were strategic or not was indeterminable. However, that she repeatedly posed questions to Hwang until she supplied the expected response or explicitly negated the interviewer’s expectation was compelling evidence that some of these questions were of consequence to the interviewer
This preliminary examination of questions in this single interview demonstrated how the interviewer’s questions prompted the interviewee to include details that proactively shaped the testimony in a way that ultimately strengthened Hwang’s construction of herself as a credible, prototypical victim of rape and of Japan’s sex slavery system. An obvious next step is to examine how questions as they relate to master narratives function in other survivors’ testimonies. More generally this examination serves as a reminder to linguists and other scholars, whether they design interview questions and conduct interviews or work with data they did not personally collect, to remain aware of and make transparent the underlying shaping forces, i.e., master narratives, that clearly and perhaps radically shape the resulting testimony.
The final methodological implication is for future studies on survivors whose testimonies are being translated. Linguists and others who translate or interpret the testimonies of survivors of sex slavery or other sexual trauma need to have a comprehensive understanding of the competing master narratives of (sex) slavery, rape, and prostitution. I found, as described in Chapter 6, that exuberances/deficiencies in translation (Becker 1995) activated the prostitution frame and misrepresented the survivor by implying that she gave her consent to sex work when she did not. These miscues compromised the survivor’s credibility and should be carefully avoided. The construction of credibility will be further developed in the following section on implications for linguistic theory.
7.3.3 Theory
In addition to applications to advocacy by and on the behalf of sex slavery and rape survivors and implications for methodology, this analysis has implications for interactional sociolinguistics, particularly for future studies on master narratives; the construction of credibility, specifically on the connection between the interdiscursive construction of credibility and the use of involvement strategies, such as sound symbolism; retellings and inter/intratextuality; the discourse of trauma, including Holocaust discourse; and the life stories of Korean sex slave survivors. The implications for each of these will be explored in turn.
Many scholars have examined the nexus of language and power, but all do not use the term master narrative uniformly. Fairclough (1989) and others (Boje 1991; Gee 1992; Antaki 1994; Mishler 1995; Bamberg 1995, 2005; Talbot et al. 1996; Bamberg and Andrews 2005) have examined how master narratives, or dominant discourses, exert power through language on specific, typically marginalized, groups. According to Mishler (1995: 114), power is exercised as certain narratives are included and legitimized while others are excluded; however, these “patterns of domination and submission” can be disrupted and subverted by counter narratives, which reflect “these excluded perspectives.”
No previous studies have brought the theory of master narratives to bear on the discourses of rape, (sex) slavery, and prostitution individually or collectively. In my examination of survivor testimonies, I focused on how the survivors challenged, complied with, and managed the three competing, and at times, paradoxical discourses. These included the master narratives of rape (and the rape victim prototype) as suffused by the Korean socio-cultural Confucian norms, and the master narrative of slavery (Barry 1979; Bales 2005) as influenced by the taboos of sex and sex crimes and adversarial sex norms (Burt 1980; Gavey 1992). Additionally the survivors had to manage the master narrative of prostitution, as an added interactional burden imposed by the adversarial discourse levied against them. Each of these master narratives invoked what Talbot et al. (1996: 227) term “a moral universe” that survivors negotiated as they attempted to “vindicate themselves as moral agents” and establish themselves as sex slaves.
There is much more to learn about how these master narratives function not only in this data set but in the testimonies and life stories of other sex slave or rape survivors. For example, how master narratives are discursively produced in the women’s testimonies in this data set could be better understood by replicating the approach that Talbot et al. (1996) and Bamberg and Andrews (2005) forward: a robust micro-linguistic application of positioning theory dedicated to exposing the master and counter narratives at work in the discourse. Such an approach could also be applied to a larger and more diverse data set that includes not only Korean but also survivors of other nationalities to determine what the culturally relevant master narratives are. This might reveal patterns of variation in disourse (Schiffrin 2006) in how sex slave survivors manage these competing master narratives that correlate to their country of origin, race, religion, level of education, socio-economic status, class, gender, sexual orientation, or other aspects of their identities.
The links between master narratives and how an individual constructs herself as credible are rich sites for further investigation. I found that in addition to balancing the competing demands of the master narratives, the women were confronted with what Labov (1997) calls the “reportability paradox”: the more reportable an event is, the less believable it is. Hwang, whose testimony I examined in Chapter 4, was confined for four years and raped an estimated 10,000 times (extrapolated from Parker 1996). Her experience, while exceedingly reportable, is literally incredible. She must overcome the incredibility of her experience by establishing the historical “facts” of her sex slave experience while tending to the master narratives, and she must do so in the face of the ceaseless adversarial discourse that seeks to undermine her credibility.
To discover how Hwang successfully constructed herself as a reliable historian and her story as credible, I combined and applied Labov’s (1972, 1997, 2006) work on internal and external evaluation and objective versus subjective experience, Chafe’s (1994) work on bringing immediacy to displaced events by shifting from introverted to extroverted consciousness, and Tannen’s (1983, 1989, 2007) theory of involvement. Using these three approaches, I showed how Hwang used sound words in conjunction with other sensory details.including constructed dialogue, a much more extensively explored internal evaluation device.to transform her subjective experience of rape into a more direct, and therefore, objective, and consequently, more credible account. She did this by embedding sound words that functioned as evaluation within the storyworld. The combination of Chafe’s, Tannen’s, and Labov’s theories could be fruitfully applied to future investigations of the interdiscursive construction of credibility.
I found that to construct herself as reliable and her story as credible, Hwang used sound symbolism as a sensory detail and, thus, an involvement device. This adds to the growing body of work on sound symbolism as an involvement device (Tannen 1983, 1989, 2007; Nuckolls 1996; Cots 2003). In addition, Hwang used sound words to describe tangible items and actions in the storyworld that established the crime of rape against her and indicted the perpetrator, the Japanese government. Understanding more about the discourse functions of sound symbolism especially as used in narratives, life stories, and oral testimonies will also require much more study. A possible next step would be to examine the use of sound symbolism not only by Korean speakers but also by speakers of other languages rich in sound symbolism to see if they use sound words as a linguistic device to construct credibility.
A deeper understanding of the connection between sound symbolism and credibility could have implications for those working in the field of forensic linguistics and who serve as expert witnesses; historians who study oral histories; and legal practitioners, who prepare witnesses, participate in depositions or conduct direct or cross examinations in domestic and international court and tribunal settings. The credibility of an individual’s account hinges on accurate translation (and sound words are notoriously difficult to translate), interpretation, and representation of it. How sound words and other details are interpreted by judges, juries, and other gate-keepers are governed by idiosyncratic and culturally specific linguistic norms. A testimony replete with sounds words could be dismissed because what is perceived as sufficient detail in one language and culture may be inadequate or excessive and erode one’s credibility in another.
Related to credibility is the issue of retellings. Multiple accounts of the Japanese military sex slave survivors’ experiences exist. One of the reasons their credibility has been challenged is because their accounts contain inconsistencies or contradictory elements. As shown in my analysis, some inconsistencies resulted from others’ mistranslations or misinterpretations, including the well-intentioned allies’ accidental or intentional distortions. Though the public discourse examined in Chapter 6 can be characterized as retellings of Hwang’s testimony, or representations of the same event, retellings were not the focus of this study per se. Additional studies could analyze if Hwang tells the “same” (Polanyi 1981) story repeatedly. Which elements.narratives, instances of constructed dialogue (Tannen 1989), explanations (Linde 1993), accounts (Scott and Lyman 1968), metaphor and sound symbolism.remain stable and which are elided or altered? Additionally, the excerpts examined in this study were so few and account for only one woman, Hwang Keum-ju, that an exploration of additional survivors’ testimonies and their retellings would help us better understand the individual and idiosyncratic versus the collective elements of a survivor’s testimony.
Additionally, the inter/intratextual (Hamilton 1996) implications of multiple retellings on the credibility of a survivor’s testimony are a rich site for future research. How do the multiple versions inter/intratextually reference and inform each other and how does this impact the testimony’s and the teller’s credibility? Could the sex slave survivors’ preemptive defensive discourse strategies backfire? Could those who encounter the testimony without knowledge of the prior adversarial discourse interpret their explanations or frequent use of negation as overly defensive or too detailed, which might erode, rather, than reinforce the narrator’s credibility? Could the involvement devices explored (sound words, constructed dialogue) trigger commonly held beliefs about language and deception (Shuy 1998)? At what point does the balance tip, and do survivors get accused of being ahistoric or unreliable historians (Charon 1993).
Another area for exploration is how the credibility of the women’s testimonies may be impacted by others’ recounting of experiences that may have been factual but were not experienced first-hand (Schiff et al. 2001b; Schiffrin 2001a, 2001b, 2006), such as the “borrowing” of Holocaust experiences (Kacandes forthcoming42). It would be interesting
42 Kacandes’, Daddy's War: Greek American Storytelling, Family Memory, and Trauma. A Paramemoir will be published by the University of Nebraska Press.
to see if as more women come forward, there is a palpable shift on emphasizing the credibility of one’s personal experience against the backdrop of fraudulent or borrowed ones. And if so, what are the intertextual ramifications of these prior and future discourses?
Related to retellings is the effect the act of telling has on the aging sex slave survivors. As I noted in Chapter 3, I witnessed the physical toll interviews took on some of the grandmothers; some became physically ill. Additionally, while many survivors openly talk about their failing health and the physical toll the trauma took on them, few speak of the psychological toll. Because they expend so much interactional energy defending themselves, one must ask if the healing or therapeutic effects of talking through one’s trauma (Schiffrin 2006) are diminished. Do the demands of testifying thwart their attempts to re-story their past traumatic events and hence their ability to transform themselves from victims to survivors (Hamilton 1998)? The growing body of work on post traumatic stress disorder could shed light on how the survivors do or do not integrate the traumatic into their selves, and do or do not verbalize this trauma. Only a small number of sex slave survivors have chosen to publicly testify. Their experience as sex slaves tragically stigmatized them and contributed to keeping them silent for sixty years. As Seifert (1993: 32) suggests of survivors of sexual violence, this silence “may be due to the lack of a discourse that allowed these women to articulate their experience in a way that preserved their dignity,” or as Laub (1998: 808) advances, perhaps, these women “cannot articulate” their “trauma even to themselves” because like survivors of the Holocaust, what happened to them is unprecedented in human history and beyond the scope of the human imagination.
Additionally, what we have learned about other survivors of mass trauma could be applied to the sex slave survivors. For example, additional studies could draw more comprehensively on what has been learned from studies on the discourse of the Holocaust (Schiffrin 1996; 2000; 2001; 2006; Greenspan 1998, 1999), particularly the studies on “replaying” traumatic experience (Schiffrin 2006), survivor myths (Weivorka 1994), and the iconic collective experiences of trauma (Ballinger 1999; Schiff et al. 2006). Kushner (2006: 401) asserts that “only by understanding the nature of ordinary people's constructions of their life histories, with their internal silences and mythologies, will scholars do full justice to the complexity and richness of Holocaust testimony.” The same can be said for the testimonies of the sex slave survivors.
A final area for exploration is in collecting and examining the Korean former WWII sex slave survivors’ life stories from an interactional sociolinguistic perspective. The survivors whose testimonies I examined tended to restrict their talk to their trauma. Like the patients Rybarczyk et al. (1997) examined, survivors have learned what is appropriate to include and exclude in their testimonies from the institutional/advocacy setting, the interview and audience participants, and the adversarial discourse. More in-depth studies of the structure and function of their life stories and narratives are needed. As demonstrated in this study, how former sex slaves utilize negation, accounts, and explanations are rich sites for exploring identity construction. Also, the survivors’ use of constructed dialogue (Tannen 1989) was only cursorily explored: How constructed dialogue is utilized by other survivors and more generally by speakers of Korean, specifically in narrative and life stories, is ripe for exploration, including its grammatical, performative, and variational patternings. More elicitation of life stories and more emphasis on the life span might create a realm in which survivors could address more comprehensively the various facets of their identities. For example, they could address their childhood days and family life before the war; their immediate post war experience, particularly, their reintegration, or lack thereof, into their families; the stigma some survivors have faced because they are single or childless; as well as the fifty to sixty post-war years of their lives that are all but unrecorded. One grossly overlooked area is the issue of human triumph in the life events of these survivors. Into what reserves did they dip for the unfathomable strength required to survive?
That the women survived being beaten, raped 7,000-10,000 or more times, and imprisoned in inhumane conditions is amazing; that they spoke out and testified in spite of culture norms that encouraged silence is honorable and brave. I felt morally obliged to publicly bear witness to these crimes committed against them and to honor their strength. I hope that this study has brought these horrific crimes, in some small measure, back to our cultural consciousness. Seifert (1993: 32) suggests that by publicly discussing and analyzing the crimes of sexual violence, we politicize them; this makes it “possible to establish the causes and contexts,” respond appropriately, and also foresee and thus effect change in the future. Accordingly, I hope this study contributes to the discourse necessary to shift away from blaming the victims for the crimes committed against them to creating an environment which empowers survivors and supports disclosure in a manner, which preserves their dignity, and ultimately prevents such atrocities from recurring.
7.4 Final Reflection
As the end of my time at the House of Sharing neared in the late winter of 2001, I knew I would never see some, or possibly any, of the grandmothers again. While I knew I could not adequately articulate or express the gratitude I felt to these women for the time they spent with me, I made a feeble attempt to do so anyway. After much deliberation, I decided to bring closure to my time at the House by a performing a particular, deferential genuflection (a proper ..-saebae or bow). I practiced the posture
of my back, the position of the palms, forehead, and gaze. The cadence and movements had to be smooth and steady and my attitude clean.
On the morning of my departure, the grandmothers were gathered on the couches in the great room. I bowed. As I lifted my head, my gaze, came to rest on the face of Pak Du-ri Halmoni; she jumped up from the couch and moved spryly to her room, which is adjacent to the great room. Several staff members swiftly followed her. I saw her take a box from atop her armoire, the one in which I placed my “yo” each morning. I saw the others attempt to wrest it from her. I gathered that her hanbok, perhaps her most valuable earthly possession, was in this box. She wanted to give it to me. Pak Du-ri Halmoni is very hard of hearing, and stubborn, so a lengthy and rather animated discussion ensued. Finally, she emerged with a much smaller gift box in her hands. Without speaking, she presented it to me. I accepted it. That was the last time I saw Pak Du-ri Halmoni in person. She passed away on February 19, 2006, at the age of 83.
During the time I have taken to finish this dissertation, Kim Soon Duk Halmoni, and Moon Pil-gi, who resided at the House of Sharing with Pak Du Ri, also passed away. It is unconscionable that Japan seems to be waiting for what Hahm (2001: 128) calls the “biological solution” for the women to die, for their permanent silence.
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Yorichi, Alex. 1944. Japanese Prisoner of War Interrogation Report No. 49, United States Office of War Information, Psychological Warfare Team, Attached to U.S. Army Forces, India-Burma Theater, APO 689, Yorichi, Alex (October 1, 1944), Report No. 49: Japanese POW Interrogation on Prostitution, exordio.com, quoting the U.S. Office of War Information, http://www.exordio.com/1939- 1945/codex/Documentos/report-49-USA-orig.html
Yoshiaki, Yoshimi. 2000. Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II. Columbia University Press: New York.
Yun, Chong-ok, 1992. Chesenjin Jugan Ianfu” (Korean Military Comfort Women)
Manuals, News Wire, News Newspaper Articles and Advertisements, and Reports
Manual
2000. Training Manual 1: Past, Present and Future Activities to Solve the Japanese Military Sexual Slavery Issue, 2000. Published by The Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan. Appendix 5, page 69. It includes the reported speech of Japanese government officials and Diet members.
News Wires
AP (Associated Press). 2006, March 26. Former Japanese Prime Minister Abe’s address to the Japanese Diet (as translated and printed on the AP wire) can be located at
AP (Associated Press). 2007, March 30. “Japan sex slave fund ends amid new controversy over 'comfort women'”
Newspaper Advertisements
“The Facts”. June14, 2007, The Washington Post
“The Truth About the ‘Comfort Women’. April 26, 2007, The Washington Post
Print Newspaper Articles
Banerjee, Neela. 2002. After the War: Urban Violence; Rape (and Silence About It Haunts Baghdad in The New York Times, July 16, 2003.
de la Cruz, Ben. 2008. Moving Past Life as a Rebel Slave: Young Ugandan Woman
Cares for Daughter Born in Captivity. In The Washington Post, Tuesday, July 29,
2008; A11.
McMichael, William H. 2002. “Sex slaves and the U.S. military” In Navy Times, December 2002.
Vachss, Alice. 2003. The Charge of Rape, the Force of Myth in The Washington Post, November 2, 2003; Nov 2, 2003; B.02.
Wax, Emily. 2004. 'We Want to Make a Light Baby': Arab Militiamen in Sudan Said to Use Rape as Weapon of Ethnic Cleansing in The Washington Post, Wednesday, June 30, 2004; Page A01.
Web Resources
2003. June 6. Japan-Korea Summit, Night-mare never ends for “Comfort Women” in The Korea Times. http://times.hankooki.com/page/nation/200306/kt2003060616170111950.htm
Tokyo Kaleidoscope, June 7, 1996. Japanese Army Sex Slaves. “I don’t believe that you didn’t receive any money.” http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/st/~kelliej/money.html
Amnesty International Stop Violence Against Women Webpage http://www.amnesty.org/en/campaigns/stop-violence-against-women
Reports
Amnesty International. 2005. AI Index: ASA 22/012/2005: 10. October 28, 2005. Still Waiting After 60 Years: Justice for Survivors of Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery System. Excerpt from interview with Chang Jeum-dol, 82, Seoul, Korea, March 2005.
Coomeraswamy, Radhika 1996. In accordance with Commission on Human Rights resolution 1994/45 Report on the mission to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the Republic of Korea and Japan on the issue of military sexual slavery in wartime, United Nations, Economic and Social Council E/CN.4/1996/53/Add. 1/Corr. 1, 7 February 1996.
Coomaraswamy, Radhika. 1997. "Reinventing International Law: Women's Rights as Human Rights in the International Community". The Edward A. Smith Visiting Lecturer Human Rights Program. Harvard Law School. September 1997.
Dolgopol, Ustinia and Paranjape Snehal. 1994. Comfort Women: An Unfinished Ordeal: Report of a Mission. Geneva, Switzerland: International Commission of Jurists, 1994.
McDougall, Gay J. 1996. International Legal Approaches toward the Issue of Japan's Military Sexual Slavery and the Liability of the Government of Japan. Seoul: Council for Korean Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan.
McDougall, Gay J. 1998.
(June 22, 1998), CONTEMPORARY FORMS OF SLAVERY.Systematic rape, sexual slavery and slavery-like practices during armed conflict, http://www.unhchr.ch/Huridocda/Huridoca.nsf/7fba5363523b20cdc12565a80031 2a4b/3d25270b5fa3ea998025665f0032f220?OpenDocument#Appendix
Parker, Karen. 1995. UNCHR Speech delivered at the 51st Session of the UNITED NATIONS COMMISSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS, Fifty-first session, Agenda item 11: War Rape.
Parker, Karen. 1996. UNCHR Statement to the 52nd Session of the UNITED NATIONS COMMISSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS, Agenda item 9: Violence Against Women and Displaced Persons.
USSD. 2005. The United States State Department 2005 TIP (Trafficking in Persons) Report, Jun 3, 2005.
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