Songs of Silence and Survival of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery
Many may be familiar with the term ``comfort woman,’’ one that euphemistically describes the hundreds of thousands of women who were tricked, coerced or abducted by the Japanese military to serve as sex-slaves for soldiers during World War II.

Comfort is not one of the words those women would use to describe their treatment however, remaining silent for so many years due to shame and politics, their stories were hidden.

In an exhibition entitled ``Lineages of Separation _ Voices and Portraits of the Survivors of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery,’’ audio-recordings and photographic portraits let us glimpse their incredible struggle from tragedy to hope through song.

``As a public secret for 50 years, the women could not speak about it, but they were able to sing’’ said Joshua Pilzer, Ph. D. student at the University of Chicago and volunteer at the House of Sharing, where 11 of the women reside, an hour from Seoul. ``They had to keep quiet for so many years because of many wrong assumptions, but there are so many things you can express in a song _ these women were expressing in song what they couldn’t express in writing or words.’’

On behalf of the House of Sharing and the Museum of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery, Pilzer collaborated with photographer and researcher Tajima Tsukasa to present the exhibition, currently showing at Fish Gallery near Insa-dong. ``As I spent time with the old ladies, they started to sing more and more. At first they said, `No I can’t sing,’ or `I can’t remember any songs,’ but of course they had so many songs that came out after time,’’ he says.

Having collected over 400 songs of comfort women throughout Korea, Pilzer developed a dedicated appreciation of the struggles each and every woman had to go through to continue on into their latter years. He believes society needs to develop a more intimate understanding of the women to really empathize.

``You can look at their faces, come face to face with their portraits, with no excessive symbolic materials, just in the clothing they wanted to wear for their photo,’’ he says.

Every Wednesday, the women gather outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul to raise their voices together to call for recognition and apology from the Japanese government. As their supporters grow in numbers, their stories are felt in many ways, influencing another generation so that history does not repeat itself and their stories are not forgotten.

Lineages of Separation _ Voices and Portraits of the Survivors of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery

Info www.galleryfish.com

(Korea Times, August 20)

The Japanese relationship with their neighbours has always been extremely mixed and odd. For instance the Japanese write using Chinese characters and owe quite a bit of their other culture to China, yet they often despise the Chinese. Similarly there was this widespread sex slavery and other abuses, yet some Japanese soldiers stayed on in Indonesia after the war helping them fight the Dutch for independence.

I find it puzzling.

You might be interested in this article:


http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/DI05Dg01.html

Korea's new 'comfort women'
By Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA - In an effort to keep US soldiers happy, more than 5,000 women, mostly from the Philippines and Russia, are used as "comfort women" in a prostitution network in South Korea, a United Nations agency reported on Tuesday.

"The plight of trafficked women in South Korea is quite serious," said the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in a study released on Tuesday at its headquarters in Geneva.

The first concerns about the trafficking of women emerged in South Korea in the mid-1990s, when reports began to circulate that there were many foreign women, particularly from the Philippines, working in the bars near the US military bases. The reports called to mind Japan's use of "comfort women", mostly Koreans, for its soldiers' entertainment from 1910-45.

The bars located near the US military bases are the leading employers of Filipinas, whom the traffickers apparently prefer for their English-speaking skills, and who are admitted into South Korea with E-6 visas, also known as entertainment visas.

According to the IOM report, these "foreign entertainers" are brought to South Korea because they are considered "essential to the survival of the military camp town businesses, which have been suffering from a declining supply of South Korean women".

In 1999, there were an estimated 1,000 Filipinas working in the US military base areas, according to the Overseas Workers Administration of the Philippine government. The women were young, some under age 20, and the majority came from the central Philippine region of Luzon, and the Pinatubo area in particular.

The report's author, June Lee, former chief of the IOM mission in Seoul, said the most conservative estimates indicate that hundreds of women arrive in South Korea each month, brought by human traffickers to be used in the local sex industry.

"Those who bring these women to South Korea appear to have a good working knowledge of the immigration regulations of all the countries involved," she noted.

Lee said it is the responsibility of the government's criminal investigators to determine whether major crime rings are behind this phenomenon.

However, the report found that a South Korean organization is the chief contractor for holders of the E-6 visa. The organization, the Korea Special Tourism Association, is "approved and regulated by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism", according to the document.

The association consists of 189 owners of clubs that operate near the various US military camps throughout South Korea.

Given these facts, "clearly there is some linkage" between the trafficking of women and the presence of US troops, said Christopher Lom, spokesman for the IOM, which is dedicated to ensuring the rights of migrants and working with governments to develop humane responses to the challenges posed by human migration.

After Japan's defeat in World War II in 1945, South Korea was liberated from Japanese domination, but was occupied by US forces until 1948. Washington sent forces again in 1950 for the Korean War, and they have maintained a presence ever since.

The IOM report states that some observers have suggested that there was an unwritten or "de facto" policy of the US military to "keep the men happy" with the presence of women near the bases.

The foreign women working in the sex industry in South Korea "have been predominantly from the Philippines and Russia", says Lee's study. But there are also women coming from Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Indonesia, "though in very small numbers", and rarely, there are women trafficked from Latin American countries, such as Peru.

The Filipinas and Russian women alike are well educated, and some - particularly the Russians - are university graduates, says the IOM report.

The IOM urges the South Korean government to reach official consensus "on Korean terminology to describe the trafficking of women into situations where they are exploited as prostitutes or placed in low-paying jobs by abusive employers".

It also cites a report released by the US Department of State in July 2001, which criticizes Seoul for its failure to take decisive action "to combat this relatively new and worsening problem of trafficking in persons".

(Inter Press Service)

I find the fact that the Japanese have never really truly apologized for their conduct in the war offensive, as one of my relatives on the Dutch side died in a Japanese prison camp.

Japanese PoW and prison camps were the worst of the war. Better off a German in a ****ing gulag than anybody in a Japanese camp.

And yet Japan has a bloody SHRINE to executed war criminals, that is visited regularly by government officials. And there is no outcry. Imagine if the German government built a monument to their war criminals. Nobody would ever hear the end of it.