Faciality of dialogic remembering: A study of Japanese military “comfort women” memory

Face of Kim Hak-sun

Sometimes, a person becomes the face of a historical event. As Gluck (2021: 103) states, if the “comfort women,” ¹ like the Holocaust, have become part of a transnational memory that transcends regions and borders, it all began with Kim Hak-sun (1924–1997). On 14 August 1991, Kim Hak-sun, then 67 years old and living in South Korea, gave the “first” official testimony about her experiences as a comfort woman.

The word “first” requires clarification. Kim Hak-sun was not the first survivor to speak about her experiences. Bae Bong-gi, Shirota Suzuko, Lee Nam-nim, Noh Soo-bok, and Bae Ok-soo had all previously testified, in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet, despite the significance of these testimonies, during South Korea’s authoritarian era (1961–1987), their faces and voices were neither widely remembered nor given societal recognition. Kim Hak-sun, who emerged after democratization, was the first to give a face to the memory of the comfort women. She imbued the signifier “comfort woman” with the meaning of a woman forcibly enslaved at Japanese military comfort stations during World War II, and gave it the face of an angry, elderly woman. It was only 45 years after the end of the war that the issue of comfort women had gained public attention, ignited transnational solidarity, and entered the realm of national commemoration in South Korea.

Soon after Kim Hak-sun’s testimony, another witness, Moon Ok-ju (1924–1996), came forward on 2 December 1991, informing the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (KCWDMSS) that she too was a victim of Japan’s military sexual slavery. She mentioned that she had seen Kim Hak-sun on the television news. Testimonies by other women followed. And this sequence of testimonies from survivors in Korea, China, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Australia—spurred by Kim Hak-sun—illustrates a powerful instance of dialogic remembering. Dialogic remembering views memory as a relational and collaborative process, highlighting its dynamic nature as meaning is continually reshaped through negotiation and tension among differing recollections (Robbe et al., 2025). In the context of comfort women memory, this dialogic process was exemplified by the face of Kim Hak-sun, which served as an impactful impetus, sparking a grassroots-driven, multidirectional dialogue.

First, survivors used their personal memories as a means of intervention to initiate dialogue with the official memory of the comfort women. “Official memory” refers to a mode of remembering through which the state and elites authorize and manage the past in accordance with present power and policy needs, thereby shaping repertoires of legitimation (Olick, 1998: 550). In the case of the comfort women, official memory takes the form of a state- and diplomacy-centered framework that positions colonial women as victims within the perpetrating structure of Japanese imperialism. Kim Hak-sun, angered by the Japanese government’s denial of military involvement in establishing comfort stations, testified and, in doing so, ruptured the denialist strand of memory that had been competitively formed. The moment a recognizable face broke through the wall of official memory, memory ceased to be a contest of national narratives and became a process of dialogue and relationship-building among citizens. Second, dialogical memory exchange occurred among survivors themselves. For example, Moon Ok-ju’s decision to speak out was activated by seeing Kim Hak-sun on television, which reignited her long-suppressed memories. Third, through survivors’ testimonies, the public was able to reframe war memory. Prior to this, comfort women had been depicted as sexual objects through the recollections of male soldiers who had frequented comfort stations (Furuhashi, 2021; Heo, 2021). However, Kim Hak-sun’s testimony—where she recounted her abduction by the Japanese military at the age of 17 and her forced sexual slavery in a Manchurian comfort station—shifted the moral weight of the narrative, forcing the public to become “co-witnesses” or “secondary witnesses of memory” (Assmann, 2006: 265). Fourth, a transnational memory community emerged that sought to prevent the distortion of the comfort women issue by undemocratic historical revisionism while sustaining dialogue with individual perpetrators closely tied to truth-finding. In December 2000, survivors, advocacy groups, Japanese human rights organizations, and international legal experts gathered in Tokyo for the civilian-led International Women’s Tribunal on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery, seeking to confront Japan’s legal responsibilities. During the tribunal, two former Japanese soldiers testified about their involvement in rapes and visits to comfort stations, earning applause for their testimonies (Ikeda, 2020). Thus, the comfort women instance of dialogic remembering expands the potential for transnational solidarity by fostering a continuous dialogue involving diverse actors.

However, as the memory of the comfort women came to be recognized as a matter of national significance in both South Korea and Japan, it also became subject to political control, a tendency that intensified amid the power struggles between conservative and progressive administrations in South Korea, as well as between the two governments. In December 2015, the conservative South Korean administration led a bilateral agreement declaring the comfort women issue to be “finally and irreversibly resolved,” excluding the voices of survivors and civil society, which provoked strong criticism both domestically and internationally. The subsequent progressive administration effectively nullified the agreement and, in a symbolic 2017 move to reframe the issue as a matter of memory rather than diplomacy, designated August 14 as the National Memorial Day for the Comfort Women. Defining a historical event as worthy of commemoration is inherently retrospective and speaks more to the realm of memory than history (Zerubavel, 2003). Yet, this “memory rather than diplomacy” framework lacked a clear path for rectifying the failed diplomatic accord and operated in a way that erased the presence of victims who had accepted the consolation money provided under the 2015 agreement, thereby excluding them from the realm of memory and silencing their voices. This illustrates that when memory operates unilaterally, without responsiveness to the other, it may constrain rather than enable political transformation.

As antagonistic relations between South Korea and Japan deepened and the issue became a site of diplomatic contention, the memory of the comfort women has increasingly taken the form of a monologue of the victims, losing its dialogic engagement with others. This shift occurred as victims’ voices were subsumed into nationalist and diplomatic frameworks, foreclosing opportunities for genuine dialogue. In 2020, a comfort woman survivor stated at a press conference, “Why do you call me a sex slave?” (see Endnote 1), but her words did not expand into dialogue. In addition, a prominent female leader from the KCWDMSS, who had long spearheaded the movement for comfort women, ran for a National Assembly seat in 2020 as a progressive party candidate, using the slogan “The general election is a battle between Korea and Japan.” She opposed the 2015 Japan–South Korea agreement and rejected Japan’s offer of one billion yen in “consolation money,” further highlighting the failures of conservative leadership. Both the emphasis on memory made by South Korea’s progressive administration and the KCWDMSS leader’s campaign slogan illustrate how, as Bull and Hansen (2016) noted, cosmopolitan memory can easily shift into an antagonistic mode in the era of populist nationalism. ²

This study critically examines the limitations of two dominant modes of memory politics—antagonistic and cosmopolitan memory—and draws on Bull and Hansen’s (2016) proposal of agonistic memory, which incorporates dialogic elements, as a politically meaningful alternative. However, it also recognizes that dialogic memory itself is always at risk of collapsing into monologue or being co-opted into antagonistic, power-laden frameworks. This is also intertwined with the diversity of memory translation, the mobility of memory that addresses multiple audiences, and the inherent limits of memory communities (McGregor and Mackie, 2018). To sustain memory as a relational and co-constitutive process, this study emphasizes the importance of facing the other, attending to the ethical tension embedded in faciality as a condition for continued dialogue. “Faciality” refers to the way the face generates meaning and mediates power within social networks, shaping the boundaries between the self, the other, and the community through the intersection of visuality and perception (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; cf. Benson, 2008).

In the context of comfort women memory, dialogic remembering extends beyond the mere documentation of victims’ testimonies; it gains significance insofar as such testimonies acquire meaning through being witnessed and responded to by others. Yet, the voices of survivors have often been instrumentalized or silenced under nationalist and diplomatic agendas, hindering the possibility of sustained dialogue. This study argues that only through ethically charged moments of encounter—where the presence of the other is sensed beyond words and demands a response—can dialogic remembering be genuinely enacted (this resonates with Robbe et al.’s (2025) theorization of dialogic remembering as a method of recalling the past in groups). Building on this relational dimension of faciality, the paper reconsiders the political terrain surrounding comfort women memory and explores the conditions under which the repoliticization of dialogic remembering becomes possible.

Faciality of dialogic remembering

Given that the Comfort Women Memorial Day was established amid power struggles between Korean administrations and the monologization of memory, there is a need to find ways to repoliticize the comfort women memory and the dialogue. Bull and Hansen (2016: 6) argue that in “liquid” modernity, when national identification weakens, cosmopolitan memory modes emerged but often failed to prevent the rise of antagonistic collective memory. Bull et al. (2021) reference cases such as Poland and Bosnia, where cosmopolitanism was absorbed by antagonistic memory. They propose a third approach—an agonistic mode of memory—that is reflective, dialogic, and acknowledges not only individual and collective subjectivity but also civic and political passion. Based on Bakhtin’s (1981, 1984) notion of dialogue, agonistic memory is open and reflective without seeking a definitive conclusion. Crucially, agonistic memory includes multiple voices and perspectives from various historical actors, including perpetrators (Bull et al., 2021; Bull and Hansen, 2016). Despite the potential of agonistic memory based on open dialogue, several questions arise regarding its application to the comfort women issue.

First, does agonistic memory grounded in dialogue not risk being once again overtaken by antagonistic or cosmopolitan modes of memory? Such dynamics are evident in the “memory rather than diplomacy” framework of South Korea’s progressive administration and in the KCWDMSS leader’s anti-Japan campaign slogan. Thus, it is essential to carefully analyze the dialogic context surrounding the initial emergence of comfort women memory in the early 1990s and to explore ethical and political measures to ensure dialogue. Second, while the agonistic mode calls for incorporating the perspective of perpetrators, does a male-dominated society not already hold such perspectives in the case of gendered violence? Beyond the personalization of victims and perpetrators, there is a continued political need to reveal the previously silenced experiences of victims. The term “comfort women” itself originates from the language of the perpetrators. For 45 years, women who had experienced sexual violence were denied the right to articulate their suffering and remained faceless. Kim Hak-sun only became a symbol of victimhood through her face of an elderly woman, desexualized and excluded from male-centered chastity discourses. Transnational feminist solidarity, responding to the voices of the victims, finally enabled the comfort stations to be remembered as places of death and violence rather than pleasure.

In examining the postcolonial case of comfort women memory, I argue that this process does not follow a sequential path through antagonistic, cosmopolitan, or agonistic modes of memory. While acknowledging the potential of agonistic memory, it is crucial to maintain the dialogic remembering that initially catalyzed the comfort women memory. As Robbe et al. (2025) underline, agonistic memory emphasizes the importance of dialogue and the productivity of disagreement as conditions for democratic remembrance. However, they argue that such dialogue still remains limited to a contest between two opposing positions. By conceptualizing the method of “dialogic remembering,” they explore non-binary and relational possibilities in which multiple positions engage, question, intersect, support, or even surpass one another. Dialogue is thus seen not as a mere exchange of utterances but a multilayered process of mutual responsiveness, in which different subjects respond to utterances and reinterpret them within their own contexts (Robbe et al., 2025). The oral testimonies of comfort women spread from below within a deeply patriarchal society, yet this process was far from uniform. Across distinct social positions and mnemonic contexts, diverse emotions and interpretations emerged, reshaping social sensibilities through multilayered waves of remembrance. Early dialogic processes enabled transnational solidarity around comfort women memory. Building on the relational potential of “dialogic remembering” proposed by Robbe et al. (2025), this study emphasizes the concept’s dimension of visual encounter. To this end, it introduces the notion of “faciality” to explore the postcolonial feminist repoliticization of the comfort women memory.

The faciality of dialogic remembering resists the homogenization or erasure that may occur in dialogue while emphasizing the singularity and heterogeneity of each narrative grounded in the responsibility to respond. For testimony to become not merely a transmission of information but an ethical act, the conditions under which the face of the other can be encountered must be secured. Faciality reminds us that the truth of testimony does not stem from logic or factual accuracy, but rather from the alterity of the other who calls for a response (Levinas, 1969). For Levinas (1969), the face is an ethical summons prior to language, the site of an original encounter that opens the relation with the Other. In contrast, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) analyze the face not as a space of ethical encounter but as a semiotic surface where signification and subjectification take place. For them, the face is not a part of the body but a surface on which social codes and power relations are visually inscribed. Yet, this surface is never a closed, mechanical system; it continuously connects with other images and can be deterritorialized as a field of becoming. From this perspective, I reconceptualize the faciality of dialogic remembering as a visual-ethical encounter in which gazes and responses intersect, disrupting the monological gaze of official memory.

Kim Hak-sun’s enraged face exceeds the category of victimhood defined by the name “comfort woman.” It can be read as an ethical and political faciality that confronts the Japanese government’s denial while simultaneously addressing other forgotten victims. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 175), the face that demands resonance and response is inherently political. The faciality of dialogic remembering thus enables analysis of the political emergence of comfort women in the postcolonial context, where colonial residues intersect with decolonial struggles. In the context of Korea–Japan relations, this postcolonial condition reveals that the asymmetrical power relations rooted in the colonial past have not been fully resolved and continue to persist within the contemporary politics of remembrance. Thus, the faciality of dialogic remembering is able to reveal the multilayered and relational dimensions of dialogue that exceed textual representation within this entanglement. In the midst of words chaotically intertwining, faciality serves as a guiding marker for dialogue.

Dialogue in the vernacular

It was only in the early 1990s, following the end of the Cold War and the advent of democratization, that Korean society had fully entered what could be called the “era of memory.” Memories of colonial rule, the Korean War, Cold War divisions, and military dictatorship could only become subjects of memory once they were no longer part of daily life (Kim, 2023). These memories exist on multiple levels. The official memory of comfort women is framed within the binary of victim and perpetrator, focusing on the relationship between colonial Korea and imperial Japan. However, vernacular memories of comfort women are more complex and diverse. Crucially, these two types of memory are not entirely separate but are intertwined. Bodnar (1994) distinguishes between official memory, constructed by culturally dominant groups to build a loyal and unified nation, and vernacular memory, which is fluid, diverse, and constantly reshaped. Confino (1997), however, critiques this binary distinction, arguing that official and vernacular memories are deeply interconnected. He emphasizes the importance of understanding how people internalize national narratives to create personal, everyday, and authentic memories (Confino, 1997: 1401–1402).

In 1990, when the KCWDMSS was established, the comfort women issue was initially framed as a crime without victims. Vernacular memory of comfort women only surfaced after official memory had been established. However, this vernacular memory encapsulates a broader spectrum of lived experiences than the official narrative, which tends to focus primarily on victimhood under colonial rule. For instance, in Kim Hak-sun’s testimony, collected by the KCWDMSS, she recounted not only the violence perpetrated by the Japanese military but also her life after escaping the comfort station. She revealed that a Korean merchant had helped her escape, and after the war, they returned to Korea, lived together, and raised children. Yet, this man was also the one who had secretly entered the comfort station and raped her. Kim endured domestic violence from him throughout her life. She testified,

Though he was called my husband, the suffering I endured living with him was immense. When he called me dirty and accused me of being a prostitute for the soldiers in front of our son, I could only blame my misfortune. (KCWDMSS, 1993: 43)

Kim Hak-sun could only bring herself to testify about her experiences as a comfort woman after her husband and son had passed away, as she could finally become a citizen in her own right, free from the burdens of her personal life. The violence she had endured had been normalized under the guise of family. Comfort women’s memory is embedded within their vernacular memories, which also include other forms of violence that shaped their post-war lives. Women who lived relatively better lives after the war may have chosen not to reveal their experiences as comfort women. Thus, reducing the comfort women issue to a conflict between Korea and Japan oversimplifies the broader dynamics of suffering that Korean society itself perpetuated (Yang, 1997), silencing victims and denying them the ability to become citizens who could freely speak about their experiences.

Kim Hak-sun, who lived in poverty for most of her life, first disclosed her experience as a comfort woman after speaking with Lee Maeng-hee, an atomic bomb survivor she had met through a government-run relief program that provided temporary public employment for low-income individuals (Kim, 2020: 405). Kim Hak-sun reflected, “I harbored much resentment towards Japan, and my life was filled with it as well, so I wanted to tell someone, too” (KCWDMSS, 1993: 44). Her use of the word “too” is particularly revealing. It suggests that the issue of atomic bomb victims, predominantly centered on Japanese survivors, had largely overlooked the 100,000 Korean victims of the same tragedy. In dialogues about the roots of forgotten female victims’ suffering, Kim Hak-sun’s vernacular memory intersected with official memory. The constantly evolving vernacular memory found space within official memory through what Hitchcock (1992) called the “dialogics of the oppressed.”

Kim Hak-sun’s testimony encouraged more survivors to come forward. On September 18, 1991, the KCWDMSS established a victim hotline to collect untold stories. The second to come forward, Moon Ok-ju had been forced into sexual slavery in China and Burma, and after returning to Korea following the war, she worked as a gisaeng (traditional style female entertainer) to support her large family. Though she learned of Kim Hak-sun’s testimony through television, she initially chose not to come forward. However, a longtime patron of the gisaeng house eventually asked her if she had been a comfort woman and encouraged her to share her story. Moon later recalled, “When he recognized that I had been a comfort woman, I felt a deep sense of shame,” to which he responded, “This is a historical issue, not something to be ashamed of” (Morikawa, 2005: 182). After much contemplation, Moon decided to reveal her identity. Of the 17 women who had been taken to the comfort station in Burma with her, only three returned to their hometowns, and Moon Ok-ju was the only one to disclose her identity publicly. Her dialogue with someone who reframed the comfort women issue not as an individual misfortune but as a historical matter helped her internalize the official memory of comfort women and overcome her sense of isolation and oppression.

While Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism has significantly influenced memory studies—primarily by informing analyses of the interplay between collective memory narratives and intercultural exchanges (Olick, 1999; Ushiyama and Baert, 2016; West, 2008, 2010);this study places greater emphasis on the dynamic relationship between self and other. It focuses on the possibility of response that emerges not from full mutual understanding, but from misalignment and asynchronicity, exploring the dialogical tension and the relational process that unfold in those very interstices. For Bakhtin (1981), dialogism is a pluralistic approach to existence that contrasts with monologism, which represents a singular, closed perspective. According to Bakhtin, dialogue is a “living” process in language, occurring between interlocutors and including the listener’s active role (Hitchcock, 1992: 3). In the case of comfort women memory, the “monologue of shame” that victims carried can be transformed into a “dialogue of remembering” through the listener’s interpretation of the events as a “historical issue.” Dialogism, in this context, provides a social intervention that disrupts the “patriarchal monologue” (Bauer, 1988: 66) of victim-blaming and fosters a collective process of remembering.

The life story of Moon Ok-ju is chronicled in Machiko Morikawa’s (2005) book, which includes a chapter titled “This is History,” detailing the circumstances that led to Moon’s testimony. In January 1992, Morikawa invited Moon to Japan, and this became the catalyst for her active involvement in the comfort women solidarity movement. Moon vividly remembered depositing money into a bank account at the comfort station in Burma but did not know how to retrieve it. Morikawa, leveraging her experience of working at the post office, founded the “Association to Demand the Payment of Moon Ok-ju’s Military Postal Savings,” and through her efforts, Moon’s military postal savings passbook was located at the Kumamoto Savings Center in Japan. However, they were informed that her savings could not be paid out due to the 1965 Korea–Japan Claims Agreement, which extinguished individual claims. Undeterred, Morikawa conducted extensive research and published Moon Ok-ju: I Was a “Comfort Woman” for the Burma Front Shield Division in 1996 after 2 years of interviews with Moon Ok-ju and field research in Burma.

For a long time, comfort women survivors had neither a voice nor a face. Many passed away in silence, blaming themselves for their misfortune, while others lived paralyzed by trauma. The few who did speak about their suffering were often helped by interlocutors such as the KCWDMSS, Lee Maeng-hee, Morikawa, and their neighbors. These interlocutors facilitated dialogue, enabling survivors to break the patriarchal monologue and testify about their vernacular memories. Just as a community of victims was formed through the hotline, vernacular memory helped to stabilize official memory. However, vernacular memory also reveals that the official narrative narrowly focuses on victim-perpetrator dynamics within state-centered discourse, overlooking other forms of violence that shaped survivors’ post-war lives. In this context, vernacular memory functions as a postcolonial and feminist methodology, revealing how survivors’ voices challenge the lingering colonial hierarchies and patriarchal norms that shaped both the system of sexual slavery and its remembrance. It emphasizes that the comfort women’s experiences cannot be confined to the comfort stations alone. Facilitated by dialogic exchange, it underscores the relational and situated nature of remembering. Yet, as Kim Seong-Nae has pointed out, while vernacular memory can recover the excluded aspects of official memory and clarify the essence of the events, it does not easily take root as part of official memory (Kim, 2013). Furthermore, vernacular memory is far more diverse and ambiguous, making it susceptible to manipulation, sometimes even to deny the comfort women issue. In this process, the embodied presence of the face-to-face other is erased, and dialogue is severed from its context and appropriated as fragmented text.

Territorialization of faces

After Kim Hak-sun’s testimony, the comfort women issue shifted from being seen as a crime without victims to a crime with victims. However, this shift also intensified the nationalist competition between Korea and Japan. In Korea, “victimhood nationalism” (Lim, 2010) spearheaded by progressive nationalists gained momentum, while in Japan, a conservative revisionist movement emerged, denying the comfort women issue amid the Japanese government’s disregard. Of course, in Japan, a broad civil society group supporting Korean nationalism also formed, while in Korea, a network of right-wing comfort women denialists began to rise. In this climate of antagonistic memory, the debate over the number of victims became a focal point. Victims’ faces were reduced to mere headcounts, and heads cannot serve as spaces for dialogue or resonance.

The number of victims is crucial for revealing the brutality of war, yet it also becomes a target of competition. The victimized country tends to inflate the number, while the perpetrator country seeks to minimize it. Lee Hae-ryeong (2024) asked, “Can the comfort women be counted?” and argued that “the key to the comfort women issue lies in the fact that their lives and deaths were never meant to be counted” (Lee, 2024: 410–411). After Kim Hak-sun’s testimony, 240 comfort women survivors registered with the South Korean government. It is estimated that tens of thousands more remain unregistered. Every time a survivor passes away, the media highlights the remaining number of survivors, focusing on their dwindling numbers rather than their stories.

Yoshimi Yoshiaki once estimated that the number of women forcibly mobilized as comfort women ranged from 50,000 to 200,000 (Yoshimi, 1995). Since then, the figure of 200,000 has been widely circulated by various media outlets, with some inflating the number to 300,000. These inflated figures have become points of contention for historical revisionists who deny the comfort women issue. For instance, the claim that 200,000 Korean women were victimized during the Japanese occupation suggests that nearly every woman in her twenties was taken, an assertion that strains credibility.

Another controversy surrounds questions that nationalist men pose, without any hesitation, to survivors, such as, “How many men were you forced to serve in a day?” In a collection of interviews with Moon Ok-ju, one chapter is titled “One Woman Served 30 to 70 Men Per Day” (Ito, 2017: 157). By focusing on the number of victims and perpetrators, the comfort women issue in Korea, where sexual violence is often viewed through the lens of chastity, is sensationalized and turned into a spectacle. Meanwhile, denialists of the comfort women issue minimize the number of men the victims were forced to serve, with Hata claiming that comfort women served an average of “3.5 men per day, with 4.8 sexual encounters” (Hata, 2022: 506).

The debate over Moon Ok-ju’s savings from the comfort station reflects this competition over numbers as well. Nationalists argue that due to hyperinflation in the occupied territories, her savings would have amounted to about 20 yen, making it practically worthless. They show no interest in Moon Ok-ju’s lifelong efforts to recover her savings. In turn, denialists claim that her savings would be worth 100 million yen today, arguing that she earned more money than the highest-ranking officers in the Japanese military (Hata, 2022: 508–511). Such arguments, rooted in misogyny, ultimately portray comfort women as highly paid prostitutes. With regard to the unclaimed savings of male forced laborers during the colonial period, nationalists consistently emphasize their enormous scale (Kim, 2024b).

This focus on numbers tends to flatten and downplay the broader violence of war. When the three million Japanese soldiers are seen only as perpetrators, we overlook the inherent violence involved in their conscription and training. The key issue is not just the number of women who were victims of sexual violence but understanding the imperial military’s political strategy that sought to shape male subjects by forcing women into sexual slavery for soldiers during wartime (Kim, 2024a). We should ask how we are currently framing the comfort women issue.

Kim Hak-sun wanted to speak about the suffering in her life, but much of the public focused instead on the brutality of the Japanese military. At that moment, the dialogue she had initiated was severed and appropriated as decontextualized text, while her face—representing not only an ethical presence but also a polyphonic subject irreducible to textual capture—was effaced. Estimating the number of victims is important for uncovering historical truth, but we must recognize that these estimates cannot be reduced to definitive numbers. As Rancière (2012) argues, those perceived as being outside the public sphere—“those who have no part”—are often seen as beings who can only cry out, rather than speak meaningfully (p. 56). Continually reducing survivors to statistics through the lens of official memory is a form of depoliticization that erases their faces. We must ask: where is the space in which their voices can be fully heard and responded to?

In the early 1990s, seeds of dialogue regarding the memory of comfort women began to sprout within listening communities (KCWDMSS, 1993). However, as official memory became stabilized, their words were often dismissed as mere outcries, and their faces reduced to numbers, turning their voices into monologues. The debate over numbers in the comfort women issue ultimately transforms the victims’ memories and their polyphonic voices into monologues, reinforcing antagonisms and antagonistic memories. According to Bakhtin (1981), the subject of a monologue exists as a complete, unchanging entity, denying the unique otherness of the interlocutor and existing within a world dominated by a single perspective and voice. Much like the images of heroes and perpetrators, the image of the victim is not the result of individual actions but is constructed by the public (Giesen and Eisenstadt, 2004: 67). This public construction of the victim’s image, reinforced by monologism and numerical fixation, illustrates how the current memory of comfort women has become standardized and objectified. The statues of comfort women erected worldwide exemplify this tendency by transforming living memories into fixed symbols.

While survivors are gradually passing away, monuments symbolizing them are spreading across the globe. On 24 December 2011, to commemorate the 1000th Wednesday Demonstration ³ organized by the KCWDMSS, the first “Girl Statue of Peace” honoring the comfort women was erected in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. This statue symbolizes the immortality of the victims and causes discomfort to the Japanese government. Since its installation, the Japanese government has publicly criticized the statue and, in the 2015 Korea–Japan agreement on the comfort women issue, requested its removal, citing the need to maintain the dignity and security of diplomatic facilities. Following the 2015 agreement, youth and student activists who opposed the deal set up tents next to the statue, becoming its “guardians.” On occasion, conservative right-wing groups directly attacked the statue, necessitating continued protection efforts. They regarded it not as a memorial to be respected but as a symbol that shamed the nation and perpetuated what they considered a fabricated narrative of victimization. Over time, the statue became a “securitized space of commemoration” under police surveillance (Shim, 2023: 669). On the other hand, feminists have raised a concern that the statue, depicting a vulnerable young girl, inadvertently invites attacks from conservative forces (Heo, 2021). Critics have also pointed out that the short hair of the girl in the statue does not accurately reflect the social class or realities of the comfort women victims. However, in response to these criticisms, the creators of the statue retorted, “Are you suggesting we create the statue in the image of a prostitute, like the parody statues designed by Japanese revisionists?” (Kim and Kim, 2016: 207). The image of the statue was chosen as a direct counter to the stereotype of prostitutes. The face of the statue was reportedly modeled after the daughter of the creators.

Since the installation of the first “Girl Statue of Peace,” replicas have been erected globally as part of the effort to commemorate comfort women. ⁴ More than 100 replicas have been installed worldwide, earning the statue the label of a “traveling monument” (Mladenova, 2022: 16). Nonetheless, the fact that all of the statues’ faces—whether sitting or standing—are identical raises concerns from the perspective of dialogic remembering. The uniformity of the faces risks homogenizing the polyphonic narratives of the victims. Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 171) understand the face not as a mere object of the gaze, but as an expressive machine composed through an arrangement of signs, redundancy, and subjectification. The face is not a fixed form, but a device through which layers of social codes and meanings overlap to constitute the subject. Crucially, it also functions as a site of encounter, demanding empathy and resonance through its relation to the face of the other. However, the series of identical statues fails to embody this multilayered faciality constituted through such arrangements, and, as a result, it cannot capture the multiplicity and overlapping textures of vernacular memory. There has been little opportunity to question why the statues take the form of young girls, why they differ from the actual appearance of the women at the time, or how this form of representation might need to evolve in remembering the victims. Currently, they hold significance primarily through their sheer number. The movement to install statues both domestically and abroad is viewed as an effort to protect them—and the memory of comfort women in general—from right-wing historical revisionists and to territorialize the unified face of the statues. As long as the statues remain focused on proliferating alongside antagonistic memory, the locations where statues are erected become symbolic battlegrounds in a territorial struggle.

Memory without dialogue becomes unidirectional and appropriative. In particular, during the wave of global reckoning with colonial pasts, even cosmopolitan forms of memory can become entangled with nationalism. The powerful voices of the victims, such as the statement “I can’t live with this resentment. Give me back my youth,” broke the silence, yet the territorialized face hindered the development of dialogic remembering. The comfort women, replicated in hundreds of statues with identical faces, came to be seen as a single symbolic figure, much like the statue in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. What should the common stage look like when the “other” neither understands nor faces one’s words? Rancière (2012) argued that politics arises through dissensus over the existence and qualifications of those who appear on this common stage. From the perspective of dialogic remembering, the common stage should not be a space for monologized testimonies and homogenized faces but a carnival of deterritorialized faces, created through dialogue. For dialogic remembering to operate, the face of the Other must be safeguarded as a site of relational encounter and a locus of response that resists total textualization.

A carnival of deterritorialized faces

Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism stems from his concept of the carnival (Lachmann et al., 1988; Elliot, 1999). At a carnival, all the taboos and restrictions that typically constrain ordinary life are temporarily lifted, with humor and irreverence replacing solemnity. Moreover, a collective, populist culture emerges, where the distinction between performers and audience dissolves (Bakhtin, 1981, 1984) Through this lens, Bakhtin discovered the principle of coexistence between dramatically opposing forces. For Bakhtin, dialogism signifies the freedom and openness of the carnival, where interaction flourishes in a space filled with discord.

The comfort women issue faced significant delays in resolution, during which Japan’s Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi established the Asian Women’s Fund (AWF) in 1995. The AWF aimed to provide financial and medical support to survivors in five countries—South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, the Netherlands, and Indonesia—using donations collected from Japanese citizens. However, many civil society organizations and survivors rejected the AWF, arguing that it did not constitute official, state-led reparations. Opposition was particularly strong in South Korea and Taiwan, in contrast to the position of Filipino support organizations, which emphasized the importance of respecting victims’ life choices even when they did not align with the organizations’ own stance (Tsuchino, 2023: 316). The KCWDMSS labeled the AWF as “consolation money,” dissuading survivors from accepting it (Yamashita, 2024: 76). In reality, the AWF’s “Dialogue Team” was unable to find in Korea an appropriate counterpart with whom to engage in dialogue (Tsuchino, 2023: 317). From the perspective of dialogic remembering, this suggests that the Korean advocacy groups at the time appropriated the dialogue in a way that effectively shut it down, rather than recognizing the comfort women as subjects of memory.

In January 1997, media outlets reported that some Korean survivors had independently accepted the AWF, further deepening divisions both among survivors and between survivors and activists. The AWF was criticized as “dirty money” (Kim, 2004: 126–128), a judgment that weighed even more harshly on the comfort women, who had already been stigmatized as prostitutes by comfort women denialists. There were other exclusionary measures as well. In 1998, the South Korean government announced that a new subsidy would only be provided to survivors who had not accepted the AWF. In addition, the names of survivors who accepted the AWF were omitted from the Ground of Memory monument, which honors comfort women. The activists who worked with AWF beneficiaries were also marginalized. A notable case is that of Park Soo-nam, a second-generation Korean-Japanese filmmaker who directed the documentary Silence. Park was accused of persuading survivors to accept the AWF and was subsequently, in 1998, banned from entering South Korea (Jung, 2022). Despite her consistent claims that she had opposed the AWF, Park’s assertions were dismissed. Survivors and activists who took approaches differing from the mainstream activist groups, or who criticized them, were often labeled as “fake” or “pro-Japanese.” What could have been formalized through dialogic remembering was transformed into a territorialized, antagonistic memory driven by nationalism.

Just as later depictions of Jesus transformed him into a middle-aged white European man (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 176), a standardized facial image of comfort women victims was constructed and used as a measuring stick for all experiences and contexts. The surviving victims who attend the Wednesday Demonstrations sit next to the “Girl Statue of Peace,” a symbolic representation of the comfort women issue. In this linear arrangement, those who oppose the support groups are placed farthest from the statue or rendered invisible. Dialogue cannot take root in the soil of monologue (Bakhtin, 1984: 176). Because comfort women encompass a wide range of experiences, dismantling the homogenized face is a prerequisite for genuine dialogue. By dismantling the face, one can imagine new combinations that connect with the landscape and other expressions, liberating them from their codes (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 189).

In Park Soo-nam’s Silence, we encounter the diverse faces of victims in dialogue. After years of filming, the documentary was completed in 2017 and covers the mid-1990s activities of 15 members of the now largely forgotten “Comfort Women Victims’ Association.” In the film, survivors protest in bustling Japanese urban areas, criticizing the AWF’s execution. Maria Rosa Henson, a victim from the Philippines, delivers speeches, while Moon Ok-ju plays a traditional instrument. Together, they create a “listening session,” sharing their stories with a sympathetic Japanese audience. The film captures them visiting the AWF office, presenting their demands, and questioning why a private fund was established instead of official compensation. The survivors also spoke about ongoing health issues caused by diseases contracted at the comfort stations and as a result of their experiences there, leading to the AWF’s final inclusion of medical expense support in its regulations. A caption at the end of the film notes that Moon Ok-ju accepted the AWF after learning of the medical support. However, these stories of survivors who had engaged in dialogue with the AWF remained largely unknown. Yet, the survivors left a message in the film: “Regardless of accepting the AWF, we will continue to state Japan’s responsibility for the comfort women issue.” This scene can be read as a moment that transcends the grand discourse of state responsibility and the moral hierarchy of victimhood narratives, as the victims, despite having made different choices, come together as “we” to sustain dialogue and relational ties. They also appear as agents who engage in conversation with the AWF, directly questioning the nature of the fund and the structure through which the state evades responsibility. Here, the faciality of dialogic remembering emerges not as a matter of consensus or shared position, but as a relational and dialogical act of seeing and speaking that acknowledges difference.

The KCWDMSS and the South Korean government did not consider the diverse perspectives and multifaceted identities of the victims. The “Comfort Women Victims’ Association” disbanded in 1998 due to pressure from both the Japanese government and South Korean support groups. In the narration of Silence, Park Soo-nam remarks that the victims fell into a new silence and isolation. The title of the film is therefore significant, implying that the era of silence could return through the appropriation of dialogue and the territorialization of faces. At the same time, silence should not be understood as a fixed state but as a mode shaped and enacted within specific contexts and conditions (cf. Yang, 2008). The film presents silence not as a state of rupture but as a visual medium regenerating relations through the victims’ faces and voices. The faciality of dialogic remembering thus operates as a visual act that returns the gaze to the audience, transforming memory into a shared relation with the viewer. Park also presents scenes in which the victims continue to engage in dialogue with activists, audiences, and citizens, thereby creating spaces of conversation. One victim earnestly asked the audience during a “listening session” in Japan to buy dried seaweed to cover her travel expenses. The victims in the film do not delegate judgment to others but take charge of their own activities. As Grunebaum (2011: 59) explains, testimony is a social act through which the practice of human community is restored via language, sustaining or recovering faith in sociability. The streets of Japan and the stages of these “listening sessions” serve as generative squares where the victims protest and share their experiences. Bakhtin (1984: 291–292) stated that the square is the center of everything “unofficial,” and it is here that the women engage in dialogue with their memories. This process of dialogic remembering creates an open, non-definitive, and future-oriented carnival of faces.

Silence includes a scene where Moon Ok-ju recalls an incident in which she killed a soldier who had threatened her with a knife at a comfort station in Rangoon. She was acquitted at the time, as it was considered self-defense. However, at the end of the story in the film, Moon suddenly recites the Oath of Imperial Subjects in Japanese. This oath, part of the 1937 colonial policy, was imposed by the Japanese Governor-General of Korea, forcing subjects to pledge loyalty to the Emperor. ⁵ Moon recounts asking the soldier, “Was that knife given to you by His Majesty the Emperor to kill a fellow subject?” The phrase “fellow subject” is significant because the women were sent to comfort stations or were not they allowed to claim their savings precisely because they were not considered fellow subjects; it is because they were not fellow subjects that the soldier threatened Moon with a knife. Yet, the women believed they were fellow subjects, reciting the oath of loyalty to the emperor. By reciting the oath in Japanese, Moon questions the very source of her suffering. Another survivor in the film also recites the oath, stating, “They took us, saying they would treat us better than Japanese citizens.”

I argue that the abrupt dissonance in the film’s scenes where those asserting colonial victimhood recite the Oath of Imperial Subjects in Japanese is central to the process of dialogic remembering. In Silence, the survivors wear traditional Korean dresses while reciting the oath in Japanese, engaging in dialogue with both the audience and AWF officials. Even as they point out the limitations of the AWF, their acceptance of the fund is part of the dialogic process of remembering. Reciting the oath while recalling the memory of killing the Japanese soldier, and at the same time resisting colonialism, creates a polyphonic stage of dialogue, forming a carnivalesque scene played out in the square of resistance (Bakhtin, 1984: 453). The testimonies of the comfort women are composed of dissonant utterances that question what it means to endure inhuman suffering as human beings, to assert oneself as a fellow subject despite having lived as a sex slave, and to ask how such experiences can be compensated. Yang (2008) emphasizes that the ruptures and absences in testimony are themselves structural products of colonial violence and forced mobilization, and introduces the notion of a “map of memory” as an analytic framework to show how the language of the “unspeakable” emerges under such conditions. Such dialogue does not aim at reaching harmonious consensus or a shared truth, but rather exceeds the text of testimony, confronting the traces and boundaries left by silences, absences, and the unspeakable. The carnivalesque nature of this dialogue resists reduction to a singular narrative of victimhood. It emerges through conflicting, asynchronous, and mutually exclusive statements, as it intersects with multiple voices—those of governments, legal systems, activist groups, media, and civil society.

The disbandment of the Comfort Women Victims’ Association and the appropriation of survivors’ testimonies as if they were evidence of falsehood exemplify how the space of dialogue has been hijacked or suppressed by political agendas and historical revisionism. In such scenes of dialogic remembering, where a survivor recites the imperial subject narrative taught during the colonial period, faciality does not remain a mere symbolic representation. Rather, it exposes the unpredictability and surplus inherent in dialogue, functioning as an ethical condition that mediates the production of multilayered memories. In Silence, the victims are not mere objects of a one-sided gaze. They criticize the AWF, accept the fund, and seek support through ongoing interactions with the public. The victims portrayed by the director, who was banned from entering South Korea, differ significantly from the familiar image of the “Girl Statue of Peace.” Through their deterritorialized faces and the process of dialogic remembering, the victims in the film reveal their multidimensional identities. In other words, deterritorialized faciality does not reproduce pre-given identities but reveals a continuous process of meaning-making and relational reconfiguration through face-to-face dialogue. Faciality functions as a visual, ethical, and political device that resists the pressure of homogenization and preserves the presence of the face-to-face Other from being erased. Thus, the faciality of dialogic remembering operates as a political possibility that sustains the relational dimension of dialogue by overcoming the unpredictability and excess inherent in acts of dialogue through the visuality of the gaze.

Conclusion

This study critically examines the potential and limitations of applying agonistic memory, grounded in open dialogue, to the comfort women issue, identifying the political and ethical conditions necessary to ensure dialogic remembering and to accommodate the victims’ multifaceted experiences. For 45 years, comfort women remained faceless within South Korea’s and transnational collective memory, but through the mediation of their faces, they began to emerge in the public sphere. In the early stages, these survivors engaged in dialogue with empathetic audiences, allowing their diverse vernacular memories to connect with official memory. However, as nationalist competition between South Korea and Japan over the comfort women issue intensified in the 2010s, survivors were reduced to mere statistics, and their faces were territorialized, counted only as headcounts. They were perceived not as individuals capable of speech but as figures who could only cry, while statues of a young girl spread globally as part of territorial expansion efforts. This demonstrates the urgent need to repoliticize both dialogue and memory.

Memory is always shaped and elevated through dialogue with others; yet, maintaining an environment that supports polyphonic and open dialogue remains challenging. To explore this potential, this article’s last section references scenes from Park Soo-nam’s documentary Silence. In the film, survivors create a polyphonic space for dialogue, simultaneously reciting oaths of loyalty to the emperor while protesting colonialism. The drive to seek a future through dialogic remembering is realized through deterritorialized faces, paradoxically enabling survivors to both challenge and accept the AWF. Faciality operates as a face-to-face and relational dimension of memory that exceeds verbal narration, opening up the potential for multidirectional dialogue. This study acknowledges the relational dimension of Bull and Hansen’s theory of agonistic memory while focusing on the visual stimuli and responsive possibilities that sustain dialogue through the faciality of dialogic remembering. Through scenes from a documentary film in which comfort women survivors use the language of the colonial period to articulate decolonization, the study highlights the postcolonial potential of dialogic remembering that exceeds the textual realm. By securing diverse forms of faciality and deconstructing imposed uniformity, this article opens up feminist possibilities to illuminate the dissonant dynamics inherent in dialogue. The carnival of deterritorialized faces is inextricably linked to the resistant practices of postcolonial feminism. Ultimately, these efforts align with a political project that seeks to liberate, rather than homogenize, the victims.