Last week, Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe remarked that there was no evidence that the Japanese military had forced foreign women to serve as sex slaves for their soldiers abroad in Asia during their march into the Asian mainland. This right-wing Prime Minister really caused an uproar and really bothered me as I have actually met some of these ‘comfort women’ as they are euphemistically called. This is just another example of the Japanese glazing over their history.
Below is something I wrote for the Korean Embassy in the US a couple years ago about the Korean comfort women.
While studying abroad at Yonsei University in 2003-2004, I had the opportunity to learn about the fascinating history of Korean-Japanese relations. Many of the class excursions we attended were related to Korean-Japanese relations. The most memorable trip was the one we took to the House of Sharing.
The House of Sharing or “Nanum ae Jib,” in Korean, is a collective home for the women who were forced to become sex-slaves for the Japanese military during the Pacific War. At the House of Sharing, I met nine women who lived with an unusual amount of determination and passion. They live there together for one purpose; to educate and show the world the pain and human rights abuse they endured. As a form of therapy, they take weekly painting lessons to try to express their pain and experiences in a positive way while at the same time portraying the horrors they suffered at the hands of the Japanese military machine. Their paintings were vivid and spoke powerfully about the loss of innocence, the fear and the savagery they encountered and survived.
The House of Sharing, in addition to being a residence for these nine strong women, also serves as a museum to educate the public. It is a small community for the purpose of care, education and therapy. They have a story to tell and have very little time to tell us their story as they are very old now.
During my visit at the House of Sharing I had the opportunity to listen to the personal testimonies of these women. The stories they told were of rape, kidnapping, savagery and escape. All nine women spoke with anger, sorrow and passion about their experiences. The House of Sharon has a room that resembles a typical shack the girls of the sort women trapped in and the actual conditions they had to endure while waiting for the constant stream of Japanese soldiers that came in to satisfy their lust. Being in the dark room with a hard wooden board for a bed and a bucket of water gave me an ill feeling. The thought that they were only 14 years old at the time and that their innocence was being robbed away from them at the tune of up to 30 men a night gave me a feeling of anger.
There are many forms of wickedness in the world, but the most wicked of crimes are those that are perpetrated against the youth. These were girls who were abducted and forced into a small shack where they would wait in the dark for soldiers to come and rape them. What was the purpose of having comfort women? The Japanese government wanted to increase the morale of their soldiers and thus had set up these comfort houses where their tired soldiers can drop in to satisfy their physical desires.
All their stories had a chilling similarity; they were usually kidnapped from their villages at when they were about 13 to 16 and stationed abroad at the front lines of the war to serve as sex slaves. There were about 200,000 Koreans who were abducted by Japanese forces and so far only 158 identified themselves as comfort women to the Korean government. Surely there are more alive, but for whatever reasons, shame probably being one of them, prevents them from coming forward. However, most have passed away, likely with unbearable pain and sadness. These 9 women are brave to reveal their past so publicly and to fight for change and recognition.
At the House of Sharing, Lee Oak-Sun (77) gave a heart-wrenching talk to our class about her experiences as a youth. She was abducted at a very young age and sent to China where she was forced to be a sex-slave. She elaborated on the fear she faced whenever a soldier walked in; they were usually very rough and wanted to get what they desired and leave.
Lee’s heart was broken with shame and pain in her early teens. After the defeat of the Japanese at the hands of the Allies, she was unable to leave China and thus started a family there and lived there until her 60s. She left China after 5 decades to come home to Korea to come to the House of Sharing in order to be a living testament to the atrocities of which she was a victim. I cannot remember her tearful talk in its entirety but I do recall is her pain, her tears and her wails of sorrow. I later found out that she was fortunate to have started a family; most comfort women are unable to start families because they have been scarred beyond psychological repair that they cannot stand to be with a man.
Most of these women’s families left them behind, because of being no longer virgins. Many comfort women grew up alone and abandoned. It is a sad consequence they had to suffer for providing comfort to soldiers who were so ruthlessly cutting through Asia conquering nation after nation in the name of an “East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere.” The East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere was Japan’s “holy mission” to create an Asian community where all Asians will prosper and co-exist. This sham of a mission was based on Japanese propaganda that Asians were the superior race on Earth – it served as a means to trick and deceive the conquered.
In looking at the experiences at the comfort women, one must examine Japanese colonial policy in order to fully understand where the Japanese were coming from and to fully sympathize and comprehend the pain and torture the comfort women had to endure.
The Japanese were the first Asian country to be westernized and be respected by the Western forces. As any East Asian history buff will attest to, Japanese modernization started with the Meiji restoration in 1868. Modernization reached its peak when the Japanese defeated the Russians in 1905 in the Russo-Japanese War. This was the first time in modern history that an Asian country had defeated a Western power. This was the coming of age for Japan essentially. The Japanese sought to expand and colonize just like the western powers that were colonizing around the world.
Japan is well known to be very efficient and good at adopting policies or technologies that it sees advantageous. They were good at emulating what they perceived as superior. This quality is good in itself; they see what is good and want to learn it and improve upon it. During that era, it contrasted starkly to the traditional Chinese view of sticking to its own tried and true ways and being as self-sufficient as possible. It was this intense drive for modernization in the image of the western powers that Japan set up its colonization policies. One could write a doctoral dissertation on this topic, but for the sake of brevity, I will only mention that Japan’s policy towards Korea was that, it sought to permanently occupy Korea and make sure that it became wholly Japanese. This meant that Korean culture, language and identity had to be eliminated eventually.
With this knowledge, it can be argued that the Japanese used the women of colonized countries as sex slaves for the purpose of killing the spirit of the colonized land. The idea was that eventually, over time, the spirit of the Korean people will suffer and slowly the identity of Koreans will disappear. It is no surprise that Korean women were the victims of such abuse. In order to truly conquer and to prevent any uprisings, the Japanese felt that they had to crush Korea and eliminate anything that would stir up a nationalistic uprising. Japan wanted to use Korea as a stepping-stone to the continent and at the same time feed its population with the harvests that could be cultivated on the Korean peninsula. Thus, Korea was in Japan’s long-term strategic plans, but as colony and victim.
Japanese atrocities during the Pacific War did not end with the comfort women. There are many other documented cases of human rights abuses at the hands of Japanese colonial policy. We must however, remember that the Japanese are not the only ones guilty of these sorts of actions. It is said that history is written by the victors, and we can be sure that soldiers from other nations have conducted themselves in grossly inappropriate ways throughout history, even the good guys as we know them, namely the western nations, have all at some point in their history a tainted past. This is not an article that is necessarily anti-Japanese, but the important issue here is that sex-slaves did exist and they did ‘comfort’ soldiers but at an enormous cost to their dignity and probably psychological stability and contributed immense pain to their lives.
The women at the House of Sharing live in quiet tranquility away from the hustle and bustle of Seoul. They are tended to by several volunteers and are visited frequently by well-wishers and students of history who wish to pay their respects. Despite their tranquil surroundings, they are haunted to this day by their indelible memories of sounds, sights and smells of gruff, musky, abusive soldiers who continually raped them throughout the Pacific War. Every Wednesday, the 9 comfort women, along with other protesters, go down into Seoul to the Japanese embassy to protest and to try to receive some sort of official apologetic gesture, not that it will relieve their pain and anger.
These women are in their 70s and 80s now and they are past wanting financial compensation for their pains or some sort of government help, but they want an official statement of remorse from the Japanese government so that they can feel a sense of accomplishment, of achieving some sort of victory against the government that invaded their country and stole their innocence. Lee Oak-Sun tearfully urged me and my classmates never to forget the horrors of history, and to prevent any future occurrences of these types of human rights violations. That day at the House of Sharing was a day of learning and an understanding of the viciousness of people when they have a complete disregard for fellow humans.
My meeting with 9 elderly women who paint and write about their experiences in order to educate as many people as possible was very stimulating and enriching. Some of them even travel the world giving talks to share their experiences with people. Because of their age, they share an urgency to spread the truth about sexual slavery in colonial Japan. Sadly, the reality is that in just a few years, there will be no more first hand victims of sexual slavery as their time to pass on will surely come in the near future. Once they are gone, it is up to the educated to keep and pass on this knowledge to future generations.
For the 200 000 Korean comfort women and the thousands of non-Korean comfort women from other Asian countries, these 9 women speak and want to secure an official apology from Japan. Just like the holocaust, and like other human rights violations, this is an issue that historians, and future leaders of government and NGOs must know existed and make sure that these types of violations against women must end. Today, the efforts of the House of Sharon have attracted attention domestically in Korea and internationally; it is the only organization of its kind and with time hopefully, an adequate account of Japanese abuse will be given in Japan and around the world to students of history.
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