13 Toward Postcolonial Feminist Subjectivity: Korean Women’s Redress Movement for “Comfort Women”

In the course of finding commonality in our difficulties and sharing awareness, we encountered the issue of the “comfort women.” We found our way in the resolution of this issue. … In other words, we found the “comfort women” issue to be the epitome of our problems. We have engaged with it to reflect our way of life and to change our society, in the belief that this will relieve the souls of the “comfort women” who died in silence or live today.

—Kim Puja et al., “Atogaki”¹

Japanese military sexual slavery was first politicized as a matter of the human rights of women in the early 1990s in South Korea. The issue soon went beyond war compensation between Japan and Korea, paving the way for transnational efforts to abolish violence against women in all conflicts. The redress movement for “military comfort women” (in Japanese, jūgun ianfu) in Korea also galvanized women’s organizing in Japan. In its early phase, groups of ethnic Korean women in Japan advocated for “comfort women,” thus building bridges between social movements in Japan and Korea. The activism of Korean women in Japan, conducted through the Korean Women’s Network on the Comfort Women Issue (Jūgun Ianfu Mondai Uri Yoson Nettowāku), hereafter Yeoseong-Net,² was distinct as it addressed the intersectionality of colonialism and gender, based on participants’ experiences of multiple oppressions as women of the colonial diaspora.

Yeoseong-Net’s contribution to create a framework of transnational feminist activism has been explored in detail as a structural transformation taking place within the framework of majority-minority women, as well as within the larger context of a globalizing Asia.³ Also, some Yeoseong-Net members’ individual memoirs were published in English.⁴ In this chapter, I focus on Yeoseong-Net to explore the process of identity formation and expression of political agency, which signaled the emergence of a new postcolonial feminist subjectivity. Here I apply Inderpal Grewal’s conceptualization of a subject that is heterogeneous as well as political, that destroys binaries and is inclusive, in opposition to a conventional notion of the subject as created out of the binaries of Self/Other, Subject/Object in the Western philosophical tradition. The new subject provides a constant critique of nationalist and even insurgent agendas, and of power relations that structure global economic flows—a critique that will never be complete.⁵ This nonessentialist heterogeneous subject is useful for analyzing the creative meaning of Yeoseong-Net. Korean women in Japan were able to articulate their identities and share their insights about the socioeconomic structure surrounding them, thereby starting a new form of transnational feminist activism based on their agency as postcolonial diasporic women. It must be noted that they had little intention to maintain Yeoseong-Net as an organization (it dissolved in 1998), and resisted basing the organization on so-called “identity politics.” Nonetheless, Yeoseong-Net helped to clarify their identities as Korean women in Japan (as distinct from Japanese women), Koreans in Korea, and new immigrants from Korea in Japan. This enabled them to forge solidarity and become active participants in politics, resisting multiple layers of oppression.

Feminists in each racial/ethnic group are affected by their race and class status, by their own experiences within their racial/ethnic movements, and by the structure of political choices for activism available at that time, so that organizationally distinct racial/ethnic feminisms emerge.⁶ With this in mind, I examine here how and why the issue of forced military prostitution mobilized Korean women in Japan, and catalyzed the establishment of the first organization of Korean women in Japan that explicitly addresses women’s liberation. In the following section, I examine the postcolonial diasporic conditions in which Korean women in Japan have been positioned, and their strategies for participating in the political sphere at the organizational level. Then, I explore Korean women’s involvement in campaigns for redress for “comfort women,” analyzing the narratives of former Yeoseong-Net members based on personal interviews. Lastly, I discuss the multiplicity of efforts made by Korean women in Japan to challenge structural oppression.

As a result of Japanese colonial rule in Korea (1910–1945), there were approximately two million Koreans in Japan at the defeat of the Japanese Empire. Two-thirds of them returned to a liberated homeland, but postwar political instability on the Korean peninsula, which was intensified by the Cold War, made an estimated 600,000 Koreans decide to postpone their repatriation in anticipation of a Korean unification that still has not occurred. The Korean diaspora in Japan is characterized by the insecurity and political ambiguity of their status as former colonial subjects who are perceived as temporary residents, sojourners, and exiles.⁷

The postwar restructuring of Japanese nationhood gradually yet systematically excluded former colonial subjects from its membership. Technically speaking, people from the colonies (the Korean peninsula and Taiwan) initially had Japanese nationality, but were subjected to a newly introduced alien registration system in 1947. Upon ratification of the San Francisco Peace Treaty in 1952, the Japanese government unilaterally revoked their Japanese nationality. Koreans in Japan were suddenly made stateless. This institutional arrangement reflecting an ethnically exclusive concept of nationality was then used to justify the exclusion of Koreans as “foreigners,” disentitling them from social welfare services such as public housing, the national pension plan, national health insurance, voting rights, and employment in public service.⁸ In the private sector, discrimination was rationalized against even subsequent generations of Koreans, who had acquired Japanese language and culture. This rationalization was based on their lack of Japanese nationality. It was not until normalization of the diplomatic relationship between Japan and South Korea in 1965 that Koreans in Japan were entitled to permanent residency on the condition of their affiliation to the Republic of Korea (ROK), while the legal status of those Koreans not supporting the ROK was not stabilized until the early 1980s.⁹

Displaced from mainstream Japanese society as outsiders, Koreans developed a self-sufficient ethnic community that included banks, schools, businesses, culture and media institutions, and religious associations. They were typically employed as casual laborers or worked in small-scale family businesses such as restaurants, pachinko parlors, junk dealerships, and plastic factories. Postwar economic growth accelerated to improve their economic condition. In spite of their long-term residence in Japan, and the fact that Japan-born generations fluent in Japanese language and culture increasingly constituted the majority of these communities, Koreans remained invisible, or outsiders to Japanese society without proper recognition, not even as second-class citizens in their country of residence.¹⁰ These conditions reinforced ethnic family and community relationships including their patriarchal structure.

The two ideologically opposing states in the postwar Korean peninsula reconstructed ethnic identity as a replacement for enforced Japanese colonial modernity. They did so by using Confucianism as a governing idea, at the center of which was patriarchy with specific gender norms.¹¹ Such state ideologies based on premodern Confucian values were readily accepted by people of the Korean diaspora in Japan during the decolonialization process, who had been yearning for national belonging in the postwar world order. Patriarchal values were further strengthened in their attempt to reconstruct family and community as a fortress against oppression imposed on them by Japanese society.¹² Unstable status and oppressive conditions in the country of residence affected women in particular, leaving them little choice but to depend on their families and their community, and thus suppressing their aspirations for gender equality.¹³

Ongoing uncertainties related to nationality and citizenship gave Koreans an unstable mentality, characterized by an endless search for self. The division of the Korean peninsula as a result of the Korean War further increased the uncertainty of their status. Uncertainty in national belongingness predisposed Koreans in Japan to become profoundly involved in nationalist politics, as well as in protests against repression by the Japanese authorities. The Korean community in Japan was ruptured along the same 38th parallel as the Korean peninsula, torn between those affiliated with the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (the pro–North Korean state association known as Chongryun)¹⁴ and the Korean Residents Union in Japan (the pro–South Korean state association known as Mindan).¹⁵

For most of the postwar period, political involvement by Korean women in Japan has been conducted under the umbrella of these two ethnonational organizations.¹⁶ The women’s association of Mindan is called the Association of Korean Women in Japan (Puin-hoe) and that of Chongryun is called the Democratic Union of Korean Women in Japan (Nyeomaeng).¹⁷ In spite of their ideological differences, these associations are alike in adopting the conventionally feminine ideal of the patriotic “dutiful wife and devoted mother.”¹⁸ This model enabled women’s political participation in nationalist projects, while reinforcing the gendered structure of Korean diaspora politics. The women’s associations were expected to contribute to the decisions of male-dominated organizations, while women’s aspirations to liberation were overshadowed by issues of ethnic liberation.¹⁹

As Japan-born generations came to comprise the core of the ethnic Korean community, the focus of ethnic movements shifted from nationalism to grassroots activism advocating human rights, based on their self-identification as “residents” in Japanese society rather than expatriates. The Korean civil rights movements first emerged through the cooperation between Koreans and Japanese in Kawasaki City, supporting a lawsuit by a young second-generation Korean man against a large electric corporation that discriminated against him in employment. Following Kawasaki, grassroots organizations advocating human rights for Korean residents appeared in cities with large Korean communities like Osaka, Kyoto, and Tokyo. Korean women organized their own civil rights groups like Kawasaki Omoni no Kai (Korean Mother’s Association in Kawasaki) and Meari Kai (Association Echo) in Kyoto.²⁰ They organized from the standpoint of “mothers” advocating for their children’s rights to have their ethnic background and identity respected in Japanese public schools. Emerging out of Korean mothers’ self-help groups, these grassroots associations produced a new agency as community leaders imbued with ethnically specific identities as mothers, linking political subjectivity across private and public spheres.²¹ Their political agency is evident in the fact that some members later were acknowledged as representatives of Korean residents in public committees sponsored by local governments.

These cases imply that femininity and motherhood were crucial to Korean women’s political participation and were reinforced by ethno-national and civic movements. Although women were always active in Korean movements for justice, their position as activists was ambiguous. That is because the “political” has historically been defined as inherently masculine, as numerous feminist critiques have demonstrated. Women actively participated in political campaigns, but were marginalized in the male-dominant organizations. Therefore women’s agency needed to be expressed through gender-specific roles such as child-rearing, which nonetheless enabled them to participate in the political sphere. Their active agency based on motherhood was not just a strategy but also reflected a major aspect of Korean women’s reality, namely their devotion to family, especially to children.

The 1970s era of women’s liberation in Japan, discussed in this volume in chapters by Setsu Shigematsu and James Welker, consequently had little impact on the vast majority of Korean women, due to the large disparity between Japanese and Korean women in terms of civil rights and economic, social, and political status, as well as a sense of distrust on the part of Korean women toward Japanese society, including Japanese women.²² There were a couple of cases where Korean women took part in the Japanese feminist movement as individuals, but these were rare exceptions; women on both sides failed to understand each other in a way that recognized the different positionality between them.

As I have illustrated, Korean women remained invisible and marginalized in movements in which they participated. It was not until the 1980s that Korean women’s feminist aspirations became salient, expressed sporadically and individually in minor ethnic or Japanese feminist media, suggesting the gradual incorporation of second-generation Korean women into Japanese public discourse.

As for collective activity, the Association of Korean Women in Japan for Democracy (hereafter Yeoseong-hoe)²³ was launched in 1987 by female activists who were members of Hantongryun (the Korean Democratic Reunification Union),²⁴ an organization supporting democratic movements against dictatorship in South Korea. Influenced by the rise of the women’s movement in South Korea protesting violence against women, Korean female activists in Japan formed their own association addressing gender equality within the Korean ethno-national movement. Another example of this kind of organization was the formation of a young women’s reading circle in 1984,²⁵ known as the Chōsen Joseishi Dokushokai (Association for Reading Korean Women’s History).²⁶ The members met to read and translate masterpieces of Korean women’s history published by Ewha Women’s University.²⁷ They published the newsletter Josei tsūshin (Women’s communication), compiling women’s bold criticism of patriarchy in Korean society, including their ethnic community and family. Although members in Dokushokai did not set out to create a movement, Josei tsūshin provided a discursive space in which Korean women discussed women’s liberation, mediating Korean women divided by different organizational affiliations. In other words, Josei tsūshin, published quarterly in the Japanese language, opened a kind of counterpublic for Korean women aspiring for liberation. It was at the moment of the politicization of Japanese military-imposed forced prostitution in South Korea during World War II that these women recognized a common interest in women’s liberation and took collective action.

In December 1990, Yoon Jung-ok, head of the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (hereafter the Korean Council), the leading organization of the movement for redress, came to Tokyo. Women who had contributed to the above-mentioned Josei tsūshin, activists who had withdrawn from Yeoseong-hoe, and several individual activists got together for a closed-door discussion with Yoon.²⁸ Seventeen women attending the session were inspired by Yoon’s reinterpretation of “comfort women” as victims of patriarchy, not just colonialism, which had shamed the victims and had discouraged them from making complaints. They decided to take action in Japan for the redress of these victims. They started with translations of Yoon’s interviews with survivors and published them as a booklet: We Never Forget: Korean Military Comfort Women (Watashitachi wa wasurenai: Chōsenjin jūgun ianfu). In 1991 they held a camp at the National Women’s Education Center (NWEC) in Saitama in which about fifty Korean women participated. Yeoseong-Net was officially launched in Tokyo in November of the same year.²⁹ The following is a part of their inaugural statement:

Reproduction of racism and oppression continues without the resolution of past colonial rule. In addition, women have been bound by the patriarchal structure. Without settling these problems, can there be any liberation for women? The issue of comfort women represents the suffering of Korean women in Japan. We are beginning to make a belated effort to confront this problem, and take action from the perspective of Korean women in Japan. We are ashamed of ourselves for having avoided this issue until now. Nonetheless, we are finally able to approach this issue after forty-six years of struggle for the unification of our homeland, protesting racism and empowering ourselves. We encountered each other when we decided to confront the oppression of women.³⁰

The statement exemplifies the merging of a critique against colonialism and patriarchy, articulated through a confrontation with the “comfort women” issue.

The military brothels had been known in postwar Japan, primarily by former Japanese soldiers who had been sent to battlefields. In the 1970s, the stories of “comfort women” appeared in the media, with journalists portraying the women as victims of Japanese military aggression, but not from the perspective of violence against women. From the feminist perspective, the issue was taken up by the Japanese women’s liberation movement and groups such as Shinryaku=Sabetsu to Tatakau Ajia Fujin Kaigi (Asian Women’s Conference Fighting Against Invasion=Discrimination) and Ajia no Onnatachi no Kai (Asian Women’s Association), as well as described in documentaries and in nonfiction. But “comfort women” had not been perceived as a concrete agenda for political action in these movements.

Thus, Yeoseong-Net launched into action to shape public opinion on “comfort women” in Japanese society, addressing it as a real and urgent issue for resolution. One month after its inauguration, Yeoseong-Net held a rally for the testimony of Kim Hak-sun, the first survivor who came out as a victim of Japanese military sexual slavery and who brought her case to the Tokyo District Court along with two other women survivors. The rally was held at the Korean YMCA in Tokyo, in which 450 people participated. In January 1992, Yeoseong-Net organized a three-day hotline in cooperation with three women’s associations, Nihon no Sengo o Hakkiri Saseru Kai (Association for the Clarification of Japan’s Wartime Responsibility), Jūgun Ianfu Mondai o Kangaeru Kai (Association to Think through the Comfort Women Issue), and Yeoseong-hoe. The hotline received testimonies from 235 people, including former Japanese soldiers. At the time of Prime Minister Miyazawa Kiichi’s visit to Seoul, Yeoseong-Net appealed to the Japanese government to respond to the Korean Council’s requests, namely for an official apology and full accounting of the facts, the building of a monument to the “comfort women,” compensation, and education about the history of the “comfort women” in Japanese schools. Yeoseong-Net produced a number of publications, including a co-edited book with Yoon Jung-ok, a translation of the survivors’ testimonies (1993), material for schools to use on this issue, and the newsletter Allim.³¹ They conducted research overseas using historical records and interviews with survivors, and gave lectures on the issue. Yeoseong-Net gave presentations at the Asian Solidarity Conference on Japanese Military “Comfort Women” Issues, organized a workshop at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, and submitted a counter-report to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women in 1994. The activities of Yeoseong-Net were multilingual and extended overseas, intermediating among advocacy groups in South Korea, Japan, China, Canada, and other areas, which demonstrates the diversity of Yeoseong-Net members in terms of language and connection.³²

I interviewed thirteen former Yeoseong-Net members in 2004. They were mostly second-generation resident Koreans. Twelve out of thirteen were of South Korean nationality, among whom three had changed their national affiliation from Chōsen (this term is associated with “North Korea” but in fact signifies the women are stateless). In terms of educational background, half of them had university diplomas and the rest were high school graduates at the time when they became involved in Yeoseong-Net. Eight had studied in the Japanese school system, one in an ethnic Korean school system, three had studied in both school systems, and one grew up and studied in Korea. Some women worked for Chongryun as office staff. One graduated from a Korean school in Japan, studied for a university degree in the United States, and had worked in New Zealand and Britain. Their occupations were varied, including a dentist, translator, interpreter, childcare worker, pharmacist, writer, photographer, housewife, and graduate student. Eleven of the women were married to ethnic Korean men and had children.

Their previous activist histories were diverse; they had participated in Dokusho Kai, Yeoseong-hoe, Puin-hoe, Ajia no Onnatachi no Kai, a documentary production on Koreans in Japan, the Korean Student League in Japan, and a local group devoted to reporting on the massacre of Koreans during the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. Together with their multilingualism, their experiences in social movements provided them with resources in organizing rallies, workshops, publishing, and networking. Considering that the majority of younger generations study in Japanese public schools, understand only the Japanese language, use Japanese (passing) names and get married to ethnic Japanese, Yeoseong-Net members were exceptionally rooted in their ethnic community. They could be considered ethnic intellectuals, but as women they had experienced marginalization in the gendered hierarchy of the Korean ethnic community in Japan.

As demonstrated in its inaugural statement quoted above, intersectionality is the key concept of Yeoseong-Net activism. At an individual level, participants in the redress movement interpreted the structural oppression of Korean women in Japan by linking “comfort women” and first-generation women familiar with their situation. Shin Minja had known about “comfort women” from books. She considered it a tragedy that happened to women under colonial rule, and as an extreme case. She felt that her mother or other first-generation female relatives could have been forced to be “comfort women” were it not for the fortune of circumstance. On the other hand, she felt guilty because she avoided contemplating the issue of “comfort women.” As sexual matters were regarded as taboo, she did not want to discuss it. Her attitude changed when she participated in the camp at the NWEC in 1991, where she shared this ambivalent feeling with other Korean women in Japan. She enhanced her understanding of the issue, finding a link between “comfort women” and the circumstances of her first-generation female relatives who were born to poor farmers and had no education.

Many Yeoseong-Net members had complaints about sexism within their families and their ethnic organizations, and their interest in feminism grew through reading The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, for example. So why did they choose an ethnic organization through which to channel their activism? In an interview conducted in 2004, Kim Yeong-hee explained to me that she was influenced by the Japanese women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, a time when domestic duties were imposed on her but not on her brothers. She complained about male dominance in Korean families, taking jesa, a Korean ceremonial ritual to honor one’s ancestors, as an example: “Though women prepare food and all other things for jesa, they are excluded from the service, which was held by only men. There is no 38th parallel in terms of women’s sacrifice.” Like many Japan-born Koreans, she was educated in the Japanese school system and incorporated into Japanese society, using a Japanese name in daily life. She experienced a crisis between Japanese society and her ethnic identity. To resolve this identity problem, she became involved in an organization of young Koreans at her university, where she felt “liberated.” She came out as “Korean,” by abandoning her Japanese name and instead using her Korean name publicly.³³ She was concerned about human rights and engaged in advocacy for her brother-in-law, who was a political prisoner of the Korean dictatorship. But in the Korean student organization to which she belonged, it was believed that women’s liberation was much less of a priority and would be realized only after Korean reunification. She was interested in the Japanese women’s liberation movement, but she did not join, because in her view the movement failed to be aware of the history of Japanese colonialism and invasion in Asia. In order to pursue gender equality through an ethnic movement, she founded the women’s group Yeoseong-hoe with other women members in Hantongryun (mentioned above). But she was faced with the difficulty of expanding women’s autonomy under Hantongryun, and left soon thereafter to look for a way to consolidate her activism in human rights, ethnic rights, and women’s liberation. When she encountered the redress movement for “comfort women,” she thought of it as “a gift from heaven,” as it might lead to an original movement by Korean women in Japan transcending difference in nationality (North and South Korean, and Japanese), organization, class, and generation. She said that though it presented a serious problem for them, the issue of “comfort women” created a space where various Korean women could encounter each other and forge solidarity. She compared the 1991 NWEC camp of Korean women in Japan concerning “comfort women” with the women’s liberation camp in the early 1970s initiated by well-known radical feminist Tanaka Mitsu. “Around fifty Korean women participated from all over Japan, with glittering eyes and passion,” she recalled.

In the words of Park Hwami, the issue of “comfort women” connected Korean women in Japan, who had been fragmented and invisible in different but similarly male-dominated organizations. Yeoseong-Net activism represented a collective identity for Korean women in Japan. In Yeoseong-Net, the members found common ground in their frustration against sexism in ethnic movements. Reframing the issue of “comfort women” from a gender perspective encouraged them to reinterpret their situation as intersectional oppression characterized by both racial and gender hierarchies. This concept allowed them to reconsider their experience through mutually affecting, reinforcing, and constructing oppressions of race, class, gender, and sexuality.³⁴

Korean women in Japan are first categorized as “former colonial subjects,” and then as “foreigners” rather than as “women.” Some members approached the Japanese women’s liberation movement only to be marginalized. Kim Puja criticized Japanese feminists for their tendency to identify themselves as “victims,” rather than oppressors, within the current structure of gender. She cited a case in which a Korean woman raised the postcolonial issue at a Japanese feminist group meeting on the topic of Alice Walker. She pointed out that it was strange that Japanese feminists identified themselves with “black women,” because they belong to the majority group in Japanese society in terms of ethnicity. No one at the meeting responded to her statement.

On an organizational level, I would like to stress that before Yeoseong-Net, the members chose to be activists in the context of ethnic movements rather than women’s liberation movements. It may be because of the very nature of modern notions of citizenship and political activism that the nation-state constitutes the horizon and the boundaries of political action.³⁵ Moreover, they were afraid to be stigmatized as traitors and worried that their criticism of sexism would undermine these ethnic movements, which were already vulnerable to oppression from the Japanese state. In this sense, alliance with the women’s movement in Korea, their homeland (though only the southern half), justified Yoeseong-Net’s activism, providing them legitimacy and autonomy as political actors, and as a distinct movement organized by Korean women in Japan.

Here a question arises. Was Yeoseong-Net a movement complicit with nationalism? Yeoseong-Net expressed oppositional views to male-dominant ethnic organizations in Japan as well as to the redress movement by South Korean women. In my interview, one member said that she was indirectly pressured to quit the Yeoseong-Net movement by a conventional ethnic organization through her husband who was employed by the organization. She interpreted this pressure to mean that the organization considered Yeoseong-Net to be dissident. Later the organization changed its attitude when the redress movement was reported by mass media. Most of all, Yeoseong-Net members came into conflict with the “false” dichotomy dividing “comfort women” by nationality, a notion largely shared by Korean activists, let alone Korean society, as well as the ethnic community in Japan. In this dichotomy, Korean “comfort women” are understood to have been virgin girls who were forced to work in the “comfort stations,” while Japanese women are assumed to have been prostitutes who agreed to work under the state-regulated prostitution system. Yeoseong-Net members contested this sharp differentiation between “comfort women” and women in “voluntary prostitution,” due to the slave-like conditions under which both groups served.³⁶ It is clear that Yeoseong-Net had an independent position in their approach to the “comfort women” issue, demanding the restoration of the dignity of all victims of Japanese military sexual slavery regardless of their nationality, former profession, and sexual experience. Thus, its political approach demonstrated how to lead the way to a new transnational feminist activism.

Within a couple of years, Yeoseong-Net had accomplished their goal of reshaping public opinion about the redress of victims in Japan. As several support groups for the redress movement were subsequently created in Japan, Yeoseong-Net came to lose its distinctiveness by the mid-1990s. Yeoseong-Net was formally dissolved in 1998, as a result of the diversification of interests among its members. Respect for individual diversity and nonhierarchical horizontal relations between members were principles of Yeoseong-Net, as expressed in their symbol of the Setton, the traditional Korean combination of five colors. The celebration of diversity and loose organizational network had implicit meaning as a protest against the centralized bureaucratic system of conventional ethnic organizations. Also, the degree of commitment to feminism and ethnicity was different for individual members. For the members with feminist leanings, Yeoseong-Net activism appeared nationalist, while members focusing on ethnicity may have felt that their activism inclined too much toward feminism. Thus, the dissolution of Yeoseong-Net was inevitable in some sense, considered a positive and constructive consequence by the members. In what directions did the members diverge? Why did a body representing collectivity of Korean women in Japan become unnecessary?

Yang Ching-ja says that the dissolution had its roots in the two competing objectives that characterized Yeoseong-Net from its inception. One of these objectives was to focus on the single issue of redress for the victims of forced military prostitution. In 1993, Zainichi no Ianfu Saiban o Sasaeru Kai (Association to Support the Lawsuit by the Korean Victims in Japan—hereafter Sasaeru Kai) was established, composed of both Korean and Japanese women.³⁷ Some core members of Yeoseong-Net moved to Sasaeru Kai. Yang recalled that when she joined Yeoseong-Net, she had thought of herself as being on the side of the “comfort women” because she was a Korean woman in Japan, a postcolonial diasporic woman. But when she met the “real” victims in Korea, she realized there was a huge gap in the extent of victimization between “comfort women” subjected to enormous violence by the state military, and Korean women in Japan. This encounter made her reconsider her commitment to the redress movement. Yang realized she was as responsible for the issue as the Japanese because she also had lived in Japanese society without knowing about a first-generation Korean woman in Japan, Song Shin-do, who had come out as a “comfort women” survivor. The disjuncture between herself and the “comfort women” had enabled her to cooperate with Japanese society while living in the country of the perpetrator.

Another example of multinational activism was the Violence Against Women in War Network (VAWW-Net) Japan, which included Yeoseong-Net members and the late Matsui Yayori, a well-known Japanese feminist and founder of Ajia no Onnatachi no Kai. Matsui raised the idea of the women’s tribunal to respond to the victimized women’s claim for justice, from the consciousness of being feminists in the nation of the “perpetrator.” With the Korean Council and ASCENT, VAWW-Net Japan held the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery in Tokyo in 2000, which involved sixty-four victims from eight countries. The organization Ridoresu Kokusai Kyanpēn (Redress International Campaign) was built by Yeoseong-Net member Kim Yeong-hee as a form of transnational activism in support of the victims. This demonstrates that the members’ interests shifted from searching for self-identity to transnational activism.

Group Chame (a Korean word meaning “sisters”) exemplifies another of these objectives; it was created in 1997 as a self-help group for Korean women in Japan. The founder, Park Hwami stated that her desire was to create a space where individual Korean women in Japan could talk about themselves, not as a theoretical enterprise, but in order to share time and space among women in the same circumstances, who experience the same difficulties and marginal status: “Not just for confirmation of our collective identity, but to prepare a condition freeing us for different goals.”³⁸ Park is opposed to conceptualizing a solid and stable collective identity, but says it is necessary to secure a space where Korean women are respected as individuals and are not marginalized. In such a place the women can explore their own identity and representation.

Yeoseong-Net activism embodied a new political agency to position Korean women as creators of social change. It encouraged drastic change in their relationships, and a transcending of boundaries separating them from women in Japan (the host society) and Korea (the homeland), and from men in the Korean diasporic community in Japan. Thus despite its dissolution, the new subjectivity embodied by this group lived on in Korean women’s activism in different fields, and maintained its efficacy in building transnational feminist solidarities. Kim Puja, a member of the governing board of VAWW-Net Japan, said that transnational feminist activism embodied in the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal became possible because Japanese feminists recognized the different positionality between Japanese and Koreans, the difference between the colonizer and the colonized.³⁹

Using Nancy Fraser’s notion of the “counterpublic,” Vera Mackie illustrated organizational networks of activists in different countries against military prostitution, sex tourism, and exploitation of migrant women as a process of creating a “transnational feminist counterpublic” in opposition to the mainstream communication channels of the United Nations or related agencies and committees.⁴⁰ Yeoseong-Net was the fruit of women’s effort to transcend ideological borders within the Korean diaspora community, and a space where individual Korean women in Japan who had been divided and marginalized in conventional organizations encountered each other and rediscovered themselves, found what they wanted to do, and dispersed in diverse directions. Yeoseong-Net was a counterpublic of Korean women in Japan that found the right words to express their thoughts, reframing their situation through the concept of intersectionality, and proposing counter-discourses to mainstream public space. Their practice of traversing intra-ethnic group differences empowered them to resist multiple forms of oppression, and nourished their capacity to create transnational activism cross-cutting ethnicity and nationality, country of residence and language, overcoming differences between the “colonizer” and the “colonized,” “majority” and “minority.” The position of Korean women in Japan is not single, but changes in various contexts; they belong to an ethnic “minority” group in Japan, situated at the “periphery” in relation to the “homeland” Korea, and they are also residents in the “colonizer” country. As postcolonial transnational feminists, their new subject position is enabled only through their efforts to articulate their intersectional positionality and to overcome these binaries at the same time.

It is not my intention to celebrate Yeoseong-Net as an example of a diasporic women’s counterpublic. However, their marginalized position led them to initiate a new transnational activism linking feminisms that had been divided by nation-states. As bell hooks argues, understanding marginality as a position of resistance and power is crucial for oppressed, exploited, and colonized people.⁴¹ These margins have been both sites of repression and sites of resistance. Thus they are also sites of possibility that offer radical perspectives from which to imagine alternatives. At the margin, these women created a new site of resistance, allowing the entrance of women from different backgrounds who expressed solidarity toward the mutual goal of liberation.

A great debt of gratitude for time and generosity is due the former members of Yeoseong-Net whom I interviewed. Special thanks go to Kim Puja, who introduced me to former Yeoseong-Net members and offered insightful advice. This chapter was written based on my dissertation research on Korean women’s movements in Japan. I am thankful to my PhD advisor, Prof. Ito Ruri and my committee member, Prof. Jung Yeong-hae. Research for this article was carried out through an F-Gens research grant sponsored by Ochanomizu University.