The 2023 AAS-in-Asia conference was held at Kyungpook National University in Daegu, South Korea under the theme of “Memory, Preservation, and Documentation.” Before presenting my research on the mediatization of transnational memories of the Japanese Empire at the conference, I was able to visit four museums of military sexual slavery in Korea with a Korea Institute Graduate Summer Research Travel Grant.
The four museums were the War and Women’s Human Rights Museum in Seoul, the House of Sharing and Museum of Sexual Slavery by the Japanese Army in Gwangju, the History Hall for the Korean People and Women in Busan, and the Museum of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan in Daegu. They all belong to a transnational network of archives run by non-profit organizations in Japan, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, and South Korea documenting military sexual slavery by Japan from Palau to Mongolia. I was first and foremost intrigued by the persistent existence of a physical archival network that counterintuitively refuses digitization in the information age. I was then impressed by how South Korea has the greatest number of these exhibitions and wanted to know more about their curatorial practices of memory. In the South Korean context, how do these museums lay claims to truthfulness against both the postcolonial nationalism prohibiting the history of the former comfort women from being known and the postmodernist view that history is simply constructed so no truth to be known?
It turns out that the greatest difference between these Korean museums and their Japanese counterpart is the ingenious use of compact space aided by media technology. While the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace in Tokyo is mainly an archive, the museums in South Korea felt more like multimedia installation art. In the museum in Daegu, there is even a VR section where visitors can interact with the victims’ belongings on the table, turn the clock, console the survivors by touching them from their heads, and build a flower bridge for them to heaven. This VR experience is offered in Korean, English, and Japanese. I am currently writing a paper on immersive media and will take this case as an example to discuss the controversial use of VR for empathy generation. While VR experiences are fun and increasingly common in art and cultural history museums, the use of “virtuous VR” in heavy topics such as racism and refugee issues has generated a lot of debate (see Lisa Nakamura’s article “Feeling Good About Feeling Bad”). My experience at the Museum of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan in Daegu will enable me to join this conversation to contemplate the use of digitally mediated compassion in historical claims, political activism, and memory preservation.