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Sure, she didn't say that in so many words. Instead, she mentioned feeling betrayed, used and lied to, her bitterness apparent and aimed mostly at the person of Yoon Mee-hyang, the longtime leader of the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (Korean Council; formerly known as "Jeongdaehyeop" and Justice for the Comfort Women). Right before she started her term as a first-time national assemblywoman, Yoon responded in a press conference, taking pains to avoid direct confrontation with grandmother Lee but nevertheless forceful in her defense of her leadership of Jeongdaehyeop.
Stepping back from the current static, however, it's only fair to examine Yoon's Jeongdaehyeop for what it has done in the last 30 years as the most visible NGO driving the public narrative around the comfort women issue. I don't mean that we should do a head-count of the artifacts ― for example, enumerating how many publications it sponsored, lectures it hosted or organized, publicity trips it sponsored, etc. I mean, let's look at how close the whole comfort women issue has come to some type of a resolution under the leadership of Jeongdaehyeop.
Frankly, while Jeongdaehyeop played an important role in the beginning as a vehicle to raise awareness around the issue, it was fairly limited to the domestic arena.
The real international milestone came with the passage of H.R. 121 in the U.S. Congress, put forward by Rep. Mike Honda. I was a passive witness to the strategic process and hard work that went into this effort. At that time, the comfort women issue was not new. Similar House resolutions were introduced before and were inevitably defeated by the Japanese lobby who convinced most U.S. lawmakers that embarrassing Japan, a stalwart ally in Asia, by getting involved in an essentially Asian dispute would be counterproductive to American interests in the region.
After the last defeat in 2006, proponents of the comfort women resolution reworked their strategy in two main ways to increase the chances of convincing their representatives in the House to pass the resolution: One, a central clearinghouse office (www.support121.org) in D.C. was founded to network and coordinate all the nationwide lobbying efforts on behalf of the resolution. A network of second-generation Korean Americans was organized ― with specific intent and strategy ― by Annabel Park, the national coordinator for 121 Coalition.
Two, they used the network to collectively deliberate on a new argument that would have more appeal to key House members. The original argument was that Japan, as a leading nation of the world, must deal with its past abuses against the peoples it had subjugated during WWII. However, such an argument was vulnerable to a counter-argument that this issue was all about Japan―bashing by other Asian nations intent on taking some measure of revenge by shaming Japan.
In response, the new leadership ― mostly Korean-Americans ― couched the comfort women issue firmly in the language of human trafficking and wartime rape. Mindy Kotler, director of Asia Policy Point, made the following point in her testimony the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Feb. 15, 2007: "The most important tool in prosecuting/stopping sexual violence in war in the future is the precedent of past recognition of sexual violence, enslavement, and exploitation. Japan's wartime military rape camps are the modern precedent for all the issues of sexual slavery, sexual violence in war, and human trafficking that so dominate today's discussion of war and civil conflict ― Bosnia, Rwanda, Nicaragua, Sierra Leone, Darfur, Burma." In short, the milestone moment for comfort women came when their experience was expanded and universalized to the foundational human rights issue.
Jeongdaehyeop was in the right position at the right time to become a huge benefactor of the new global legitimacy. However, Jeongdaehyeop took the huge gift of a compelling public narrative and seems to have retrenched the discourse back into a Korea vs. Japan paradigm, even dipping liberally into the tried-and-true well of Korea's defensive nationalism that's largely defined as a reaction against Japanese colonialism. While expedient in furthering the outrage against Korea's victimization by Imperial Japan, opportunities were lost to foundationally resolve this issue by elevating the context in a way to not "name and shame" Japan but invite the post-WWII Japan to be a part of the solution that, first and foremost, caters to the hopes that the victims who were systemically raped during WWII by the soldiers of Imperial Japan, want to leave behind as their healing legacy.
As grandmother Lee said in her press conference, "Korea and Japan are neighbors. Our students eventually will be the owners of the countries. So these students need to know why we need an apology and compensation … The students are the ones who will resolve the issue of the wrong done to the comfort women victims."
Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture.
