From a grandmother’s courage to the footsteps of peace

I entered the 2026 youth work contest on the victims of Japanese military sexual slavery, in the art and design category, with a set of goods designs. The contest closes after this was written, so the honest status is entered and nothing more.

The contest title is the one I could not get out of my head: from a grandmother’s courage to the footsteps of peace. It asks for five things at once, and that is why it is difficult and why I wanted to try it.

The five things it asks for

Know the history of the “comfort women” correctly and remember it correctly. Feel the violence and the violation of rights that are still happening inside conflicts today. Point at a future in which rights are respected, and at the movement that gets us there. Go past consolation offered to the victims and into practice that makes a better tomorrow. And leave a message of hope — a young person’s commitment to protect the peace that is next to us and to spread it.

Five briefs in one. Most entries pick one and do it well. I wanted a form that could hold several at the same time, which is why I chose goods rather than a single poster.

Why goods and not a painting

A painting is seen once, in one place, by the people who came to see it. A designed object is carried. Somebody puts it in a bag, sets it on a desk, hands it to a friend, and the sentence on it gets read again on a day when nobody was thinking about history. For a subject whose whole danger is being forgotten quietly, the object that travels is doing more work than the picture that hangs.

The category allowed design, illustration, calligraphy, picture postcards and goods, and I used the ones I already work in every day at KKUMUL — hand lettering and paper goods. That part was not a stretch. Pointing them at this subject was.

What I was careful about

This is not my history to dramatise. The survivors are real people, most of them now very old, and some of them have spent decades saying the same true thing to rooms that did not want to hear it. The design brief I set myself was: no spectacle, no pity, no invented faces. Courage, and then footsteps. The grandmother’s part of the title is already the strongest thing in it, and my job was to not get in front of it.

I will update this page with the result when the contest announces it, whichever way it goes.