Session 2. The Waves and Echoes of Kim Hak-soon’s Testimony
Kim Hak-soon Told the Truth: What That Means Then and Now Alexis Dudden I Professor, University of Connecticut, USA
Hello. It is an honor, a deeply humbling honor to be with you today. I wish I were physically present, I am not. And that brings me to framing this 30th anniversary during the pandemic which is defining all of our lives in new ways. For the halmoni, if we think about it, the current discomforts that we are enduring are nothing. What how many Kim Hak-soon and all other victims of Japan's history of militarized sexual slavery endured was what the United Nations defined as a crime against humanity. The inconveniences we are enduring and for those who have actually lost people to the current pandemic, my condolences, the inconveniences we are enduring because of the pandemic are nothing when we think about what, halmoni Kim Hak-soon said in her testimony in August 1991. She was visited regularly 3 to 4 people a day. Sometimes 7 to 8 men a day would rape her. That is criminal behavior and from which no human can be expected to endure. I begin with this memory of learning from Kim Hak-soon. I was a student. What in Korean is still known as a girl student at the time in Tokyo, and my Japanese language instructor had us read in the Asahi Shimbun halmoni Kim Hak-soon’s testimony. I frame my memory, my personal memory of Kim Hak-soon this way, because what she said, the truth of her life and the truth of hundreds of thousands of similar victims and survivors, is not an antiJapanese statement, as many of us are portrayed when we raise this history. Instead, it is the truth, and I learned from her truth through a Japanese language instructor at one of Japan's most prestigious universities paid for by the government of Japan. Fast forward 30 years today we have a current administration in Japan which would have the world believe that all of these women are liars. Here in the United States about 100 miles from where I am sitting, a professor at one of the world's most prestigious university law schools Harvard, Professor J. Mark Ramseyer this year caused a great controversy and called into question the validity of all testimony. What halmoni Kim Hak259
