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| Of History and Hope |
| Former Japanese comfort woman Lee Ok-sun fights on |
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Melissa Wabnitz (melissaw)  |
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Published 2007-10-03 09:21 (KST) |
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 |  | |  Lee Ok-Sun, courtesy of Amnesty International. | | | ©2007 Amnesty International | World War II may have been officially declared over in 1945, but for 81-year-old Seoul resident Lee Ok-sun, the battles of the past still rage. Kidnapped from her Pusan, Korea, home at the age of 15 and forced to labor as a construction and sexual slave, Lee now spends her days educating others about her plight and demanding atonement from the government of Japan.
One of an estimated 200,000 Korean comfort women, Lee lives at the House of Sharing, a nonprofit organization and museum outside of Seoul dedicated to supporting the living survivors of Japanese sexual slavery and advocating on their behalf.
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FROM THE SECTION |
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| Internationally, women from Thai, Laos, Malaysia, Cambodia, China, Korea, the Philippines and Taiwan were apprehended or deceptively recruited by Japanese soldiers in order to work as unpaid sex workers. The "Wianbu" or "comfort women" were housed and confined to "comfort stations" wherever Japanese camps had been established throughout greater Asia. The practice began as a privately-ran enterprise during the Sino-Japanese War and became adapted and expanded by the Japanese military in 1932, in Shanghai [1].
"The Japanese systematized the military sexual rape and sexual slavery of women in a way that was not seen before and hasn't been seen since," said Angela Lytle, a House of Sharing volunteer and feminist scholar.
This past July, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution formally calling on Japan to acknowledge and formally apologize for sexually enslaving women like Lee leading up to and throughout World War II. Following the United States' lead, similar resolutions were introduced in the Philippines as House Resolution 124 and Canada's Motion 291, both awaiting further action [2].
"The truth of the matter is that they [the Japanese] took away my youth. They took away my identity, my country, they even took away my Korean name and gave me a Japanese name of "Tomi," said Lee during a recent interview. "The [Japanese government] is waiting for us all to die."
Before that day comes, however, Lee said she intends to demand a formal apology until she can no longer "fight for the government and people of Japan to acknowledge they were wrong and make their books reflect that."
The House of Sharing and its volunteers adopted a list of seven "formal demands," according to literature provided by the organization. Among the demands for the Japanese: admit to drafting women into sexual slavery, apologize with individual letters, admit the sexual slavery in records, erect a monument tablet, pay retributions, teach the truth, bring war criminals to justice and repeal the Asian Women's Fund.
The Asian Women's Fund was established in 1995 by Japanese citizen groups in order to "raise awareness of the issue and prevent such abuses." Fund administrators estimate about $17,000 was distributed to 285 former comfort women in the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan [3]. Lee and other advocates say the fund was meaningless as it wasn't legal restitution and the beneficiaries of the fund didn't include all the victims but was limited to the handful of victims who were represented by a limited number of victim's organizations [4].
"Apologies offered to former comfort women have been vague and unacceptable to survivors," said Purna Sen, director of Amnesty International's Asia-Pacific Program. "Moreover, the Asian Women's Fund fails to meet international standards of reparation and is perceived by survivors as a way of buying their silence."
 | | | "Woman of Earth" by Ok-sang Im, a sculpture decorating the grounds of the House of Sharing. | | | ©2007 Melissa A. Wabnitz | | The Horrors of the Past
Lee acknowledges that many in the International community may dispute her stories and argue that she and other women knowingly provided sexual services to soldiers for money.
"You may be sitting there saying 'Well, it was your will that you serviced these men, these soldiers,'" she said. "And then there are stories that we are dragged, it was not out of our own will, and we were forced into it. That's the dispute, the question, and I am here to let you know that I've experienced this, the harshness. I was beaten until I lost hearing. I was tortured."
Citing her initial abduction by Japanese soldiers from Pusan, Lee said it wasn't just women who suffered, but her entire country.
"The Japanese government stole the children of Korea, they've stolen and taken and dragged both the men and women of Korea. They would force the boys into hard labor and to join the military and force them to do these things, and they would take the women to also labor and be comfort women. And they didn't see us as comfort women and people, but as objects, anything you would throw away," she said. "Just goods is what they considered us as."
After her kidnapping, Lee was taken to a labor camp on the outskirts of China where she and other Koreans worked to help repair a decrepit airport. Still, the conditions were terrible.
"You can imagine how we felt, we didn't have a change of clothes, we only had the clothes on our backs from when we were kidnapped," she said. "Our clothes were worn out, and it was getting much, much colder in China and we couldn't change our clothes. We couldn't wash our clothes and day in and day out they made us labor."
While she was daily digging trenches and building walls, Lee said she starved from her daily rations -- a single piece of stale bread. One day, however, Lee said she decided she had had enough.
"It was a tough and horrible situation and we felt like we really couldn't live like that anymore, and some of the women, girls with us, we started banging on the walls of our room and screaming and saying, 'let us go home,' and you imagine, the little hands we had and banging on the wall, it didn't make all that much noise, but one of the [Japanese] soldiers came in and heard us and said 'Why aren't you working? Why aren't you outside?'" Lee said. "And one of the girls said to him, 'We just want to go home. We can't live like this anymore.' So the soldier much to our shock said, 'Okay, fine. We'll take you home.'"
Instead, the girls found themselves dropped off at a privately run comfort station. Bewildered and unaware of the horrors to occur, Lee said the years that followed brought nothing but increased hardships and constant thoughts of suicide.
Relaying a heart-wrenching tale of watching a 14-year-old girlfriend get "sliced in half by a Japanese soldier's sword and her body thrown to dogs," Lee said the Japanese soldiers, especially officers, were "inhumanely cruel."
Gently unwrapping and displaying her foot where a soldier stabbed her following an escape attempt, Lee smiles with pride. "I started running, and they grabbed me and they pulled me back and they beat me and said to me, 'Do you want to run away again?' and I didn't submit to them," she said, though an interpreter. "I didn't thank them for my life and I didn't apologize to them or say, I would never run away again. Instead, I said to them, 'If you give me an opportunity again, I will run away again. I'm going to go home, whether you like it or not.' Finally they stabbed my foot, and the result is the scar you see here."
The soldiers, Lee said, would consistently beat the women because they wanted them to perform various sexual services and to "surrender" to the Japanese.
"They stole women from all over Korea who were as young as 11 years old. At 11 years old, you don't know what is going on at all, and they haven't even menstruated," said Lee. "The officers killed so many girls because they didn't do what the officers wanted them to do … They would beat us and beat us and I didn't understand why they had to do that -- it was beyond human. And it wasn't just like being stabbed or hit, it was like when you were stabbed, the officers would take the knife and push it in and then twist it and pull it back."
Displaying the half-dollar size indention on her arm, Lee explains there are still "scars all over my body because of this."
As horrific as it may sound, Lee's story is hardly unusual. Military comfort women served up to 30 men a day, and many more during the weekends [5]. If they were dispatched to an area without a formalized comfort station and rooms, the women were forced to have sex with entire groups of troops. The sexual service fees paid by the soldiers to the comfort station owners differed according to the hour and ethnicity of the comfort women, and a few comfort stations were run on a no-fee basis [6]. Though the soldiers were required to wear a condom (sakku), many ignored the regulations and as a result, venereal diseases and pregnancies were not uncommon among comfort women.
 | | | "Testimony" by artist Won-chul Chung, a linocut at the Historical Museum of Sexual Slavery by the Japanese Military. The photographs are of women who revealed their past and faces to the world. | | | ©2007 Melissa A. Wabnitz | | The Hope of the Future
Though all of the enslaved women were officially released after Japan surrendered, life was anything but easy. Homeless and starving, Lee and others fled to the mountains in China and waited for help that never came. Eventually, she and the other women with her "crawled down the mountain on our hands and our knees" and found husbands -- mostly elderly widowers -- in neighboring villages.
Other comfort women were temporarily housed at POW camps of the Unified Forces, took ships heading home or attempted to make their way back to life before slavery. Many killed themselves out of shame and others vowed never to speak a word of their experiences to another living soul [7].
For more than 30 years following the end of WWII, the survivors kept their stories hidden away, at least until 1972 when Pong-ki Pae (Hak Soon Kim), an illegal Korean resident of Okinawa, Japan, was forced to reveal her past as a former comfort woman to avoid deportation [8]. Five years later, news of her story was leaked to the media and international attention was finally paid to the plight of the comfort women -- many of whom were still facing the physical and emotional side effects of being systematically raped for months and years of their lives.
When asked why she chose to reveal her past, Lee said her life "has been full of misery because of what Japan did to me. I had to tell someone about this."
Perhaps inspired by Kim's brave international testimony and the increased awareness of support groups, more and more women victims came forward in the 1990s. Aiding their plight for apologies and reparations, organizations such as the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan was formed in 1990 and the House of Sharing, where Lee and others receive support, was established in 1992.
At first, even the characteristically feisty Lee said she was ashamed of revealing her past. Though her two former husbands and her stepchild knew her story, Lee didn't immediately feel comfortable with talking to outsiders, much less testifying before the House of Representatives in the United States or speaking to Sharing House visitors and schools.
"I didn't know how to go and say what happened," she said, "I was kidnapped and then raped at the age of 16."
 | | | "Wednesday" by Sister Teresa Ann -- a paper mache recreating the scenes from the 15-year-strong Wednesday afternoon demonstrations in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, Korea. | | | ©2007 Melissa A. Wabnitz | | Working through her emotions, Lee and the other "halmonies" or grandmothers who live at the Sharing House outside of Seoul have actively helped publicize their plight through testimonies and a weekly demonstration at the Japanese Embassy in Seoul for the past 15 years. The women living there also paint and have regular therapeutic art sessions, many of which are on display at the adjacent Historical Museum of Sexual Slavery by the Japanese.
The battle for justice continues, as Lytle and other volunteers remind visitors to Sharing House.
"This issue is a historical issue but the core of the issue hasn't changed," she said. "The fact is that the world-over, women's bodies are devalued, women are treated as commodities. Between economic, racial and gender oppression, women are marginalized and moved and utilized in the same ways today. Women are systematically raped in Congo, in Rwanda, in Yugoslavia in the 90s and the core issue is the same -- Women were available commodities for trade, for sale, and that hasn't changed."
Women devalued as items instead of human beings is "why you have the trafficking of women into this country today for the sexual entertainment of Korean men and foreign men," Lytle said, noting that even in her home country of Canada, sexual entertainment is a booming business.
Pleading with her audience of visitors to "help her with this fight," Lee spoke of growing older and of her determination.
"I am standing in front of you today to ask you to help us fight this. All of the women who have suffered from this, we are all 80 and 90 years old in age, and we don't have any more strength to fight this sometimes," she said. "You are our strength. You know, how much longer can they honestly live for? How much longer can we honestly live to stand up and fight?"
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Sources
1. War Journal (7. 1938) of the 9th Brigade Ground Force. (Information retrieved at the House of Sharing.)
2. Canada Association for Learning and Preserving the History of WWII in Asia, Toronto Chapter.
3. "The Comfort Women Issue," Embassy of Japan in the United States of America.
4. The Historical Museum of Sexual Slavery by the Japanese Military.
5. The Comfort Women: Japan's Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War by George L. Hicks, W. W. Norton and Co. (October 1997).
6. Hour and fee schedule of comfort women (5.26.1943), a piece of information that was found at a comfort station headquarter in Mandare, Burma. (Information retrieved at the House of Sharing.)
7. The Historical Museum of Sexual Slavery by the Japanese Military.
8. Chronology of Dates and Events, Comfort-women.org, Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues Inc. (2004). |
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©2007 OhmyNews
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