Belated Narrating: “Grandmothers” Telling Stories of Forced Sexual Slavery During World War II

Abstract

On March 11, 2001 Korean “grandmother” Kap Soon-Choi walked onto the stage of a lecture hall at the University of Michigan in the United States and sat down between two younger women, one her interlocutor, the other her translator. After leaning toward her interlocutor for the first question, she began her testimony, translated into English as “We were so very poor.” For over an hour Kap Soon-Choi told her harrowing tale of abduction and forced sexual slavery in a Japanese military “comfort station” to a hall full of hushed college students. She told her story; she wept; she resumed. After her formal testimony, Kap Soon-Choi responded to audience questions for another hour. Throughout the two hours of testimony to her radical degradation, the Michigan Daily photographer shot photos for the next day’s paper.

Our policy should henceforth be to draw the sponge across the crimes and horrors of the past—hard as that may be—and look, for the sake of all our salvation, toward the future.

—Winston Churchill, as quoted in George Hicks

The authority for this tribunal comes not from a state or intergovernmental organization but from the peoples of the Asia-Pacific Region and, indeed, the peoples of the world to whom Japan owes a duty under international law to render account.

—Summary Judgment of the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal 2000 for the Trial of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery