Hearing the Voices of "Comfort Women": Confronting Historical Trauma in Korean Children's Literature

Abstract

During the period of Japanese colonization (1910-1945), especially during World War II, thousands of young Korean girls were forced to work as sex slaves in so-called 'comfort stations'. The silenced voices of Korean girls who were victimized and abused in this way have recently become an important topic in Korean children's books. This paper examines attempts to break that silence and to give voice to the young Korean victims of this atrocity in Korean children's literature. The teenage girls in these picture books and novels describe the trauma of their forced journeys, their systematic abuse and the difficulties they faced reintegrating into society afterwards. In this article, the concepts of dark secrets and therapeutic, authoritative, and critical voices are used to examine literature which confronts historical trauma and depicts the violation of childhood.