On May 24, 2015, thirty women peacemakers from fifteen nations, including American feminist activist Gloria Steinem and two Nobel Peace laureates, Mairead Maguire from Northern Ireland and Leymah Gbowee from Liberia, walked with Korean women of the North and South to call for an end to the Korean War and the peaceful reunification of Korea on the seventieth anniversary of its division. The arbitrary division of the peninsula in 1945 by the United States and the Soviet Union led to the creation of two separate states, setting the stage for an all-out civil war in 1950 that became an international conflict. After nearly 4 million people were killed, mostly Korean civilians, fighting was halted when North Korea, China, and the United States representing the UN Command signed a ceasefire agreement in 1953, which called for a political conference within three months to reach a peace settlement. Over 60 years later, we are still waiting. To renew the call for a peace settlement by offering a model of international engagement, Women Cross DMZ organized peace symposiums in Pyongyang and Seoul where women shared experiences of mobilizing to bring an end to violent conflict, and crossed the two-mile wide Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that separates millions of Korean families as a reminder that division can be overcome. As one of the members of the organizing committee of Women Cross DMZ, I travelled with other international women peacemakers to meet face-to-face with Korean women on both sides of the DMZ and cross the military demarcation line that divides Korea. On the seventieth anniversary of Korea's partition this August 2015, I write as a historian of modern Korea to reflect upon the experience specifically from a feminist standpoint.

The past year or so has been a time of particularly vigorous volcanic activity in Japan, or at least activity that has intruded into public awareness. Perhaps most dramatic was the deadly eruption of Mt. Ontake on September 27, 2014, whose 57 fatalities were the first volcano-related deaths in Japan since 1991. On May 29, 2015, Mt. Shindake, off the southern tip of Kyushu, erupted violently, forcing the evacuation of the island of Kuchinoerabu. That same day, Sakurajima, located just north in Kagoshima Bay, erupted more forcefully than usual. Sakurajima has been erupting in some fashion almost continuously since 1955, but since 2006, its activity has become relatively more vigorous. Indeed, a May 30 Asahi shinbun article characterized these eruptions as “the latest ominous sign that the Earth's crust around the archipelago is getting restless.” The article argued that the twentieth century was an anomaly in that volcanic activity throughout Japan was relatively subdued, whereas the more vigorous activity of recent years is closer to the long-term normal pattern.

This article is the first of a five-part symposium on the U.S. tour of Uemura Takashi, former Asahi reporter and current part-time university lecturer, from late April to early May, 2015. (See parts two, three, four and five here).

The following is a series of reflections upon Integrity of Memory: ‘Comfort Women’ in Focus, which took place on 1 May 2015 at Marquette University. Readers will find out, first, what motivated me – neither historian nor East Asianist – but someone in philosophy - to take up this project. Secondly, I will report on how the symposium proceeded and was received by the Marquette community. Subsequently, I will talk about the phenomenology of the “apology contention.” Lastly, I will share how I came to incorporate the “comfort woman” issue into my ethics and epistemology course as a case study.

NYU is at its origin a community-oriented university, and there was never any question that Mr. Uemura's talk should be a public event. The central themes, furthermore, include not only the wartime history of Japan, but also the role of women in history, the idea of a free press, and the nature of politics now—matters which are immediately relevant to everyone. Although the talk was scheduled in the last week of classes and publicized less than a week beforehand, it drew a standing room only crowd. The audience was diverse, and included students and faculty from NYU, Columbia, and nearby universities; artists; a filmmaker; journalists from Japan and Korea, Asahi Television New York, CNBC, and the New York Times. Carol Gluck provided a clear, sweeping history of the role of the comfort woman issue in public discourse, including its transformation into a global topic after Kim Hak Sun's public testimonies in 1991; Chief Cabinet Secretary Kono's statement in 1993 acknowledging the government's role in the forced prostitution of women during the war; the 1995 apologies of Prime Minister Murayama; and the contestations of these statements that have since developed. One could see in Prof. Gluck's overview an increasing attention given to the comfort women, particularly by those groups who tend to argue against their importance. Yukiko Hanawa then offered additional thoughts and provocations after Mr. Uemura's talk. For Prof. Hanawa, the comfort woman issue becomes global at the point when women become able to define the problem in their own terms. She also warned against becoming caught either in the boundlessness of emotional appeals or arguing over the details of a positivist history in ways that sometimes miss the larger picture.

The UCLA event featuring Uemura Takashi was held on May 8th. Over 120 people attended. It was filled with tension, due largely to the fact that Los Angeles has become the primary site for Japanese right-wing activism on the west coast, especially since July 2013, when a memorial to the “Comfort Women” was erected in Glendale Park. Shin-issei (new immigrants arriving from Japan over the past quarter-century) have been organizing meetings and study groups to promote a revisionist history in the greater LA area, and one group, the Global Alliance of Historical Truth (GAHT), led by Koichi Mera, filed a lawsuit seeking the removal of the Glendale statue (this lawsuit was dismissed by a U.S. District Court judge in the summer of 2014). As anticipated, nearly two-dozen Japanese (-American) nationalists showed up for the event. Some of them clustered at the center of the lecture hall and caused tension by chattering among themselves during the lecture, abruptly raising their voices during the question-and-answer session, and distributing their pamphlets entitled “Comfort Women Not Sex-Slaves” to the audience.

It was April 28, 2015—my 57th birthday. I was leaving Japan to embark on a lecture tour. My mood was glum. Fatigue accumulated over the past months had left me with a case of sinusitis, and I was beginning to lose my voice. How can you be going on a lecture tour of the US when you can hardly talk, I asked myself. Moreover, it was an English-speaking world that awaited me. True, there were supposed to be interpreters. But would my story get through to the audience? Waves of uncertainty overtook me.