Alyssa Noch is a graduate of Aquinas College. She has a BA in two majors, English with a Writing Emphasis and History, along with a minor in Women’s Studies. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Public History and an Archival Administration Certificate at Wayne State University. Her current research focuses on gender, sexuality, and women. She also has additional research interests in music, folklore, and oral history traditions.
Alyssa currently works with the Milford Historical Society in their museum and archive. She assists them in creating exhibits, networking with the local community, and archiving archival and collection materials.
In the future, Alyssa intends to continue working with many different people and their histories, especially those historically marginalized. One of her goals in life is articulating these ideas and stories to broader audiences, whether through museum work with collections and exhibits or through archives and outreach programs connected to them.
Comfort Women in Context
How do we remember mass legacies pain? Where do these memories reach? What does the present do with these memories of injustice?
Comfort Women and their advocates have been grappling with these questions since survivors began to speak about their sexual enslavement and demand justice for the crimes done against them.
Comfort women were sexually enslaved during World War II by the Japanese Government. Comfort Women were stolen from across East Asia (including six Dutch women) with the largest percentage of women being Korean. Their journey to overcome societal shame and pressure to remain silent on their enslavement, have brought into question how a society remembers its traumatic memories.
Alyssa Noch’s mini-documentary, explores three playwrights’ interactions with the memory of comfort women and explore the difficult cultural and political barriers these women have had to overcome to be recognized. Their hard-won place in global memory not only serves as a reminder to never allow these crimes to happen again but also as living individuals who still are seeking justice for their enslavement.
More information on Comfort women and where to support.
Comfort Women Justice Coalition
Asian Women’s fund digital museum on Comfort System
NPR article on Comfort victims in the Philippines
Transcript
Remembering Comfort Women Through the Stage: An Examination of Transnational Memory
Plays and musicals serve as useful mediums to communicate historical memories, even painful ones such as those held by comfort women. The term “comfort women” refers to the thousands of women, mostly from Asia, whom the Japanese government sexually enslaved during WWII. Of the estimated 50,000 to 200,000 women forced into the comfort system,[1] 80 percent of whom were Korean,[2] only about twenty-five percent survived.[3] Among the many stage productions that relate these women’s stories, three offer a unique look into the comfort system for English speaking audiences. Hanako, also known as Comfort Woman and Nabi, by playwright Chungmi Kim, The Eye Holds the Truth by Yoshibiji Watanabe, and Comfort Women: A New Musical, an Off-Broadway production by Dimo Kim each provide a different lens through which to remember the comfort women. To tell the stories of the victims in this massive human rights violation, playwrights have had to walk a fine line between being entertaining and respectful in educating about the comfort system and reinstating agency to comfort women by giving them a voice on stage.
The first playwright to tackle presenting this history to the US was Chungmi Kim in 1995. Her play went by many names throughout its performance history, but it was first known as Hanako. It came out just as the comfort system began to gain international attention thanks to surviving comfort women speaking out and sharing their experiences. These testimonies effectively introduced the memories of Korean comfort women in the US. Kim used these testimonies as the focal plot mechanism of Hanako. In Hanako, the plot unfolds around a family that has immigrated to the US from South Korea, placing particular focus on the youngest member of the family, a college student named Jina, and the oldest member, a grandmother, who is formerly known as Hanako. In the play, Jina finds out about her grandmother having been a comfort woman during WWII. Jina discovers this through her grandmother’s interactions with two other ex-comfort women, whom her grandmother accidentally meets when the other two women visit New York to publicly speak.[4] Through having the plot unfold in this way, Kim puts agency back into the hands of former comfort women by having them present their experiences on stage. Kim’s aim with Hanako was to teach Asian and American audiences about the comfort system while also drawing on her own immigrant experience, coming from South Korea to the US,[5] to expand on how the memories of comfort women have an impact on the Asian American community.
Following the footsteps of Hanako, in 2015, Japan born Yoshibiji Watanabe released The Eye Holds the Truth in the US, six years after the conclusion of Chungmi Kim’s production. The Eye Holds the Truth is a six act play originally “[w]ritten and directed by… Watanabe in 2013 and starring his wife Kazuko Yokoi.” Watanabe offered a remorseful perspective on the legacy of comfort women as the son of a war criminal who engaged in the system. The playwright felt guilty for his father’s crimes and has made it his purpose in life to spread a larger international audience memory of the comfort system. With The Eye Holds the Truth, he sought to accomplish that.His commitment is evident through the testimonies of comfort women given in The Eye, a play about three comfort women and a child born to one of them from an encounter with a Japanese soldier.[6]
The same year Watanabe’s play toured the US, Dimo Hyun Jun Kim came out with his first version of Comfort Women: A New Musical, the first musical on the comfort system topic written and performed in the US.[7] The musical was performed Off-Broadway until about 2019, with international touring productions expected in the future. Agnes Constante, journalist for NBC News, described the musical as a “story of a young woman who is promised a job at a factory in Japan but is instead brought to Indonesia to become a Japanese Imperial Army sex slave.”[8]
Like Chungmi Kim, Dimo Kim immigrated to the US from South Korea. By the time Dimo Kim’s musical hit the stage in 2015, the history of the comfort system had become part of the South Korean education system, but not part of the education system of the US. As a result, Dimo Kim’s stage production is aimed specifically at non-Asian-Americans who most likely know little to nothing about the plight of comfort women.[9]
Accordingly, Dimo Kim’s musical was very reactionary to what he perceived to be going on in America during the mid-2010s when it came to the memory of women’s experiences, like the lack of attention and seriousness crimes against women involving sexual assault and harassments are often given. This led to several revisions of his play. Starting in 2015, according to Constante, Kim had “heavier focus… placed on providing historical context and explaining sexual slavery,” because he believed American audiences needed greater information on the subject. He then went on to further revise his stage production during the #MeToo movement in 2018. He changed his
script to empower the female characters by having them — rather
than a male soldier — plot their escape from the military-run
brothel. Along with those changes, [he] cut down on violent scenes.[10]
In doing this, Dimo Kim expressed his desire to honor these women and return agency to their lives and ownership of their memory.[11]
All of these playwrights created stage productions to honor, preserve and spread the memories of the comfort women with one of their primary goals being “to prevent history from repeating itself,” through education and providing comfort women with a voice on stage. Through these productions, they have effectively contributed to a transnational form of activism and memory for many, largely Asian, communities. It is important that such activism continues, as we cannot be allowed to forget the horrors of the comfort system. We must rely on these interactions with memory and not permit these kinds of atrocities to keep repeating. By engaging with these memories we honor their victims and make a promise to never forget.
[1] Peipei Qiu, Su Zhiliang, and Chen Lifei, Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves, (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014), 37.
[2]George Hicks, The Comfort Women: Japan’s Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War (New York: W. W. Norton Company, 1995), 11.
[3] Wallace Edwards, The Comfort Women: A History of Japanese Forced Prostitution During the Second World War (Anaheim: Absolute Crime Press, 2019), 5.
[4] Elizabeth W. Son, 2016, “Korean Trojan Women: Performing Wartime Sexual Violence,” Asian Theatre Journal : ATJ 33 (2) (Fall): 369-394, 371.
[5] Son, “Korean Trojan Women,” 371.
[6] Chang Jun, “Comfort Women Play Brings Dark Chapter of History to Life,” China Daily (North American Ed.), September 1, 2015, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2015xivisitus/2015-09/01/content_21809180.htm.
[7] 李雯蕊, “The ‘Comfort Women’ musical with an all-Asian cast returns,” China Daily (North American Ed.), August 15, 2018, https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201808/15/WS5b73cc9ba310add14f385ed4_1.html.
[8] Agnes Constante, “Musical about ‘comfort women’ draws attention to horrific WWII practice,” NBC News, August 20, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/musical-about-comfort-women-draws-attention-horrific-wwii-practice-n1044166.
[9] Remi Yamazaki, “‘Comfort Women’ Musical Builds Asian Community: Dimo Hyun Jun Kim, director of Comfort Women – A New Musical, on adapting social issues for entertainment,” The Diplomat, August 5, 2015, https://thediplomat.com/2015/08/comfort-women-musical-builds-asian-community/.
[10] Constante, “Musical about ‘comfort women'”.
[11] Constante, “Musical about ‘comfort women'”.
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