Human rights activist and filmmaker Dai Sil Kim-Gibson delivered a moving presentation on Korean comfort women on Thursday.
Kim-Gibson was introduced by English Professor of English Belinda Kong, who currently teaches a class on Asian Diaspora Literature of World War II.
Kong described Kim-Gibson's impressive history of documentary films, which include the titles "Olivia's Story" (2000), "America Becoming" (1991), and, the focus of Thursday's lecture, "Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women," a film which Kim-Gibson wrote, produced, and directed.
Kim-Gibson opened her lecture with a general overview of the comfort women situation. The action of the Japanese military during World War II constituted "nothing less than an officially institutionalized sexual slavery on a massive scale," she said.
She broke down the Japanese justification for their use of comfort women into three main components: to prevent local rape and the subsequent arousal of local opposition, to protect the Japanese soldiers from venereal diseases that would weaken them against the Allied Forces, and, finally, to protect military secrets. Three types of comfort women institutions evolved out of these justifications.
Comfort women would either be sent to directly military institutions, private houses regulated by the military, or houses open to ordinary citizens but forced to give priority to Japanese soldiers. Kim-Gibson stressed both the indisputable involvement of the Japanese military in all of these situations and the way in which these systematic situations led to a dehumanizing brutality in which the comfort women were treated as nothing more than clinical military supplies.
To this day, the Japanese have refused to take direct responsibility for the plight of the comfort women, Kim-Gibson said. The closest the Japanese government has come to an apology is in the 1993 statement that apologized on moral grounds, but remained mute in terms of assuming any legal responsibility.
"The comfort women are dying fast," Kim-Gibson stated. "But Japan is still playing an unconvincing and arbitrary hide and seek game."
She described Japanese efforts to provide financial compensation to the comfort women as insulting and cruel; to accept the money is for many of the women tantamount to prostitution.
However, while they hate and oftentimes refuse monetary compensation, in the majority of the cases, the women suffer a very low economic standing and have no choice but to accept it.
When Kim-Gibson first embarked on her humanitarian movement for the Korean comfort women, she said that it was with the intention "to give a voice to the voiceless."
She has since disregarded this notion as "incredibly self-righteous," and today insists that it was not she who gave a voice to the voiceless; it was the voiceless who enabled her to speak for them.
She spoke of the many grandmothers who astounded and inspired her with their courage and strength, one of whom was insistent that "[the Japanese] defiled my body, but not my spirit."
"If you hear the voices, you will do something," Kim-Gibson concluded. "If history is a collection of will full memory, it is also one of creating forgetfulness. And forgetting is the loss of self."
Students attending the filmmaker's lecture said they found the talk to be inspiring.
"It was such a great and moving opportunity to hear this woman speak not only about the issue of comfort women, but also her own personal journey to begin advocating for comfort women and human rights," said Helen Pu '10.
"I can only hope that it will inspire people to recognize human rights and the universality of human suffering," she added.
Kim-Gibson will lead a smaller discussion in Kanbar 109 today at 11:00 a.m. Her documentaries are available for viewing at Hawthorne-Longfellow Library.