WUNRN
Call for Japanese Government Apology & Compensation
By Leslie Patrick - -South
She smiles brightly as she pushes her walker past me on the garden
path. Though her eyes have turned milky with cataracts and age, her gaze is
bright. She is tired of fighting. I am about an hour south of
Portraits of the comfort women
as they protest for justice in front of the Japanese embassy in
The diminutive woman in the
garden is Kim Gun-ja. Born in
For Kim, separated from her sisters, the nightmare was still just
beginning. When she was 17, her adopted father sold her to the Japanese army.
This was when the horrors of her life as a comfort woman in the war-ravaged
area of Manchuria (now
Kim Gun-ja’s story whirls inside my head as I watch her tiny steps, gnarled hands grasping the bars of her walker. She has endured so much; I hardly know what to say. Anyong haseyo. Hello. I exhaust my basic Korean quickly, so we simply gaze at each other. I feel ashamed as I stare back at her, a tourist gawking at a spectacle. What was she like before she was forced into sexual slavery? Did she dream of a career? Of a husband and children? Surely she never imagined a life sequestered in misery and despair. My mind spins with questions I could never ask, even without the language barrier. Then she smiles at me, and in that smile is the assurance that I am welcome. She is glad I have come. She is relieved that people care about her, that people have not forgotten her plight.
I had never heard of the term “comfort women” until I came to
A euphemism for prostitutes, more than 200,000 comfort women were
used as sexual slaves by the Japanese army. Although approximately 80 percent
of these women were Korean, the Japanese also conscripted Chinese, Filipinos,
and a handful of other ethnicities to work at their comfort stations throughout
East and
Sometimes raped up to 40 times a day, the women were constantly under threat of sexually transmitted diseases and were forced to have abortions in the most abominable conditions if they became pregnant. If they did not comply with an act a Japanese soldier requested, they could be tortured or even killed. While thousands of comfort women died during their internment, tens of thousands more went on to face what many consider a fate worse than death: alienation, discrimination and a lifetime of serious medical conditions.
Statues at the House of
Sharing are dedicated to some of the comfort women who have passed away. Photo
courtesy of the author.
Now, nearly 70 years later,
only a handful of comfort women – or halmoni,
the Korean term for grandmother, as they prefer to be called – remain alive.
They are fighting a fierce war of their own, claiming that the Japanese
government has never taken full responsibility for its crimes against them,
never officially apologized, or even recognized their wrongdoings. Though a
handful of Japanese government officials have made statements expressing
remorse over what happened to comfort women, they maintain that it was private
contractors, not the government, that sanctioned the comfort stations.
Therefore, they claim, there is no need for an official apology from the
Japanese parliament. Monetary retribution has never been offered through the
government directly, a sore point among many of the remaining comfort women. In
1995,
Over the past 20 years, as stories have tumbled from the halmoni’s anguished
memories, many attempts have been made by Korean and Japanese women’s groups
alike to petition the Japanese government for an official apology. It has yet
to arrive. The remaining halmoni
feel that the Japanese government still owes them, and that the money,
accompanied by an official apology, will prove that the Japanese finally take
responsibility for their crimes so many years ago.
But more than the financial relief that monetary compensation
would bring, a public recognition of
I imagine Kim Gun-ja, fists raised in outrage, voice rising in protest in the hope that the Japanese will finally listen. The vision seems so unlikely as I watch this stooped, silver-haired woman amble serenely among the flowers in the late afternoon sun. She is old and frail, but as long as the last halmoni lives, the spirits and voices of an entire generation of Korean women will ring out through her presence.
She smiles at me, and I am honored to be in the company of this
determined halmoni,
fighting an entire nation in order to redeem her past. It seems only a matter
of time before the Japanese government sees what I see. Maybe then these
courageous women can finally rest in the peace of forgiveness, their spirits
free and untarnished by the painful memories of long ago.