Visualising Korea: The Politics of the Statue of Peace

ABSTRACT

In 2015, the Japanese imperial army’s system of military sexual servitude/military prostitution once again became central to relations between South Korea and Japan. After the signing of a 2015 agreement meant to resolve disputes between the two countries, the Statue of Peace, an effigy of a young Korean woman, was reproduced in both physical form and through digital media, expanding its visual presence in both the material and virtual worlds. This study examines events between 2015 and 2018 through the lens of visual politics and argues that, to fully understand the political impact of the Statue of Peace, we need to assess it not only as a physical effigy, but also as a form of digital reproduction. In doing so, it highlights that the mechanical reproduction of the Statue of Peace freed it from the limitations of being a physical representation, and allowed it to interact in more diverse contexts as a tool of resistance against the Japanese government’s proposal and the Korean government’s complicity with the 2015 agreement. This study adds to the analytical toolbox of visualising Korea with the aim of providing greater insight on an important issue facing South Korea and its relationship with Japan.

KEYWORDS:

• Korea
• Japan
• colonialism
• visual politics
• Statue of Peace
• memory
• Northeast Asia
• South Korea

Notes

1. The agreement signed on 28 December 2015 was publicised as a significant milestone in bilateral relations. Often referred to in Japanese as the ianfu nikkan gōi (“comfort women” agreement), it was in part the result of efforts by the then-Obama administration to apply pressure to the leaders of both nations to resolve their disputes and refocus their attention on the security threats from China and North Korea (Tisdal, 2015).

2. The only time that the rally was not held was at the time of the Great Hanshin Earthquake (Hanshin Awaji Daishinsai) in 1995.

3. The Pagoda of Peace in Chwigan Woods, Hadong County, was the first “comfort women” monument to be constructed. It was completed in May 2007.

4. The significance of the Statue of Peace has been described by its creators as representing the pain experienced by the women and as hope for peace. The Korean Council states that the statue represents the expression of history, wishes for peace and the solidarity and patience of the women (Kumagai, 2016, p. 79).

5. The military sexual servitude/military prostitution by Japan’s imperial army between 1931 and 1945 is often referred to euphemistically as the “comfort women” (wianbu in Korean, ianfu in Japanese) issue. This term originally denoted Japanese prostitutes in military brothels and later was used to refer to women who were coercively or fraudulently recruited from Japan’s colonies (Kwon, 2019, p. 8). The term is highly contested and I use it in this article because of the controversies in the use of other expressions and because the phrase “comfort women” has general use in academic and historical literature (Kim, 2016, cited in Kwon, 2019, p. 10).

6. Both the Ambassador and the Consul General returned to their posts in April 2017.

7. The statue’s replicas that existed before 2015 were created as a form of protest against Japan’s original demands for the removal of the statue in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul and to expand international awareness of the “comfort women” issue.

8. For more on this see Choi (2012).

9. The public acknowledgement of Kim Hak-sun as a survivor, the transition to democracy in South Korea, the discovery of Japanese Defence Agency documents and changes in domestic politics in Japan coincided to bring this issue into both domestic and international contexts.

10. Murayama also wrote letters of apology to each of the survivors, as did subsequent Prime Ministers through to Koizumi.

11. In Japanese the organisation is called Zaidan hojin josei-no tame no Ajia heiwa kokumin kikin and paid “atonement money” to individuals in Taiwan and the Philippines as well as Korea. Indonesia accepted funds for the construction of welfare facilities for the elderly in lieu of direct compensation.

12. Regular visits to Yasukuni Shrine, a religious site that enshrines the spirits of all war dead including Class A war criminals, by Japanese Prime Ministers and politicians have also attracted the ire of former colonised nations.

13. The clause reads: “The Government of the ROK acknowledges the fact that the Government of Japan is concerned about the statue built in front of the Embassy of Japan in Seoul from the viewpoint of preventing any disturbance of the peace of the mission or impairment of its dignity and will strive to solve this issue in an appropriate manner through taking measures such as consulting with related organizations about possible ways of addressing this issue” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, 2015).

14. However, as far back as December 2011, Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko requested South Korean President Lee Myung-bak to have the statue removed.

15. According to Lee (2017, cited in Kwon, 2019, pp. 10–11), the South Korean public saw the removal of a symbol of the “comfort women” as “equivalent to erasing their existence and the redress movement”. The removal of the statue was “symbolic of the repetition of the colonial past” (Kwon, 2019, p. 14) in which young women from the Korean peninsula were displaced from their villages and village leaders were complicit in their removal.

16. The Convention stipulates that countries have a duty to safeguard the dignity of diplomatic missions.

17. Moon described the agreement as a “political agreement that excludes victims and the public” (cited in Lee & Shin, 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This research has been funded by the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Queensland through the School Strategic Research Initiative.