A Review of Daisil Kim-Gibson’s Silence Broken: Korean
Comfort Women
By Joohee Lee
Comfort women: knowing nothing about the topic I found the word to sound almost
pleasant, maternal. But at best, it is a gross understatement, a euphemism masking
the inhumanity and cruelty marking the identity. During World War II, the Japanese
military forced captive women of various nationalities including Filipino, Taiwanese,
Japanese, with the majority being Korean, to work in a brothel-system for their
soldiers. Of the women who survived the years of abuse and terror working in
the comfort stations, most lived with the silent shame of their pasts. Many
have died in secret. But the ones that have chosen to take political action
and actively seek compensation are struggling to have their grievances heard.
"Half a century has passed since the time when every day was a dreadful
nightmare for me but Japan still tells lies and avoids responsibility. How can
they do that in the presence of myself and many others like me, victims who
are alive and kicking?" A former comfort woman for the Imperial Army of
Japan, Chung Seo-Woon posed this question to the packed audience at the 1995
NGO Forum held in conjunction with the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing.
The grievances of surviving Korean comfort women against the Japanese government
and their demands for a formal written apology and appropriate state-level compensation
remain unmet. Why did it take half a century for survivors to actively pursue
justice? My initial explanation was that the mentality of Asian societies, which
regard these women with a mixture of sympathy, pity, and shame, prevented them
from bringing the issue to the public. But after watching the film and speaking
to Kim-Gibson, I learned that the value system of Asian societies was only part
of the reason. There were factors of double discrimination because they were
Asian and female. Prejudice clearly played a role, because out of the surviving
comfort women, the Dutch women were the only ones whose grievances were brought
to and resolved in court. Kim- Gibson pointed out the factor of priority. While
the Japanese government denied the involvement of the army in establishing comfort
stations, the Allied Forces, viewing the issue in context of the larger effects
of war, pushed it aside.
With her latest work, Korean-American film director Daisil Kim-Gibson takes
part in the effort to address the inhumane crimes committed by the imperial
Army by telling the personal stories of comfort women in their own voices. "Silence
Broken: Korean Comfort Women" documents and immortalizes the scarring experiences
of surviving Korean comfort women and gives voice to Japanese officials and
present-day scholars presenting their sides of the issue. The premier showing
of "Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women" was on March 20th at the
Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where Kim-Gibson, along with Grandmother Chung Seo
Woon, former comfort woman and feature subject of Kim-Gibson’s dramatization,
were present for opening and closing comments and questions.
"Silence Broken" opens with serene and pleasant images of the Korean
landscape: strong-flowing streams, verdant fields of vegetation and blossoms,
mountains and peaks surrounded by mist. The wailing sounds of traditional Korean
folk singing are piercing, creating an air of the accumulated sorrow, han, and
suppressed rage of the scarred souls of the comfort women.
During the first half of "Silence Broken," Kim-Gibson interviews the
surviving women who give glimpses into their terrible memories of working literally
as sex workhorses in the military camps. Many of these personal stories have
common beginnings of lies and empty promises of factory jobs, ways to get family
members out of jail. The extreme poverty created by the war plagued the living
conditions of majority of Koreans and made any prospects of earning money nearly
impossible to refuse. It was especially hard to refuse for young girls and young
women who were desperate to help out their family.
It was personally uncomfortable and disturbing to watch and listen to these
Korean grandmothers tell of the unspeakable abuse they endured as young women
taken from their homes, transported like goods, having their bodies become mere
objects of "comfort" and sexual relief for Japanese soldiers. But
pity is the last thing that these women want to evoke in the public. It is useless,
for their sorrow has been branded into them. What they want is to gain some
kind of quiescence from the horrors they’d endured, to have their issues
be acknowledged without skepticism of its validity, to show that they have no
need to keep silent or be ashamed.
"Silence Broken" does not focus as much as on the past experiences
of these women during the war years, but on the women themselves. Her presence
in the film is suppressed and she allows the voices of the former comfort women
to guide her and the audience through their disturbing pasts and their present
struggles to find some sort of quiescence in their lives. For some, it also
meant having to sacrifice family support and facing criticism and blame for
bringing dishonor upon themselves for revealing such a "shameful"
past.
In the second half of her film, Kim-Gibson recreated the personal story of one
of the survivors, Grandmother Seo Woon
Chung. I found that the dramatization gave the viewer a chance to take a breath
from the intense, somewhat disorienting and emotionally taxing nature of the
first half of the film, which was primarily the women’s personal testimonies
and interview segments with Japanese officials.
But I also found the language transition from Korean to English to be a bit
awkward. Director Kim-Gibson, during the question and answer segment after the
film, explained that her decision to have the actors and actresses speak in
English was the result of several factors. She wanted to allow the non-Korean
speakers to get a chance to watch the film without having to focus on reading
subtitles. Although she admitted that she remains a bit uncertain about the
effectiveness of her intentions, Kim-Gibson said that she finds it senseless
to worry over what’s already been done.
What made a lasting impression on me were the women’s inner strength, their
bold willingness to speak of matters that are considered taboo by Korean society,
and their unwavering stance in their cause to receive due compensation from
the Japanese government. Private funds, monetary compensation, or half-hearted
verbal apologies are not what they want, for these cannot possibly compensate
for their loss of human dignity and chastity, which they valued more precious
than life itself. They want the Japanese government to face up to the wrongdoings
of their army and to help them bring a sense of closure to their struggles.
In her director’s statement, Daisil Kim-Gibson discusses the personal impact
of talking to the women about their experiences and her struggle to capture
on film the humanity of these women:
Since I was drawn into the lives of these women whom I call grandmas, following
the Korean custom for
women old enough to have grandchildren, my life has not been the same. Old
enough to be called "grandma"
myself, born in North Korea when Japan ruled our country, the stories of these
women frequently made me a
captive of unruly and turbulent feelings that led me into a psychic region
beyond my mind’s eye and shook me
with such fury and sorrow that I shuddered. That’s why it has been an
extra struggle to make this film… In
making this film, I often felt my entire personal history becoming entangled
with the history of my land of
birth, coupled with that of mankind. In rare moments when my self was stretched
beyond the focal point of my consciousness, my ego, I felt I have a vision,
not of mine but of an unborn work to which I was to give birth. Yet, those
were fleeting moments that disappeared sooner than they came. Clearly, then,
in one sense the completed work is as shallow as I am but I hope it is more.
I rely on the power of the collective voices of the women who tell their stories
and all those who suffered the insufferable, living or dead. If there is even
an echo of those voices, the film will have a power surpassing the maker.
By the time I moved to the dramatized scenes, it no longer became important
for me to keep track of who said what. I began to feel the power of their
stories as a common experience, their collective story becoming aglow with
pain that touched my heart (Kim-Gibson "Silence Broken--Director’s
Statement").
Kim-Gibson succeeds in her efforts to flesh out a historical event and to reach
over generation gaps. She wants the comfort women to be more than faded figures
of a period in Korean history which people of later generations may be unfamiliar
with or indifferent towards. The humanity of these women drew me in and it was
impossible to objectively treat their experiences as a historical event. Although
there was no way I could relate to the difficulties faced by these women, the
film allowed for the audience to empathize with them and to share in the common
experience of human suffering. But Kim-Gibson extends her aim of public empathy
to the larger issues of humanity and political and social action, ending her
closing remarks with: "Add you voice to theirs [the comfort women] to bring
the silenced past into the present and to a future that should never repeat
the unspeakable crimes against ourselves, humanity."
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