Abstract
A long-standing threat of war on the Korean Peninsula has retarded recognition and reconciliation of military-related atrocities committed in the establishment of this divided territory. Meanwhile, surviving generations utter their grief over the internecine and foreign killing of their ancestors in grassroots memorials and ceremonies. When restless ghosts of mass-murdered individuals appear in shamanic ritual spaces, they summon subversive networks around capsulated moments of the most unrestrained violence and shake onlookers out of their Cold War vigilance. They enact their whispered family traumas to push against nationalist narratives and to provoke a shared experience of injustice while often overlooking consensus on political mobilization. This chapter will consider one such ritual specter: there is a community ritual for the spirits of “comfort women”; a case that may be seen as a form of femicide of sexually enslaved women by the Japanese imperial army. Taking a close look at these atrocity rituals does three things: they highlight the presence of colonial forces in a Cold War-bifurcated region. Secondly, by seeing them as a shamanic liberatory practice, these rituals can demonstrate a type of epistemological disobedience to modern, militarized states. Thirdly, their predominance of female ritualists, clients, patrons, and onlookers speaks to the demand to involve non-patriarchal communities in intergenerational healing, decolonial states of being, and Indigenous cultural resilience.
I wish to thank Seong Nae Kim for guiding me through the Haewŏn chinhon kut site and for her mentorship over the years, and the Korea Foundation for their generous support in my research (KF Ref.: 1022000-003867).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Ruth Fulton Benedict (1887–1948) and Franz Boaz produced a textbook for the U.S. Defense Department on the Indigenous people of deterritorialized areas in the wake of WWII. Ruth Benedict (1946, reprint 1978) is most well known for her book, The Chrysanthemum and the sword. Franz Boas (1858–1942) established the U.S.’ first Ph.D. program in Anthropology at Columbia University. Benedict contributed a chapter on religion in Boas’ (1938) proceedings, covering “varieties of primitive religions” in Siberia, North America, and Melanesia (pp. 627–65). For more on Boas’ colonial frontier see Kulkarni, 2010. For more on anthropology’s racialized assessments of international cultures see chapters 2 and 3 of Visweswaran (2010).
- 2.
- 3.
The U.S. also treated the 1955 Bandung Conference, third worldism, non-aligned neutralism, and anti-nuclear weaponization with suspect. It is not surprising that North and South Korea along with the U.S. and USSR were not invited to the Bandung Conference.
- 4.
From 1964 to 1973, the U.S. conducted a covert CIA operation to take down a communist group in Laos (a neutral country), dropping over two million tons of cluster bombs (more than all the bombs dropped during the Second World War), making Laos the most heavily bombed nation in history.
- 5.
A few months before this announcement, Nixon orchestrated secret bombings in northern Cambodia (a neutral country) to cut off a North Vietnamese supply chain.
- 6.
For many Americans, the most memorable of these anti-war demonstrations may be the day when four Kent State University students were killed by the Ohio National Guard on May 4, 1970.
- 7.
In the 1980s, Hanoi politburo conducted its own internal investigation to find an estimated 5000 civilians in central Vietnam were massacred by South Korean troops between 1965 and 1973. In 1999, Ku Su-jeong published her thesis through a weekly magazine, Hankyoreh21, where she summarized these findings and estimated that as many as 9000 civilians may have been massacred. It is unclear how they distinguished between unarmed civilians and guerilla fighters. Another civic investigation found that 80 different massacre incidents were committed by South Korean troops in five provinces throughout central Vietnam between 1966 and 69 (Kim, 2019; Kwon, 2006).
- 8.
For an example of such historiography, see Chapter 2 of Yang (2003).
- 9.
Laurel Kendall (1996) also reflects on the shift in public attitude toward shamanism in Korea. In her earlier work, she was “exasperated, when the very existence of shamans was denied by many urban and middle-class Koreans… These attitudes have been less prevalent since the 1980s, when shaman rituals gained popular appeal and media attention as celebrations of national culture” (p. 17).
- 10.
Some of these political resistance groups that utilize mudang images and rituals as a part of their protest include student activists and agricultural laborers. See N. Lee, 2007. The types of post-colonial movements in North Korea may only be speculated since researchers of U.S. Allied countries have been denied access to North Korea ever since the country’s division.
- 11.
When newspaper reporter, Senda Kako began investigating materials on “military comfort women” (jugun ianfu). Senda went on to write several bestsellers on the topic in the 1970s. In 1984, Matsui Yayori published a short article in Asahi Shimbun about comfort women which took little notice until Yun Chung-ok interviewed Matsui in the late 80 s and published her findings in newspapers in 1990.
- 12.
These white sheets of traditional paper (honsin) were posted behind the main ritual shrine. Each sheet with a woman’s name represented the spiritual embodiment of a deceased comfort woman. Observers placed white flowers on the main shrine to pay their respects to these spirits, to honor their lives, and to acknowledge their past experiences of injustice.
- 13.
The spirits that enter into shamanic ritual space are often characterized as lamenting, restless, and resentful. A major objective of the kut is to help the dead make peace with the living so that they may peacefully join the world of the dead (Hong, 2011).
- 14.
The provincial shrines of the kuttang metonymically linked North and South Korea toward a forward-looking, unified, and pre-modern nation.
- 15.
This ritual was sponsored by the Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery (정신대 문재 대책 협의회) and ran annually for several years in that decade.
- 16.
The effect of militarization produces systemic violence against women and children as seen in these individual life stories of abuse and killing of girls during the colonial period.
- 17.
- 18.
Lee Na-Young (2018) argues that from the beginning, the “comfort women” movement have spearheaded international attention and collaboration.
- 19.
To better understand the limited success of a genocide ruling, see Jung (2021).
- 20.
Jeong-Mi Park (2011) discusses the Korean soldiers involved in the “comfort” system.
- 21.
One such case may be seen in how parts of Kim Mun-suk’s (2021d) early interviews were used while important affective information was lost in later testimonial records.
- 22.
- 23.
Pusan Daily (Pusan Ilbo) reported an estimated 30,000 children may have been born in this way. They and their mothers continue to live in poverty because they are ostracized by Vietnamese society (부산일보, 2005).
- 24.
After the Vietnam War, more than one million people fled the country to escape political persecution. Vietnamese Americans now comprise the fourth largest Asian immigrant group in the U.S. (Maffini and Pham, 2016).
- 25.
Vietnam (like South Korean, like the U.S.) believes in the myth of linear development from welfare predicaments to democratic freedom as if increased engagement in global capitalism will amount to national security. The Make America Great Again (MAGA) campaign in the U.S. has infected overseas communities to long for a Cold War era (completely ignorant to a Korean peninsula that continues to be gridlocked in Cold War division). This new nostalgia for lost futures signals the risk of reemerging Cold War atrocities as seen in the Ukrainian conflict.
- 26.
- 27.
“The majority of Korean immigration to the U.S. during the 1970s and early 1980s can be traced to military brides, who sponsored relatives and thus became the first link in chain migrations… military brides are responsible (directly and indirectly) for bringing forty to fifty percent of all Korean immigrants since 1965” (Yuh, 2005, p. 278).
- 28.
Eunkyung Kim (2021b) critiques the Western biases of the “comfort women” issue to demonstrate this lack of constructive collaboration. See also Kim (2021c) and Lee (2021a).
I find great potential in alternative youth educational materials in translation like the graphic novel Grass, reviewed by Mah and Kim (2021) and in animations like A Never-Ending Story and Herstory (Wojcik-Andrews & Yoo, 2019).
- 29.
References
Ahn, M. (2021). 박수남 감독 다큐멘터리 속 오키나와의 강제징용 군속과 위안부 재현 연구: 마이너 트랜스내셔널한 기억과 ‘비커밍 아웃’으로서의 증언 [A study on the representation of forced laborers and comfort women in zainichi female director Park Soo-nam’s documentary: focusing on minor transnational memories and the performativity of testimony as ‘becoming-out’]. 문학과영상, 22(3), 739–778.
Alarcón, N. (1990). The theoretical subject(s) of ‘this bridge called my back’ and Anglo-American feminism. In G.E. Anzaldúa (Ed.), Making face, making soul/haciendo caras: creative and critical perspectives by women of color (1st ed., pp. 356–369). Aunt Lute Foundation Books.
An, D.V. (2006). Building up and improvement of the institution of the socialist oriented market economy in Vietnam (Development Economics Working Paper No. 22837). East Asian Bureau of Economic Research. https://eaber.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/CIEM_Dinh_2006_01.pdf.
Bak, G.Y. (2012). 생애사적 맥락을 통해 본 전통지식으로서의 민간요법 –단절과 변화, 지속의 메커니즘 [A folk therapy as a traditional knowledge through the context of life history. The mechanism of discontinuation, change and continuation]. 역사민속학, 38, 223–262. G704–000849.2012.38.002.
Benedict, R. (1978). The chrysanthemum and the sword: patterns of Japanese culture (29th ed.). World Publishing. (Original work published 1946).
Boas, F. (1938). General anthropology. D.C. Heath and Company.
Choi, C. (1993). The discourse of decolonization and popular memory: South Korea. positions: East Asia cultures critique, 1(1), 77–102. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-1-1-77.
Cumings, B. (1997). Korea’s place in the sun: a modern history. W.W. Norton and Company.
Derrida, J. (1994). Specters of Marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning and the new international. (P. Kamuf, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1993).
Falola, T. (2017). Ritual Archives. In A. Afolayan & T. Falola (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of African Philosophy (pp. 703–728). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59291-0_45.
Fanon, F. (1967). Toward the African Revolution. (H. Chevalier, Trans.). Grove Press. (Original work published 1964).
Feng, P. (2016). An “uncomfortable” past: documenting Taiwanese “comfort women” in a secret buried for fifty years. Feminist Studies in English Literature, 24(1), 5–31. https://doi.org/10.15796/fsel.2016.24.1.001.
Hodge, J. (n.d.). Our mission in Korea. Korea. Troop Information & Education Sect. Headquarters, XXIV Corps.
Hong, G. (2014). Ghosts of Camptown. MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S., 39(3), 49–67. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/550253.
Hong, T. (2011). 서울 진오기굿의 재차구성과 의미 [The composition and principles of Seoul jinogigut (shamanistic ritual)]. 공연문화연구, 22, 94–121. https://doi.org/10.35150/korear.2011..22.004.
International Monetary Fund (1957) Annual report of the executive directors for the fiscal year ended April 30, 1957. https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/ar/archive/pdf/ar1957.pdf.
Janelli, R. L. (1986). The origins of Korean folklore scholarship. Journal of American Folklore, 99(391), 24–49. https://doi.org/10.2307/540852.
Jung, Y. (2021). Limits of reflective memory culture: the German media’s understanding of the Japanese military comfort women issue, 1990–2019. Korea Journal, 61(1), 72–99. https://doi.org/10.25024/kj.2021.61.1.72.
Keesing, F. (1945). Applied anthropology in colonial administration. In The science of man in the world crisis, R. Linton (ed). Columbia University Press.
Kendall, L. (1996). Getting married in Korea: of gender, morality, and modernity. University of California Press.
Kim, C. (2021a). 한국 법원의 일본군‘위안부’ 판결들 [South Korean court’s rulings on Japanese military ‘comfort women’]. 일본비평, 25, 242–259. https://doi.org/10.29154/ILBI.2021.25.242.
Kim, D. (2013). Critical mediations: haewon chinhon kut, a shamanic ritual for Korean “comfort women”. positions: East Asia cultures critique, 21(3), 725–754. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/521019.
Kim, D. (2004). Forgotten war, forgotten massacres: the Korean war (1950–1953) as licensed mass killings. Journal of Genocide Research, 6(4), 523–544. https://doi.org/10.1080/1462352042000320592.
Kim, E. (2021b). 일본군‘위안부’ 기억 장소로서 초국적 지식장 : 영어권의 ‘위안부’ 연구를 중심으로 [Transnational knowledge field as sites of memory on the Japanese military “comfort women”: focusing on the study of “comfort women” in the English-speaking regions]. 역사학연구소, 42, 13–59. https://doi.org/10.31552/jh.2021.09.42.13.
Kim, H., & Lee, C.S. (2017). Korean media: the case of television dramas, eyes of dawn (1991) and snowy road (2015). Asian Women, 33(3), 87–110. https://doi.org/10.14431/aw.2017.09.33.3.87.
Kim, J. (2021c). 미국 시민사회의 일본군‘위안부’ 문제 인식과 램지어 논문을 둘러싼 논란 [American civil society’s understanding of the ‘comfort women’ issue and the controversy over Ramseyer’s article denying the history]. 역사비평, 35, 198–225. https://doi.org/10.38080/crh.2021.05.135.198 “American civil society’s understanding of the ‘comfort women’ issue and the controversy over Ramseyer’s article denying the history.” 역사비평, 198–225.
Kim, M. (2021d). Cross reading of early testimonies from the Japanese military’s comfort women movement: focusing on Korean military comfort women (朝鮮人軍隊慰安婦)(明石書店, 1992) and forcibly taken Korean military comfort women 1, 2 (1993, 1997),” 역사연구 42, 61–96.
Kim, H. (2019). 베트남전 참전 자국군 전쟁범죄 문제에 대한 한국의 대응과정 평가: 미국의 미라이, 노근리 학살과의 비교를 중심으로 [Evaluation of South Korea’s dealing with its alleged war crimes during the Vietnam war: based on a comparison with U.S. massacres in My Lai and No Gun Ri]. [Master’s thesis, Seoul National University]. S-Space SNU Open Repository. https://hdl.handle.net/10371/150926.
Kwon, H. (2006). After the massacre: commemoration and consolation in Ha My and My Lai. University of California Press.
Lee, C. (2021a). Can the comfort women speak?: mainstream US media representations of the Japanese military sex slaves. Korea Journal, 6(1), 22–45. https://doi.org/10.25024/kj.2021.61.1.22.
Lee, J., Kwak, Y., Kim, Y., Kim, E., Park, E., Shin, Y., ... Lee, S.I. (2019). Transgenerational transmission of trauma: psychiatric evaluation of offspring of former “comfort women,” survivors of the Japanese military sexual slavery during World War II. Korean Neuropsychiatric Association, 16(3), 249–253. https://doi.org/10.30773/pi.2019.01.21.
Lee, J. (2009). Surrogate military, subimperialism, and masculinity: South Korea in the Vietnam war, 1965–73. positions: East Asia cultures critique, 17(3), 655–685. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-2009-019.
Lee, J. (2021b). 일본군 ‘위안부’ 운동 초기 증언의 교차적 듣기 『조선인 군대 위안부(朝鮮人軍隊慰安婦)』(1992)와 『강제로 끌려간 조선인 군위안부들』 1,2(1993, 1997)을 중심으로 [Cross reading of early testimonies from the Japanese military’s comfort women movement: focusing on Korean military comfort women (朝鮮人軍隊慰安婦)(明石書店, 1992) and forcibly taken Korean military comfort women. 1, 2 (1993, 1997)]. 역사연구, 42, 61–96. https://doi.org/10.31552/jh.2021.09.42.61.
Lee, K. (2020). 일본군 위안부의 ‘주체화’에 관한 고찰 [A study on ‘becoming subjective’ of comfort women]. 日本思想, 38, 161–185. https://doi.org/10.30615/kajt.2020.38.7.
Lee, N. (2018).경계에서 출발해 경계를 넘어: 1990년대 일본군 ‘위안부’ 운동의 초국적 연대를 중심으로 [From boundary, beyond boundaries: transnational women’s solidarity of the Korean ‘comfort women’ movement in the 1990s]. 구술사연구, 9(2), 191–230. https://www.earticle.net/Article/A337909.
Maffini, C.S. & Pham, A. N. (2016). Overcoming a legacy of conflict: The repercussive effects of stress and intergenerational transmission of trauma among Vietnamese Americans. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 25(6), 580–597. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926771.2016.1182955.
Mah, S., & Kim, S.(2021). 만화 번역전략 및 역사 만화 번역 특수성: ‘위안부’ 만화 “풀” 번역을 중심으로 [Translation strategies of comics and distinctiveness of historical comics: focusing on the analysis 풀 and its translation grass]. 동서비교문학저널,58, 73–101. https://doi.org/10.29324/jewcl.2021.12.58.73.
Min, Y., & Oh, S.(2021). Global perspective on the comfort women issue: thirty years after first being publicized. Korea Journal, 61(1), 5–21. https://doi.org/10.25024/kj.2021.61.1.5.
Moua, J. (2020). Shamanism: the healing tradition of Hmong people. Writing Waves, 2(2), 1–8. https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/writingwaves/vol2/iss2/11.
Paek, Y. (2021). 왜 미군 위안부는 잊혀져야 했는가?– 기지촌의 로컬리티와 기억의 정치 [Why ‘U.S. camptown prostitutes’ had to be forgotten? – the locality of US camptown and politics of memory]. 로컬리타 인문학,25, 39–76. https://doi.org/10.15299/tjl.2021.4.25.39.
Park, H. (2005). Two dreams in one bed: empire, social life, and the origins of the North Korean revolution in Manchuria. Duke University Press.
Park, J. (1998). The colonized colonizers: Korean experiences of the Vietnam war. The Journal of American-East Asian Relations, 7(3/4), 217–240. https://doi.org/10.1163/187656198793646004.
Park, J. (2011). 한국전쟁기 성매매정책에 관한 연구:‘위안소’와 ‘위안부’를 중심으로 [A study on prostitution policies during the Korean war: focusing on ‘comfort stations’ and ‘comfort women’]. 한국여성학회, 27(2), 35–72. G704–000349.2011.27.2.002.
Park, J. (2015). 한국 기지촌 성매매정책의 역사사회학, 1953–1995년: 냉전기 생명정치, 예외상태, 그리고 주권의 역설 [A historical sociology of the Korean government’s policies on military prostitution in U.S. camp towns, 1953–1995: Biopolitics, state of exception, and the paradox of sovereignty during the Cold War. 한국사회학회, 49(2), 1–33. https://doi.org/10.21562/kjs.2015.04.49.2.1.
Park, S. (2019). The role of putative epigenetic mechanisms in the intergenerational transmission of trauma effects in “comfort women” survivor offspring. Psychiatry Investigation, 16(6), 475–476. https://doi.org/10.30773/pi.2019.05.01.
Park, T. (1999). Change in U.S. policy toward South Korea in the early 1960s. Korean Studies, 23, 94–120. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23719217.
Shringarpure, B. (2019). Cold war assemblages: decolonization to digital. Taylor & Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429242649.
Visweswaran, K. (2010). Un/common cultures: racism and the rearticulation of cultural difference. Duke University Press.
Wojcik-Andrews, I., & Yoo, H.(2019). Revisiting comfort women history and representing trauma in South Korean films: A never-ending story and herstory. 미래영어영문학회, 180–184. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17620-4_5.
Yang, J. (2003). Cultural protection policy in Korea: intangible cultural properties and living national treasures. Jimoondang.
Yoon, J. (2017). Victory over communism: South Korean protestant’ ideas about democracy, development, and dictatorship, 1953–1961. The Journal of American-East Asian Relations, 24(2/3), 233–258. https://doi.org/10.1163/18765610-02402016.
Yuh, J. (2005). Moved by war: migration, diaspora and the Korean war. Journal of Asian American Studies, 8(3), 277–291. https://doi.org/10.1353/jaas.2005.0054.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hwang, M. (2023). Kut as Political Disobedience, Healing, and Resilience. In: Carranza Ko, Ñ. (eds) New Ways of Solidarity with Korean Comfort Women. Palgrave Macmillan Studies on Human Rights in Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1794-5_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1794-5_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-99-1793-8
Online ISBN: 978-981-99-1794-5
eBook Packages: Political Science and International StudiesPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)