There’s a scene in Song of the Reed (蘆葦之歌) where an octogenarian with perfectly permed hair hunches into her microphone and asks the audience in a soft-spoken manner why the Japanese government hasn’t apologized to her. She is speaking in Hoklo (more commonly known as Taiwanese) to a predominantly Japanese audience at a conference in Tokyo, and by now, her voice is trembling.
A lady in a shapeless-looking suit translates this to Japanese, as melancholic music starts playing in the background. The scene then shifts to a Japanese woman working for a Tokyo-based group that lobbies on behalf of comfort women discussing the horrors that Taiwanese women endured during World War II, before shifting back to the old lady being helped off stage. It is a heartfelt, almost heartbreaking, scene.
And that is precisely the goal of the director, Wu Hsiu-ching (吳秀菁). Wu says over lunch near National Taiwan University that she wished to make a documentary where the audience could easily relate to the subjects.
Photo courtesy of Wu Hsiu-ching
Despite the language barrier — there are no English subtitles — her message of empathy shines through.
“I want viewers to watch the film and see the old women not merely as ‘comfort women’ or as part of a national discourse, but as human beings,” Wu says.
FORGIVE, NOT FORGET
Photo courtesy of Wu Hsiu-ching
A few years ago, a friend of Wu’s approached her to ask if she could make a film about her grandmother who was a comfort woman. Wu was immediately drawn to the idea of telling a personal story, especially since she felt that other documentaries about comfort women in South Korea and China tended to fixate more on blaming the perpetrators.
The 76-minute film traces the everyday lives of six survivors from different parts of Taiwan. It follows them on their repeated trips to Japan to give lectures at universities and protest for recognition of the wrongs inflicted upon them. Flashbacks to the past are sparse and there are no gruesome images or boring voice-overs from historians. Rather, the focus is on how the horrific experience has shaped the survivors today.
Wu says the message is to forgive but not to forget.
“Of course their wish is to see the Japanese government apologize to them in their lifetime,” Wu adds. “But forgiveness is a more powerful tool than accusation — it’s saying that even if you don’t apologize to me, I’m still getting on with my life.”
But not everyone believed that Wu’s message would sit well with audiences. It took Wu and her team more than a year to find a production company that would release the film.
“We were told that the documentary was ‘too calm,’ that it wasn’t dramatic enough,” she says.
Song of the Reed is indeed very slow-paced. In one scene, one of the survivors, an old woman from the Truku tribe in Hualien, dresses up in traditional clothes and dances with other people in her community for a good three minutes.
Another scene shows a survivor puffing away on a cigarette as she and her granddaughter chop meat in preparation for a family dinner. Yet, it’s the little details like these, of how they go about their daily lives that make them more relatable; it’s drawn-out sadness rather than in-your-face horror.
GRANDMOTHER’S TALES
Another reason why it was difficult to find a production company to release the film could be because the topic of comfort women is not discussed as much in Taiwan as it is in South Korea or China. This is something Wu attributes to many Taiwanese taking a liking to Japanese culture, as well as the nostalgia surrounding Japan’s 50-year colonial legacy in Taiwan.
Wu says that the documentary was well-received in three separate screenings in Tokyo and Kyoto last year, and that part of the success, in fact, was due to it being slow-paced and void of horrific images.
The topic of comfort women might be difficult for both Taiwanese and Japanese to discuss, but Wu felt that anyone could relate to a grandma telling her tales.
“If you just put it out there that it’s all Japan’s fault and demand an apology, the audience might take it as a personal attack,” Wu says.
She adds that Japanese viewers might feel like they are being unfairly blamed for the misdeeds of past generations, but that if the message is conveyed through a story, then they’ll respond more positively.
Over the course of filming the survivors for three years, Wu says it began to feel “like they were my own amah,” or grandmother. And this is how she hopes audiences would see it too.
Being able to relate to the grandmothers is a valid argument, but I still can’t comprehend the lack of English subtitles. The documentary may be raising awareness in Taiwan and Japan, but without English subtitles, they are alienating a large potential viewership. And shouldn’t this topic be something that the world should know about?
Song of the Reed is currently being screened at the Ambassador Changchun Cinema (國賓長春影城).
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