Opinion

Japanese Can'T Deny an Unbearable History

By DOUGLAS LUMMIS

One spring day a 13-year-old girl, out on an errand for her parents, was kidnapped by a soldier, taken to a police station, and gang-raped. "When I shouted they put socks in my mouth and continued to rape me. The head of the police station hit me in the eye because I was crying. That day I lost my eyesight in my left eye."

Bosnia? Rwanda? Guatemala? No, Korea, 1934. This is the 1995 testimony of Chong Ok Sun to a United Nations investigator describing the day she was "recruited" as a "comfort woman" for the Japanese military.

Ms. Chong told how she was then sent to a Japanese military camp, where she was raped (without her consent, what else can you call it?) by as many as 40 soldiers a day. (I imagine the men lined up outside her tent, trying not to notice the thin stream of blood trickling out the door and into the mud under their boots.) Girls who protested, she testified, were tortured and killed, generally with swords. Twice she escaped, but was caught and brought back. After five years she was left for dead on a mountainside. She survived and returned to Korea.

There are many stories like this. Reading them is unbearable. It seems that many Japanese today who cannot bear to think that such things happened have decided to think that they did not. "There is no evidence that they were forced," they say. "There is only their own testimony, but no documents." These people don't understand what a document is. All historical documents are based on the experience of participants and witnesses. Testimonies of people like Chong Ok Sun, written down, are documents. In this case her testimony is part of a United Nations document. It even has a document number: E/CN.4/1996/53/Add.1.

Of course some say that the testimonies of these many victims from many countries are all lies, and the fact that they are all so similar is the result either of coincidence or conspiracy. We hear this claim often these days: the Nanjing massacre was a made-up story; the Holocaust was a made-up story ― will we be hearing that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a made-up story?

Much of the historical record is unbearable, and our lives would be happier if we could rewrite it as a happy myth. But denying reality won't work. What happened, happened. The Japanese government used sex slaves. Many were little children, virgin girls who hadn't known what the sex act was. One of the army's methods of disease control (these U.N. documents tell us) was to kill the girls who got diseases.

Chong Ok Sun testified that about half the girls in her camp were killed. Many of those who survived, broken in body and spirit, died after the war. But some lived long enough to tell their stories. Listen to them. Their testimony is one of the most important documents of our time.

Shukan ST: Feb. 28, 1997

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