n the wake of the wartime experience of sexual slavery for the
Japanese military during the Asia-Pacific War (1930-45), Korean
survivors lived under great pressure not to speak about what had
happened to them. These sexual slaves were known as "comfort
women," and this book brings us into the lives of three of them:
Pak Duri, Mun Pilgi, and Bae Chunhui. Over the course of seven
years, author Joshua Pilzer worked with these now-elderly women,
living alongside of them, smoking with them, eating with them,
singing and playing with them, documenting and trying to understand
their worlds of song. Hearts of Pine focuses on the selves and
social lives that these three women cultivated through song. During
four decades of post-war public secrecy about the comfort women
system, song served for these women as both a private and a public
means of coping with their trauma - each used song in a different
way to reckon with their experiences and to forge a new sense of
self. In the 1990s a nationalist movement arose in South Korea to
seek redress from the Japanese government and to tend to the
previously-shunned comfort women survivors in their old age.
Suddenly these women, and many others like them, found themselves
pulled from the margins of society and thrust into the very center
of the public cultural spotlight. Appearing on television and radio
as well as at political events and protest rallies, the "comfort
women grandmothers" collectively functioned as an emblem of the
horrors Japan inflicted on long "enslaved" Korea - a Korea that had
now overcome Japanese domination. But while the women were to stand
forward as symbols of Korea's triumph over metaphorical
enslavement, they were still not enabled to speak of the details of
their own actual enslavement, as these horrors remained too
disturbing for the public to tolerate - the public did not want to
hear about what the comfort women had suffered, only that they had,
like Korea herself, survived. Yet in the face of the selective
interests and forces of the public cultural imagination, and
directly into the media spotlights of South Korean public culture
itself, all three of these women continued to use song as a means
of expressing publicly that which they were not supposed to talk
about. Through the intimate and tenderly crafted portraits of three
off-beat old women in a South Korean old age home (who made routine
appearances on national television and radio), Hearts of Pine
addresses basic questions about the power of music vis-a-vis other
forms of social expression, illuminates the history of Korean music
in the twentieth century, and tells a new history of the "comfort
women" system and postwar South Korean public culture.
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