“I think the comfort women are us”: National identity and affective historical empathy in students’ understanding of “comfort women” in South Korea ☆

Abstract

This study investigates how students’ national identity affects their historical understanding by mediating their use of affective historical empathy. The research focuses on the case of “comfort women” (women forced into sexual slavery for Japanese soldiers during WWII) in South Korea—a topic in which a strong nationalist narrative dominates social and educational discourses. I conducted semi-structured, task-based group interviews with 16 high school students in South Korea. In interviews, students’ national identity mediated how they utilized four types of affective historical empathy: Students as ethnic Koreans cared more about “our” Korean comfort women over others; cared that Korean comfort women and others suffered from what “we” and “they” did as nations; cared for those women's voices from a humanitarian perspective beyond their ethnic and national boundaries; and cared to make social changes for those women and themselves as future citizens of their democratic nation. These findings help us understand how students’ emotional attachment to “our” nation and its members can mediate their historical understanding through affective historical empathy as well as how affective historical empathy can motivate students to move beyond purely nationalistic concerns. This case study also stimulates reflection on historical empathy's implications for students’ democratic civic participation.

Keywords

National identity Affective historical empathy Students’ historical understanding Comfort women

Affective engagement with history—rather than purely cognitive understanding—has been posited as a critical element in students’ historical understanding. It is this kind of affective historical empathy—or “empathy as care”—that motivates students to make personal connections to the past (Barton & Levstik, 2004, pp. 206–243). National identity is an important form of affective attachment, but a purely national focus can also keep students’ historical connections narrow and simplified as well as limit their potential contribution to the development of students’ democratic citizenship (Barton, 2012; Barton & Levstik, 2004, pp. 48–68). This study of South Korean students’ ideas about “comfort women” (women forced into sexual slavery for Japanese soliders during WWII) demonstrates that national identity mediates their sense of affective historical empathy (“empathy as care”), but it also shows how attitudes of care can motivate students to move beyond purely nationalistic concerns. This research thus casts light on students’ understanding of national history in South Korea, but it also serves as a powerful case study that stimulates reflection on affective historical empathy's implications for students’ historical understanding and history education's greater potential for students’ democratic citizenship.¹

Throughout this paper, affective empathy will be equated with “empathy as care,” as described by Barton and Levstik (2004), rather than “empathy as perspective recognition.”

The relation between history education and students’ national identity has been a major focus of investigation in recent years. Many researchers suggest that students’ national identity—“emotional adherence to what is ours” (Junco, 2011, p. xiv)—can affect their historical understanding by mediating their personal connections to both past and present worlds (Barton & McCully, 2005; Carretero, Asensio, & Rodríguez-Moneo, 2012; Epstein, 2009). For example, in Barton and Levstik's study (2008), students in the United States strongly identified with and felt connected to their nation's past. Although this emotional attachment to what they perceived as “their” national institution or “their” people is an important part of national identity (Connor, 1993), its implications for students’ affective historical understanding have been under-explored. However, given that affective national attachment can offer its greater potential for democratic citizenship when supported by shared historical connections (Barton, 2012; Barton & Levstik, 2004, pp. 48–68), and that “historical empathy as care” can be used as a tool to expand and complicate students’ historical connections to both past and present worlds (Barton & Levstik, 2004, pp. 228–243; Brooks, 2011, 2014; Kohlmeier, 2006), the relation between students’ national identity and affective empathy and its implications for students’ democratic citizenship needs further research. Toward that end, this study investigates how students’ national identity mediates their affective historical empathy, through examination of students’ understanding of comfort women in South Korea.²

The term “comfort women” has been controversial because of its “offensiveness” (Y. Park, 2000, p. 201) and “untruthfulness” (S. Kim & Lee, 2017, p. 220). Alternatively, the more accurate term, “Japanese military sexual slave” is formally used by many international institutions such as the United Nations, but is not popular in South Korea. The South Korean public and scholars “reacted negatively to the use of the term ‘sex slave’” “because the image of their being in abject slavery was hurtful to their [comfort women survivors'] self esteem” (Soh, 2008, p. 72). Instead, they “searched for a respectful way” by adopting the fictive kin term “grandmother (halmo˘ni)” (Soh, 2008, p. 73). Although it is not unusual for Koreans to use some kin terms when they address or refer to non-kin members, it is not usual in history textbooks. Furthermore, by using the kin term, scholars illustrate that they feel personally connected to those women, as Kim-Gibson (1997) demonstrated in her article, “They Are Our Grandmas.” It has also been criticized for obscuring individual women's voices and experiences by not using their individual names (Soh, 2008, p. 76; Yang, 1997, p. 53). These controversies over how to name those women demonstrate the complicated discursive dynamics around comfort women, especially in the South Korean context. In this paper, I use the term comfort women because it is the most widely used in scholarly and educational discourses, and I also agree that “the discomfort of the reader vis-à-vis the ironic term can alert us to its inadequacy” (Y. Park, 2000, p. 201).

Comfort women in South Korea is a powerful case for this study because South Korea is a country in which boundaries of ethnic and political groups had until recently coincided, a condition that reinforces Koreans’ sense of national identity (Connor, 1993). Also, from the beginning, the comfort women movement for redress has been led and supported by many emotionally-charged Korean scholars, activists, and the public (S. Kim & Lee, 2017; Kim-Gibson, 1997; Yang, 1998) and as the South Korean president recently described, it is still an “emotionally” involved issue for the “majority of our people [South Koreans]” (Griffiths, 2017). That is why it was included in the national history curriculum with strong public support, and changes in its representations in the government issued/authorized history textbooks have attracted intense public attention in South Korea (Y. Jung, Kim, & Lee, 2016; C. Kim, 1997, p. 2; J. Park, 2001). Also, as an on-going international controversy, it provides students a chance to engage with important civic concepts such as power, justice, and civic responsibility, among others—issues which implicate but also transcend national identity. Furthermore, as an example of women's historical experience, it has the potential to alert students to the historical and political significance of women's lives and how they differ from those of men.

Background

Comfort women in South Korea

The contemporary discourses around comfort women in South Korea illustrate the complicated intersection of national identity and affective historical understanding. In highlighting personal connections with comfort women as Koreans, many Korean activists, politicians, scholars, and the public have demonstrated intense emotional responses to the comfort women's historical experience and how it should be remembered.

The term comfort women is a euphemism. This term was used to refer to those women who were mobilized in Japan's occupied territories—mostly in its colony, Korea—and victimized as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers from the early 1930s until the end of World War II. Estimates of the total number vary, but historians argue that approximately 50,000 to 200,000 women were forced into this institutionalized sexual violence (Yoshimi, 2000, pp. 91–94). Although stories of this, one of the largest cases of human trafficking in the twentieth century (The European Parliament, 2007), had been known in parts of Asia, it was not recognized as an “issue” until a comfort women survivor Kim Hak-Sun's public testimony, in December 1991, about her experience. Her story attracted public attention and inspired scholars to engage in research on the topic (Yoshimi, 2000, p. 33). In January 1992, Japanese historian Yoshimi published Japanese archival documents demonstrating the involvement of the Japanese military in the “comfort system.” As a result, in 1993, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Kono issued a vaguely worded statement admitting the country's involvement in the comfort system but not its legal responsibility.

However, controversies over responsibility continue. In demanding a “sincere” apology and compensation, comfort women survivors filed suit against the Japanese government and have held weekly protests, since January 8, 1992, in front of the Embassy of Japan in Seoul. To support them, many international organizations and national and city/state assemblies have passed resolutions calling on the Japanese government to apologize, including the United Nations (1996), the European Parliament (2007), and the U.S. House of Representatives (2007). In December 2015 the Japanese Prime Minister expressed his “most sincere” apologies and promised an $8.3 million payment that would provide care for the women and the two nations’ foreign ministers announced that each side considered it a “final and irreversible resolution.” In return, the South Korean government promised to “refrain from accusing or criticizing” Japan over comfort women (WSJ Staff, 2015). This agreement was welcomed by the UN's Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, a former South Korean Foreign Minister (“UN chief welcomes agreement,” 2015) but not by comfort women survivors or their supporters because they had not participated in the process of reaching the agreement (Choe, 2015). This “final” agreement was recently brought up again by new South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who argued, “The reality is the majority of our people cannot emotionally accept the comfort women agreement” (Griffiths, 2017).

The comfort women movement for redress has involved personal connections since its beginning. Many scholars and activists initiated and joined the movement because of their feelings of personal connection. For example, Yun, the first scholar who researched and brought up the topic of comfort women in public, did so because she felt a responsibility toward the comfort women: Although they were “all born in an unlucky country,” she was barely able to avoid the forced draft when she was a first year college student due to her privileged background (S. Kim & Lee, 2017, p. 208). Another scholar, Kim-Gibson (1997), also described how she felt personal connections to the comfort women in her article, “They Are Our Grandmas”: “I listened to these stories [comfort women survivors’ testimonial narratives] as a woman, born in Korea, with overflowing sorrow, outraged by the violations inflicted by the Japanese on Koreans, by men on women, by the rich on the poor, and by the powerful on the weak” (p. 269).

The South Korean public has also found personal and emotional connections with comfort women as “Koreans.” For example, a major newspaper described it as “a matter of our national pride” (“Historical truth should be elicited,” 1992, cited in Yang, 1998, p. 128). As public emotional engagement empowered the movement, its nationalistic perspective obscured shared responsibility and simplified historical complexities (Yang, 1998). In framing the comfort women's suffering as “exclusively a Japanese war crime” (against Koreans) (Soh, 2008, p. 1), the nationalistic perspective has concealed the structure of the violence, which has been

in the concentric structural conjuncture of (1) gender inequality in masculinist sexual culture and patriarchal abuse of power against wives and daughters at home; (2) class exploitation in society under capitalist economy; (3) “race” discrimination under colonial rule of Imperial Japan; and (4) Korea's unequal diplomatic relations with Japan (during and after colonial rule) and with the United States after the war in the nation-state power dynamics to redress historical wrongdoings. (pp. 105–106)

The flattened understanding of comfort women has also been reflected in the history curriculum. Since comfort women became included in the national history curriculum with strong public attention and support, the government-issued history textbooks until recently described the comfort women's experience as exclusively “our national suffering” from Japanese colonization (Ministry of Education, 1996, p. 136; Ministry of Education, 2002, pp. 116–117). In presenting the colonial past as “the collective grief, sorrow, suffering and humiliation of Koreans as a nation” (H. Kim, 1997, p. 91), the briefly-mentioned comfort women's experience “only serves to arouse anti-Japanese, Korean-nationalist sentiments in students” (p. 92). However, new government-authorized history textbooks embrace a wider range of aspects of this experience, including survivors’ on-going efforts for redress and personal stories. For example, the textbook, used in my participants’ school, recognizes the gendered aspect of those women's suffering by using the term, “sexual slavery,” which had not been used in earlier versions of textbooks. Investigations into how the representations of comfort women in textbooks affect students’ understanding have been demanded (Morris-Suzuki, 2013, p. 17) and their relation with students’ use of affective historical empathy particularly needs further attention given that discourses around comfort women have centered around affective historical connections.

Historical empathy as care

Barton and Levstik (2004) articulate historical empathy as a set of two cultural tools: 1) perspective recognition and 2) care. They describe the first as a cognitive understanding of people's perspectives in the past. They argue that this is an indispensable component for students’ historical understanding as well as for promoting students’ ability to deliberate with diverse others, but it cannot be the only goal of history education that aims to prepare students for democratic civic participation. This is because “to engage in meaningful deliberation with those whose ideas differ from our own, we must do more than understand them—we must care about them and about their perspectives” in a participatory, pluralistic, and deliberative democracy (Barton & Levstik, 2004, p. 207).

In describing this second type of empathy, Barton and Levstik (2004) suggest that students can make personal connections between themselves and the past through four forms of caring:

We can care about the people and events of the past when we select some as more interesting or personally meaningful than others, we can care that particular events took place when we react to the triumphs or tragedies of the past, we can care for people in history when we want to respond to suffering by the victims of injustice or oppression, and we can care to change our beliefs or behaviors in the present based on what we have learned from our study of the past. (p. 229)

Although teachers may confront a wide range of challenges promoting students’ affective historical connections (Brooks, 2009; Cunningham, 2007, 2009; Endacott & Brooks, 2013), recent studies imply that these four types of care interrelate and collectively contribute to students’ historical understanding and citizenship preparation.

First, caring about seems to initiate students’ personal connections to the past and promote their historical understanding. In caring about, students become interested in and want to learn more about certain parts of the past, particularly when it allows them to explore the feelings and experiences of people in the past and relate these to their own (Barton & Levstik, 2004, pp. 229–232; Endacott, 2010). Students in Brooks's study (2011) were also attracted by “kind of personal” topics such as ones that a student's parents were interested in or when their teachers emphasized historical characters’ humanity (pp. 187–188). In her study, students’ caring about contributed to their cognitive understanding by motivating them to work hard at their historical inquiry. Barton and McCully's study (2012) also indicated the potential of caring about to help students understand multiple perspectives of historical conflicts, including their own.

Second, caring that and caring for seem to be intertwined in many students’ caring in strengthening their personal connections to the past and encouraging historical inquiry. In caring that, students make moral responses to historical consequences. Their moral responses cannot be solely cognitive (Barton & Levstik, 2004, p. 233), and in Brooks's study (2011) students demonstrated “a personal or emotional response” in evaluating what happened to historical characters they cared about (p. 188). For example, one student cared that young children worked in poor conditions during the beginning of the Industrial Revolution; she said, “I would be pissed off if my little brother, who like plays on the floor with his little blocks, was crippled because he has to work 13 hours a day” (Brooks, 2011, p. 188).

Once they care that, many students care for by wishing to help people in the past who were victimized. Although students understand they have no way to intervene in historical events, they still hope to help those “real people,” as they would do in their present lives (Barton & Levstik, 2004, p. 235). For example, in Kohlmeier's study (2006) once ninth graders cared that Ji Li, a middle class Chinese school girl suffered from being a target of da-zi-bao (posters of critiques hung on homes of bourgeois community members) during the Cultural Revolution, they cared for her by discussing how to stop her suffering. One student said, “she could have stood up and said I'm not going to write anything about the teachers” (Kohlmeier, 2006, p. 50). Also, the caring stimulated students to work hard for a better understanding of what happened to people in the past and what could have been done to help them (Kohlmeier, 2006). These types of care can help students develop their ability to participate in civic life by providing opportunities to reflect on their understanding of justice and explore ways to promote it.

Lastly, students can care to by being willing to take actions to make changes in their present lives by applying their historical understanding. This caring to seems to extend students’ connections between themselves and the past to the present world and to be a key element in promoting students’ democratic civic participation. However, because many students have difficulty in caring to (Barton & Levstik, 2004, pp. 237–240), researchers have explored how to develop this capacity (Brooks, 2011, 2014; Kohlmeier, 2006). For example, in observing two social studies teachers who actively invited their students to connect their understanding of the past and their present lives, Brooks (2014) pointed out the importance of teachers’ explicit instructions to help students make links between the past and present and offer historical examples of efforts to promote equality and justice (pp. 87–88).

Given that historical empathy as care is a tool to make personal connections to both past and present worlds, as discussed above, and that national identity is one of the most powerful associations rooted in shared history (Barton & Levstik, 2004, 2008; Cornbleth, 2002; Ho, 2010; Levstik & Groth, 2005; Searle-White, 2001), the relation between historical empathy as care and national identity needs further study. Also, given that both students’ historical understanding and their affective national attachment are concerned with nation-specific societal contexts (e.g., Cornbleth, 2002; Hahn, 1998; Ho, 2010; G. Kim, 2018; Levstik & Groth, 2005), as Barton and Avery (2015) note in a recent review, case studies can enrich our understanding of national identity and its relation with historical empathy as care.

This study as a case study can offer a powerful context to capture the relation between historical empathy as care and national identity by investigating students’ understanding of comfort women in South Korea. This is because although discourses around comfort women lie at the intersection of national identity, affective historical empathy, and historical understanding, little is known about this in students’ thinking. Although the comfort women's experience was introduced into the national history curriculum in South Korea with strong public support, due to a shared affective historical connection to comfort women as Koreans, relatively little attention has been paid to how students’ national identity and affective historical empathy mediate their historical understanding. Do students only care about comfort women because of their national attachments, or does their care represent something broader and more universal?

Methods

To examine how students’ national identity mediates the ways in which they utilize affective historical empathy to make sense of comfort women in South Korea—a topic in which a strong nationalist perspective dominates social and educational discourses—I conducted open-ended, semi-structured, task-based, 30-min interviews with 16 students, aged 16–17, in four groups of four. (All students’ names are pseudonyms.) These students were volunteers from one school, a public, academic, mixed-gender high school in one of the large metropolitan areas in South Korea. This nonrandom procedure was necessary to gain access, but it may have limited both the range of students who were interviewed and the ideas that may show up in my data. As a result, the external generalizability of these findings is limited.

Although the high school was selected for convenience, it may be considered a “typical” site for examining students’ historical understanding. The educational system in South Korea is centralized: The national government, through the Ministry of Education, develops and revises the national curriculum, issues/authorizes textbooks, and develops and supervises the national college entrance exam (Seth, 2002). In this school, except for one who studied abroad during the elementary school years, all participants were those who have completed three Korean history courses (one each in elementary, middle, and high school), each of which has been based on the national curriculum and which used government-issued/authorized textbooks. Teachers are also selected, trained, evaluated, and regularly relocated within their district by the Education Office, and this leads to a standardization of methods, perspectives, and teaching quality (Seth, 2002). Additionally, each participant would have been preparing for the same national college entrance exam. Within this system, especially at academic high schools at which the competitive national college entrance exam is expected, students have little room for extra-curriculum lessons or activities (Seth, 2002). I assume the school that I selected closely followed the general trend because it was located in a predominantly middle class neighborhood in which so-called “education fever” is said to be high, and its academic performance is far above the average in standardized tests.

Also, the timing of my interviews is important to note. I interviewed students in December 2016, when the textbook screening system was in transition. Since 2008, government-authorized history textbooks have been used, but the Park administration was trying to change it into a government-issued textbook system against intense protests. A few weeks before my interviews, the draft of the government-issued history textbook was released for public review amid controversy. One of the major controversies was its representation of comfort women (Y. Jung, Kim, & Lee, 2016). Also, at that time, South Korea was in the middle of its political upheaval. Hundreds of thousands, including a large number of high school students, had gathered for weekly protests calling for the president's impeachment, which occurred a few months later. This social atmosphere may have encouraged students to think more critically as well as to spontaneously share their thoughts about comfort women and other political issues.

In this context, I conducted small group interviews using elicitation techniques in order to investigate the intersection of national identity, affective historical empathy, and historical understanding in students’ thinking using the case of comfort women in South Korea—a topic which lies at the intersection. In each interview, I asked students to do two group tasks using photo-elicitation techniques and participate in two sentence completion tasks. Such techniques are alternatives to direct questions and are useful when interviewing participants who have little experience sharing their ideas or when discussing controversial or sensitive topics (Barton, 2015). Also, the use of such techniques in small group interviews can enrich the data's quality because participants’ responses to each other can bring taken-for-granted ideas to the surface (Barton, 2015). Furthermore, group interviews can reduce tensions that participants may feel during individual interviews due to differences in power and status between researchers and participants (Eder & Fingerson, 2002). It was particularly important for this study's participants: South Korean students in an academic high school who generally have few chances to discuss their ideas about controversial and sensitive topics in public settings with adults. Using elicitation techniques in small groups may have offered students a comfortable space to share their ideas, but it may have limited the thoughts that students brought into interviews due to any inter-personal tensions among group members or lack of familiarity with interview tasks.

For the first group task, I showed the students a set of 10 pictures and asked them to work together to “select three that would be used to explain comfort women in a mock international conference.” The pictures were chosen from multiple sources in order to invite students to engage in discussions on wider aspects of the topic: four were from government-authorized history textbooks, one from an alternative, non-authorized textbook that is not used in schools, another four from South Korean news media, and the last from foreign news media. Some, particularly ones from government-authorized history textbooks, may have reminded the students of the predominant understanding of the topic in their society, whereas others, such as a picture of a Dutch comfort women survivor, may have challenged it; and some, particularly ones taken in the 1940s, presented comfort women's historical experience, whereas others, such as a picture of a news conference on the recent governmental agreement, presented contemporary discourses around it. After a few minutes I asked students to explain why they chose some pictures over others, and whether anyone in the group had different opinions.

For the second group task, I gave another set of 10 pictures and asked students to work together to select three by asking, “If you wanted to compare the topic of comfort women in order to help someone understand what it is all about—why it happened and why it is important—what images would you choose?” Those 10 pictures covered a wide range of international and historical issues, which are often compared with the topic of comfort women in different contexts, such as child labor, the Holocaust, slavery, Korean prostitutes around U.S. military camp towns in South Korea, controversies between South Korea and neighboring countries, and others. I then asked them to explain their choices in order to see what they thought the most relevant comparisons were, as a way of getting at their underlying ideas about comfort women.

After these group tasks, I asked students to complete sentences individually in their own words. Sentence starters were, “The ‘comfort women’ are…” and “The ‘comfort women’ would never have suffered if…” The open-ended nature of the sentence starters may have allowed students to display their ideas without forcing them into predetermined categories. After about a minute to think or take notes, I asked each student for their answers and to explain what they meant.

I interviewed South Korean students in Korean and transcribed the audio data in Korean first, then translated it into English during analysis. In doing so, my personal and professional backgrounds and positionality may have influenced my data and analysis. My experience as a student and a teacher who learned and taught the national history curriculum in South Korea may have helped me better understand the knowledge, assumptions, and inferences that students may have brought to interviews. Conversely, because of my teaching experience, students in this study may have perceived me as a teacher figure and that may have limited the ideas they shared in interviews.

I analyzed the student interview data, using both inductive and theoretical thematic analyses (Braun & Clarke, 2006). As Braun and Clarke (2006) suggest, I read over my field notes and interview transcriptions many times to look for codes, “the most basic segment, or element, of the raw data or information that can be assessed in a meaningful way regarding the phenomenon” (Boyatzis, 1998, p. 63, cited in Braun & Clarke, 2006). Based on the initial codes I searched for themes, in sorting the different codes into potential themes and reviewing them with Patton's (1990) dual criteria—internal homogeneity and external heterogeneity. For example, in grouping students’ answers responding to the same tasks as well as comparing them with students’ responses to different tasks across interviews, I developed a set of coding categories such as “students’ interest in and support for comfort women” and “a strong sense of moral judgments on and responsibility for comfort women's suffering.” The coding process was done with both inductive and theoretical approaches. I used theoretical thematic analysis to examine how students used four types of care in understanding comfort women and how their national identity mediated their caring. Also, in taking an inductive approach, I looked for re-occurring patterns in students’ responses. Finally, the themes throughout both the theoretical and inductive approaches were combined into the broader analytic domain.

National identity and the mediation of students’ caring

In interviews, students’ national identity mediated how they utilized four types of historical empathy as care: in identifying themselves with ethnic Korean comfort women, students cared more about “our” Korean comfort women over others; in associating themselves with their nation, students cared that “our” Korean comfort women and others suffered from what “we” and “they” did as nations; in taking a humanitarian perspective, students cared for victimized women's voices beyond their ethnic and national boundaries; and in sharing responsibility as future citizens of their democratic nation, students cared to make social changes for those women and students themselves. These findings help us understand how students’ emotional attachment to “our” nation and its members can mediate their historical understanding through affective historical empathy as well as how affective historical empathy can motivate students to move beyond purely nationalistic concerns.

Caring about: the priority of Korean comfort women

Students’ national/ethnic identity mediated their caring about comfort women's experience in terms of who they were and who “we” are. First, students’ caring about comfort women was clear from their personal identification with those women as Koreans. Throughout the interviews, students counted ethnic Korean comfort women as “our” people and used the fictive kin term “grandmother (halmo˘ni)” to name them regardless of these women's current citizenship status. Given that neither students’ interest in more familiar groups’ historical experience over others’ nor their historical identification using first person plural pronouns is inevitable (Barton, 2001; Barton & Levstik, 2004, pp. 48–57), students’ caring about Korean comfort women in this study was evident from their interest in and personal connections to those women.

In associating themselves with Korean comfort women as Koreans, students clearly cared more about “our nation's [Korean] [comfort women] victims” over “others.” In a hypothetical setting in which they had limited resources to devote to comfort women, all groups of students agreed to give precedence to the Korean comfort women victims. For example, although students were aware that there were non-Korean comfort women and some students brought that up in discussions, when asked to select pictures that would be used to explain comfort women in a mock international conference, no group chose the photo of a Dutch comfort women survivor. One group discussed: Other groups’ discussions also reached the same conclusion. In another group Yoon-ju explicitly explained, “This [the photo of a Dutch comfort women survivor] is a good one to point out that there are many victims in many other countries, but because for now it is more important to focus on our situation, [we] excluded this photo [from our presentation for the mock international conference].”

Ha-eun:	(pointing at the photo of a Dutch comfort women survivor) Don't we need this one? [It can present that] comfort women were not only from Korea…
Hyeon:	(interrupting Ha-eun) But, we should focus on our national victims. The reason we do this now is to provide an apology and reflection to our national victims first, and then, to others…
Gibum:	(to an interviewer) Do we have a particular topic/argument for the presentation?
Ha-eun:	(to other students) [Including the photo of a Dutch comfort women survivor] would/can support an argument that it is not only relevant to our nation but others too.
Interviewer:	It's up to your group.
Hyeon:	But, when choosing three [pictures] among ten, our national victims (should take) precedence.

Also, as students in other studies cared about certain parts of the past by being interested in and willing to learn more about them (Barton & Levstik, 2004, pp. 229–232; Barton & McCully, 2012; Brooks, 2011), students in this study cared about “our” Korean comfort women by demonstrating their active interest in them. When mentioning the photo of a Dutch comfort women survivor, students exclusively pointed out her non-Koreaness, yet they explained who Korean comfort women were in more detail. They described how those “young” (o˘lin) women were “dragged away” (kkŭllyo˘kata) following the firmly fixed “paradigmatic” image of comfort women in South Korea, as in “a ‘virgin’ mobilized coercively or deceptively” (Soh, 2008, pp. xiii, 72). Although students never used the word “virgin,” by not mentioning any other demographic features of them, such as their socio-economic background (although many comfort women were from working class families), and in comparing comfort women with child labor victims, students highlighted that the women were “young.” They also emphasized that the young women had “not volunteered,” but were “coercively taken.” Although two students (Hye and Cheol in the same group) said they were “deceived” by sweet-talk that they could have decent jobs, in another part of the interview, even those two described the women as “[being] dragged away.”

In addition, students wanted to learn more about Korean comfort women. According to them, because their textbook covers comfort women too briefly, they had taught themselves about comfort women beyond their classroom. They responded that the information that they gained beyond their classroom helped them build a fuller understanding of the topic by providing details and up-to-date news. For example, Tae-wan said that the comfort women's personal life stories enriched his understanding of what happened. And Jae-hoon and Bora had chances to understand comfort women's suffering vividly with information that “would not be appropriate to present in textbooks” through YouTube, a website for sharing video files. Also, according to Eun-bin, Yoon-ju, and Tae-wan, through the news media they learned about recent developments such as the governmental agreement and public responses to it. In each of these cases, students focused on Korean comfort women; no one indicated any interest in non-Korean comfort women. In demonstrating more interest in and exclusively making personal connections with Korean comfort women, students cared more about them as Koreans over others.

Caring that: the role of the national government

Students’ national identity mediated their caring that Korean comfort women suffered during and after the war in terms of what “we” and “they” did as nations. That is, students associated themselves with their political entity (Korea before 1945 and South Korea after 1945). For example, students cared that those women suffered during the war because “our nation was weak.” When asked to complete a sentence individually in their own words with a sentence starter, “The comfort women would never have suffered if …,” students agreed that those women would never have suffered if “our” nation was strong enough to protect them. For example, Hyeon said, “If we had kept our people safe, if we had built up our strength [and] had the power to keep ourselves out of those kinds of situations … the comfort women would have had normal lives as someone else's mothers and grandmothers, not as the comfort women.” Along with that, Kyu-jin said, “I can't think about it another way. Because the nation was weak, its neighbor invaded, colonized, and exploited [the weak nation, Korea].”

Also, in talking about who has been responsible for these women's suffering, students emphasized national responsibility. For example, students cared that comfort women survivors have suffered even after the war because the Japanese government did not take its primary responsibility for their suffering during the war by providing “a sincere apology.” Although students were aware that some Japanese Prime Ministers made apologies, because students did not see them as sincere and coherent, they agreed that a sincere apology had never been offered. For example, Jae-hoon said, “The Japanese government officially stated that it will not mention it [will apologize no more after the recent governmental agreement]. I'm aware that long ago, long ago, about three or four decades ago, one Japanese Prime Minister made an apology. I don't remember his name, but I think at least as [because] history does not change, the following [Japanese] Prime Ministers should have had to keep making apologies. And then, to keep remembering, [their] history textbooks should cover it.”

In addition, students cared that those women have been distressed by “our” Korean public's attitudes and traditional norms of women's chastity for decades. Students agreed that those women have suffered from the stigmatizing and silencing by their fellow Koreans. As Song-yi explained:

Our national context in which women's chastity has been highly regarded made it hard for them to talk [about their experience]. It would be very hard for grandmothers to tell [their experience]. So, if the social atmosphere let them speak out about those things [what they experienced] and “what compensation I deserve,” and if human rights were guaranteed and public attitudes were different, it [speaking about their experience] would not be so difficult.

In talking about those women's suffering during and after the war, students demonstrated their passionate moral reactions and judgments to “our” national leaders and government. Students criticized them for the comfort women's suffering during and after the war. For example, they strongly blamed “national traitors” (Gibum) for Japan's colonization of Korea. This referred to pro-Japanese Korean collaborators, who were expected to devote themselves to their nation but contributed to national suffering by pursuing their own self-interests at the expense of “our” national interests (Tae-wan). Students did not seem to defend the colonizer, Japan. Instead, they demonstrated their high moral expectations for and disappointment in “our” Korean leaders and the government. Gibum said, “Without national traitors, it [the comfort women’ suffering] wouldn't have happened. Our national people, first/at least, were our nation's people. It happened because our nation was weak, but I think they [pro-Japanese Korean collaborators] played big roles in keeping Korea colonized for such a long time.” In the same vein, students criticized “our” current government and political leaders for their tepid attitude toward supporting those women even after they broke the silence to demand justice. Hyeon even suspected that the South Korean government keeps the presentation of comfort women brief in history textbooks in order to conceal its incompetence.

Because the South Korean government hasn't properly dealt with it, it would become hard to present its details [in textbooks]. Because if they [textbooks] cover it in detail, its [the government's] incompetence such as the decision that they rashly made at the 1965 treaty between South Korea and Japan can be revealed. Going deep into the study of that, if students started to think about it, the incompetence of the government would come out. [That's why textbooks present it so briefly.]

Students’ reflections on “our” responsibility for “our” comfort women's suffering led them to think about “our” responsibility for others’ suffering: Students cared that “we,” South Koreans, also have responsibility for others’ suffering. For example, groups of students discussed how sincerely “our” government apologized for the South Korean military's sexual victimization of Vietnamese women during the Vietnam War. Although both mentioning it and comparing it with comfort women are very intense controversies, no student rejected the discussions. (These two cases actually differ in significant ways; moreover, no such apology occurred.) In one group, when Song-yi said “In Vietnam, we did [victimized Vietnamese women] as the comfort women [were victimized]. Our military did [victimized] Vietnamese women as the comfort women. But as I know, our nation apologized for that.” In response, Bora argued that it was not enough “because our nation's [South Korean] textbooks don't properly cover it.” Another group also talked about possible perspective differences in the South Korean government's apology as follows. In discussing national responsibility for “our” comfort women and others, students cared that “our” comfort women and others suffered.

Sun-ho:	In reflecting on the pain that our nation left [to the Vietnamese] during the Vietnam War, we are making TV programs like this (a given photo of Korean-Vietnamese in Vietnam).
Eun-bin:	No, it's not.
Yoon-ju:	But they can have different perspectives on that.
Eun-bin:	Hmm, we…
Yoon-ju:	But, Japan believes that they compensated us, but we don't agree. From our perspective…

Caring for: comfort women’ voices

Students cared for comfort women's voices and this was the least nationalist aspect of their understanding. When asked to select pictures that would be used to “explain” comfort women in a mock international conference, all groups of students discussed how they could help those women. Students wanted to help them by caring for their voices—by listening to them, considering them as historical evidence, and making them heard. Caring for comfort women's voices led students to take a victim-centered perspective and apply it to other parts of history in terms of whose voices we hear and whose voices we should hear. In taking this humanitarian perspective, the students seemed to be concerned not only with their ethnic and national communities but also beyond them.

Students considered comfort women as victims of wartime sexual violence, and they cared for these women's voices by listening to what they said about their experience. As an indication of the seriousness with which students regarded their testimony, students used the term “sexual slavery” and distinguished it from other non-sexual violence cases. In one group, students agreed to compare comfort women's experience with slavery in terms of their coerciveness. But they refused to compare it with child labor because they believed it was not “labor” for pay but violence. By describing their suffering as women's suffering and distinguishing it from massacres committed during wars such as the Nanjing Massacre and the Holocaust, students rejected the popular nationalist understanding of comfort women in South Korea, which equates those women's suffering with national suffering and obscures the gendered aspects of the violence.

Hyeon:	[The case of] slavery is definitely required [to compare with comfort women] because the comfort women were sexual slaves. Although we formally use the term, comfort women, [you can use the term] sexual slavery to explicitly illustrate their suffering. It was slavery, but we use the term, comfort women to be considerate of the grandmothers’ feelings.
Gibum:	Yes, basically sexual slavery.
So-yeon:	Because they all were dragged away when they were young, this… (suggesting child labor victims to compare with comfort women).
Hyeon:	Child? But it's labor. … strictly speaking, [it is] not [about] labor (or) exploitation, but violence. (Later, he argued he wanted to challenge the Japanese government's argument that those women worked for pay.)…
Ha-eun:	In photo number 1 (the photo of slavery) there are all men. In many cases, men were used as slaves [for their labor power], for women, from the women's perspective, women were not used as slaves [for their labor power], but for sexual slavery.

Students cared for those women's voices as historical evidence, and they referred to what the survivors said as evidence in talking about the nature of their suffering. For example, students responded that the comfort women survivors’ narratives were the best source for explaining what happened; when it was not available, what the women created based on their firsthand experience, such as a painting, would be a good alternative. Also, when asked to select three pictures that would be used to explain comfort women in a mock international conference, no student demonstrated feeling a lack of either written accounts or Japanese documents among the given pictures. They respected the comfort women survivors’ voices as historical evidence. This contrasts with the popular nationalist approach that has heavily relied on Japanese written documents, which often marginalizes comfort women survivors’ voices (Yang, 1997).

Hyeon:	[I'd like to select] picture 7 [a comfort women survivor's painting]. It would be best if we had one [picture] showing the victims testifying, but because we have only these now, [the painting is] the best source to illustrate [their] suffering.
So-yeon:	Because the grandmother painted it by herself.
Hyeon:	Yes, because she painted it by herself.
Gibum:	Painting can be used for emotion-focused therapy. Because this [painting] best illustrates the grandmothers’ emotions, this is used at museums and other places as a representative image. With this image I think foreigners [in the mock conference] can feel how those women were hurt. So, I want to choose this one.

Students also cared for those women's voices as active social agents. Students appreciated those women's agency in demanding justice, which transformed themselves from passive victims into active activists. Gibum said:

I think the comfort women [survivors] are the strongest and most courageous women. If someone experienced those kinds of things, it must be hard to come out into the world again against our social norms. [This is why] Some even stayed in China [after liberation] to hide themselves and [what happened to them]. But they [comfort women survivors] plucked up their courage to resolve the issue. Although some might criticize them in saying “why are you causing trouble?” when they came out to reveal “I'm not the only victim,” they came out into the world to fight. I think they are the strongest and most courageous women.

In the same vein, students agreed that survivors’ voices should be heard in the process of resolving issues concerning responsibility because “they are the people directly involved in it” (Ji-hee). That is why all students criticized a recent agreement between the South Korean and Japanese governments, “made only by political elites” (Cheol) disregarding comfort women survivors’ voices. In respecting survivors’ agency, students rejected the nationalist understanding and policies in South Korea, based on the belief that a government can represent its victimized citizens (M. Kim & Kashiwagi, 2018; O'Brien, 2000, p. 5).

In caring for those women's voices, students took the victimized women's perspective. This humanitarian perspective seemed to help them understand other victimized women's experience beyond “our” comfort women's. For example, students applied it to another part of history, the Korean “tribute women” to the Mongol Empire. This is very briefly mentioned in government-issued/authorized history textbooks solely as part of national suffering, but students challenged this interpretation. For example, in one group Cheol claimed that “in world history those kinds of things happened all the time” and Jimin tried to justify it in arguing that those women were for “marriage.” Ji-hee, another student in their group, disagreed and matched them with comfort women: “I don't agree [with what Jimin and Cheol said]. That is [conceived] from others’ [outsiders'] perspectives, but from those women's own perspectives, their marriages were forced to some extent. I don't see any difference between being forced into marriages and being forced into sexual slavery.” Another student in the same group, Hye, agreed with Ji-hee and said that because all those women were taken against their will, “I think they are all similar.”

Students also applied their humanitarian perspective to a current sexual violence issue, kijichon women (Korean prostitutes around U.S. military camps in South Korea, which have existed ever since the Korean War), which is not covered in the national history curriculum or history textbooks. Some students reminded their group members of a short story about kijichon women that they learned in their literature class. Both mentioning and matching them with comfort women are very controversial: One professor, who was accused of comparing them with comfort women, was severely criticized by comfort women survivors, the public, and politicians (U. Kim, 2004). In one group, students disagreed about how freely working class women would choose to become prostitutes in comparing the comfort women and kijichon women. When two male students, Gibum and Hyeon, tried to distinguish the two by claiming comfort women were taken against their will but kijichon women were not, two female students, Ha-eun and So-yeon, tried to link kijichon women and comfort women in terms of how working class women were vulnerable to sexual victimization. So-yeon argued “because they didn't have money, they even sold their bodies,” and Ha-eun suggested understanding their circumstances from their own perspective, in saying “You can talk about the social circumstances [to explain why] those women could not help but do it.” In discussing sexual victimization in both past and present worlds, students cared for the voices of victimized women beyond “our” comfort women.

Caring to: sharing responsibility for social change

In caring to make social change, students identified themselves as future citizens of their democratic nation whose political power is both a right and a responsibility. Students shared a sense of victimhood with the comfort women by referring to those women and themselves as victims and potential victims of injustice. Students presented the women as “our nation's grandmothers,” who were victimized by the Japanese military during the war because “our” nation was weak and by the Japanese government and even their own Korean people and government for decades after the war because “our” social norms distressed them and “our” political leaders and government were not competent enough to demand justice. Students also demonstrated their concerns for themselves as Ha-eun described themselves as “potential victims” of injustice “if it is not resolved properly.”

Ha-eun:	I think the comfort women are us.
Interviewer:	Us?
Ha-eun:	Yes. Comfort women['s experience] is history but it is not only history in the past. If it is not resolved properly and if the history is obscured, we can be potential victims.
Interviewer:	When you say “we,” do you mean we, the present generation like yourself?
Ha-eun:	Yes. Because the present is the repeated past [history is repeating itself], although [you] might think this is a bit much, what happened in the past can happen again in the future. Things that don't make sense [absurdity] such as colonization can happen again in the future or we may not notice it even though it's already happening now. This is why the comfort women is something beyond history. It is beyond something “we need to be concerned for it.” Because this is our concern and because we might go through it, we should take this as if it is ours and take responsibility for it. [That's why I] said the comfort women are us.

Also, as Ha-eun demonstrated, students shared responsibility not only for what “we,” as descendants of their national/ethnic community, have done to those women in the past but also what “we” can do for justice in the present world. For example, to share their responsibility students wanted to keep calling the Japanese government to account (Jae-hoon) and change “our” social perception of the comfort women “until they do not feel shame” at being victims of wartime sexual violence (Sun-ho).

In talking about what they can and should do to share responsibility, students aimed to become “strong citizens” in democracy, who have political power to make social changes. According to Sun-ho, Kyu-jin, and Eun-bin, they can and should become “strong citizens,” participating in politics beyond voting, because the views of their political representatives do not always correspond with those of their fellow citizens.

To become “strong citizens,” students emphasized the importance of teaching and learning history. All students strongly criticized the South Korean government's recent effort to publish government-issued history textbooks. Some students responded that these textbooks seemed unlikely to misrepresent comfort women because if they do, neither educators nor the public would accept it (Hyeon and Song-yi). For some other students, the matter was how the government-issued history textbooks will limit students’ understanding of and room to discuss the past. As Sun-ho said:

As I know, currently six high school history textbooks are used. Then, among the six, at least two or three present different perspectives. Then, students can learn different perspectives. Then, if we learned with different textbooks in different schools, if we discussed topics of the Vietnam War or comfort women based on what we learned, in asking questions like, “Our textbook didn't say that. Does your textbook say so?,” we can discuss and find answers, we can reflect on and learn/realize what we didn't know. But because the government-issued history textbooks will unify perspectives and offer only one perspective, if the perspective was wrong, if we learn the wrong perspective and take tests about it, I think it is very shameful.

Regarding historical understanding as a resource to construct democratic citizenship, students cared to make social changes in the present using their understanding of the past.

Discussion

In interviews, students’ affective historical empathy dominated their understanding of comfort women in South Korea—a topic in which a strong nationalist perspective prevails in social and educational discourses. However, in many cases students’ use of affective historical empathy was mediated by their national identity. First, in identifying themselves with Korean comfort women, students cared more about the Korean comfort women and wanted to know more about them. Also, in associating themselves with their nation, students cared that “our” Korean comfort women and others suffered from what “we” and “they” did as nations. Lastly, in sharing responsibility, students cared to make social changes by identifying themselves as future citizens of their nation. The only time that national identity was distanced from students’ affective historical empathy was students’ caring for. In caring for the comfort women survivors’ voices, students took a humanitarian perspective by listening to survivors and applying it to other wartime sexual violence cases in the past and present. This demonstrated that affective historical empathy was not only mediated by national identity but also motivated students to move beyond purely nationalistic concerns.

The emotional aspect of national identity can offer an explanation for the implications of students’ identification. By identifying themselves with “our” nation and “our” national members, people “imagine” a nation; according to Anderson (2006), a nation is “an imagined political community” (p, 6). By “imagined,” he does not mean “unreal,” according to Searle-White (2001), but “he simply means that nations are communities in which people believe there is a connection between them and the other members of that nation, even if they have never actually come into contact with those others. … These connections do not have to be historically ‘true’; they simply need to be psychologically real” (pp. 52–53). In other words, although students’ other multiple identities from their ethnic, gender, community, and religious background can also complicate the connections (Barton, 2012; Barton & McCully, 2005; Cornbleth, 2002; Epstein, 2009; Levy, 2014, 2017), what students “know” about their nation refers to what they “believe or think is true” about their nation's past and present and how they “feel about or evaluate that knowledge” (Cornbleth, 2002, p, 525). For example, Barton and Levstik (2004) note how students they studied in the United States demonstrated their understanding of national history in terms of “how our country became independent, how the Civil War nearly spilt us apart, how we mistreated Native Americans” and evaluated historical significance in terms of how particular people, events, and trends in history served their understanding of “‘who we are’ as a nation” (p. 51).

This emotional attachment to “our” nation and its members mediated the ways in which students in this study made their personal connections to both past and present worlds through affective historical empathy. First, students initiated their personal connection to the past based on their ethnic/national identity. They developed connections between themselves and historical actors, the Korean comfort women, in terms of their shared ethnic/national identity as Korean. In interviews students felt more intense intellectual, emotional, and moral responses to “our nation's grandmothers,” the Korean comfort women. This reminds us of Epstein's studies (1998, 2001, 2009), which demonstrate how students’ ethnic identity, their learning experience about their national history, and their understanding of the past can affect and be affected by one another. As African-American high school students in Epstein's study (1998) constructed their understanding of their national past under influence of their personal race-related experiences, in this study South Korean high school students constructed their understanding of comfort women and steered their learning experience beyond their history classroom as ethnic Koreans.

However, this study's findings are more encouraging because, in caring, students extended their boundaries of “our” history. Students not only cared that Korean comfort women have suffered but also cared that others, such as Vietnamese women, have suffered from what “we” did as a nation. In doing so, as Barton and McCully (2012) suggest, affective historical empathy served to help students engage with both sides of perspectives, the “ours” and “theirs,” of the conflict. Furthermore, students in this study critically reflected on “our” perspective of the conflict in caring. For example, in caring that the Vietnamese women have suffered from what “we” did as a nation, students understood that the Vietnamese can have different perspectives on “our” apology for their suffering by comparing the Vietnamese perspective with “ours”: “They [Vietnamese] can have different perspective on that [“our” apology],” as “Japan believed that they compensated us, but we don't agree.”

In addition, in interviews students extended their connections beyond their ethnic and national boundaries in caring for those women's voices. In listening to Korean comfort women's voices as a way to help them, students linked their understanding of past and present issues in terms of wartime sexual violence. They discussed how comfort women can be compared with other historical and current sexual violence cases such as the “women tribute” to the Mongol Empire, the South Korean military's sexual victimization in the Vietnam War, and Korean prostitutes around U.S. military camps in South Korea. In caring for those women's voices, students discussed issues of the common good beyond their intimate ethnic and national communities from perspectives such as “wartime sexual violence against women” and “human rights.” At the same time, in doing so, students engaged with discussions of controversial issues. Although mentioning these sexual violence cases and matching them with comfort women are intense social controversies in South Korea, when some students brought them up, no one refused to discuss them. They cared about their group members’ different perspectives by accepting the importance of different perspectives, understanding the differences in perspectives, presenting their own reasons for arguments, listening to others’ reasons carefully, and reflecting on their own positions.

Students also linked their understandings of history and citizenship by regarding historical understanding as a resource to construct citizenship and identifying themselves as future citizens of their nation. Students wished that the comfort women had never suffered from sexual violence and social stigma, but because they fully understood it already happened in the past and there is no way to go back, they discussed what they can do in the present world to help stop these women's suffering and achieve the justice they are fighting for. In doing so, students recognized their political power to make social changes as both a right and a responsibility as citizens of their nation.

Implications

This study's findings suggest the potential contribution of affective historical empathy to the development of students’ historical understanding in a way that prepares them for participation in a pluralistic and deliberative democracy. In interviews, students utilized four types of affective historical empathy to construct their understanding of both past and present worlds. In doing so, they found their understanding of history personally meaningful. These personally meaningful historical connections not only encouraged their cognitive understanding of the past world, as demonstrated in other studies (Barton & McCully, 2012; Brooks, 2011, 2014; Kohlmeier, 2006), but also helped them reflect on the common good and be willing to make changes in their present world. Although students initiated their personal connections to “our” ethnic/national historical actors, they extended their boundaries of “our” history in caring what “we” did as a nation and what “we” need to do to promote the common good, human rights and justice. Given that identification with larger social groups grounded in shared historical connections can promote group members’ collective responsibility for the common good (Barton & Levstik, 2004), this study's findings suggest that affective historical empathy can contribute to the development of students’ democratic citizenship.

Also, this study's findings suggest that affective historical empathy can complement the impact of students’ national identity on their historical understanding. Although the sense of attachment to one's nation and its members can attract students’ interest and promote the development of their citizenship, as explained above, it can also hinder the interest of students who feel themselves to be marginalized from “us” (Barton, 2012) and limit the development of students’ citizenship by identifying the nation's past with its present as inherently good, moral, and strong (Barton & Levstik, 2004). However, this study's findings suggest that affective historical empathy can help students extend their boundaries of “our” history beyond their intimate ethnic and national group and use their moral compass for “our” past and present.

Yet, for a better use of affective historical empathy in the history classroom more studies are required. In particular, studies on the ways in which students can engage with their caring beyond their national boundaries are necessary. Although considering citizens’ rights and responsibilities within their national boundaries comes naturally to many in this present world, when students care for the common good and care to make social changes beyond their intimate social groups, we can fulfill the potential of history education to prepare students for citizenship in a participatory, pluralistic, and deliberative democracy.

Conclusions

This study challenges us to think about the place of emotion in history education, aiming at preparing students for democratic civic participation. Although many studies demonstrate that affective historical empathy and national identity can promote students’ historical understanding and democratic citizenship, this study's findings suggest a more complex and encouraging relation. In this study South Korean students’ national identity mediated their historical understanding through their use of affective historical empathy, and conversely, their use of affective historical empathy complemented national identity's possible limitations on their historical understanding by motivating them to move beyond purely nationalistic concerns. By initiating their personal connections to the past as well as extending the historical connections beyond their national boundaries, students’ affective historical connections helped their historical studies be more effective and meaningful. Accordingly, these findings present empirical support for historical empathy's affective dimension, which has often been overlooked in history education, as well as suggest the need for curricular challenges for promoting students’ affective historical connections to both past and present worlds.

Declaration of Competing Interest

None.

Acknowledgment

I am most grateful to Dr. Keith C. Barton for his advice and insightful comments as well as to the teachers who helped me recruit participants and the student who shared their ideas for this study.

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