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When I think of her, I smell the peach at the end of my nose. From late June to July 2005, I met her for the first time in Hwasun, Jeonnam Province, during the peak of peach. It was when I was working as an investigator for the Sexual Slavery Victims for the Japanese Imperial Army at The Truth Commission on Forced Mobilization under the Japanese Imperialism Republic of Korea. Hwang Seon-soon reported that she was 'Sexual slave victims for the Japanese Imperial Army', and I had to investigate her damage and decide whether to register with the government. I was in my early thirties, passionate, and had no difficulty in meeting and talking to people.

In July 2005, Hwang Sun-soon met with me at her home in Hwasun, Jeonnam

Hwang Seon-soon was born in December 1924(January 1925) during the lunar calendar, but the birth registration was done in December 1926. Her parents, who farmed in Jangseong, Jeonnam Province, died when they were young, and lived with their younger brother after her sister married. In January 1943, while she was going to eat with her brother to her aunt's house, she met men recruiting women to work in the factory. Busan men were about 50 years old, and Japanese men were over 40 years old. They said, "You can go to a rubber factory in Busan and work for just one year to make money to buy two cows." Hwang Seon-soon decided to follow the men. And to crying brother, she said, "Go to aunt's house, and I'll make money and buy a cow for you."

I took a train from Songjeong Station and went to Busan through Daejeon. There were 20 women on board each time the train stopped. After getting off at Busan Station, she went to Yokosuka, Japan, and took the ship 'Haewoomaru' to 'Nambang'. Haewoomaru, as Hwang Seon-soon said, refers to the HEIYO MARU. The ship, which was operated by Japanese shipping company Nippon Yusen Kaisha on the Pacific coast, was drafted into the Japanese Navy in October 1941 and then transported cargo and passengers to Saipan, Chuuk, and Rabaul. And on January 17, 1943, it sank after being torpedoed by an American submarine.

Hwang Seon-soon thought that something was wrong when she boarded a ship from Busan to Japan, but she could not ask anyone. So the place where she went on a ship for about ten days and night was 'Nabor'. It was a place where the Japanese Navy dressed in white came and went, and the black-skinned natives lived. The Japanese guide led her to a one-storied house with ten small rooms on both sides, with the corridor in the middle. Her room was marked with a paper that said ‘Akiko’. Life in the house was painful. "The Japanese soldiers abused me saying ‘you are really ugly’ and I suffered from the hardships of being cursed Kichigai(mad girl). Her appearance, saying, hurt my heart and was impressive.

HEIYO MARU(Japanese transport, 1930-1943) afire and sinking

after torpedoed by USS WHALE(SS-239) in the central Pacific, 17 January 1943.

Hwang Seon-soon entered Busan after liberation through Singapore and Japan, and then went to Seoul for a night and went back to her hometown. In 2005, she was registered with the Korean government as a victim of the Japanese military 'comfort women'. I wrote about her damage and spent a long time writing down where the forced mobilization was as a ‘comfort women’ of the Japanese military. I didn't know where the ‘Nabor’ she said was. I looked at the islands of the Pacific region, similar to her pronunciation, and found a place called ‘the Republic of Nauru’. It was a strange place for the comfort women of the Japanese army to be damaged, but I decided to believe that the Republic of Nauru was occupied by Japan during World War II. Through this process, the area where Hwang Seon-soon was damaged as a ‘comfort women’ of the Japanese military officially became Nauru.

In March 2008, Japanese researcher Yoshimi Yoshiaki interviewed Hwang Seon-soon with an interpreter. Yoshimi recorded that Hwang Seon-soon was taken in 1944, but this was wrong because HEIYO MARU sank in January 1943. In an interview with him, Hwang Sun-soon said, "I was sorry because some soldiers treated me well, and they died in war." It was a lot different from what she told me about the Japanese. Perhaps it was a conscious word of a Japanese male professor in front of her.

Yoshimi said that Hwang Seon-soon was taken to Singapore based on the interview. In fact, in an interview with him, Hwang Seon-soon almost talked about Singapore, and the name of the area called ‘Nabor’ was mentioned only slightly. The interviewer who heard the story asked, “So is it Rabaul?” Then Hwang said, “It was not Rabaul, but Nabor. When the person who was investigating(the author) first came, I remembered everything and taught him everything.” I realized only after reading the oral phrase that Park Ok-ryeon, who was mobilized in Rabaul, said, “I was taken to Nabaru.” If the place where Park Ok-ryeon was taken is Nabaru, the place where Hwang Seon-soon was taken is Nabor. Hwang Seon-soon has never heard of a place called Rabaul. Rabaul's English pronunciation is ‘Labor’ and Japanese pronunciation is ‘Labauru’. Therefore, we can understand that Hwang Seon-soon was taken to Rabaul.

It has been 15 years since I met Hwang Seon-soon. Only after she passed away on January 26, 2018, I was convinced that the place where Hwang Seon-soon was taken was Rabaul, not Nauru. I want to correct the official record now, and I reveal my past that I was passionate but did not think deeply.

In the meantime, I became a researcher who felt desperately that making history after the victim's memory was a heavy and painful work. I feel like I'm still hanging around at the door of the victims' memories, but I believe that the puzzle of memories should continue to be found. It is because it is the thing to tell the story of the victims as ‘history’, it stops violence against women. This was what the victims had always hoped for in their lifetime.