Journal Entry By Kim Pongsuk

In a space of faster and easier global interaction in the “modern era,” the presence of “the other” becomes more and more important to the discourse of the nation. In East Asia, the Chinese way of thought had been the centre of both Korea and Japan for much of history. However, because of an increased amount of foreign interaction, one important goal for many nations was to establish themselves as an independent country in the world. One task of this was through the establishment of a national identity as a symbol of uniformity and consolidation. In Japan’s days as an Empire, their status nevertheless relied on the inclusions and exclusions of “types” of people such as intellectuals, women, and colonial subjects. Through these categories of

Journal entries and stories of comfort women also reveal the contradictions in an attempt to include colonial women in the nation. In a journal entry by Kim Pongsuk, she claimed that “the Japanese told us that we would serve the Emperor and the great cause of the Japanese empire by becoming nurses and taking care of the Imperial Japanese soldiers.” Many narratives of colonial peoples give off the impression of an evil Japanese empire coercing colonial subjects into “serving the Emperor,” as if denoting the fact that the Emperor, in turn, was working for their interests. When these narratives are presented along post-war history and the Japanese state refusing to apologize for manipulating Korean women as comfort women, then there is often emphasis on vilifying the Japanese empire. In other words, the common narrative has been that colonial women were “included” through manipulation, yet “excluded” simply because the burden was put onto the “others,” as Japanese women did not have the same expectations. In observing the role of domestic women, however, it is also evident that they also faced exclusion from national identity. Many writers of the Meiji era like Okuma and Fukuzawa Yukichi excluded any mention of women from their writing. Okuma and Fukuzawa’s “writing out” of the role of women, by not even taking the time to acknowledge their presence, reveals how little

We do not have the big picture in mind.’” In another, the Japanese owner of a shop protected his employees from the forced military draft. Stories like this reveal the contradictions among Japanese themselves that create unevenness in national identity. Nevertheless, as important as it was to create an inclusion of the peripheries in the creation of a national identity, the difficulties in applying inclusion ultimately reinforced the discourse of exclusion, thus reinforcing the difficulties in narrating and applying national