It seems like every few month some major paper features an article on Korea’s World War II comfort women:

Reporting from Toechon, South Korea — Kang Il-chul rides in the back of a van packed with gossiping old women. The 82-year-old girlishly covers her mouth to whisper a secret.

“We argue a lot about the food,” she says, wrinkling her nose. “To tell you the truth, some of these old ladies are grouchy.”

There are eight of them, sharing a hillside home on the outskirts of Seoul, sparring over everything from territory to room temperature.Some wear makeup and stylish hats; others are happy in robes and slippers. A few are bitter, their golden years tarnished by painful memories; others have sweet dispositions and enjoy visiting beauty salons or performing an occasional dance in the living room.

But they all share one thing: Decades ago, they were forced to serve as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers occupying the country before and during World War II. They were repeatedly raped and beaten over months and years.

Now time is running out for the halmoni, or Korean grandmothers. About 150,000 to 200,000 Korean women served as Japanese sex slaves, most living out their lives in humiliated silence.  [LA Times]

In her place has emerged the indefatigable Kang. As a teenager, she recalls, she was lured from her home by Japanese soldiers who offered her caramel candy.

Kang recalls the day she was taken. “The soldiers had a list with my name on it. They put me in a truck. My nephew came out to look at them. He was just a baby. The soldiers kicked him and he died.”  [Japan Times]

Kang Il-chul was born in 1928, in Sangju, in Gyeongsang Province, southeastern Korea. In 1943, when she was sixteen, a military police officer came to her house and abducted her, saying that she was being conscripted for the National Guard.  [The House of Sharing]

This house was set up in 1992 with money from Buddhist societies and Korean charities. There are some wonderful statues in the garden. Some depict young women but I like this statue of an old woman called “Woman of earth” (below). In the yellow cardigan is Kang Il Chul, age 75. After the war she married a Korean man in China. She, like most of the others, was literally kidnapped by the Japanese. She was in bed aged 15, heard a tap on the window, and saw her friend with a soldier who had a knife in her back. “Come out or we’ll kill your friend” was the threat, and she was put on a truck which was blacked out and then another truck and then another.  [WNYC]

Kang was most emotional when talking about her homeland, which she said she did not see again until 2000.

“Maybe it was because my country was small that I had to suffer,” she said. “When I came back to Korea, I did not tell anyone what I did in China.” [The Harvard Crimson]

1944 Comfort Woman Recruitment Ad

The controversial military commentator Ji Man-won has come under fire again after saying that claims by some women to have been drafted into sexual slavery as “comfort women” by the Japanese Army were fraudulent.

Ji said on his website on Wednesday and Thursday that only 33 women had been confirmed former “comfort women,” or Chongshindae, by Shim Mi-ja, a comfort woman whose painful past was acknowledged by the Japanese Supreme Court. Ji said none of the 33 took part in a protest former comfort women stage every Wednesday in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul. He said Japan concluded that one ostensible comfort woman who appeared frequently on TV was a fraud and refused to pay her compensation. Ji claimed no more than 20 percent of all comfort women were forcefully conscripted by Japan, while the rest were ordinary prostitutes trying to escape from poverty.  [Chosun Ilbo]

The media such as the above LA Times article never mentions how many of these women were sold as comfort women by Korean brokers as well as many times by the girl’s family looking to make money.  It is well known that the Japanese put advertisements out for Korean women to work as prostitutes.  So if Ji’s theory is correct that 20% were forcibly conscripted and the rest were common prostitutes that would still mean anywhere from 20,000 - 40,000 women were scripted if you believe the total number of 150,000 - 200,000 were comfort women in the first place. That is still a huge number.

Anyway I still believe Japan should apologize for war time sexual slavery again, but this time in a large public speech to draw maximum media attention. During this speech then announce that Japan to atone for its past sins would become a champion of women’s rights beginning with the plight of modern day sexual slavery of North Korean women in China that both the South Korean and Chinese governments choose to ignore. Then Japan should announce that they would start accepting North Korean defectors into Japan and become an outspoken advocate of North Korean human rights.

This would in turn bring attention to the modern day Korean comfort women and turn the tables on the Chinese and Koreans who continue to demand apologies and compensation from Japan for sexual slavery that happened over 60 years ago while they do nothing about the sexual slavery going on right now.   However, I think national pride is going to win out on each side and ten years from now we will still be discussing the comfort women issue even if Japan has made ten more apologies in that timeframe.