The eightieth anniversary of the end of the second world war has passed with little fanfare in much of Australia. In the Melbourne suburb of Oakleigh, however, a commemoration of sorts is planned for this Saturday, 6 September. The organisers are the Chinese Australians for Peace Association and the ceremony will centre on the unveiling of a life-size bronze statue of a girl with plaits wearing the pants and tunic of a young rural woman of South China. This, declares the ABC, is Australia’s “first Chinese WWII comfort women statue.” The startling implication is that it may not be the last.
“Comfort women” is a euphemism for women who were prostituted by the Japanese army during the war. Across Asia, hundreds of thousands of them were taken from their homes or workplaces and press-ganged into service in “comfort stations” attached to Japanese garrisons or military supply stations. Dutch-Australian Jan Ruff-O’Herne was among the victims and in later life was prominent among activists pressing the Japanese government to accept legal responsibility for the system.
The plaits on this statue differentiate it from its Korean counterpart, which has bobbed hair. There are two Korean comfort women statues in Australia, one in the Sydney suburb of Ashfield, the other in the grounds of the Korean Society of Victoria building in Oakleigh. Worldwide, more than seventy such statues provide evidence of an unresolved trauma in Korean history and — despite some significant bilateral agreements — an enduring problem in Korean–Japanese relations. The first of them was erected in Seoul, opposite the Japanese embassy.
A girl with plaits or a bob offers a very different image from a soldier with a gun. She doesn’t say “Look what we can do to you” but rather “Look what you did to us.” For Australians, it is as if a statue depicting the skeletal figure of a survivor of a Japanese POW camp were to be erected somewhere — perhaps in front of the Japanese Embassy in Canberra. But Korean- and Chinese-Australians are of course Australians themselves. The comfort woman statues are a reminder that new generations of migrants bring to this country different legacies of war.
This is especially true of migrants from the People’s Republic of China. Unknown but certainly large numbers of Chinese women were pressed into sexual slavery by the Japanese military. The survivors carried a significant legacy of trauma into the postwar years, their health and often their lives altogether ruined. Yet after the creation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, memories of the war years came close to being obliterated by the sound and fury of mass campaigns targeting domestic “enemies of the revolution.” “Remembering the bitter past” was a collective activity focused on Chinese landlords or capitalists. It was only in the 1980s that this sort of memory work began to be reoriented towards Japan.
Once given their heads, historians in China had plenty of material to work with. The Anti-Japanese War was much longer than the Pacific War and entailed Japan’s occupation of a vast swathe of Chinese territory. The Nanjing massacre of 1937 was the largest single atrocity committed by Japanese forces anywhere. Oral histories, the creation of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum, the publication in translation of The Rape of Nanjing by Chinese-American Iris Chang, movies, television series, and now an annual day of mourning — all these have together generated a collective memory of wartime atrocities that feeds into anti-Japanese nationalism in China.
Like the war itself, the comfort women system was deemed a proper subject for historical research in China only decades after the communist takeover in 1949. Ironically, it was exposure to Japanese research on the topic, along with direct action by South Korean victims, that inspired China’s leading historian of the comfort women system, Su Zhiliang. China now has two museums dedicated to the comfort women, one in Nanjing and one at Su Zhiliang’s home institution, Shanghai Normal University.
In South Korea, democratisation meant space for freewheeling social movements, including feminist movements, capable of pursuing human rights issues independently of positions taken by the government. China has no such space. Entry to the museums is restricted, and in recent years the Chinese government has withdrawn support from an international movement to have the Voices of Comfort Women placed on the UNESCO “Memory of the World Register.”
Outside China, this is a free-floating issue that can easily find fertile soil in diasporic communities. But it has been taken up by other interest groups, too. In Berlin, the installation of a Korean comfort woman statue was supported by a coalition of civic groups of mixed ethnic and national origins with shared interests in crimes of sexual violence, particularly but not only in the context of war. As Japanese demands for the statue’s removal show, however, commemorations invariably have a geopolitical context. The transnational, universalist meanings attached to the peace statues do not exclude their particular, nationalist meanings.
Why such a statue in Melbourne? And why now? The formation of the Chinese-Australians for Peace Association, apparently for the purpose of sponsoring the “peace statue” (heping tongxiang), implies the existence or threat of war, possibly the remembered war that ended in 1945 but also, again possibly, the war that may yet happen if China decides to take Taiwan. The threat is not imminent, but since Russia’s assault on Ukraine it has become a constant in Australian discussions about security in the Pacific.
The founder of the Peace Association is Jimmy Li (Li Jianmin). Li is a good citizen: president of the Chinese Community Council of Australia (Victorian chapter) and a member of the Monash Multicultural Advisory Committee. He supported recognition of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. He promotes Chinese ethnic engagement in local society and politics. His organisation is not like the Australian Council for the Peaceful Reunification, which has been listed by the Australian government as a body exercising foreign influence. It looks more like a community expression of hope that history will not repeat itself and that a war in Europe will not again have a parallel in Asia.
Yet, corresponding as it does with this week’s huge military parade in Beijing marking the eightieth anniversary of the end of the war, the unveiling of the Oakleigh statue can also read as aligning Chinese-Australian interests with China’s. Koreans in Victoria understand the optics. Their representative society, the Korean Society of Victoria, has given permission for the use of their premises for the ceremony on Saturday so that the Chinese and the Korean statues can sit side by side for the day. But they have refused permission for the Chinese statue to be installed there permanently. In this, says KSV president Chang Suk Lee, they are “influenced in part by the prevailing political landscape.”
To the extent that he means the geopolitical landscape, this statement reflects awareness of the difficult relations between South Korea and China in recent years and also of the realities of a regional order in which South Korea is aligned not only with Australia but also with Japan. In anti-Japanese sentiment, South Korea has long outranked China, but in his Liberation Day speech this year South Korean president Lee Jae Myung made reference to Japan as “our neighbour” and our “partner in our economic development.”
Is it possible to disentangle awareness of this difficult history from nationalist sentiments? Searching for a space separate from the spheres controlled by the state in China, ANU researcher Yujie Zhu has emphasised the relative independence of the research and historical memory work undertaken by Su Zhiliang. But the fact that Su’s research wasn’t conducted at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t rule out nationalist readings.
Among Su’s findings are that Chinese victims of the comfort women system numbered no less than 200,000, accounting for half of all comfort women across Asia. These huge numbers, varying greatly from all other scholarly estimates, are characteristic of patriotic history in China. Comparably, in a statement redacted in the English-language version of the ABC report, Chinese-American documentary film-maker Leo Shi Young states: “Comfort women were not just Koreans; there were even more Chinese.
Unsurprisingly, comments by local visitors to the comfort women museum in Shanghai show that the exhibits reinforce the Chinese nationalist narrative and anti-Japanese feeling. There is a risk that the Chinese Australian for Peace Association’s statue will stir up tensions within Australian communities with links to the region.
There is one other noteworthy thing about Chinese comfort women: the consistency with which men figure in reports about documentation, exhibitions and commemorations.
This is not the case elsewhere. In South Korea, the first name to come to mind (apart from any of the many victim activists) is probably Yun Chung-ok, an English literature professor at Ewha Women’s University, who in 1990 did much to educate the public about the comfort women system through a series of newspaper articles on the subject. In Japan, it is Yayori Matsui, daughter of a Christian pacifist, inspiration for the Women’s Active Museum of War and Peace in Tokyo, and an early adviser to Yun Chung-ok.
In China, however, the obvious name is that of male historian Su Zhiliang. Close on his heels is the filmmaker redacted from the ABC report, Leo Shi Young, who is in the forefront of efforts to create Chinese statues to accompany Korean ones. In Australia, Jimmy Li is following in Young’s footsteps.
A movement for recognition of war crimes perpetrated against women, driven by women, necessarily changes character when it’s led by men. With the best will in the world, male activists cannot avoid lending a different aura to the movement. After Fadime Şahindal, a Swedish national of Kurdish origin, died at the hands of her father in a so-called “honour killing” in 2002, she was carried to her grave by women. As Swedish MP Nalin Pekgul, herself of Kurih origin, remarked, “The most important thing was that it was not her male relatives who laid her to rest.”
Pekgul’s point was that the male relatives unavoidably personified the system that resulted in Şahindal’s death. It would overstate the case to claim that the men who have taken the lead in propagating knowledge of China’s comfort women in themselves embody the state-based system of national rivalry that underpins war and war crimes. Nonetheless, once it was felt necessary — by Young — to create a Chinese statue as well as a Korean one, the Korean statue lost something of its universal symbolism as a monument to the sufferings of women through rape in war. Once Young emphatically stated that there were more Chinese victims than Korean, the comfort women issue seemed in danger of being hijacked by competitive narratives of victimhood. It might now be difficult for the Chinese Australians for Peace Association to avoid their no doubt heartfelt gesture of commemoration becoming hostage to these narratives.
The tensions over the installation of peace statues are sometimes represented as a case of right-wing Japanese nationalists versus transnational feminist and human rights activists. But Japan has a strong tradition of activism around the comfort women system, which had its Japanese victims too. The Women’s Active Museum of War and Peace in Tokyo is a fine example of commemorative activity, asking visitors to reflect on the past and on Japan’s responsibility for the system. It’s the sort of internal critique that is hardly possible in today’s China. •
