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Remembering the ‘Comfort Women’ Issue : From Oblivion to Memory Boom

This study explores how the past of ‘comfort women’ is remembered in post-colonial South Korea. The politics of forgetting or collective memory has been practiced for half a century, due to the stigma imposed on the survivors and to viewing the issue only as a national shame. However, the issue got momentum to be remembered together with matters around settling the colonial past in history. Due to this shift, memory of the ‘comfort women’ has been accelerated since early 1990’s, thus causing the transfer from oblivion to memory boom. I will investigate the way in which collective memory regarding ‘comfort women’ is constructed or reconstructed within nationalist and patriarchal discourses. Collective memory of the comfort women is very much gendered and nationalistic, since it is constructed around the ideas of chastity ideology and women’ s body as a symbol of nation. Thus, nation and gender are the core concepts in constructing the history of culture and commemoration of the comfort women in post-colonial South Korea. Lastly, in remembering the past of comfort women I propose an interpersonal and transnational perspective beyond their nationality.