Today I spent my Thursday evening neither participating in the merrymenet of yet another ladies' night in Itaewon nor staying at home trying to catch up on work or rest or cleaning, or all of them.... Tonight yours truly was a regular culture vulture who devoured a great play in Daehangno, - and what's more a play entirely in Korean.
Prof. Koh, my colleague and Korean teacher, invited me to come along. I thought: why not? It'd be interesting to see how much I can enjoy watching a play in a langauge that I don't understand.
I am so glad I went.I didn't have any problems understanding what was going on in the play. I was profoundly moved by it - and at the end I got to meet and chat with the playwright, the American-Korean poet, Chungmi Kim, as well as with her friend who happened to be the president of the Korean Committe for Solving the Problem of Comfort Women (a very rough translation of the name). Both women, blessed with noble features and regal talk and walk, cut quite dashing figures while solemnly and obligingly answering questions from the audience.
The difficult topic dealt with in
Comfort women is quite well known, but here's the jist (condensed from a web site on the Internet): Between 1937 and 1945, the Japanese Imperial Forces conscripted or abducted about 200,000 young women, some as young as 12, from Asian countries to serve as sex slaves, known euphemistically as “comfort women,” for more than 2 million Japanese troops and officers. Most women, though, were Korean. They were forced to work in brothels all over the Pacific area . At the end of the war, many of the comfort women were killed and some committed suicide. Those who survived suffered in silence, isolation, poverty, and shame, and their stories remained buried for decades. In 1991, the first survivor of the comfort houses broke the silence. Since then, others have come forward demanding justice and reparations from the Japanese government. There are at present only about a hundred survivors in South Korea.
(Tonight, three of those survivors were scheduled to have a question-answer period after the play. Unfortunately, as the playwright tearfully explained, they were too fragile and sick to travel to Seoul. ). The Tokyo government has apologized for its wartime atrocities, but refuses to accept responsibility for the comfort women, known in Japanese as ianfu, saying the trade was the work of private entrepreneurs.
The play was originally called
Hanako by the Japanese name of one of the sex slaves, but later the title was changed to
Comfort Women. It was first staged in English in New York and it was fairly successful, won several awards.
The play centers around three old women who used to be 'comfort women' in the past. It is set in L.A. (anyhow, somewhere in the U.S.A). Hanako lives in the U.S.A. and has a loving granddaughter who one day brings to her house two old Korean women on an official visit to the U.S.A. for the purpose of testifying against the Japanese war atrocities.
Hanako is not very welcoming. The other women's attempts to talk about the past she vehemently refuses and claims that she was not touched by the war in any other way except for the loss of her brother; however, at one point she reaches to hang an object on the wall and reveals a tattoo on her back by which she is recognized as a former comfort woman. One of the visiting women was her friend during their horrendous times as sex slaves in Osaka. Hanako then goes through an awful night of remembering her ordeal: being abducted from her home, raped, beaten, tips of her fingers cut off, humiliated,ostracized... Throughout her agony ( powerfully evoked on the stage by an enormouosly talented actress and the interchanging horrible bright red and sickly yellow light that illuminates her contorted face and body, by smoke, and horrendous sounds) a ghost of her mother comes to her, sings to her, tries to comfort her. I just couldn't stop weeping seeing her writhing on the stage, her pain looking so real and her longing for her mother's comfort impossibly touching. In the morning her granddaugther finds her lying motionless on the bed. Another heart-wrenching scene when the granddaugther tries to revive her grondmother - and succeeds. At the very end, Hanako asks for the window in her living room to be opened (earlier she wouldn't let anyone open it), and bright sunlight comes in illuminating granddaugther and grandmother hugging firmly.
It seems that the message Ms. Kim sends with her play is how important it is to deal with your past, whatever it is. Hanako denied hers for the longest time, never finding peace, never letting the sun shine on her. In the end she is released from her inner prison once she was forced to come to terms with her past. Is this also the message to the Japanese to acknowledge their crimes and pay adequately for them? No doubt about it - especially after I saw her in a friendly embrace with the President of the Committee for solving the problem of former comfort women. So far, Japan has done very little. In 1995, the government initiated a special fund, made up of individual and corporate donations, to pay each former sex slave about $23,000 - almost the same sum as the U.S. paid to its citizens of Japanese descent who were placed in internment camps during the war. Many women refused to accept the money, arguing that the private funding allowed the government to sidestep its responsibility. Last year, a court in Japan ordered the government to pay $2,300 to each of three survivors who had demanded $4.3 million in damages. They rejected the offer and plan to appeal. What' ll happen remains to be seen.
Thsi play reminded me of "Vagina monologuse" , actually of one particular segment, the one about Bosnian women who were raped by Serbs during the Balkan war. How much harder is a war for a woman than a man? In how many different ways does a woman suffer at times of war: abducted, raped, humiliated, mutilated, dehumanized, despised...
I just can't stop thinking about the play. It moved me beyond anything that I've seen in a long long time. My own paternal grandmother was born just before the WWI started; she survived the WWII but saw her husband killed in front of her own eyes, three of her six children died of sickness and/or hunger during a 500 km march with other refuges who were running away from the wrath of communist partisans...My mother's family lost everything: a couple of sons, my grandfather's carpentry, all of their land...I'll write about this perhaps some other time...
Back to my Thursday evening at the Theatre: After the play Prof. Koh and I walked from Daehangno to Hansung campus, 'hiking' over Naksan. A beautiful new moon, air crisp and clean, not too many people. I enjoyed walking side by side with this kind smart woman who every once in a while would grab my hand to get me out of harm's way ( as serious as a rollerblading kid, a delivery ajoshi on his clattering motorbike, a group of ajummas marching for fitness...). She did this so naturally and affectionately, just like a regular mother would do. Oddly, all the weeping and a whole roller-coaster of emotions didn't leave me drained but somehow almost uplifted. I guess it's true that tears wash away a lot of poisonous stuff...at least sometimes.
