- by Mary Liston Liepold

During World War II, many thousands of women were forced to serve the Japanese army as sexual slaves. The majority were from Korea, and many came from China and Japan, but women from the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, the Dutch East Indies, the Netherlands, Australia, Indonesia, New Guinea, Burma, and other nations were also interned and abused in the hideously mis-named “comfort stations.”

Since the facts began to emerge from the hush of history in 1988, the survivors and their supporters have led a growing global movement. They are pressing the government of Japan to acknowledge the “comfort woman” system as a war crime, formally apologize, make reparations, and write the women’s experience back into history, both by covering it in school textbooks and by erecting a memorial and a museum in Japan. For as that wise woman Anonymous has said, “If we do not remember our past we are doomed to repeat it.”

1988 – 2009: Korean Activists Demand Justice and an End to War

“I think the government of Japan is waiting for us all to die out, so our memories will die with us,” sexual slavery survivor Won Ok Gil told me in our offices earlier this month. “But even if we do, this story will not die! Rape is not just a past issue, but a current one. Every time a war occurs, women like me will suffer, and we will demand an end to war for all women.”

"Kidnapped" painting by Kim Soon-deuk. From the "Remember the Past" paintings archive of The Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan.

“I was born in Pyongyang, North Korea. In 1940, when I was 13 years old, I was offered a job in a factory, but instead I was sold off as a “comfort woman”―a sex slave. I found myself at a camp. How can I even describe it?

I refused when they tried to take off my clothes, so they hit my face, kicked me, and dug their heels into me. Even if I fought, they would rape me continuously. Soon I had an STD. When I couldn’t accept men, they abused me physically and verbally and they stopped feeding me. Then they performed surgery on me. It was such a cruel act! They ended up blocking my fallopian tubes on both sides. They couldn’t continue to take advantage of me as a “comfort woman” after the surgery. Nothing made me better, so they tied a special ribbon around my waist to show that I was not available for sex and gave me a small amount of money every day to pick up trash.

Because of the surgery (I found out much later) I could not have children, but because of the ribbon I finally got away from the camp and returned to my family. I was never able to tell them what had happened and they never learned. Then one night when I was walking home, a man called out “Hanako!” That was the Japanese name they gave me in the camp. I froze. He dragged me somewhere and kept me for days, then dragged me back to the camp where I was a slave again.

I was so young that I hadn’t had my period yet, and nobody told me anything. When it happened I was sure I was bleeding from the inside. I was scared and I fought the men off, but there was no relief. The men kept coming so fast I couldn’t clean up, so they beat me for being dirty. I didn’t even know how to wash my things. They would kick me from behind and I would become part of the laundry.

Won Ok Gil

Finally, after five years, the war was over. Everyone disappeared and the only ones left were the women. There was no food until the older girls found some rice. One day I looked out the window and there was a line of people saying, ‘If we don’t get on this boat we won’t get home.’ I thought the boat would take me to Pyongyang so I got on, but it went to Inchon in South Korea. On the boat there was an outbreak of cholera. No one was allowed off for two weeks, and there was no chance to wash. I was still in the clothes I left in. Once I got off, someone―maybe the Americans―gave me a few won, maybe 3 cents or 30 cents, and a rice bowl. I turned around and people were getting on a truck, so I got on too and was dropped off at a park in Seoul.

I was so dirty and smelly that I didn’t have enough dignity to go home, so although people could go south to north, I stayed in the park. A woman came and told me that if I obeyed her she would give me clean clothes and send me home. I followed her without a word and got a bath―new clothes, lingerie, a dress, everything! The woman asked me, “What can you do?” and I said “Nothing.” Then suddenly I heard music downstairs, and I started to sing. It was a bar, and because I had a sweet voice, I was in that house singing for years. Later I sold fruit and gum from a small basket. I did many things before I was able to make a living on my own.

Every year on our Independence Day women like me used to hide, because we were afraid of being ridiculed. One day, after my adopted son grew up and had children, we were watching television and a women’s demonstration came on. Someone asked, ‘Why would they do that?’ My daughter-in-law said the women demonstrated because they were courageous, and she encouraged me to visit key organizations and get my own story out.

The first few demonstrations were hard but soon I realized that it is not I who should be ashamed, but the Japanese Army. Since then I have gone to demonstrate at the Japanese Embassy in Seoul every Wednesday, even when I’m sick, unless I am in the hospital. I am proud that these demonstrations have been going on for 17 years.

It has been many years since the war ended and I have never been able to live as a true human being. I am 82 years old and I have still had no contact with my family. I am sick from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet. I have had four surgeries on my stomach. But out of 234 survivors who came out, only 91 are still alive. I have come out with the goal of letting everyone in Peace X Peace and other organizations know about my life. I want at least one of us to receive a full apology from the Japanese government that will send a message to the current generation about what can happen in war. One of our goals is to build a museum where today’s generation can learn about the past and connect it to the future. Right now the Japanese government is not taking responsibility for its actions. Japanese school children do not learn about Korean comfort women. They need to learn this. Maybe then all the regrets and the feelings that I have will be resolved.”

A Korean Council Wednesday demonstration

Gil was in Washington, DC, with a delegation from The Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan. The Korean Council holds demonstrations every Wednesday in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. Like the more than 50-year-old Black Sash in South Africa, the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, Women in Black, and similar movements around the world, its members bear unceasing witness to evils that would otherwise be hushed up for the greater comfort of the perpetrators. The Council also operates an information clearinghouse and recruits volunteers who attend to the material and emotional needs of survivors. And it educates the public about today’s conflicts and the costs to women and society worldwide.

In DC, the women were visiting Congressional offices as well as organizations like Peace X Peace, encouraged by the US House of Representatives’ 2007 resolution urging the Japanese government to take responsibility for its past. Since then the Netherlands, Canada, Great Britain, and the EU have also passed resolutions, and several international assemblies, including one in Japan, have added their own. United Nations organizations and NGOs around the world have joined in solidarity.

In 1995 Japan issued a signed apology from the then-prime minister and set up an “Asia Women’s Fund” to provide material compensation. The fund is fed by donations, not government money. Many survivors have rejected these payments because they come from private charity, just as the Argentine Madres refused boxes of bones purported to be the remains of their ‘disappeared” children and small payments they viewed as attempts to buy silence.

Especially since June 22, 1998, when UN Human Rights Commission Special Rapporteur Gay McDougall released her study Contemporary Forms of Slavery, the Japanese government has issued several carefully worded statements of apology. But it continues to reject legal responsibility and the terms war crime and crime against humanity, even as researchers continue to accumulate new evidence. Some individuals and organizations still insist that the scale of the incidents was small and only prostitutes were involved.

As an American, I am proud of the 2007 House Resolution and the support US NGOs are providing. I find these actions especially significant because we have our own memory holes in history, including one that’s oddly, if asymmetrically, parallel.

1945 to 1965: Americans Forget the Internment of the Japanese

No one knows exactly how many “comfort women” were victimized because the government destroyed records near the end of the war. The Korean Council uses the range most experts agree on, between 100,000 and 200,000. In 1942, soon after the US declared war on Japan, my nation interned some 112,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of them citizens and the rest imported laborers who had been effectively barred from citizenship. Families lost homes and businesses and suffered profound humiliation and dislocation. The US Supreme Court upheld the policy in 1944―the year I was born―and it was not until the mid-1960s that US history books began to include the internment of the Japanese in accounts of World War II. I was a young adult when I first learned of it.

Uprooted Japanese Americans were housed in barracks like these, photographed by Dorothea Lange

President Ronald Reagan issued a formal apology and reparations in 1988―the same year that Ms. Yoon Jeong-ok spoke out at a Seminar on Women and Tourism, bringing the “comfort women” to Japan’s national attention for the first time and the year before McDougall’s report.

It is estimated that only 25% of the comfort women survived. Many were killed at the end of the war. Most survivors were unable to have children because of the damage they suffered or the diseases they contracted. Japanese American families have their own trauma, and children learn about it today from books like Journey to Topaz. Taken together, these bitter memories help us to remember that we stand together against war and injustice, not against any nation or any people.

The Future: It’s Up to the Women

The Korean Council was founded in 1990 “to resolve the issue of military sexual slavery by Japan and thereby recover the human rights and dignity of its victims, to stop the revival of Japanese militarism, to prevent sexual violence against women in armed conflicts, and to contribute to world peace.” South and North Korean women have worked together in the Council and with sister organizations since the year after its founding. They hold co-symposiums, forums, joint research activities, and UN activities, meeting in Pyongyang, Seoul, and abroad.

By keeping the horrors of war alive in national and international memory, Korea’s women activists benefit their Japanese sisters and their sisters around the globe. In the past decade, with encouragement from the US, Japan has been sliding away from the pacifist constitution that was imposed on it by the victors in WWII. The fact that the Japanese had no choice in adapting to a peace economy makes re-arming understandably attractive to some proud nationalists. Japanese firms have been producing high-tech weapons and weapons components since 1953. But relatively low military spending is one of the reasons Japan ranks near the top of most social indicators. Japanese women now have the highest life expectancy in the world.

Won Ok Gil and her fellow survivors took part in their 880^th Wednesday demonstration on August 26. Their aim is to prevent what happened to them from ever happening again, to any woman, anywhere. Peace X Peace members in more than 100 countries share that aim.

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About the Author

Mary Liepold is the Editor-in-Chief at Peace X Peace. To reach Dr. Liepold, email maryl@peacexpeace.org.