Alexis Dudden I Professor, University of Connecticut, USA

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 Shimbunhalmoni 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 anti-

Japanese 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 Hak-

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soon did through her courageous bravery 30 years ago was explained to legal communities, the world’s judicial communities, the value of human testimony. Especially the value of testimony of those not privileged, those not accredited by prestige, by a certain university status. And I think it's an important moment during a pandemic to consider the voices we are not hearing and place those in conjunction with what halmoni Kim Hak-soon did for world history for forever. s

She stood up decades after the crime that had been committed against her body and said this was horrible, this ruined my life, but I am still here. And I'm still here for a reason, I'm still here to tell the truth. I was a girl student in Tokyo at the time and my male teacher had the bravery to say, “This is the language I want you to learn Japanese in.” And I frame Kim Hak-soon ’s testimony of this way because Kim Hak-soon herself wanted the world to learn from her history, her truth and not as something to blame on a nation but on a

system.

The state-sponsored system of militarized sexual slavery perpetuated by the government of Japan in the 1930s and 40s remains history's largest example of human trafficking, and human trafficking for the purposes of rape. And we need to think about the value of her individual testimony representing hundreds of thousands of victims and survivors, and continue to measure it against denial, against ignorance, and against people who simply don't care. She remains one of the bravest people of the 20th century and it is incumbent on all of us to carry her legacy into the 21st to end forever the horror perpetuated on her body. Thank you again so much for including me today and I wish you just a very successful conference.

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