Abstract
Rooted in a bitter history and propelled by a motley sense of shame, resentment, and nationalism, memories of the colonial past remain fraught in South Korea and Japan. This article surveys the course “Beyond the ‘Memory Wars’: Reconciling the Past,” which was offered as part of a hybrid exchange program between Underwood International College at Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea and International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan, to assess the challenges and possibilities of teaching memory studies within a cross-cultural undergraduate classroom. While a mix of earnest curiosity, personal stakes, and healthy competition kept the students engaged, empathetic, and enthusiastic, they displayed a curious commitment to facts and truths. This was manifest in both their learning agility on-site and their mistrust of digital technology—even as they were thoroughly immersed in it. Perhaps owing to their generational milieu, students appeared to need more engagement with memory beyond institutionalized archives and systems of knowledge.
Keywords
How South Korea remembers its colonial past has always been fraught. Rooted in a bitter history often deemed “unresolved” and propelled by a motley sense of shame, resentment, justice, and nationalism, the cultural memory of colonialism is marked by shifts and upheavals—at times (luke)warm but mostly cold. It was, therefore, with some apprehension that I undertook the task of teaching a course on “Reconciliation” to students from Underwood International College (UIC) at Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea and International Christian University (ICU) in Tokyo, Japan. This article surveys the course “Beyond the ‘Memory Wars’: Reconciling the Past” designed for the UIC-ICU LearnUs Global Semester Program. 1 I hope to provide a glimpse of memory studies in the context of a cross-cultural undergraduate classroom, and, in doing so, assess the challenges and possibilities of teaching memory studies at this particular juncture.
Students
As an exchange program between two all-English international colleges in Northeast Asia, the student body was diverse. While the majority of students were Korean and Japanese, students came from Finland, India, New Zealand, and the United States, and many of the Korean and Japanese students had lived abroad in Australia, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, and the United States for 3–5 years. Ages ranged from 17 to 20, and everyone was studying memory as an academic discipline for the first time. Ten students were selected from UIC and ICU, respectively, but only three were gendered male. 2 Due to the particularity of the program, these students spent the entire semester learning, living, and traveling together. 3
Curriculum
I began with a survey of seminal texts in memory studies: Halbwachs (1992) on collective memory, Landsberg (2004) on prosthetic memory, Hirsch (2008) on postmemory, Erll (2010) on cultural memory, Rothberg (2009) on multidirectional memory, Young (2016) on memorials, Sturken (2011) on memory tourism, and Hoskins (2009, 2018) on digital memory. These were accompanied by Caruth (1995) on trauma, Laub (1995) on testimony, White (2016) on narrativity, and Minow (2002) on reconciliation to explore memory alongside its frequent partners, trauma, representation, and justice. With these conceptual tools, we moved onto a number of primary texts along the following three historical topics: “The Korean War and the ‘Red Virus’,” “The ‘Comfort Women’ Issue,” and “Korea’s ‘Forgotten War’.” The reason for these three topics was twofold. First, the focus on South Korea allowed classes to be conducted beyond the classroom. With ample funding, texts could be complemented by on-site field trips whereby students experience firsthand what they studied. Second, I wanted students to see the complexity of memory by focusing on instances of civil war and state violence, of victimization by another, and of perpetration onto another. This was to steer them away from a nationally bound notion of memory toward one more dynamically complex—always shifting and becoming. Primary texts included short stories, novels, graphic novels, documentaries, dramas, testimonies, songs, memorials, monuments, museums, and ruins.
Theory
Students responded eagerly to Erll, Hirsch, Landsberg, Rothberg, Sturken, and Hoskins. Many questioned what constitutes a “collective” in Halbwachs and preferred the dynamism of “cultural memory” by way of Erll, Landsberg, and Rothberg. They agreed that media plays a crucial role in the formation and transmission of cultural memory and were quick to point that they, too, had “prosthetically” “inherited” memories of colonialism and the Pacific War. They were also enthused by Sturken’s (2011) critique of “kitsch consumerism” (pp. 281–282) and confessed to never realizing their participation in memory tourism. Responses to Hoskins were unexpectedly divided. Contrary to my belief that Hoskins (2009) would resonate most strongly with these Gen-Z youths, who upon orientation had created chatrooms, exchanged Instagram handles, and were constantly liking, sharing, and commenting on each other’s posts, they were wary of “miscellanizing information” (p. 97) through digital technology. Comments noted the dangers of “anyone writing history” and “tarnishing the truth,” the failure to “sincerely memorialize and mourn” over social media, and the risk of “turning memory into entertainment” in digital games. 4 It was the rare student who considered the potential of digital memory to foster affective engagement and to produce a more confrontational memory culture to undermine gatekeeping by select hegemonic institutions. Most surprising was how the students took to Caruth and Laub. While a few questioned the authors’ “overly theoretical definitions,” most were fascinated by trauma’s challenge to textual referentiality and the need to rethink our engagement with the past. Yet, once we began discussing Human Acts (2014), a poetic novel on 18 May Gwangju Uprising, students were quick to disapprove its “truth effect” over “actually telling the truth.” Every discussion occasioned a question on “truth”; students were, at best, ambivalent about the possibility of any knowledge that was not “objective” or “empirical,” pointing to how ingrained and unwavering a hold “truth” had on young minds.
Primary texts
In lieu of discussing every text, I will elaborate on student responses to the “Comfort Women” issue. 5 Several weeks were spent on the topic, and a mix of earnest curiosity, sincere enthusiasm, personal investment, and competitive camaraderie kept discussions vibrant and productive.
Comfort women testimonies
I first divided the students into groups, provided a list of primary and secondary sources, and had each group research and present on the history, controversies, representations, and gender(ed) politics of the comfort women. This was to let the students discover the entangled issue rather than passively receive information. Having established the past and present of the event, we read a number of comfort women testimonies compiled by the International Commission of Jurists in 1994. 6 As I had hoped, the students noticed the “dry,” “clinical,” and “formulaic” style of the testimonies. Excepting minor variations in voice, every testimony opens on being coerced/tricked as young girls, then details the extreme violation endured at the comfort stations, the pain/shame experienced upon liberation, and, finally, their need for a “formal apology” (International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), 1994: 87). Students astutely problematized the testimonies for “freezing” the women’s lives into “one single incident,” erasing each woman’s subjecthood, reifying the “ideology of chastity” by moving from sonyeo to halmeoni, 7 and making mere “evidence” out of human lives. At the same time, many professed to “bawling” while reading the testimonies: it was their first time encountering the women’s words, and they were “heartbroken” and “shocked” to learn “what really happened.” What caught me by surprise was how, unlike the UIC students who were all familiar with the issue (albeit in differing degrees), all 10 ICU students had never even heard about the comfort women until now. 8 Many were emotional and their voices wavered as they spoke of the “blatant erasure” and “injustice done by Japan” and questioned “why and how” it was that they knew nothing of the event—as history, past, ongoing contention.
Comfort women statues
What elicited the most engaged and productive discussion was our visit to the Statue of Peace aka Sonyeosang (literally Girl Statue) across the Japanese Embassy in downtown Seoul. A bronze statue of a barefoot girl sitting with clenched fists and dressed in hanbok, the Sonyeosang represents the comfort women. 9 More than any other site, the site-specificity of the Sonyeosang affected the students: the statue was barricaded on all sides, several police officers stood guard, riot police buses walled the street, and policemen also looked down from several floors in a high-rise across (as pointed out, with a sharp gasp, by one student) (Figures 1 and 2). Upon my stating that we were from Yonsei University and asking permission to approach the Sonyeosang, the officers opened the barricade for us (Figure 3). Students found the space “chilling” and “uncomfortable.” They lamented that “the police officers made it difficult to approach the statue” and expressed fear lest they be “punished for one wrong move.” Everyone kept at least a meter’s distance from the statue and no one dared to sit next to the girl (whereas everyone took turns sitting next to the statue at the War and Women’s Human Rights Museum where it also stands). The mood was made more tense by a small booth occupied by the anti-Japanese organization known as Banil Haengdong (Anti-Japanese Action). Flanked by placards condemning the present government’s friendly position toward Japan, activists chanted “We oppose the rise of the Japanese government’s military actions” in turns. As the police and activists had no interactions, we were puzzled about what/who the police were guarding. When asked, the police replied that they were “guarding the Sonyeosang against people trying to deface it.” The activists, in turn, retorted that “the police stand with the pro-Japanese conservatives who wish to tear down the Sonyeosang and erase Japan’s past wrongdoings.” If both parties purported to guard the Sonyeosang, why, then, the students demurred, were they apathetic toward each other? “Their indifference,” the students remarked, “amplified the air of fear around the Sonyeosang.”
The Statue of Peace aka Sonyeosang in downtown Seoul, Korea, November 2022.
The statue A Heartfelt Apology in Pyeongchang, Kangwon Province, Korea.
In class, students further discussed their on-site observations—from the anxiety of “being constantly under surveillance” to the “utter politicization” of the statue and its space. Many added that the visit was “completely unexpected” because they had never seen the Sonyeosang “in its true place.” Some commented that the absence of the Japanese Embassy made “her” seem “ghostly.” 10 Many lamented how the statue had been “appropriated for politics rather than for memory.” During break, one ICU student timidly approached to ask if she could share a variation of the Sonyeosang she had seen online. 11 The statue was of a man clearly resembling former Prime Minister Shinzō Abe prostrating in front of a young hanbok-clad girl looking down from her seated position (Figure 4). When asked why she needed permission, she choked up and said she did not want to “offend the Korean students by showing [her] discomfort.” With assurances that this was precisely why we discuss contentious memories, she addressed the class—to impassioned responses. Some expressed disbelief at “its brazenness,” others doubted “its purpose,” and still others disapproved the “fantasy of apology over a real one.” A Korean student confessed to “feeling apologetic” to her Japanese classmates for “a statue clearly meant to humiliate and provoke the Japanese”; one Japanese student remarked that “seeing it wounded [her] national pride” while another suggested “the need to question Japan’s role in precipitating such a statue”; others belabored how the statue’s intent to heal the survivors ended up erasing them by “making Japan its audience.” Learning of the statue’s name, A Heartfelt Apology in English but Eternal Atonement in Korean, the students bemoaned how the Sonyeosang and its variants were “problematically didactic” and, as such, perpetuated an impasse of “competitive memory.”
Images from Ethics of Re-membering.
Student projects
To champion collaboration and innovation befitting the program, the final project asked students to utilize alternative media as they critically and creatively reconsidered memory and reconciliation. Following are illustrations of two final projects. 12
Ethics of Re-membering
One group created a set of collages titled Ethics of Re-membering to problematize the “single-sided story” of the comfort women issue through the iconicity of the Sonyeosang (Figure 5). One collage opens on a dark silhouette; turned over, it reveals a girl whose hair and dress recall the Sonyeosang and whose features are pieced-together from multiple ethnicities. The other collage shows images of comfort women spilling forth from an unzipped and unbarred mouth. Scattered around are images of women and war and excerpts from testimonies and newspapers in Korean, Japanese and English. In assembling the girl’s face, the irony of cutting up women’s bodies to represent the comfort women was not lost on the students. They noted that “cutting, arranging, and collaging female bodily parts felt like an immense violation,” but they did so “to emphasize women’s bodies,” that is, to highlight the comfort women issue beyond a patriarchal nationalist agenda that sees it as a wound to national pride rather than a violation of women’s bodies and rights. The multiplicity of women suggests how the comfort women issue is not limited to Korea; the throngs of people lining the work represent a “temperamental public”; the tapes marking the collages suggest the “act of re-membering.” Finally, news of present-day wars appear alongside testimonies to expand the issue into an ongoing one (Figures 4–7).
Seeing Ethics of Re-membering, students appreciated how the taping enabled “a whole picture without erasing its fragmented nature.” It was, they critiqued, “a nice way to problematize how the stories that re-member ‘the girl’ still preclude our knowing her fully.” They also liked the tactility of the collages because it “seem[ed] to give physical presence” to the issue. When nudged to say more, they added that “presence offers the semblance of stability to an overtalked but unresolved issue.” While some praised the work for its transnational scope, others noted that it did little to take the issue beyond the pre-pubescent virginal sonyeo and post-menopausal asexual halmeoni framework, as problematized during discussions of the Sonyeosang, and suggested that the collage “be improved by adding images of the women across various ages.”
I can speak
Two students created an e-book titled I Can Speak (Figure 6). 13 Borrowing the title from a film loosely based on survivor Lee Yong-su’s life, the e-book uses typographical artwork to “emphasize an undeniable truth” about the comfort women. The project is “a response to people like Ramseyer” who pick at inconsistencies to deny the forcibility and systematicity of military sexual slavery under Imperial Japan. 14 The first chapter “Can I Speak?” uses text-as-image to draw a series of silhouettes based on Lee’s testimonies from 1993, 2003, 2007, and 2018. These four testimonial figures are picked on and dwarfed by two hands depicted in Korean and in English. The second chapter “You Can’t Speak” shows how Lee’s words come undone by such denial and silencing that brings a wall of word-bricks to fissure. The third chapter “You Can Speak” depicts how “our belief in the unchanging truths of Lee’s testimony” allows her to be sutured to her fellow survivors. This is affected by transitioning the swirl of words emanating from the original silhouette into “hopeful stars” that connect her to an iconic image—a girl being snatched by imperial soldiers in former comfort woman Kim Sun-deok’s painting Taken (Figures 8–12).
Excerpts from I Can Speak.
The class was visibly impressed by the e-book and its design. While some inquired into its digital tools, more students engaged with its images and narrative. They appreciated how the testimonies “made up the halmeoni” and how the different images and colors showed “the fragility and strength of words” depending on “who speaks and how.” Students also liked how the snippets of red, signaling inconsistencies, “proved” themselves “insignificant” amid the sea of “true words.” Some remarked that the use of black space and non-margins “recalled the black panels from Grass,” 15 and commended the pair’s “utilization of ‘inter-medial strategies’” (Erll, 2010: 392) to elicit an “affective response.” A few were critical of the e-book’s “symbolization” and “fragmentation.” They claimed that the testimonial excerpts were “hard to read” and that the narrative was “hard to grasp without prior knowledge of the debates surrounding Lee’s testimonies or without the creators’ explanations.” Thus, they questioned “what knowledge I Can Speak can effectively disseminate” and suggested “adding an Appendix with explanations.”
Conclusion
As an undergraduate course, the biggest limitation lay in the top-down transmission of knowledge. Although brilliant students, many appeared constrained by the need to present the “correct answer.” This commitment to being “correct” made them rely on and return to rigid categories, causalities, and “truths,” despite having learned to and being knowledgeable of the contrary. This is not to say that new discoveries were not made. Students were fascinated to learn about memory—its dialectics, malleability, mediality, hegemony, politics, ethics—and about the ways memory informs our present. Nevertheless, there were limits to expanding our dialogue beyond what was studied, learned, and taught. Since our texts had to be in English, I also felt anxious when students blindly applied theoretical claims to the comfort women or the Korean War. Without recourse to in-depth historical knowledge, it was difficult to enact Rothberg’s (2009) “multidirectional model” (p. 12) in the classroom. This was to be expected in an already loaded syllabus (and an intensively packed program), but the task of figuring out how to allow for contingencies and envision wider possibilities of memory awaits me.
Another aspect that needs improvement is digital memory. In that, the next generation is familiar with new forms of media—digital, social, and, now, artificial intelligence (AI)—it seems paramount that memory be examined more closely with digital technology. Had I known that digital media would be so widely used for the final project, I would have dedicated more sessions to digital memory studies. 16 For example, incorporating more experiential aspects of digital memory would create a valuable learning moment. Doing “field work” allowed the students to complicate and expand their views about how and why we study memory. In light of the students’ preoccupation with “truth” and trepidation over popular memory practices on social media platforms—even as they participate in this very practice—I plan to devise a semester-long project that avails them to see how social media can act as alternatives to institutionalized archives and related systems of knowledge and power. In that the humanities classroom has been significantly altered by the arrival of ChatGPT—and amid news of beta-testing for MemoryGPT (n.d.), which claims to be “like ChatGPT, but with long term memory”—it seems imperative that these topics also be examined within digital memory. 17 The idea of teaching the unfamiliar can be nerve-wracking, but there is a real need for present-day scholars to overcome generational and technological lag.