| Abstract | In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: It is strange that there is nobody here in Japan who came out as a user of the Japanese military comfort station. The soldiers were almost of the same age as us. Since we are alive here and now, so should they. —Ahn Bopsoon, Korean survivor of military sexual slavery A person writes the words just to play a little modest light on some shadowed corner of life. And then someone waiting in the corner looks into the light and is transformed by it. The power is not in the words. The words are not matches that light the fuse inside the spirit of person who reads them. —Lewis B. Smedes, Forgive and Forget Introduction In following postcolonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty, I begin with a question: Who speaks for the Korean past?1 In particular, who speaks for the Korean history of the Japanese military sexual slavery system? I raise these questions because certain positions seem to be absent in the writing of Asia's history during the period of colonialism and the Pacific war. The problem is not only that certain categorical positions are absent, such as those of a particular class, gender, nationality, or sexuality, but that attempts are made by others to designate the viewpoints and methods to represent them. In this essay, I address the subject positions of the women survivors of Japanese military sexual slavery through the representation of their testimony. If the category of "comfort women" of Japanese sexual slavery can substantially and metaphorically designate the absent positions in history at both regional and global levels as I claim, creating and deconstructing the methods of representation of testimony—that is, from whose point of view do we listen to the testimony?—will be the very issues that matter. I focus on this methodological question as a site of contestation as well as a source of inspiration in theorizing the writing of history. This essay is about the method, ethics, and, ultimately, epistemology of representing the numerous and nameless subjects that have been called "Japanese military comfort women." Relatively widely known as the Japanese military comfort women system, the Japanese sexual slavery system operated, for the most part, during the period of the Manchurian and Pacific wars, from 1932 to 1945. The system was planned and implemented for the sexual satiation of Japanese male soldiers through the enslavement of women from (for the most part) Korea, China, Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, the Philippines, and beyond. Enslaved "comfort women" were brought to "comfort stations" throughout the vast region in which the Japanese imperial army fought for the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, which spanned East and South Asia as well as the South Pacific islands.2 In the case of Korean recruitment, enslaved women were mostly teenagers, drafted via force, fraud, and other means of menace; their total numbers are estimated to have been between 100,000 and 200,000, making Koreans the most numerous victims. Once installed in the comfort stations, the women were raped by dozens of Japanese soldiers each day; in some cases, this continued for years. It was not until the late 1980s that the truth about this unthinkable system and its unpunished crimes began to surface. Although since then even basic information about the comfort system has been contested, at the moment the first survivor spoke out to say and recognize that "I am a former comfort woman," a new epoch opened in writing colonial history and perhaps in attaining justice for these women. When the first self-identified Korean survivor, Kim Hak Soon, said, "I have wanted to speak [about] this experience," it was a deconstructive moment in the functioning of comfort women as a trope of shame and secrecy in Korean history.3 Whose shame and secrecy have enveloped the subjectivity of this woman? How can we understand our unpreparedness for this revelation, the "opaque" in our knowledge?4 If sati designates a metaphor for physical and epistemic violence against women in India, the enslavement of comfort women symbolizes the violence against women in colonial Asia that has been unspoken.5 In a Foucauldian sense, when the other in a system of knowledge—the subject's exterior—begins to...
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