KJCKorea
Journal Central

The purpose of this article is to critically reflect on the categorization of Japanese military ‘comfort women’ survivors into a countable population by government registration in Korea. This is also to ask again the question of whether we can count the number of victims of ‘comfort women’ for the Japanese military. To this end, first of all, the symbols and emotions inherent in the testimony struggle of Kim Hak-sun, who revealed herself as a survivor of the Japanese military ‘comfort women’ for the first time in Korea, were examined. The ruins as an image of war memory revealed by Kim Hak-sun’s testimony are not identifiable places with geographical names, and it was suggested that they were places where corpses that could not return were floating by overlapping reading <Memories of the Sea> by Taeko Tomiyama. This image of ruins is imprinted on the mobilization and existence of Japanese military ‘comfort women’, who are considered to have no need to count the living and the dead, and the aspect of the movement that created a transnational polis. In light of this, the legalization of government registration of Japanese military ‘comfort women’ victims, which was made in response to the domestic movement against the rise of the civic fund issue in Japan, is limited to those with Korean nationality. This implicitly helped to strengthen the nationalist frame in the Japanese military ‘comfort women’ movement, memory, and narrative. We must be wary of the fact that today’s practice of counting the number of survivors of ‘comfort women’ and boasting of the K-defense industry and calling for redemption may be under the same flag of nationalism. This paper argues that the ultimate goal of the Japanese military ‘comfort women’ movement is to stop and oppose the war caused by the expansion of capitalism that mass-produces countless beings.

the Japanese military ‘comfort women’, Kim Hak-sun, testimony, nationalism, Memories of the Sea (by Tomiyama Taeko), anti-war