Dear Friends,

My name is Ahn Sehong and I am a photojournalist living in Nagoya, Japan. Since 1996, I have been taking photos of the Korean surviving ‘comfort women’ (now in their 80s-90s).

The term refers to “women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II”, living in China.

While taking their photos, I also conducted lengthy interviews with them. Then I started to understand their lives, and I have exhibited their photos both in Korea and Japan since 1998.

As a result I have obtained some supporters who are sympathetic to those women’s situations, and we established a project called “the Juju (lit. means ‘layer by layer’) Project” to help those women.

My photo exhibition on the subject was to be held on 26th June 2012 at the Nikon Salon in Tokyo sponsored by the Nikon Company. I was also scheduled to talk about related issues to the project.

Suddenly it was cancelled two weeks ago by the sponsor, Nikon, who apologised to us but did not offer any reasonable explanation. Since then I have found my personal information being posted on the internet, and I and my family has been intimidated by some anonymous calls.

We are also continuously informed by the various forms of media that some extreme Right-Wing Japanese people have protested near the exhibition location.

My family feels very scared about this situation, but we are determined to have the photo exhibition and to talk about the comfort women, who now number only a surviving few. We also intend to bring issues relating to their human rights and their treatment by Japanese government to a wider range of the public.

Our project aims to restore their dignity and draw attention to the atrocity of such wars.

Individual photographers and their associations, please persuade Nikon Company to sponsor the comfort women photo exhibition on 26 June!



Please support and encourage us!

Ahn Sehong – The Juju Project team

If you need further query, please contact us:
Home page: http://ahnsehong.com / http://juju-project.net
E-mail: ahnsehong@hotmail.com