NORTHEAST ASIAN HISTORY FOUNDATION 09/2022
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Park Jeong-ae, Researcher, The Institute for Korea-Japan Historical Issues
Coming out as ‘Comfort Woman’ to Remain in Okinawa Where She was Dragged To
October 1975. Okinawa, Japan.
The deportation of Bae Bong-ki was drawing near. It was November 1944 when she arrived in Okinawa without knowing where she was, so she had been living there for 31 years. Bae Bong-ki was born in Shinryewon, Yesan-gun, Chungcheongnam-do, in September 1914 and lived about 30 years in Joseon and 30 years in Okinawa. Instead, she survived the violence of colonial rule and war.
Okinawa had been under US control after the defeat of the Japanese army and was returned to the Japanese government in 1972. The Japanese government announced that it would grant special permanent residence only to those Koreans living in Okinawa whose entry to Japan before August 15, 1945, could be confirmed. People had to report within three years.
Japan was not the place Bae Bong-ki wanted to come to, but she had no choice as to where to live if she was deported from Okinawa. It was not because she had friends, a house, or a stable job. She was not even fluent in Japanese. But Okinawa was a place where Bae Bong-ki learned how to survive anyway after staying alive on a battlefield dominated by death. Bae Bong-ki was neither Japanese, Joseon, nor Korean, but she continued her life as a part of Okinawan residents.
The reporting deadline was approaching, but Bae Bong-ki, who had never learned Korean or Japanese, could not figure out how to fill out and submit the report. She asked a restaurant owner she had worked with before for help, and the restaurant owner wrote down the story of Bae Bong-ki's coming to Japan and submitted it to the Okinawa Prefectural Immigration Office.
In the process, it was revealed that Bae Bong-ki had been taken to Okinawa as a “comfort woman” in the past. Bae Bong-ki was the first survivor to testify to the harm inflicted on her in public, but it was not something she intended. Her past and present life were exposed against her will, and she was constantly harassed by people who came to cover or meet her.
Many people went back as Bae decided to ‘avoid any person,’ but there were those who could listen to her story next to her. In 1979, director Tetsuo Yamatani released the documentary film "An Old Lady in Okinawa (沖縄のハルモニ)," which captured the appearance of Bae when he visited her. He also recorded the conversations with Bae and published a book with the same title in December of the same year. The subtitle of the book is “The History of Japan’s Prostitution (大日本賣春史).” In this work, Bae's life is segmented and arranged according to the director's perspective and intention.
After hearing the story of Bae Bong-ki for nearly 10 years, Kawada Fumiko published a book called 『Red Roof Tile House: A Military Comfort Woman from Joseon』 in 1987. This book was translated into Korean in 2014 and published under the title 『The Story of a Korean Woman Who Became a Japanese Military Comfort Woman: A Red Roof Tile House.』 In her foreword, Fumiko Kawada confessed that the most difficult part of writing her book was that "Bae's life was so horrible that as a young person, I could not comprehend it completely." It would be impossible to fully understand the life of a person deprived of the right to live the daily life she wanted within a network relationship riddled with control and violence. Because documents written from the victims' perspectives are rare, the language to express their lives is poor, and the victims still feel it is not safe to tell their stories. Why do we struggle to understand their lives, then? Perhaps it is because we want to liberate our past, present, and future that are still trapped in a controlled and violent relationship by remembering them.
They Said It was Heaven
When Bae lived in Sinryewon, her family was poor. Her father was a farmhand, and her mother ran away. Her sister, two years older than her, started working as a domestic servant when she was eight, and Bae, who lived with her brother, three years younger than her, also started working as a domestic servant at the age of seven. When she turned seventeen, she married a man over thirty, but her husband never returned after he went out to earn money. She married another man at nineteen, and he was a farmhand like her father. They could not maintain their livelihood, and they eventually divorced.
After that, Bae lived here and there. When she was working as a farmhand in Heungnam, Hamgyeongnam-do, in the late autumn of 1943, a Japanese man and a Korean man, "women brokers," asked Bae, who was 30-year-old at the time, to follow them to a "warm place full of pineapples and bananas." They said she did not have to work there, the banana fell by itself, and she could lie under the trees.
When she left Heungnam Station and stayed in Seoul for about a month, more women joined her. When she followed a Korean man named Kaneko and stayed in Busan for about a month, more women joined her. In March 1944, of the lunar calendar, Bae and other women followed a Japanese man named Kondo and Kaneko to leave Busan Port and arrive at Moji, Japan. There, Yoshimura and Suzuki joined them. Three men of Kondo watched every move of the women. Later, they became managers of the brothels set up in various parts of Okinawa. Six months after staying in Moji, Bae and others were sent to Kagoshima. There were 51 women.
On November 7, 1944, Bae Bong-ki and others arrived in Okinawa aboard the conscription transport ship Marai. It was after the US air raids (October 10 Airstrike) had ended. The streets of Okinawa were covered with ashes and piles of garbage. The women brought to the burnt-out hospital were confined, and soon after, they were assigned to various places. Seven women were sent to each island of the Kerama Islands, such as Tokashiki Island, Zamami Island, and Aka Island, 20 to the Naha Islands, and ten to the Taito Islands. Bae was sent to Tokashiki Island with Kaneko.
Surviving in Hell
On Tokashiki Island, while the women stayed in a small thatched house for a few days, the Japanese army ordered Kaneko to fix the private house they had taken over as a brothel. It was a red-tiled house in a remote part of the village. Kaneko made walls in four rooms with veneer to make six rooms and turned the room used to keep stock and store things into a room, giving a room to each of the seven women.
Here, Bae was called 'Akiko.' The other women’s names were Kikumaru, Haruko, Suzuran, Mitchan, and Aiko.
Soldiers lined up at the entrance to the red-tiled house. Soldiers first bought a ticket at the ‘ticket office,’ and when it was their turn, they entered the room and handed the ticket to the ‘comfort woman.’ At the end of the day, they counted the number of tickets the “comfort women” had to calculate their income, but no cash was given to them. She said all the expenses taken to get to Tokashiki Island became their debts. As troops moved, they set up a temporary brothel there and reassigned “comfort women” to the brothel.
From March 21, 1945, American B-29 planes came to Okinawa. On the morning of March 23, when the Bae woke up, the village was as quiet as a grave. At around 10 am, the air raid sirens began to sound. The ‘comfort women’ got up and went into the middle of the river, having no time to escape to the air-raid shelter. When she turned to women crying, “Guys, take us, too!” Bae saw Mitchan and Aiko crawling out before the brothel, dragging their thighs covered in blood. However, she had to jump right into the air-raid shelter.
Air raids continued every day. Haruko also died during the attacks. After almost the entire red-tiled house was burnt down, the ‘comfort women’ were instructed by Japanese troops to flee to the mountains. The four surviving “comfort women” followed their keeper, Kaneko, to the Third Division’s camp on Ridge 234. They stayed in the mountains for several months, washing uniforms and running errands for soldiers. One day, they discovered that Kikumaru and Suzuran had left the camp with the conscripted soldiers. The remaining “comfort women” were Bae and Kazuko. While living in the mountains, Bae survived by enduring hunger and fear.
On August 18, 1945, the Third Division surrendered. Bae Bong-ki and her party came down from the valley on August 26 and attended the disarmament ceremony. After that, their belongings were checked, and they were sent along with civilians to a camp on Zamami Island, then to the Yaka Camp on the main island of Okinawa, and again to the Ishikawa Camp. Bae left the Ishikawa Camp at a time when she could not even remember how much time had passed.
After that, Bae walked and walked. She said it was when she was walking the streets of Okinawa alone that she shuddered with the thought of ‘being deceived by the Japanese army and abandoned in a strange land.’ She did not know anyone, she did not speak the language, she had no money, and nothing at all.
There is a Branch but No Root
Bae Bong-ki did not trust anyone and did not stay anywhere in the land controlled by the American soldiers after the Japanese lost the war. In October 1975, Bae Bong-ki lived in a barn in the middle of a sugar cane field on the main island of Okinawa. When visitors asked her why she had not returned to her homeland, she said she could not go back because she was ashamed of what happened on the battlefield. In September 1988, when a Japanese reporter who visited her invited her to go to her hometown together, she broke into tears for a long time while saying, “Well, I want to go, I have to go.”
The Kim Hyeon-ok and Kim Soo-seop couple have been visiting Bae Bong-ki since 1975, even after she slammed the door in their faces. They gradually built up a routine of going to the hot springs together and grilling meat. There were days when Bae said, “After all, Korean people should have Korean food.” In this routine relationship, Bae was also told, "The reason you came to where you are is not because of your fate, but because of Japan that started the war and colonized Joseon." In January 1989, when she saw the news that Emperor Hirohito had died, she said, "He should have apologized before he died," She even said, “Avenge me.” She no longer recalled her homeland in torment; she was angry with those who created an era of violence and thought people should live with human dignity.
On October 18, 1991, when Kim Hak-soon gave her public testimony and the voice was raised that the issue of Japanese military 'comfort women' should be addressed, Bae died at her home in Okinawa. Her funeral was attended by many Korean-Japanese and Okinawans who remembered her. She lived without roots, but many people became branches for her. Those branches will become roots one day.
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