A Gesture Life Chang-Rae Lee Summary

A war crime is an act that constitutes a serious violation of the law of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility. Examples of war crimes include intentionally killing civilians or prisoners, torture, destroying civilian property, taking hostages, perfidy, rape, using child soldiers, pillaging, declaring that no quarter will be given, and using weapons that cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering. The concept of war crimes began to emerge during the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century when the body of customary international law applicable to warfare between sovereign states was codified. Chang-rae Lee is a Korean American novelist and a professor of creative writing at Stanford University.
Like other Asian American authors, Lee explores issues central to the Asian American experience: the legacy of the past, the encounter of diverse cultures, the challenges of racism and discrimination, and exclusion, dreams achieved and dreams deferred.
Since the publication of Chang-rae Lee‘s A Gesture Life in 1999, critical attention has been paid to issues of Asian American studies, such as the problems of searching for identity and esteem in a non-native environment, the collisions between cultures, and the diasporic experiences of Asian Americans. But this paper focuses on the work‘s exemplary exploration of war crimes. To put it differently, it situates A Gesture Life within the huge body of war literature, particularly literature that has revisited the experiences of the Second World War. A Gesture Life not only presents modern immigrant problems that often trouble Lee‘s characters, it also demonstrates an unfamiliar side about war crimes: how a war criminal looks at his history and how this experience influences his whole
life. The term ‘comfort women’ is a euphemism for women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II. Of the estimated 200,000 women that were forced into this form of prostitution, approximately 80 per cent were Korean since, at this point in time, Korea was a Japanese colony. Additionally, soldiers indicated that, next to Japanese women, they preferred Korean women. In 1932, after the big intergovernmental problem of the mass rape in Shanghai, these stations were established in order to enhance the morale of Japanese soldiers and protect the local public from rape (Yoshimi, 1995). Japan began drafting Korean women from around 1937 when “its army invaded China and the soldiers raped and murdered tens of thousands of Chinese women in Nanjing” (Yoshimi, 1995). At that time, the Japanese military had limited access to Japanese comfort women who were essentially former prostitutes and most of whom had been infected with venereal diseases. Thus, the military leadership suggested that the government recruit unmarried and young Korean women: “Japan began an active assimilation process, which included the ‘Pledge of the Imperial Subjects’ hoisting of the Japanese national flag, worship of the emperor, and attendance at Shinto ceremonies” (Yoshimi, 1995). Soldiers viewed these Korean women as gifts from the emperor and believed that if they had sex with a comfort woman they would be safe in war. In Japan, this atrocity turned up in memoirs but was seldom regarded as a criminal act. Even Japanese feminists regarded “the plight of comfort women [as] just one more example of how ‘women’ were victimized in war. The generic portrayal in Japanese recollections turns a blind eye to the specificity of comfort women’s victimization in terms of gender, ethnicity and class” (Yoshiaki, 1995). For years, the surviving comfort women were silent about this atrocity and were relegated to the status of a minor aspect of the Second World War. However, since 1991, many of the women decided to break their silence and speak out about this gross human rights violation. They demanded reparations combined with a legal apology – neither of which they received. Although a series of lawsuits have been put forth against the Japanese government, none of them have been successful and the Japanese government is still unwilling to take full responsibility, let alone offer a formal legitimate apology. Official apologies ultimately move towards social justice by drawing on the rhetoric of truth and empathy and without them, marginalization is furthered. Thus, the discourse surrounding official Japanese government statements with regards to ‘comfort women’ has reinscribed and reproduced their marginalization.
There are three primary purposes the Japanese hoped to achieve by establishing comfort stations. The first was to enhance the moral of the Japanese soldiers. As the war continued, soldiers “began to lose their fighting spirit, which had grave consequences for their psychological state and caused many difficulties in managing occupied territories. The authorities saw the sexual comfort facilities as a means of reducing these problems” (Howard, 1995). The second purpose was to protect soldiers from venereal infections, a widespread problem amongst soldiers. Thus, soldiers were required to only use the stations established specifically for them. Furthermore, women stationed to comfort soldiers were required to complete regular check-ups and were often let go of if they showed signs of a venereal infection. The last and most direct reason for the implementation of these stations was to prevent mass rape. Soldiers frequently plundered areas and destroyed areas while raping women and “rape, in particular, tended to provoke strong anti-Japanese local feeling” (Howard, 1995). These women were most often recruited under the impression that they would be given a high-paying job such as a nurse or teacher, or they were kidnapped or sold by their families who could not afford them (Yoshimi, 1995). An American study emphasizes that comfort women were found essentially everywhere it was necessary for the Japanese military to fight. Within only the first few pages of the novel, we obtain valuable information about Franklin Hata: he is Japanese and ran a medical supply store in a beautiful suburban town called Bedley Run.
Now he is retired from his business, the store has been sold, and he contently lives in a grand house that is commercially valuable. He has a financially secure life. He is very friendly, very nice, and people all know him and like him. To put it shortly, everything seems to be perfect. Hata‘s self-delusional narration is a more remarkable issue when he describes his relationship with K. A comfort woman, a sexual slave of Japanese military, K also suffers from the tyranny of Hata‘s subjective narrative. Her pain is downplayed. Her words are twisted. Her actions are constantly watched and judged by Hata, who manipulates the image of the woman to his own
wish. Hata wants to present K as his love interest. Thus, the passages about his interaction with K have been shaped into a love affair and colored with romantic elements. For example, K is first introduced into Hata‘s narration as ― “the only one of them who gazed directly at me” (182). The description suggests there is a special link generating between the woman and the narrator. Hata defines his relationship with K as romantic one. He is assigned by his commander to watch K closely to prevent her from committing suicide. In other words, he is practicing the military discipline over her. But Hata apparently does not want to regard their relationship as oppressive. He calls it ― “an initial date, like any two university students” (248).