In producing Chungmi Kim's eponymous Hanako (1999), the first Asian American play on the topic of “comfort women,” East West Players (EWP) provided a critical space for addressing this devastating chapter of Asian history and showing its relevance to communities in the United States. It also inadvertently launched the play on a ten-year transpacific journey as Comfort Women (2004) in New York and as Nabi (2005–9) throughout South Korea and Canada. Hanako dramatizes the intergenerational bonds between a Korean American university student, her grandmother, and Korean “comfort women” survivors who travel to New York to give their public testimonies. As the play develops, one learns that the grandmother has been repressing her own memories of enslavement as one of an estimated two hundred thousand young girls and women euphemistically called “comfort women” whom the Japanese Imperial military forced into sexually servicing its troops in the years leading up to and during World War II.Footnote 1 Survivors kept their wartime experiences a secret from the public until the early 1990s, when a social movement for redress emerged in Asia. Over the past two and a half decades, activists and artists from around the world have joined survivors in their quest for justice. The recent agreement in 2015 between South Korea and Japan to “resolve” the “comfort women” issue sparked outcry from survivors and their supporters for its insincerity and inadequacy, further galvanizing the movement. Hanako and its afterlives as Comfort Women and Nabi are part of the transpacific culture of political activism and artistic expression that contends with the ongoing struggle over the history of “comfort women.”Footnote 2
The production of Hanako was part of an effort in the late 1990s to broaden EWP's repertory, especially to reach Korean American audiences. “The EWP,” writes Esther Kim Lee, “have had the longest history of producing plays written by Korean or Korean American writers.”Footnote 3 Although during the early years of its history, EWP produced three plays by cofounder Soon-Tek Oh (in 1967 and 1970), the company did not stage another play by a Korean American playwright until Sung Rno's Cleveland Raining (1995) and Kim's Hanako (1999).Footnote 4 “Korean American plays,” adds Lee, “were rarely produced during the 1970s and 1980s, when plays presented under the category of ‘Asian American theater’ were mostly about the Chinese and Japanese American experiences.”Footnote 5 EWP had a “predominantly Japanese American” subscription base in the 1980s: “It was only in the mid-1990s,” she points out, “that the company explicitly made efforts to include plays about other ethnicities.”Footnote 6 Tim Dang, artistic director of EWP, hoped that Hanako would foster dialogue between the Japanese American and Korean American communities.Footnote 7 A play such as Hanako could appeal both to first- and second-generation Korean Americans and to Japanese American audiences learning about the history of “comfort women” for the first time. One audience member, Mary Omoto, who saw the EWP production said, “Before I saw the play, I didn't know something like this had happened. For the Japanese not to offer an apology is appalling.”Footnote 8 Reviewer Sam Chu Lin wrote, “Many in the audience were visibly moved by what they had seen,” adding that “fears that the presentation might split Los Angeles’ Korean and Japanese communities proved unfounded.”Footnote 9
Hanako was part of a season that included productions of Cherylene Lee's Carry the Tiger to the Mountain, about the murder of Vincent Chin, and Tim Dang and Joel Iwataki's Beijing Spring: A Musical Odyssey, about the Tiananmen Square uprising.Footnote 10 These productions focused on the mobilization of individuals and local communities against injustice. Alice Tuan wrote that this lineup “seemed to create a season of Theatre of Guilt and kept new audiences from being interested.”Footnote 11Hanako and its subsequent productions as Comfort Women and Nabi deal less with narratives of guilt, Japanese culpability, and state politics. Instead, Hanako focuses on personal and familial conflicts over memory, and thus it encourages dialogue about a potentially divisive history across ethnic and national boundaries. The play fosters compassion for the survivors while allowing the audience to identify with the granddaughter figure as a witness to the women's survival and activism. Though the play is sentimental and didactic at times, it stages and offers a redressive critique of dominant narratives surrounding sexual slavery at the hands of the Japanese military: the “comfort women” issue as a strictly Asian concern; a nation-centered history of silencing; and the privileging of redress in the form of an official apology and reparations. Hanako, Comfort Women, and Nabi treat remembrance, witnessing, and community formation as more than simply common themes but as possibilities enacted through productions around the world.
Kim, a first-generation Korean American poet, playwright, and screenwriter, first wrote The Comfort Women (1995), a one-act play inspired by the testimonies of survivors.Footnote 12 Reading these testimonial accounts “shocked and enraged” the playwright, compelling her to examine, as Diane Haithman puts it, the “emotional scars of women who had survived 50 years of shame.”Footnote 13 “I wanted to honor all the ‘comfort women’; those who broke the silence and those who have not,” explained Kim. “And I wanted to give them a voice with dignity in hopes that the world would listen to them and do something to prevent the recurrence of such horrific human-rights violations.”Footnote 14 Kim articulates the redressive possibilities of artistic treatments of the history of “comfort women.” She also seeks to expand the often nationally and temporally bounded parameters of the “comfort women” issue beyond merely “condemn[ing] such war crimes by Japan” to include discussions of women's human rights.Footnote 15 Kim considers the history of “comfort women” to be “not just the story of the past” but an example of how a lack of state responsibility for the crimes of military sexual slavery contributes to the contemporary culture of impunity granted to perpetrators of violent crimes against women.Footnote 16
After meeting survivors in Korea, she developed the one-act play into a full-length version titled Hanako, which premiered in 1999 at EWP's David Henry Hwang Theater, where it was directed by Tzi Ma.Footnote 17 “Instead of recounting the horrors of war,” wrote Haithman, Hanako focuses on “a fictional meeting between some aged comfort women and a very traditional Korean grandmother of their generation who meets them when she emigrates to New York.”Footnote 18 “The power of Kim's text,” wrote Julio Martinez of EWP's production, “compensates for the occasionally uneven, self-conscious performances of the four-person ensemble and director Tzi Ma's unimaginative, pedestrian staging.”Footnote 19 In spite of the fluctuating production values of Hanako, EWP staged an important intervention: it gave visibility to the history and cause of “comfort women” survivors. The play's subsequent production lives as Comfort Women and Nabi is the focus of the rest of this article.
Comfort Women (2004)
For the revised production Comfort Women, Kim strengthened the relationship between the grandmother and her granddaughter, made the character of the grandmother's mother more prominent throughout the play, and wrote the final scene to be more hopeful.Footnote 20 The play, which received mostly positive reviews, was directed by Frances Hill at the Off-Broadway theatre Urban Stages in New York.Footnote 21 Lindsey Wilson described the Urban Stages production as a “play of enormous emotion and prominent social awareness.”Footnote 22 She continued, “The cruel and inhumane treatment these girls were subjected to is horrific and graphic in its description, but it is a description that needs to be broadcast to the world. Comfort Women is here to not only declare ‘this happened,’ but ‘this happened to me.’”Footnote 23 She concluded that the play's personalization of history, allowing audiences to connect with individuals, is a “very powerful way to learn, but it's also a very emotionally draining method of learning.”Footnote 24 Some reviewers pointed to the weaknesses of the play. While Jenny Sandman considered the play “overdue and a timely examination of war atrocities,” she wrote that the “compelling story” becomes “a little harried” toward the end: “The yelling, singing and the many brutal stories leave no time for the audience to rest or reflect.”Footnote 25 “The script suffers from a tendency toward melodrama and convenient coincidences to move the story forward,” wrote Dan Bacalzo.Footnote 26
The realist drama of Comfort Women takes place in the living quarters of an elderly Korean woman who lives with her family in Queens, New York, and has dreams and flashbacks of her life before, during, and after World War II. Her twenty-one-year-old granddaughter Jina interrupts her private reveries by inviting home two survivors. Jina's grandmother is reserved and dismissive of these survivors and their activist work, prompting one of the survivors to passionately defend their cause and share her wartime experience. Frustrated with her grandmother's rudeness, Jina storms out of the room and is not present when the tension between the grandmother and the survivors reaches a climactic moment. One of the visiting survivors confirms her suspicion that the grandmother is a former “comfort woman” when she catches a glimpse of the name “Hanako” in Japanese tattooed on her back. While the survivor recalls her memories of Jina's grandmother as a young woman, the grandmother becomes visibly upset and adamantly denies that she was Hanako, the name a Japanese officer gave to her when she was a “comfort woman.” After Jina takes the two survivors to a rally to protest a speech by the Japanese emperor at the United Nations, a series of reenactments of the past that the script refers to as “memory scenes” takes place on an upstage platform behind a scrim. After remembering painful scenes from her time in the “comfort stations” and from her postwar life, the grandmother tells the ghost of her mother that she was Hanako and that she and her mother need to accept her past. Jina, who hears about her grandmother's secret past from the other two survivors, returns to comfort her grandmother and to assure her that she loves her grandmother and that the two of them will share her story with others.
The playwright's decision to locate the story of the encounter between the grandmother and the other two survivors in the United States demonstrates the supranational contours of the social movement for redress and frames it as a transnational Asian American narrative. Don Shirley postulates that “perhaps [Kim] was trying to demonstrate just how far the bitterness engendered by the Japanese actions can travel.”Footnote 27 However, he finds the setting “arbitrarily distant” from the location where the violence first took place.Footnote 28 Unlike the critic, I view the setting of the narrative in the United States as strategic: locating it across the Pacific from the origins of the wartime experience was necessary for the larger cultural work the play performs. The grandmother's immigration to the United States has made it possible for her to “forget” her past. Repressing her memories of having served as a military sex slave, Jina's grandmother instead channels her memories of the past into a personal memorializing of her brother. Her brother, who was conscripted into the Japanese Imperial Army, was badly wounded during the Hiroshima bombing when he was stationed there and passed away from his injuries after he returned to Korea.Footnote 29 The action of the play unfolds on the day the grandmother is preparing for her brother's jesa, a Korean memorial ritual, held in the home on the anniversary of a loved one's death, in which food, drinks, and prayers are offered to the spirit of the deceased. Jina brings home the survivors because she thinks they will help her grandmother seek reparations on behalf of her brother.
In bringing these two histories into conversation—the conscription of Korean colonial subjects into the Japanese Imperial Army and the American bombings of Japan during World War II—Kim gestures toward the complicated transpacific politics of remembering World War II–era atrocities. One of the visiting survivors encourages Jina's grandmother to report her brother's death to a Japanese organization that is collecting data in preparation for pressing Japan to make reparations to its former World War II colonial conscripts. The possibility of pursuing reparative measures from the United States with regard to the Hiroshima bombing is not even mentioned. In fact, the play enacts a forgetting of US culpability in privileging the brother's victimization as a Japanese colonial subject. While national politics of memory are not the focal point of Comfort Women, the play does raise an important question regarding who is responsible for remembering and atoning for these wartime atrocities.
Though immigration to the United States allows for a forgetting of certain traumatic memories from the homeland for the grandmother, the United States also becomes a site for remembering for second-generation Asian Americans who have a different relationship to the history of “comfort women.” Laura Hyun Yi Kang writes about Korean American cultural productions that address “comfort women” history “as enunciating not only a diasporic Korean identification with the ‘comfort women’ but also the producers’ cultural and national location in the United States, a place that allows and enables its variously ethnicized subjects into such rememberings and representations.”Footnote 30 Situating Comfort Women in the United States allows the playwright to explore the participation of Asian Americans, particularly those of Korean descent, in the transnational social movement. Jina sees her support of survivors as an extension of how her grandmother taught her to “value [her] Korean heritage and do something worthwhile.”Footnote 31 Through the character of Jina, the play dramatizes how many second-generation Korean Americans have been drawn to the cause of the survivors through a combination of a desire for close ties to one's cultural heritage and an espousal of human rights and social justice.Footnote 32 Jina, who is characterized as idealistic, passionate, and caring, is politically involved in the cause of “comfort women”: she studies their history, attends rallies that raise awareness, and gathers signatures for a petition to the Japanese government in support of survivors’ demands for redress.
Comfort Women also imagines how different survivors might have continued their lives, from a grandmother who has kept her past a secret from her family to survivor-activists who travel the world to tell their stories. The grandmother represents the countless women who chose not to come forward. In Korea, two hundred and thirty-eight former sex slaves officially registered with the South Korean government in order to receive government support for housing, living, and medical expenses;Footnote 33 as of December 2015, only forty-six of these women were still alive.Footnote 34 These numbers do not include the thousands of women who did not come forward to the government and most likely kept their past a secret from their families and communities. Because of the Confucian roots of a patriarchal society such as that of Korea, which valorized a woman's chastity, survivors faced immense social stigma and ostracism from their own families and communities. The play opens up the space for the audience to consider communal and familial responsibility for silencing this history and intensifying the suffering of survivors. In the case of Jina's grandmother, her mother forced a sense of shame upon her daughter and insisted that she forget her past so she would be able to reintegrate into society. The grandmother adopted this attitude of shame and attempts to pass it on to her granddaughter: “Those women—are not the kind of people Koreans are proud of,” she explains. “They are shaming our country.”Footnote 35 This sense of ignominy stems not only from past victimization at the hands of Japanese colonial powers but also from current exhumation of the past by survivors.
The play challenges this discourse of shame and presents survivors as dignified and as people who are integral to the social movement. Comfort Women shows that many Americans have learned about this history through the international travels of survivors who have participated in court hearings, protests, and testimonial events organized and sponsored by student groups on university campuses, civic and social organizations, and human rights organizations in the United States. In the play, the two survivors are in New York to participate in the rally to protest the Japanese emperor's speech. Kim juxtaposes the public space of the UN protest with the private space of the home to illustrate the possibilities of reparative action beyond officially sanctioned parameters. The private space of the grandmother's living quarters becomes an alternative redressive space, decentering the Japanese state as the sole provider of justice. Restitution goes beyond apologies and reparations from the state; it also includes the personal sharing of memory. Private exchanges of memory enable survivors to depart from scripted public testimonies and thus assert ownership over their own narratives.Footnote 36 In Comfort Women, the two visiting survivors make their case for remembering and redressing the injustices committed against former “comfort women,” particularly to the grandmother who embodies the reluctance of many Koreans to join their cause and to Jina. The survivors view members of Jina's generation as agents of reparative action. “We were political hostages—sacrificed out of human greed and injustice. Yet, in our homeland, we were the outcasts hidden away. The faceless faces, the voiceless voices for over fifty years. … Who can give us back our youth?” asks one of the survivors as she turns to Jina.Footnote 37 “Your generation is our hope,” the other survivor tells Jina.Footnote 38 The elderly women articulate a multigenerational horizon for justice and consider Jina and her generation to be the torchbearers of the struggle.
Nabi (2005–9)
In contrast to the US productions, the Korean productions of Nabi, which received positive reviews, become an explicit form of arts-based activism.Footnote 39 Eunmi Bang wanted to direct a play in 2005 in connection with the sixtieth anniversary of Korea's liberation from Japanese colonial rule. “As a woman,” she told me in an interview, “I also wanted to tell a story about women.”Footnote 40 Bang understood that liberation from Japanese colonial rule was not a widespread joyful event because of the devastation to communities, particularly the women who had been forced into military sexual servitude. Survivors faced an uncertain future of social ostracism and psychological and health issues. Bang read a Korean newspaper article about the New York production of Comfort Women and decided to contact the playwright. She felt compelled to share Kim's play about “comfort women” whose wartime and postwar experiences complicate a celebratory remembering of Korea's liberation. The two women engaged in e-mail correspondence over several months about translations and about restructuring the play. In addition, Kim attended rehearsals before the premiere in Korea to offer her feedback.Footnote 41 Translated into Korean with minimal revisions, Nabi premiered in May 2005 at the Seoul Theater Festival and toured throughout South Korea in 2006.Footnote 42 Bang, the founder of the Nabi Theatre Company, continued to direct and produce the play in theatres, schools, churches, prisons, and on the streets for the next three years, even taking Nabi to Toronto and Vancouver in 2008.Footnote 43
Though she is slim and petite, Bang has a loud, almost shrill voice that I could not help but hear during 2007 protests in Seoul known as the Wednesday Demonstrations, during which we all stood across from the Japanese Embassy and called out for an official apology and legal reparations. After the protests, I noticed the director energetically greeting the survivors. When Bang agreed to an interview the following summer, she asked that I meet her at a protest not too far from the Japanese Embassy, this time for a completely different cause. In the summer of 2008, protesters in groups as small as a handful and as large as several thousand demonstrated daily in front of government buildings, along the streets, and in open plazas against the importation of American beef in particular and against the conservative Lee Myung-bak presidency in general. On the designated afternoon of our interview, I found my way to a small clearing by a street near the city center where Bang had gathered with her fellow Catholic parishioners. A group of riot police stood next to the small group of protesters. Bang and I sat on a stone platform between the police and the protesters. After the group dispersed, Bang asked that we find a quiet place to talk. We began our interview in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant specializing in beef soup and soju, a rice-based alcoholic drink. Then we wandered through the streets of central Seoul, eventually ending up in front of a bookstore. What I found interesting about our walking interview was Bang's need to be on the move and close to passersby. She did not want to be sequestered, instead choosing to be immersed in the everyday landscape of the city's residents. This desire for connection with local communities is evident in Bang's work in Nabi and her touring of the production to nontraditional performance spaces to enact social change.
The changes to the script were geared toward making the play more palatable to a Korean audience and less emotionally draining. Comfort Women, according to Bang, was clearly written for an American audience and consequently came across as didactic, with its barrage of testimonial accounts of wartime experience. Because the history of sexual slavery at the hands of the Japanese military is more widely known in Korea, Bang explained that the play “should not be for educational purposes only, but also develop an impression and move toward catharsis.”Footnote 44 Bang felt that Kim approached the subject matter as a human rights issue, whereas she viewed her artistic process in very personal terms. “For me, the grandmothers are like my mother,” she told me.Footnote 45 Her focus was on restoring their dignity and showing them as women who are not consumed by their past.
Through the play, Bang wanted Korean audiences to have a glimpse into how the grandmothers are living today, not just a series of recollections of the past. “The grandmothers,” Bang said to me, “do not continue to live depressed lives and always say, ‘I was a “comfort woman,” I am unhappy.’”Footnote 46 She added more singing, such as the Korean folk song “Arirang,” to illustrate that survivors enjoy everyday life and are not solely defined by their past. Another major change in the script was the omission of one survivor's account that Japanese soldiers placed women at the entrance of a cave as human shields. Though the playwright wanted to retain this moment, believing it to be one of the saddest accounts retold, Bang thought it necessary to alternate the narrative flow of the play with “both tension and relaxation,” so that there was not a constant bombardment of testimonial accounts.Footnote 47
The company that performed Nabi in Korea viewed their work as a form of activism, one that was part of the advocacy for state redress for survivors while also using theatre to teach younger generations. In 2007, Nabi was produced in ten middle schools and high schools in Seoul as part of an education initiative sponsored by the Seoul Department of Education.Footnote 48 “The Department of Education,” Bang explained, “understood that I was teaching history through performance.”Footnote 49 Since it is difficult in Korea to delve into the complexities of the “comfort women” issue in history textbooks, Bang said, the “Seoul Department of Education selected my performance work for live historical education.”Footnote 50 During a postperformance talk at Sookmyung Girls’ High School in Seoul in 2007, I was struck by how the director framed her troupe's productions of Nabi as a reparative gesture.Footnote 51 The company sought not only to teach history but also, in the process, to raise a protest consciousness. Nabi, which has been seen in countless productions in Korea, is an important cultural means through which Koreans of all ages have learned about the story of “comfort women” survivors and their quest for justice.
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Chungmi Kim's Hanako and its afterlives as Comfort Women and Nabi perform an important task of representing and documenting a transpacific politics of memory, the global reach of the social movement for redress, and the postwar lives of survivors—both those who have chosen a quiet life and those who have taken an active role in the social movement. But these productions do more than portray the experiences and histories of survivors; they have also brought together larger communities invested in memorializing the history of “comfort women” in the face of state obfuscations and in offering a critique of the burdens women have borne in colonial and nationalistic projects. This redressive theatre, which began on the stages of East West Players and has traveled both east and west, creates a space of reengagement where artists and audiences can remember and bear witness to the history and legacies of these brave women.
