Closure for 'comfort women'
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.jpg) Grandma Cau's lips balance a cigarette in her mouth, a caved-in bowl of wrinkles. A former Chinese comfort woman of WWII, Cau, 92, is one of the three women featured in the 2016 film "The Apology." Directed by Tiffany Hsiung, the documentary screened at Colorado State University's ACT Human Rights Film Festival in April2017. Grandma Adela, a Philippina, applies lipstick before meeting with fellow former comfort women. Grandma Gil of South Korea sings Korean songs "A Pier" and "Wild Roses" on a bus to the airport.
In Tokyo, Gil shouts, "Apologize! Apologize!"
"I gave birth twice," Grandma Cau says. "A boy, in a field. Later, a girl. I strangled one, threw away the other. They were the babies of my enemy."
The episode evokes the results of a survey of 192 Korean counterparts published in The Survey of Korean Comfort Women (The War/Women's Rights Center, Seoul, 2002). It lists 12% as having experienced pregnancies, with reports of abortions, miscarriages, and live births. Many of the babies born "died right after birth." How? Met blunt ends as Grandma Cau's babies did?
A question burns. Will the closure for the comfort women ever come in the form of a satisfactory apology (the German Chancellor Willy-Brandt-style on-the-knees-in-the-rain mea culpa) and "legal" compensation (funded by Japanese government and topped with an unequivocal admission of crimes against humanity)? Japanese officials apologized eight times since 1992, including Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2015. But all fell short.
Now, only 36 out of 238 former Korean comfort women, who registered with the South Korean government, survive.
However, thousands of former Korean comfort women who never registered may believing throughout Asia, and beyond, a fact world media seem committed to ignore. The women in hiding probably are also craning their necks looking for a satisfactory apology.
Given the Japanese nationalists' "apology fatigue" and cries to rescind already-delivered apologies, the closure comfort women seek is not likely to come soon ― if ever. Apologies can take centuries. Consider the apology of April 18, 2017, delivered by the Jesuits of Georgetown University for selling 272 slaves in 1838, 179 years after the deed (USA Today, 4/19/2017, 2A).
Without an on-the-knees apology, will comfort women die without "properly closing their eyes," the result of unhealed "heart wounds" (the han in Korean)?
Activism to wrangle a sufficiently-acceptable apology and compensation from Japan will grind away, as supporters vow, even after the death of all surviving comfort women. However, in the face of the potentially imminent death of surviving comfort women in urgent need of closures, exploring parallel closures for them that can come independently of external occurrences like political apologies and government compensation, should proceed. The Dalai Lama teaches such internally-generated closures spring from "self-compassion." The trick is it requires victims to be "non-judgmental about what causes them pain." Clearly, attaining that state of mind won't be easy. But it offers the surest path to a closure. And it can be theirs now.
The author of an autobiographical novel about Korea, "The Voices of Heaven," and a poetry book, "Long Walks on Short Days," Maija Rhee Devine is working on her next books ― a nonfiction book and a novel about comfort women of WWII. Contact: www.MaijaRheeDevine.com or maijadevine@gmail.com.
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