I will also be posting on the lecture I went to in March "Songs of the Korean Comfort Women." I attended this lecture because I was unable to attend the screening of the Vincent Chin film. I thought this lecture was really interesting because of the approach the man (I forget his name) took on an issue that can easily be looked at through the lenses of “oh these poor women who had such a hard time and I feel really bad.” I thought that was what the lecture was going to be, but to my surprise, the approach of studying the songs sung and written by the Korean Comfort Women was an innovative approach and really pretty interesting. The songs were more a means of coping, especially the societal ramifications of returning to Korea after being a comfort woman. It was never good for a woman to come back after being a comfort woman, and they were basically social outcasts if they talked/admitted to what had happened to them during the war.

Throughout the presentation of his research, I could get more and more of the connection he had with the women in the shared house in Korea. This is a house where some of the comfort women live together. The photos and video really showed just how invested he was in not treating these women as tools in his research but researching through building close relationships with these women. I thought the content of the presentation was really good and I really like the approach it had taken. It wasn’t presented in a way where we should feel sorry for the women, but the songs were a means of empowering the women and allowing them to find a voice to talk about what had really gone on for them in that experience, especially after having to silence that after returning to Korea.