Relational masculinities, dependence, and insecurity: making sense of the 2015 Comfort Women Agreement by unmasking gender

ABSTRACT

This article critically assesses the 2015 Comfort Women Agreement between Japan and South Korea by employing the lens of gender – an approach that, curiously, has been neglected in making sense of the so-called landmark deal. For this examination, I revisit Connell’s conceptualization of the relationship between hegemonic and subordinate masculinities, defined in terms of complicity and marginalization, and propose two interrelated concepts as a way to capture their interactive relationality. I argue that the Agreement cannot be fully understood without careful attention to a global politics of gendered hierarchical relations between hegemonic and subordinate masculinities, anchored in the mutuality of dependence and insecurity in regard to the United States, Japan, and South Korea. This is seamlessly woven into the gendered domestic politics that resonated with the Japanese government’s apology and the Agreement’s implementation in South Korea. I demonstrate how the allegedly distinct domains of the official/public and the secret/private in fact fundamentally overlap to bolster the artificial domain of masculinity – a critical factor that underpinned the Agreement, in which masculine fears and desires were implicated.

KEYWORDS:

• 2015 Comfort Women Agreement
• gender
• masculinity
• hegemonic and subordinate masculinities
• Japan–South Korea relations

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Audie Klotz, L. H. M. Ling, Hongying Wang, Francine D’Amico, Gavan Duffy, Margarita Estévez-Abe, Lisa Yoshikawa, Cathy Wu, Michael Sprunger, Zachary Smith, Taine Duncan, Sun Joo Kim, Katherine In-Young Lee, Dong-hee Kim and Sung-hee Oh for their valuable comments on, and support for, my earlier work conducted at various stages. I also thank Marysia Zalewski and other International Feminist Journal of Politics editors, as well as anonymous reviewers, for their extremely helpful comments, suggestions, and support. This article is dedicated to L. H. M. Ling for her lifelong efforts toward uncovering issues relating to masculinities and to the countless comfort women who were sacrificed in the gendered system, in hopes that justice will be served.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Up to 200,000 young girls and women from Korea, China, the Philippines, Burma, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Dutch East Indies were forced to serve as sexual slaves for Japanese soldiers. See Hicks (1995) Soh (2008), and Yoshimi (2000) for further details.

2 In August 1993, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono admitted the coercive nature of the recruitment of young women and girls “against their own will” and the management of comfort stations by the Japanese military (MOFAJ 1993).

3 Notably, three months before the deal’s announcement, the Abe administration chose to forget the memory of comfort women, as demonstrated by the fact that the issue was eventually erased from Japan’s final National Action Plan (NAP) to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1325, announced in September 2015, despite Japanese feminist activists and civic organizations strenuously emphasizing the need to include it (Motoyama 2018).

4 Responding to mounting criticism from the public, the South Korean government launched a task force under its Ministry of Foreign Affairs on July 31, 2017, to investigate the processes that led to the signing of the Agreement and its terms from a victim-centered standpoint.

5 See Lind (2008, 47) for the terms of the 1965 Agreement.

6 On July 11, 2018, the FJR and the Korean Council merged to become the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan.

Additional information

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Jooyoun Lee

Jooyoun Lee is an Associate Professor of Global Studies at St Edward’s University, Austin, TX, USA. Her recent work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals, including Arts & International Affairs, Third World Quarterly, The Korean Journal of Defense Analysis, and Pacific Focus. Her ongoing projects include a book manuscript entitled Triumphant Victim: Japan’s Historical Memory and Foreign Policy.