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Art History 350WYousong NamResearch PaperThe Historical Evidence of Comfort WomenJapan invaded Korea from 1910 to 1945. Korea often calls this period the history of humiliation. People, who were against Japanese government lost their lives, people who were on their side lost their national consciousness. While men either fought or obeyed them in Korea and Japan by respectively being written as the heroes or the traitors in Korean history, many Korean women secretly suffered in neither of these countries. Starting from the beginning of the 1930s, they forcibly became comfort women for Japanese soldiers fighting in diverse countries like Philippines, China, Indonesia and other foreign countries instead of Korea and Japan. Lots of women were used as their sex slaves. They got sexual harassment everyday by the average number of ten men up to thirty. During the weekend, they needed to deal with more. These women were mostly young teenage girls, but there were a few in their 40s. Many of them were lower class and countryside girls because they were easy to be deceived by hiring advertisements. The population of these comfort women was about fifty thousand to a hundred thousand people. The Japanese sometimes just caught these women with force by kidnapping. When they were pregnant, got diseases or couldn’t be used as sexual tools, they got shot. They were forced sexual slavery, not women working as ‘comfort’ soldiers. All international institutions including UN now apply the term ‘Military Sexual Slavery By Japan’ today. Korean government did not pay attention to this issue until 1991. These unheeded women in Korea have constantly requested an apology from Japan, which continuously has denied the evidence of living comfort women. As it has been such a violation of human rights, Korean artists also create artworks related to it. However, interestingly, these works of art employ non-mimetic figures into cartoons, animation, paintings or statues. Many artists depict them as cartoons or animation. Koreans tried not to display such atrocities in the public media by putting living human figures. Why would they choose the strategy forcing people to imagine how tough the life of these women than directly displaying historical evidences or mimetic figures to the audience? The bronze statue of a young girl sits down on the chair with empty seat next to her (Fig.1). She grabs her hands hard. Her angry face straightly touches the audiences’ conscience. She wears Korean traditional costume called ‘Hanbok’. Her short hair is cut out like it is plucked off. The bird sits down on her shoulder. She has no shoes, letting only her tiptoes on the floor. This statue represents old memories of the aged comfort women. A married couple, two sculptors, Woo sung, Kim and Sukyeong, Kim created this ‘Statue of a girl’ to celebrate a thousandth meeting of Weekly Wednesday Demonstration which deals with all issues in relation with Korean comfort women. Thirty-seven Korean civic groups commissioned this demonstration and the statue. The statue, especially, is under the project named “Nabi”, meaning the butterfly. The aim of the project is to let all people know the historical truth of Korean comfort women by building statues in various places in the world. Each ornament of the statue conveys symbolic meanings. The seat next to her is for any visitor to sit down to look in the same direction as her. The ugly haircut was often noticeable feature for these women because they forcibly got their hair cut by Japanese soldiers. The hairstyle also stands for their disconnected relationship with their parents and hometown under the force of Japanese Imperialism. Grabbing hands shows the anger toward the Japanese government. The reason why her feet can’t fully stand on the ground is because Korean government also avoids helping these women directly for the sake of the current relationship with Japan. Historically, the Korean government was not helpful in the past either, so the statue displays the feeling of being neglected by her country. Her shadow doesn’t look like this young girl’s. Its shadow has side appearance of an old woman with bent back because young comfort women now are aged. The white stone of the butterfly sculpted in the heart of this old woman is a wish that the dead comfort women could be reborn in the next life without the horrible experience the current life had. The very first statue is found near the entrance of the Japanese Embassy in Korean capital city, Seoul. They currently own four statues in Korea, one in Glendale, California of the U.S.A. and they are trying to build several in Singapore and Australia now. Many people still don’t know about comfort women in Korea. Some people even believe what Japanese have claimed about this issue. They often turn their faces away making the excuse that comfort women were volunteered prostitutes. Japanese soldiers paid for it, but this money never went to these comfort women. All of this money was for the owner who built the tent for Japanese soldiers to have a sex with these women. Once people pay attention, they often figure the lies of Japanese out because we have living evidence. Therefore, to get attention from the world, we need to make an emblem for comfort Women. Making a statue like this and building them all over is to remind people of the comfort women and their histories when they see butterflies with short hair cut in Korean traditional costume. They created one representative image of Korean comfort women as if they are branding them into the world market. Other paintings also include this marketed appearance of Korean comforted women. One instance is Untitled by Hyung Bae, Kim (Fig.2). It draws giant yellow butterflies as large as the lying girl’s face. They bring her soul on their way to the sky, or the young girl is reborn as one of these butterflies after her death. She lies down on the ground with her arms crossed in the back. She takes off her white Crocs shoes, but still wears the Korean traditional costume with agony. This young girl overlaps the statue above due to the costume, the butterflies, her bear feet, wrinkles between eyebrows and short hair. Behind her, the Japanese flag, sword and guns stand. The flag of Rising Sun unfurls boastingly. The lines of open flag and weapons form the shape of a mountain. The hat of Japanese army encloses the top of this mountain. Another artwork called still holding on to hope by Sin, Kim also has similar features (Fig.3). The old woman has mien with winkles telling her tough life. Yellow flowers become small and butterflies take a place of them as they go above. Butterflies cover the white smoke coming out from the black funnel. This ugly burnt tree stands at the center of the painting. The smoke and pinkish dark sky fills the background. In the setting of the bomb scene behind, the whole picture creates heavy atmosphere. Yellow butterflies and flowers estrange two from the hazard behind. The gray color of girl on the right should belong to the smoke in the backside rather than the picturesque view at the very front. This statue has features of the statue of a girl such as grabbing hands, wrinkles between eyes, raw hair and Korean traditional outfit again. The chair she sits on lastly confirms that suggestion. She sits besides the old woman who wears same costume. Creases on both of women between two eyebrows bear likeness. Instead of the old woman’s shadow on the floor of the statue, this picture places the real aged comfort woman into the seat. Common characteristics of all these three images build the brand of Korean comfort women; therefore, even Japanese exploited these features to spread malicious rumors about them (Fig.4). This picture had been emerged to Japanese community. It was hard to find out the source, but it obviously contains mockery. The red letter on the top of left original statue says ‘fake’ while the other indicates ‘truth’. The white stake with the inscription of both in Korean and Japanese declares ‘Dakesima is Japanese’. What they called ‘Dakesima’ is the Island called ‘Dokdo’ under Korean effective control. With the problem of comfort women, Japan has persisted this island is theirs in spite of clear historical record. The imitated statue on the right only wears a pair of briefs. Paper money is caught into her hand and underwear. She has tobacco in her mouth. It definitely demonstrates the brand marketing of comfort women has been successful, as it also brought side effect like this case. The blotted out portion is not from original picture, but Korean media who thought it is too horrible to show to Koreans as it was. Although Koreans got hurt, these kinds of reactions help ensure the statue itself to be the symbol of comfort women. It mirrors Korean cultural characteristics. This proposes another assertion why non-realistic medium dominates the artworks of these women. Koreans are very conservative. We were very cautious about mentioning or dealing with sexual words in the public. We are also sensitive about talking about colonial history. In other countries, there are popular films like A Woman In Berlin, 2008, The Flowers of War, 2011 or An Eye of the Dawn from China 2014 (Fig.5). We had only one movie; Your Ma’s Name was Chosun Whore, which was made in 1991 (Fig.6) when we just started to pay attention to this matter. This was too sensational and minors are not allowed to watch. Its main poster even drew the atmosphere of adult-rated movies as if only adults should know what comfort women were for. The movie revealed what people thought of these women. This movie recognized this public view and took advantage of it. When people saw these women, they focused on sexual concepts than the historical facts at the time. The director of the movie has documented several movies about comfort women. However, this is only one movie he used human models in the story of getting sexual harassed because many of the audience members knew the truth and realized the realistic scenes could hurt comfort women. Another instance confirms this supposition. When one director tried to make one movie out of the story, many people got angered. The majority criticized that director and main actress desperately had to make a public apology and could not show up for a long time in the media. Although a movie itself overly sensational and commercial, this incident signifies our cautious cultural aspects. Another reason that we can’t discuss comfort women with real models is because we are also closely related with Japan politically and economically. Korea is too close with Japan geographically, economically and politically to have a direct confrontation. Imagine the relationship between Canada and the United States. Recently, due to the boom of Korean wave, many Korean singers, actors or actresses get major income from Japan. Lots of tourists of Japanese visit us and we visit them. In China, around 2012, there was big boycott of Japanese products because Japan nationalized the Senkaku Archipelago. China could conduct it because they know it could attack Japanese market intensively than their markets. The market in china is the biggest among three countries due to its enormous population, whereas Korea doesn’t have strong population to have a great impact on Japanese market. Chinese people were very angry at this dispute of islands; therefore, some people conducted a witch-hunt against anything related with Japan. For instance, they broke a car made in Japan even though there was driver inside at the time of assault. Many people thought it was such an overreaction and risky response; however, they could do that because they were not fearful about losing economic status. Even if their economy was one of the strongest in the world, they wouldn’t be able to do if they ever consider losing benefits. On the other hand, Korea is afraid of throwing what they have to save these comfort women. They create non-mimetic artworks as a certain solution for specific audiences, too. Korean Education system allows Korean history as an elective for students to take for Korean SAT. As long as it is not essential, young audience who can’t really sympathize with the historical facts now even have fewer chances to learn about their history. In official governmental textbook of Korean history, they just put few historical pictures (Fig.7), which do not tell us exactly what the comfort women have gone through even though there are enough shocking proofs. One media interviewed teenagers on the street to celebrate the March First Independence Movement happened in 1919 in Korea. Many teenagers couldn’t distinguish patriots and traitors of Japanese colonial era on the interview. Here is a portion of the script:Reporter: Do you know Wanyong, Lee?Student: Hwangyoong, Lee?Reporter: No, I mean Wanyoung, Lee.Student: Ah, isn’t he the person who was a brave guy against Japan during the colonization?Reporter: What do you think about this flag (show the Japanese rising sun flag)?Student: It looks so cool. Reporter: It is actually the flag standing for Japanese Imperialism.Student: Does it matter?Some students even mention they thought rising sun is awesome. The Rising Sun flag of Japan is everywhere, but it is the flag that represents the imperialism of Japan during WWII. It is tantamount to Swastika. They don’t know the basic elements of our history. Then, how could it possible for them to know about comfort women? These cartoons, animations or paintings might be the conclusion as an approachable method to youth. The reason we have lots of websites dealing this topic is to reach them because they are major population who daily use Internet. With animation, we could even approach not only teenagers but also younger children in familiar way on equal terms of Mickey Mouse. Recent data prove it is in effect. One student club in Kwangyeong high school in Seoul, Korea invented these handmade butterfly shaped ornamental badges (Fig.8). The income are all for donations to comfort women. On August of last year, they donated 11,700,000won (about eleven thousand seven hundreds in dollars). Another student organization interests the big audience with further steps. This group also consists of students of Seo-cho high school who sculpted a life-sized statue in their own style of depicting comfort women and even produced stamps (Fig.9). In this manner, young audience not only learns the history but also persistently invents creative tactics to overcome Japanese government, which makes no bones of telling wrong histories to their generations and the world. The exhibition, “Flowers that never fade” held in Angouleme, France on February of 2014 adapted this method to attract global market as well. This exhibition was part of the annual International Comics Festival in Angouleme. Graduate student of Art Education, Hyunji Kwon suggested different cause of rare realistic figures. She has an exhibition of artwork related with comfort woman at the hub. She suggests a different reason why they are often displayed in non-mimetic medium. It was because they should be depicted as victims rather than survivors. After Korea became independent, Japan dealt with them by burning all the evidence about comfort women and keeping it for secret. They knew it would be such a controversial issue to the world. Korea accepted it because they needed money to rebuild new country when all countries finally let Korea to be independent. This contract is called Korean Japan Promise. However, as comfort women became an issue, Korean government had to avoid its responsibility to Japan without mentioning the contract. This is because if they accept part of it was our fault, our whole basis of nationalism has been built in a wrong way. Therefore, whole Korean media has been trying hard to make them look poor in order to turn the responsibilities over ‘bad’ Japanese. One way was making fantasies and stories out of one subject through non-realistic figures and in mass-production is an adequate measure. Non-mimetic art can be mass-produced. The U.S. president, Barak Obama recently visited Korea and made a comment on issues of comfort women, ‘It’s a terrible, egregious violation of human rights, even in midst of war, it’s shocking’. Moreover, this was an official statement in the summit between Korea and United States of America, which was a day after it of U.S.A. and Japan. This has caused the world to shed the light on this topic again. Now it became tough for Japan to disregard this problem. Comfort women are now warm-hearted grandmothers. One aged grandmother says this: “All of you who listened to my testimony make me strong.” These are the stories that we should remember and protect. Whether non-mimetic or realistic, all of these efforts are our endeavor to keep facts. A West German Prime Minister, Willy Brandt knelt down and apologized officially in a grave of an unknown soldier died during the World War II in Poland in 1970. The U.S. history admits their faults discriminating African Americans and informs in their official textbook. As they admit their faults, they could develop into better countries. Wouldn’t it be time for Japan to accept their shame?-99942656864350Figure 1 Woo sung, Kim and Su kyeong, Kim, Statue of a Girl, 2011. Seoul, Korea Figure 1 Woo sung, Kim and Su kyeong, Kim, Statue of a Girl, 2011. Seoul, Korea -685800-1485900Figure 2 Hyungbae, Kim. Untitled, 2014. Ink on paper, 50cmx70cmFigure 3 Shin, Kim. Still holding onto hope, 2013. Ink on paper, 50cmx70cmFigure 2 Hyungbae, Kim. Untitled, 2014. Ink on paper, 50cmx70cmFigure 3 Shin, Kim. Still holding onto hope, 2013. Ink on paper, 50cmx70cm-5715002684780Figure 4 left: the real statue of a girl, right: the fixed of the statue of a girl using computer graphic generated by one Japanese, located in Personal blog , the whitened wooden stab was also created by him.Figure 4 left: the real statue of a girl, right: the fixed of the statue of a girl using computer graphic generated by one Japanese, located in Personal blog , the whitened wooden stab was also created by him.-571500168275114300411480000114300-571500Figure 5 From the left: Woman In Berlin, 2008, The Flowers of War 2011 in China. Film. Figure 5 From the left: Woman In Berlin, 2008, The Flowers of War 2011 in China. Film. Figure 6 Your Ma’s Name was Chosun Whore, 1991. Korea. Film.-341630-685800Figure 7 From left: One of Korean official textbook of middle school and high school Figure 7 From left: One of Korean official textbook of middle school and high school Figure 8 The butterfly badges made by student club in Kwangyeong High school. Metal. 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