뉴스레터

The history of the Japanese military comfort women began to be rewritten in the early 1990s. We are leading world peace and the restoration of human rights, aiming for new perspectives, new language, and a new future. At the heart of it are the survivors of sexual slavery. Simultaneously, there were activists, researchers, and citizens who were in the same boat with them, who looked for data, created a language, and added meaning. Recording the moment, we hope to have our history handed down to future generations.

Return without news

The March 19, 1946 issue of the Daegu Times carried the following story: "Oh Ryong-bi, head of a refugee camp for Korean residents in Shanghai who returned home through Busan and other cities on March 10, leading 6,000 disaster-stricken compatriots all over China, said, 'Our company had included 300 unmarried women… the 'comfort women' who were taken to the faraway continent in the past because of poverty, form the majority, and they are those in a miserable condition who have returned to their beloved homeland but have not a single relative to welcome them.'"

This is almost the only story having reported that about 300 comfort women who had been dragged to the Asian-Pacific region during the war had returned home through Shanghai after liberation.

Former professor Yun Cheong-ok, born in 1925, had said that she could devote herself to scrutinizing the status of damages from the question: "What became of the girls who had been dragged away?' While newspapers reported on returnees every day after the liberation, it was difficult to discover stories telling about the return of the comfort women. What became of them after the war? Where did the women who had arrived in Busan in March 1946 go? We had forgotten the memories completely before Kim Hak-sun, the sexual slavery victim of the Japanese military, gave her public testimony on August 14, 1991, didn't we?

People who saw the "comfort women"

The Center for Research and Documentation on Japan's War Responsibility located records in excess of 1,000 volumes by sorting out documents related to comfort women from the 1990s from Japan's war experience stories and the history of military units preserved by Japan's National Diet Library. As many as 208 books dealt with records in the 1950s-1980s compiled before the comfort women issue fully emerged as historical and social topics. Japanese soldiers featured in the records showed sympathy for the comfort women who had been dragged into the war zone, but did not hesitate to use the comfort stations. There are some writings claiming romantic relationships with comfort women.

The Allied Forces also saw comfort women who remained where the Japanese troops had left. They thought that the comfort women system was vicious, having cheated and sexually exploited women, but were indifferent to those who were of no use in waging war against Japan. This can be inferred from the fact that the perpetrators involved in incidents having exploited Asian women as sex slaves were not punished as war criminals in the war crime trials held in Tokyo, Indonesia, Guam, and other countries.

Koreans who had stayed in war-ravaged areas recollected having also seen comfort women. Jeong Jeong-hwa, a member of the Republic of Korea Provisional Government, said that he had seen 30 comfort women that the Liberation Army had protected in Chongqing, China. Koreans, who had met the end of war after being dragged to Taiwan as soldiers and civilian employees, also said that they had saved 200 comfort women there.

Yet all of them say that they have no idea where the women went. After the war, victims of the forced mobilization by the Japanese military and businesses formed organizations and have raised their voices, but the comfort women could not.

Korean comfort women found by US troops in Naha, Okinawa in April 1945

Korean comfort women who were staying at the prison camp in Jamami Island, Okinawa in May 1945

No one knows where the women in the picture went.

The victims before Kim Hak-sun told us about it, too

Kim Hak-sun carries significance in that she publicly testified for the first time regarding the comfort women's suffering as war and colonial crimes. However, there were victims who had recounted their experiences of damage before Kim Hak-sun.

Stories about Bae Bong-gi, a Korean sexual slavery victim who had lived in Okinawa, were known to the world through the media in 1975. The incident caused an uproar in Japan, but the news was not delivered to Korea. Former professor Yun Cheong-ok met with Bae Bong-gi and wrote the story for the August 29, 1981 issue of Hankook Ilbo, but reactions were not great. In 1984, news was released about No Su-bok, another victim of sexual slavery who had lived in Thailand. No Su-bok, who had been forced into sexual slavery after being taken to Singapore and Thailand from Busan in 1942, was unable to return even after the liberation. She had looked forward to the day of return to Korea, but escaped the prison, ashamed of seeing her parents, once her day of return was set. No Su-bok, who had married a Chinese-Thai man, looked for her siblings through the KBS "campaign for reunion of separated family members", and her story of having parted with her family because of having been dragged away as a comfort woman was finally revealed. But people's interest stopped there. No one could imagine the existence of other victims who might have lived elsewhere.

Women's magazines identified the victims of sexual slavery and conveyed stories about them when the comfort women were not in the spotlight in the field of politics, academia, and society in the 1980s. The September 1982 issue of Lady Kyunghyang carried an exclusive memoir of Lee Nam-nim, then 55, who had been a sexual slavery victim from Seung-ju of Jeollanam-do Province. Lee Nam-nim was taken as a comfort woman with her neighborhood friend Sundan in February of 1945. She was forced into sexual slavery in Rangoon, Burma, and detained in Kata by the allies after the war. In mid-July 1946, she arrived in her "land longed for even while asleep", but had nowhere to go. The memoir ends with narratives of opening a bar after suffering sexual assault by a restaurant owner and hopping from bar to bar. Bae Ok-su, featured in the April 1984 issue of "Real Women", was also a victim taken to Burma in July 1944. She was forced into sexual slavery at a temporary building near Japan's army barracks in Arakan, Burma. After Japan's surrender, she went to Saigon, Vietnam, through Bangkok, Thailand, and Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Bae Ok-su married a Korean man that she had met at a camp, but was later divorced due to her husband's maltreatment; she remarried, this time with a Cambodian of Vietnamese descent. She returned to Korea along with overseas Korean residents ahead of the "Vietnam's collapse" in 1975, but struggled in poverty because Bae Ok-su, then a "wife of a Vietnamese", could not receive the support to be given to the "Vietnamese wife of a Korean man". Having stayed at an inn in Seoul, Bae Ok-su ended her story saying, "I'd like to leave the crimes committed by the Japanese Empire on record so that they will not be committed again."

To historicize victims' narratives

Although victims recounting and evidence are everywhere, little being seen, much less questioned properly. In fact, until the 1980s, images of comfort women reenacted in novels and cinemas were merely sensual, showing close-up scenes of being exploited sexually. Although victims after Kim Hak-sun raised their voices, moves to deny history by distorting the damages suffered by comfort women are unusual today in 2020.

Are we listening to the victims' narratives properly? Questions intended to make history should be to imagine a future society of human rights and peace. If human rights are the rights to have a person's free and autonomous everyday life be respected, peace is the state of balancing such daily routines. From the history of the Japanese military's sexual slavery system, are we properly learning, questioning, and finding answers? The victims' narratives are still all around us.

January 1946, Chuuk Islands, Mid-Pacific