HWANG KEUM-JU, A KOREAN GIRL, was 18 when she was “drafted” by the Japanese to work in a factory. Trucked off to Manchuria, she was ticketed in a freezing barrack and assigned a Japanese name. The day after her arrival, an officer ordered her into a small room and told her to do as he said or be killed. He then ordered her to remove her clothes from her.
“It was like a bolt from the sky,” she later said. “My long braid clearly showed I was a virgin….I told him no.” When she continued to resist, he ripped and cut her clothes off her. She fainted, only to wake up in a pool of blood. That was just the beginning of the horrors she would experience as a sex slave for Japanese troops.
War creates strange euphemisms, but one of the most twisted has to be “comfort women.” These women—an estimated 50,000 to 200,000—were held as slaves to sexually service Japanese soldiers in the 1937–1945 Sino-Japanese War and World War II. For almost 50 years later, their story was virtually unknown. Even now the tragedy of the comfort women is shrouded in controversy, particularly over what these women are owed for their suffering. Promised legitimate work, they left behind lives of hardship and took a chance for a better future. Despite their terrible wartime experiences, several not only survived the war but overcame their deep emotional scars and found the courage to tell their stories.
THE VAST MAJORITY of comfort women were uneducated rural Koreans between 14 and 18 years old, whose poverty and circumstances left them vulnerable to exploitation. Throughout the women's short lives, the Japanese had been their colonial overlords and the yangban, the Korean gentry—and for that matter, any man in that patriarchal society—their superiors. The future held little more than destitution. So when men showed up in their villages offering good work in Japanese factories or front-line hospitals, along with a chance to learn and lead a better life, the most courageous girls signed on.