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영어

This paper contextualized the different texture and meaning revealed in the midst of representation of comfort women through the comparative analysis of documentary films on ‘comfort women’ which were produced by Korea, Taiwan and Japan. The framing methods of comfort women survivors is overlapped, or differentiated from each other according to the awareness within society and the nation’s identity, and the government’s role. This paper had a discussion about one’s eyes and emotion involved in sharing and difference, and East Asian contexts of politics and ethics. The Korean film director Byun’s films are discriminative in that his films realize comfort women’s testimony as the process of growth into a social agent making their own voice other than comfort women victims’ being the object of compassion. The testimony of the former comfort women victims in the films becomes a performative stage in which they raise up their own distress into the expression of social wounds. In addition, there appears an excessive subjectivation phenomenon in which comfort women survivors are self-conscious. This reflects a desperate situation where they have no choice but to be an activist who performs a new history writing herself under the circumstances where the government fails to properly play its corresponding role in comparison with the people’s strong will for nationalism. In contrast, Japanese documentary puts more emphasis on interviews including detailed stories of victims instead of providing the historical information related to comfort women system. Main focus is striving to try discover individual human’s portrait hidden behind a group. Comparing to Byun’s documentary, the comfort women survivors seem to be relatively free from the camera. In addition, activists’ voices are minimized. Such a representation method has a strategic meaning of breaking through the Japanese government’s attitude of not taking into account the individual victims at all but putting nation-to-nation relations ahead of everything in handling the issue of compensation for comfort women. Although the historical trajectory of Taiwan was similar to that of Korea, but Taiwanese documentary film shows the difference in that emotional aspects of victimized women such as distress and grief are highlighted. Taiwanese film shows the tendency to approach comfort women’s suffering as the issue of a wounded citizen due to warfare other than the issue of nationality. In addition, they tend to give a lot more weight to understanding and consolation of an individual’s pain rather than putting emphasis on collective power for change. The emotion of sadness, which dominates film, belongs to psychological reality of Taiwanese who have been under the long political suppression, together with relatively weak nationalism, complex sentiment toward Japan, and unclear state identity.