Keith Howard is the editor of True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women, published in 1995. The book contains 19 exclusive first-hand testimonies from surviving Comfort Women, which portray the coercion, violence, abduction, rape and false imprisonment they suffered at the hands of the Japanese military. He is an ethnomusicologist, musicologist and anthropologist with regional interests primarily in Korea, but also Siberia, Nepal, Thailand, Kyrgyzstan and Zimbabwe. He joined SOAS University of London in 1991, and in 2017 became Professor Emeritus at SOAS. He has written or edited 23 books and has published 170 academic articles and 210 book/music reviews.
Professor Howard, you are an ethnomusicologist and musicologist known for your work on Korea. You have written and edited 23 books, most of which focus on Korean music, dance, and culture. What led you to your work on the stories of "comfort women"?
In 1993–4, I organised two seminars at SOAS on ‘comfort women’, one given by a Korean professor (female), one by a Japanese human rights lawyer (male). This was not long after the ‘comfort women’ story began to become public, and some materials – usually of poor quality, or poorly translated, and often sensationalized by the media – were beginning to appear. A BBC documentary had been produced in 1992, and when I was in Pyongyang in 1992 the state broadcaster actually broadcast that documentary. So, I was aware of growing interest, but also problems with how the issue was being promoted to the English-speaking world.
I had recently worked on the changes to legislation about women’s rights, and had met the senior female lawyer and rights activist in Korea. I was also aware of the ‘hidden’ history: carrying out fieldwork on music in rural Korea in the early/mid 1980, I would often visit a village where a female singer would be introduced, but who had a ‘hidden’ history. Nobody would tell me details, but there were many hints, and I realised how common the hidden past was for many female singers (who struggled with their families, or communities, and who were still not considered ‘normal’ and ‘full community members’). So, when the comfort woman story began to be told, everything I had encountered fell into place.
True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women contains 19 life stories of comfort women which you translated and edited. Can you tell us more about how the book came to be?
A publisher came to the seminars I had organised, and asked me whether I would write a book on ‘comfort women’. I said, ‘NO’, but that the Korean women’s coalition had just produced a book in Korean of oral testimonies, and that what was needed was good English translations of ‘comfort women’ telling their stories. I was aware that some of the Korean texts did not give full details of what had been said, and did not specify genitalia or some of the more anatomical details. This needed to be changed if we were to edit the testimonies into an English version. Cassell, the publisher, decided the translations of oral testimonies, with appropriate opening and closing contextual/legal chapters, was what they wanted. They approached the Korean coalition and was given permission to translate. I arranged for a suitable translator who I worked alongside, and we negotiated for original transcriptions where the details had been compromised in the Korean text. I contracted the Japanese human rights lawyer to compile the final chapter, and I wrote two short introductory/contextual chapters. In editing, I also added translations and glosses in the text to avoid footnotes. When we had a full manuscript, we thought about the cover, and other details, always ensuring that we did not in any way sensationalise or wrongly represent the serious subject matter. Our title was simple: ‘The Korean Comfort Women.’ Cassell put the book into production, just as we discovered another book was being published with the same title! Ouch. We got a sample of that other book, which had a comfort woman standing in underwear on its cover – it was sensationalising the issue! Anyhow, Cassell stopped the print of our book, and we retitled it, adding the ‘True Stories’ to differentiate our book from the other one.
Are there connections between the stories and history of comfort women, and ethnomusicology or musicology in Korea?
Yes, because female entertainers were by many considered much the same as kisaeng. Some were kisaeng in their youth – some had become senior and important musicians, for sanjo and as singers. But also, in the countryside, many of the female singers (of folksongs) had a ‘hidden history’. I do not want to speculate too much about this, but if you read ‘True Stories’ songs and music are often mentioned in the testimonies – so much so, that one ethnomusicologist who read ‘True Stories’ went on to research his PHD on comfort women and music (Joshua Pilzer, now at the Univ. of Toronto – his book, Hearts of Pine, published by Oxford University Press, is based on his PhD thesis).
Why do you think it is important for the stories of comfort women to be told?
‘History’ perhaps should be ‘Herstory’. Oral testimonies are vital as evidence. They keep the truth being told, since they can be preserved. In contrast, history tends to retell the past in the present, using secondary rather than primary sources, or with no way of talking to those who lived the history being told. So, oral testimonies are our most complete and more significant forms of evidence. As comfort women die, so history begins to move to secondary sources, and as that happens, reinterpretation happens. We have seen that recently with Ramseyer in the US, and how his untrue claims have become common within Japanese circles. Also, novels and popular culture retellings of the comfort women issue mix fact with fiction, and this reduces their value – how do you separate the facts from the fiction? Oral testimonies, particular where the person telling it is still alive and can be questioned or asked for more details, are based much more closely on facts (memories can of course be false or partial, and some stories may not be as factual as they are claimed.) Once the last comfort women die, so history will start to be written in very different ways – so the more oral testimonies, including online interviews and if possible Q&A sessions, then the more that history can continue to be based on fact.
What progress have you seen regarding the stories and history of comfort women and acknowledgement, justice, or scholarship since the book came out in 1995?
Korean feminist scholars, and women’s organisations, have tended to try to monopolise access and to control the agenda. This is unfortunate and has led to some criticism of the book I worked on. I have been told many times that I should never have been allowed access to the testimonies, and that Cassell should never have contracted me to put the book together. Also, some of those who mix fact with fiction do damage by blurring the lines between truth and non-truth, and there is a common way of using literature to teach about Korea that can make the situation more blurred. However, the book I put together was used for two TV documentaries (without credit), for an issue of the journal Index on Censorship (credited), and was circulated and referred to within the evidence considered by the UNHCR. You will be aware – and I sent you my recent article – that relates some of the current issues, as I see them, and the fact that my article was not published shows that the subject remains controversial.
What work is still left to do?
Lots of work remains. Forced sexual slavery has been commonplace throughout human history, and is still happening. The Japanese acceptance and rejection still needs to be challenged. Only a small number of comfort women remain alive (and beyond Korea, other countries have been much less involved in collecting testimonies), and soon nobody will be left. The more publicity that is given to testimonies, so the less that history can be rewritten – I take my lead from Milan Kundera, and his comment when Czech history was rewritten after the Soviet invasion of 1967: he talks about the importance of memory over forgetting…
Thank you so much!
Learn more about Keith Howard's works here.