ABSTRACT
In December 2011, South Korean redress groups erected a “peace statue” of a teenage girl in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. The statue quickly became emblematic of the large number of underage Koreans mobilized as military comfort women by wartime Japan and the postwar state’s refusal to acknowledge its legal responsibility to surviving victims. South Korean academic Park Yuha has criticized the statue (now, statues) as distorting the truth about Korean comfort women, the great majority of whom she claims were adults. Park’s assertions hark back to similar criticisms made in the 1990s by Japanese feminist and scholar Ueno Chizuko, who ascribed the association of comfort women with virginal adolescents to the anti-Japanese, ethnocentric rhetoric of the South Korean advocacy movement.
From the standpoint of women’s studies and colonial gender history, this “liberal” critique founders quickly on the shoals of historical fact. An analysis of the oral histories of surviving victims indicates that the majority of Korean comfort women were under the legal age of 21 at the time of their recruitment. Veterans’ memoirs corroborate historical documents showing that Japanese civil and military policy toward colonial Korea produced a strong propensity to mobilize teenage girls for sexual slavery. The deeper underlying cause was the structural violence of Japanese colonial domination aggravated by military expansionism. Park and Ueno focus narrowly on sexual discrimination, which they believe should have united Korean and Japanese victims, forgetting that many colonized women experience racial injustice as more oppressive than sexual bias.
