Floating Bridge

by Stephanie Minyoung Lee

Winner, Ray Ventre Memorial Nonfiction Prize, Selected by Natalie Lima

Woo Yun Jae, aged 65. Some time in 1944 she saw the Japanese put up a floating bridge over the Hung Pok River and cross the bridge to the other side. The soldiers never returned to the military camp.
—Comfort Women an Unfinished Ordeal: Report of a Mission, International Commission of Jurists, 1994.

I never lived as a woman.

I began visiting the statues because of my mother. Most are called the “statue of peace,” although the literal translation in Korean is sonyeosang, or statue of a girl. There are approximately fifty of these statues around the world, including one near where I live in Los Angeles, called the Peace Monument of Glendale. Rendered in bronze, the statue depicts a girl in traditional Korean attire sitting next to an empty chair symbolizing the victims who have passed away or remain unknown.

“We should call them ‘military sex slaves,’ not ‘grandmothers,’” my mother told me once, referring to the victims whom the statues commemorate. We were on our way home from a celebration for the sonyeosang in Glendale.

“They don’t like to be called ‘slaves,’” I pointed out. “But it’s sugarcoating and downplaying the seriousness,” she insisted. We kept disagreeing until she gestured at my semi-sheer blouse and said it was improper for the occasion. This was a rule of modesty that she would have never tested, and she was appalled that it had not crossed my mind.

We were speaking about the “comfort women,” who were scarcely women, many in their twenties and late teens, from more than thirteen countries across the Asia Pacific, trafficked into and detained in Japan’s imperial system of military rape, during the score of years or so until the end of the Second World War. Historians have estimated the number of victims to be anywhere from 60,000 to 400,000, but the total cannot be confirmed. The majority are believed to have died during their captivity. Despite the Japanese government’s ongoing efforts to suppress the facts, a critical mass of historical records has survived, including in U.S. national archives, where footage of “comfort women” was discovered in 2017 and 2020.

At the time, I did not know where this history began, so I started with the places where the victims are remembered. In September 2018, I attended a rally in San Francisco for the “Column of Strength,” a sculptural work portraying three girls from Korea, China, and the Philippines facing a Korean woman in the likeness of Kim Hak-sun, the first survivor to come forward in 1991. This monument was deemed so offensive by Japan’s right-wing faction that, one month later, the Mayor of Osaka wrote a ten-page letter to San Francisco Mayor London Breed and severed a 60-year sister-city relationship. 

Six months after that rally, during a visit to Seoul, I visited the House of Sharing, a museum and shelter for the “comfort women” in the suburb of Gwangju. That same week, I watched one of the fifteen remaining Korean survivors, 92-year-old Lee Yong-soo, speak at a “Wednesday demonstration” in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul, calling for the Japanese government to unconditionally apologize. This weekly event, reportedly the world’s longest protest on a single theme, was first held in January 1992. Across the street from the embassy is the original sonyeosang installed in 2011, the catalyst for sinking relations between South Korea and Japan, which are said to be at a historic nadir.

Mostly, however, I have stopped speaking about the issue because the people around me seemed not to care. Particularly during these months of lockdown and protests and death and insurrection, I am not sure what space others have for another tragedy, this one nearly eighty years in the past. Growing up in Los Angeles during the 1980s, I often found myself explaining where and what Korea was. Cut to the present, in which both Koreas are mentioned daily in the news for reasons I could have never imagined:  COVID-19; Kim Jong-un; BTS, the K-pop boy band; K-pop stans, for regularly flooding the hashtags created by American right-wing extremists.

Among these lows and highs, I wonder who will remember the “comfort women,” often called “grandmothers” in their native tongues, which is said to be a term of respect. To me, however, the appellation seems overly familiar and, moreover, untrue for those who were unable to bear children or held back from family life, believing themselves to be unworthy of normalcy, after having survived things that I suspect the human brain is not wired to understand, although they seem to keep happening all the time, in different iterations around the globe.

What I did not quite prepare for was how this history would infiltrate my association with commonplace things, such as the word “comfort.”  The euphemism of “comfort women” is ludicrous, as the late Iris Chang wrote in The Rape of Nanking—so ludicrous that it itself is obscene, because “comfort” is a word reserved for a hearty drink on a wintry day or consoling a small child deprived of a toy. It is no word for the largest known case of modern sex trafficking and slavery by a government, in this case, the former Empire of Japan.

Many of the survivors have rejected the term “comfort women” as a verbal cover-up. “I am very strong about this. We were not ‘comfort women,’ because ‘comfort women’ means something warm and soft. We were ‘Japanese war rape victims,’” said Dutch survivor Jan Ruff O’Herne, in a meeting with a Japanese government official before a public hearing on Japan’s war crimes in Tokyo during December 1992.

Jan Ruff O’Herne would go on to testify around the world, the first white woman to step forward as a victim, knowing that the Japanese government would dismiss the Korean women’s cries. But she, too, passed away in August 2019 without receiving the apology for which they revealed everything in the last years of their lives.

. . .

In January 2019, two months before my visit to Seoul, one of the former “comfort women” named Kim Bok-dong passed away at the age of 92. When she was 14 years old, Japanese soldiers visited her home and told her parents that she was being drafted to work in a garment factory. Instead, she was shipped to a military barracks in Taiwan, where she was dragged into a room, then beaten and raped. Before this happened, the officers debated whether she was too young, but they proceeded anyway.

Afterwards, Kim Bok-dong used the pocket money that her mother had given her to buy a bottle of high proof liquor, which she and a few other girls drank in a suicide attempt. They were revived by Japanese army medics who pumped their stomachs and kept them alive for the torture.

During her eight years in captivity, Kim Bok-dong was taken to Japanese military stations in China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore. She went home in 1945 after American forces arrived. She did not tell her family what had happened until her mother demanded to know why she would not marry.

Kim Bok-dong believed her mother died of heartbreak after learning the truth. For nearly fifty years, she did not tell anyone else until after 1991, when 67-year-old Kim Hak-sun convened a press conference in Seoul. After Kim

Hak-sun’s story went worldwide, hundreds of women from South Korea,

North Korea, Taiwan, China, the Philippines, Timor Leste, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Malaysia, and Papua New Guinea came forward about what they had endured in “comfort stations” around Japanese military zones throughout the Second World War.

In the wake of these testimonies, the Japanese government continued to deny any role in the “comfort” system, until a Japanese historian named Yoshimi Yoshiaki published six items that he had uncovered in military archives. The documents confirmed that the Imperial Armed Forces of Japan had transported and housed young females throughout the Asia Pacific, beginning in 1932 and until Japan’s surrender to the Allied Powers in 1945.

Yoshimi Yoshiaki’s discovery led to a statement by Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Kōno Yōhei in August 1993, admitting that the military was directly or indirectly “involved” and promising to undertake a thorough study and “forever engraving such issues in our memories through the study and teaching of history.”  Neither of those things has come to pass.

I was born a woman, but I never lived as a woman, Kim Bok-dong said in interviews over the years. She was echoing the words of Kim Hak-sun, who had passed away in 1997. I want a formal apology.

These birds are why I’m all right.

As a child, I favored a brand of instant ramen called Sapporo Ichiban. Sometimes when my sister and I craved a snack, my grandmother would crack apart the fried, crimped noodles into small pieces, which we ate in lieu of potato chips.

This was an irregular treat. My grandparents, as well as my aunt and uncle, had lived through Japan’s occupation of Korea, which lasted until the surrender on August 14, 1945, and consequently my relatives thought twice before buying Japanese goods. Even my mother, who was born after that war, attempted this boycott against the former colonizers, agonizing before buying a Sony stereo or a Toyota car, although we lived in America. Instant food was an exception, however, perhaps a delayed reaction to the fact that most Koreans never had enough to eat in the aftermath of the Second World War, followed by the Korean War.

Sometimes I miss eating this ramen, its particular man-made blend of sodium overload, but the word that causes me to think twice is ichiban, which means “first” or “number one” in Japanese. This word reminds me of the condoms used by Japanese soldiers in “comfort stations.”  Their full brand name was totsugeki ichiban or “number one attack.”  In Korea, women and girls were considered the carriers of family virtue, the essence of chaste wifehood and motherhood, all the things the soldiers obliterated with every attack.

I can hear the criticism already—that this is all speculative, and how can I read the minds of soldiers in the past, based on words printed on prophylactics that were useless anyway. The women were ordered to make the men wear condoms, and many men beat the women for daring to ask. In any case, there were not enough condoms, or satku, such that the women had to wash them out for reuse by hundreds and thousands of men to follow. The system had been created for them, for their use with impunity, complete with hired doctors, who examined the victims for sexually transmitted diseases and sometimes raped them afterwards. Some doctors administered opioids to keep the women subdued and numb, as well as abortions and hysterectomies, if needed. If needed, infanticide. After which the women were forced back into the never-ending violence.

During my visit to the House of Sharing, I saw a photograph of a discarded condom, found in the ruins of a “comfort station” in Okinawa. It was a decayed brown casing, not much to look at, nothing to think twice about, except for the fact that it had been distributed throughout the Empire of Japan— nearly 500 million acres of territory, as far north as Sakhalin, past China and Myanmar into the Andaman Islands, down to Papua New Guinea, and across the Pacific Ocean to Micronesia.

In between were the Philippines, Taiwan, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Timor-Leste, and outposts in Palau and the Mariana Islands. The Imperial Armed Forces provided approximately 50,000 condoms per division per month, or about two condoms per month per soldier. An estimated 32 million condoms were provisioned to armies in the field in 1942 alone.

Scattered between these points on the map were hundreds of “comfort stations,” where victims were detained after being ensnared through false promises of work and wages, dragged away, or terrified into submission, and sometimes sold by family or neighbors into the hands of middlemen, then uprooted and transported by trucks, trains, or ships through major port cities like Busan, Shimonoseki, Saigon, Manila, Java, Rabaul.

In the years after the war, details like these were known to the Allied Forces, despite the Japanese military’s efforts to erase the crimes. According to interviews with survivors, during the last days of the war, soldiers killed women and girls en masse, then abandoned their posts, leaving the living to fend for themselves. Back in Japan, during the two weeks after surrender, as thousands struggled through the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese officials incinerated records of wartime policies, including of the “comfort” system, adding to the shrouds of black smoke in the sky. But some officers later wrote openly of their participation, including Godzilla film director Honda Ishirō, who ran a “comfort station” in China, and former Navy officer Nakasone Yasuhiro, who later became Prime Minister of Japan.

There were no press conferences, however; no investigative journalists or celebrities to take up the cause. During the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, rape in “comfort stations” was missing from the charges. The Allied Powers had their sights on the results of human experimentation carried out by Unit 731 in China and the territory ceded by the Japanese Empire—the realm of the South Pacific, the Orient, the Far East with its curved eaves and silent girls. The reticence of the women was perhaps no exaggeration, but the offense lay in framing it as prurient allure, as opposed to a cornerstone rule of household subjugation—the practice of biting one’s tongue when living with several generations in gated compounds or small communities—especially in Korea, where a woman was second to her father, husband, and son, all of whose necks were under the thumb of a distant Japanese Emperor.

Some of the survivors, like Kim Bok-dong, ended up telling family members when they returned home, then blamed themselves for burdening their lives with the unbearable knowledge. Others did not have the words to describe the horrors that they had suffered. One survivor, Hwang Geum-joo, maintained that she had cornered then-First Lady Yuk Youngsoo, the wife of popular dictator President Park Chung-hee, who implored her not to resurrect the ghosts of Korea’s annexation by Japan, since the countries had signed a basic agreement for future economic relations. Instead of having their rights vindicated as one of the most egregious cases of state-sanctioned violence against women and children, the survivors were left to their own devices to internalize the trauma and the weakness of a mother country that had housed collaborators and abandoned its most vulnerable citizens.

In those days, Korean women were expected to kill themselves after sexual assault, to save face and preserve familial honor. At the “comfort stations,” the survivors witnessed fellow prisoners taking their lives, perhaps from honor, perhaps because life no longer seemed worth the effort to survive. But this draconian and misogynistic rule assumed that rape was a local matter. It did not contemplate the organized way in which females were preyed upon for their lack of education and invisibility in an elitist society, then detained in remote military outposts, maimed, burned, or slashed in every place imaginable, forced into medical procedures and invasive gynecological exams, on top of the daily gang-rape—all the while called flowery Japanese names written on wooden tiles hung on the walls.

Not that the system was efficient or effective. In the end, it was a monstrosity, conceived in the same violence that it purported to prevent, around which a behemoth culture of military rape exploded. After the international outcry over the Rape of Nanking in 1937, Emperor Hirohito fretted over his reputation. The military brass received orders to co-opt a network of “houses of relaxation” with the karayuki-san, women and girls from impoverished families in Japan, who had been bartered, sold, or defrauded, then smuggled abroad into a commercial sex work system, despite the various international treaties outlawing trafficking, slavery, and forced labor, not to mention the rape of female prisoners of war.

To bolster the swelling multitude of troops, the military was instructed to supervise local recruiters in discreetly procuring women and girls from the occupied countries, preferably those who were virgins. Aside from the sadism, this harvesting of bodies had a cold calculation. The authorities reasoned, if that is the right word, that soldiers who raped civilians or visited sex workers outside the military system would be susceptible to venereal disease and therefore worthless in this all-or-nothing war.

. . .

During my visit to the House of Sharing, the tour guides took us through a replica of a “comfort station.”  As we made our way underground, our footsteps resounded on the stairs. The structure was a small wooden cubicle with one makeshift window, a cot, and a basin, where the women and girls washed themselves in disinfectant after every soldier, as required by military regulations. The guide held out wooden tiles branded with feminine Japanese aliases. The tiles were placed face up for girls who were “occupied” and face down for girls who were “available”—like dishes at an izakaya, except it was humans on the menu.

Part of me wanted to engrave the details in my memory, these strokes of a history still under contention. But I also wanted to tread back up the stairs, into the light and the crisp country air, and regain a bit of myself. That was my privilege, a brief encounter with a darkness that I will never understand.

Elsewhere on the grounds, however, were a few elderly women who had survived it all. Later in the tour, the guides took us to a room where 93-yearold survivor Lee Ok-seon sat awaiting our questions. She was having a good day and had agreed to appear before the visitors. Through an interpreter, I asked how she had persevered, but she hemmed and hawed and spoke of another subject. I do not know if she did this deliberately or if it was a symptom of her years. In any case, I did not pursue the question; no one did. There was something inappropriate about pressing this snowy-haired lady, with her lined visage and bowed posture, to recount the worst days of her life.

. . .

In his landmark book Comfort Women, Japanese historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki noted the case of a Korean victim who was sold for an advance payment of 300 yen, about $10,000 in today’s time, and led off through deception. This aspect of the “comfort” system is belabored by ultranationalist history deniers in Japan, who consider the acts of accomplices to be exculpatory, although Japan’s government has conceded that the military was “involved,” albeit while insisting there is insufficient hard evidence, ignoring the fact that the military took pains to get rid of the bodies and the government destroyed much of the paper trail.

These lingering uncertainties, particularly over the total number of victims, is manna to the right-wing zealots, who obsess over lacunae in the survivors’ testimonies about how they were recruited, eliding the consistent pattern of acts they describe in “comfort stations” across multiple countries, insisting that these nonagenarians recount every detail of a trauma that they must have tried to erase from their minds.

For my part, in the historical records that have been uncovered, I have never seen any waiver, any contract signed by any woman or girl disclosing that she must have sex with a certain number of men every day or undergo a medical procedure that will prevent her from ever having a child. To my runof-the-mill lawyerly mind, every aspect of the “comfort” system smacks of respondeat superior or command responsibility, the doctrine that the master is liable for the wrongs of the servant, or the buck stops with the principals, not the accomplices or agents. Whichever way the women arrived, why didn’t the Japanese imperial military simply send them back?

This minimizing of violence against women is in no way restricted to dark corners of the Internet. In reputable foreign policy magazines, I have read repeated calls for Japan and South Korea to get over the dispute for the sake of regional security, as if the issue was limited to the two countries; these pundits having penned their opinions, I assume, while carrying on with their personal lives, which is precisely what the victims can never reclaim. From my human perspective, the proposition that drawing a curtain over such violence will nurture stability down the road seems to be fundamentally flawed. Men tortured in war are lionized, but women tortured in war are told to make peace.

What stands out to me in the survivors’ testimonies are the things they wanted most:  a job, an education, an appealing outfit when most people were living hand-to-mouth. Mun Pilgi, who was born in 1925, had a mother who secretly sold a bag of rice to pay for her elementary school tuition. Her father, who had pressured his wife to keep bearing children until she had a son at the age of 41, believed that educated girls were sly foxes.

When Mun Pilgi’s father found out about the deception, he burned all of her books, beat her, and threw her out of the house. She spent the next few years caring for her younger siblings, until she was approached one day by a neighbor, who promised to send her to a place where she could study and earn money and brought her to a Japanese policeman. The men cut her hair, gave her a new dress, and put her and four other girls on a train bound for Manchuria.

To me, the number that matters is one, as in any one rape against any one woman is one of the gravest crimes. Or perhaps the number 606, which stands for salvarsan, a derivative of arsenic that was injected into “comfort women” as a palliative for syphilis, which also made them infertile. In a culture where children are expected to care for their aging parents, this deprivation may have been one of the cruelest harms.

In 1997, filmmaker Dai Sil Kim-Gibson embarked on a documentary about the Korean “comfort women.”  One of them was Song Shin-do, who was detained for seven years and taken to Tokyo at the end of the war by a Japanese soldier, who then abandoned her on the spot.

During her captivity, Song Shin-do became pregnant four times and bore three children, whom the soldiers took away and disappeared. The fourth one died in her womb. There being no medical assistance around at the time, she reached inside and drew the body out.

In 1993, Song Shin-do filed a lawsuit against Japan for an official apology and compensation, but the Tokyo District Court, followed by the Tokyo High Court, and finally the Supreme Court of Japan, denied her claims.

In the documentary, Kim-Gibson asks Song Shin-do, Grandmother, why do you have birds?

I raise these birds because I do not have children. These birds are why I’m all right, she says.

An honorary doctorate in hardships.

In my family, we served men first. At mealtimes and gatherings, the first plate, the bigger portions, the choicest cuts of meat, would be set down before my father, my uncles, or my older male cousins. On nights when my father came home late at night, my mother would scoop the steaming cooked grains into a stainless steel bowl with a matching lid and bury it between hand-sewn quilts that we stored in a sliding closet. I think she could have just left the rice in the cooker until he arrived, but maybe she felt compelled to maintain the ritual, even in America.

In those days, I lived for the summers when my sister and I would depart with our grandmother to my uncle’s house in rural Pennsylvania. We would get up, wash and brush our teeth, have our grandmother braid our hair, then head outdoors to the swimming pool for hours at a time, with our cousins’ children in tow. At night, my grandmother, my uncle’s wife, and my female cousins would cook full-course meals for the men and children, after which my sister and I would watch endless hours of television. Sometimes my aunt, who was living with my uncle, her younger brother, would sneak us junk food from his liquor store in downtown Philadelphia.

I do not know how my older cousins, my uncle’s sons and daughters, felt about these interludes with the encroaching summer visitors. I was primarily conscious of the sensation of freedom from my mother, who made us complete extra homework and study on weekends throughout the school year. You’re too hard on your children, my uncle would inform her, and she could not respond or defend herself, since he was an older man.

I think I have rarely spoken out explicitly against this ranking, this default order of male over female in life. Not knowing quite how to reverse that which seems beyond my control, I think I have mostly given off the vibe of opting out, while constantly weighing inside how to go about my business alone.

. . .

The story that my aunt told my sister is that a soldier approached her while she was leaving high school one day. He asked my aunt if she wanted to train as a nurse, earn good money, help the soldiers fighting to defend Japan in the war.

My aunt had never been offered anything grand like this before. A few other girls were already on the truck. My aunt considered the situation, then stepped onto the bed. A short time later, the vehicle began rolling away.

The story that I heard from my mother is that my grandmother smeared dirt on her face, crumpled up her clothing, and went to the gates of my aunt’s school. It was a private girls’ academy, one of a few in the area, founded by American Christian missionaries—Jinmyeong Girls’ High School in Seoul, which my grandmother’s family called Hanseong secretly, since Koreans were banned from speaking their own language during the country’s colonization by Japan. My grandmother crouched behind some foliage and waited to see if what she had heard about was true.

My aunt told my sister that, before the truck went too far, she began having second thoughts. She crept her way to the edge of the bed, then made a split-second decision and jumped off, shoving away the soldiers’ attempts to drag her back onto the truck.

My aunt never returned to high school again. In my mother’s telling, the reason why my grandmother hid behind the bushes that day was because her aunt had told her a rumor that girls were being kidnapped in front of their schools. While my grandmother was waiting outside the girls’ school gates, she had seen a truck filled with men in uniform, and it was this then that she made up her mind.

I do not know if my grandmother saw my aunt getting on the military truck or if her reconnaissance mission was on another day. Perhaps my mother was told a filtered version of the encounter, to obscure the danger that my aunt was actually in, to make the reality seem less terrifying. Whatever the story was, it caused my grandparents to pull my aunt out of high school. They chopped off her hair and kept her at home, without quite explaining why.

I have saved up some questions for my aunt the next time that I see her. Whether the soldiers were Japanese or whether they were Korean soldiers who spoke Japanese. What happened to the other girls on the truck and whether she ever saw them again.

But I have not spoken to my aunt in the three years since a chasm opened between her and my mother, following some heated conversation that ended with my aunt yelling into the phone, I am not educated like you!

Theirs is a fifteen-year difference in age, and it has meant everything.

By the time my aunt was married, she had lived through Japan’s occupation, World War II, and the Korean War. My mother, on the other hand, was born a few days after Gwangbokjeol, the day that the light returned, or August 15, 1945, one day after Japan’s surrender, when Korea gained independence.

Aside from a brief detour in childhood, when the family evacuated to Pusan during the Korean War, my mother completed elementary school, junior high, and high school without further incident, then attended Ewha Womans University, where she studied English literature under a professor named

Yun Chong-ok, who would begin researching the issue of “comfort women” decades later, opening up the Pandora’s box of Korea’s occupation by Japan.

With my grandmother’s implicit approval, my mother then applied for and was accepted to graduate school in America, but my grandfather was against the whole plan. He thought my mother, his youngest child, should settle down and get married.  

Your mother’s life only got hard when she met your dad, my aunt said to my sister once. At the same time, no one in our family supported my parents’ separation. In the end, my mother could not bring herself to file divorce papers and violate in a court of law the rule of loyalty to her husband, one of three submissions that Korean women owe to men throughout their entire lives.

. . .

In the course of these run-on weeks and months, I have resorted to a habit of braiding my hair in the mornings, sometimes twisting it down both sides of my head, or wrapped over the crown, or gathered into a single strand down my back. It is the swiftest way for me to regain a sense of order, grasping for a simpler time in life, when my days began with the comforting pressure of my grandmother’s hands against my scalp, weaving my hair into clean lines.

But, as my mother often reminds me, I am too old for that. I am too old for any braid, too old to lay claim to this hairstyle by which unmarried women were identified in Korea at one time.

In 2000, Hwang Geum-joo was one of fifteen “comfort women” from Korea, China, and the Philippines, who filed a lawsuit against Japan’s government in Washington, D.C. The D.C. Circuit Court ultimately denied their claims, on the grounds that the dispute was political in nature and could not be determined by American tribunals.

My long braided hair clearly showed I was a virgin. How was it possible that I could take off my clothes in front of a man?  I was dressed neatly in hanbok, traditional Korean dress. I told him no. He told me then I would be killed… I told him I could not do so even if it meant death.

At thirteen years old, Hwang Geum-joo chose to work as a domestic servant in exchange for an advance of 100 won, perhaps worth a few hundred dollars today, which would pay for medicine for her sick father. She considered her employer’s household to be a foster family and lived with them until she was eighteen, when the family received a wartime labor draft notice from the Japanese military for her oldest foster sister to work in a factory overseas.

Mindful of the 100-won debt, Hwang Geum-joo decided to go in her foster sister’s stead. At the train station at Hamhung in what is now North Korea, her family gathered to see her off.

I wore a navy blue skirt and a Chinese cabbage color top, made of a fine material. I braided my hair and tied it with a red ribbon. And one thing I will never forget, I wore a black cape. At the time, there were very few who could afford a cape, but my mother had it made for me.

Hwang Geum-joo was held in Manchuria until August 15, 1945. On that day, she was alarmed by the sudden silence in the military base and crept to the mess hall, where a lone Japanese soldier told her that his country had been bombed and she had better go back home. She told this to the seven other “comfort women” left in the station, but they were too ill and enervated to leave. They asked her to tell their parents what had happened to them, because people had to know.

Hwang Geum-joo sojourned on foot with other war refugees to the Kore-

an border, then down to the 38th parallel, where American soldiers sprayed her with DDT, causing the lice that had swarmed over her on the military base to drop dead from her body. She made her way to Seoul and continued surviving on her own, working at a small eatery and a textile factory, then selling tofu on the streets, and took in five orphans abandoned during the Korean War.

A day arrived when her birth mother came to see her, after having heard through a relative that her daughter was alive. They stared at each other in silence, then Hwang Geum-joo asked her mother to explain how her father had died. Having sworn not to return to her hometown until she had made something of herself, Hwang Geum-joo never went back, not even when her mother died.

I want people in the United States to publicly acknowledge my past, to recognize the hardships I had to endure and the humiliation I had to suffer. Admittedly, it is not like an award in recognition of one’s great achievements but perhaps just celebrating the fact that I am still alive. Maybe, they can give me an honorary doctorate in “hardships.”

I don’t need translation.

In the early days of the lockdown, I found myself reliving habits that I had sworn never to repeat. Cutting napkins in half to make the supply last longer. Pickling vegetables. Soaking produce in tubs. The more I retrace these patterns, the greater my determination grows never to admit to my mother how right she was all along.

One habit, though, never fails to remind me of my aunt, and that is peeling an apple in a single rind. The thinner the peel, the greater my value would appear to my future mother-in-law, who would judge whether I was worthy of her son—or so my aunt said—through this demonstration of domestic science, a game of arcane culinary arts, of maximizing any bounty when everything is scarce. I was dubious about the ritual, but it didn’t seem worth raising hell over, so I shut up and picked up the knife.

I spent more time with my aunt those days, in her tiny apartment in downtown Los Angeles, next to the Angels Flight funicular, that beloved device of L.A. noir. In the afternoons, the apartment would flood with sunlight and reflect off the mother-of-pearl lacquer wardrobes that she had shipped all the way from Seoul.

My aunt had an old rotary dial television with which I would amuse myself while she cooked us something to eat. It was during one of those visits, when I was flipping through the channels, that I came across an episode of the original Iron Chef.

We can’t watch this, it’s in Japanese, I said.

My aunt looked up. Speak for yourself, I don’t need translation, she answered, then laughed at my open-mouthed surprise.

As soon as she said those words, all the vintage family photographs that I had seen from that era flooded into my mind. Until then, I had not grasped my aunt’s situation at that particular moment in time.

. . .

In the photograph taken at my mother’s college graduation, my aunt’s expression is haughty, her makeup pristine, her hair coiffed into a careful bouffant. She is at the height of her glory, the crème de la crème of society, a time when she donned pearls and fur and her family ate rare meat every day.

She is not a college graduate, however, or a high school graduate. Eventually, my aunt made good on her impulse to become a nurse, but it was during the Korean War, when she met my uncle, a refugee from the north, as was my father. After the country was sliced into two, the southern half seemed to move inexorably on, embedded with U.S. military bases and bolstered by financial aid following the normalization of relations with Japan.

My aunt and other sharp-eyed Koreans embraced the new money, the club life of dance halls and dinner parties, the treacherous private cash pools called gye, in which my grandparents refused to participate, to my aunt’s frustration. But she played the risks skillfully, amassing a degree of wealth carrying her to such great heights that she would not let her children sit anywhere in public without first laying down a white handkerchief. The instinct that had spurred her when she was young to seize every opportunity was channeled towards a merciless hunger to climb upwards and grasp for more.

By the time my aunt and her husband came to America, however, all of that luxury had melted away, for reasons that she never explained, at least not to my mother. She earned a living as a garment worker, a restaurant owner and a cook, a cashier in her younger brother’s liquor store, scraping up and rebuilding her savings with her bare hands. The days in which she was a schoolgirl forced to learn Japanese and nearly taken to become a sexual slave were far behind her now, swallowed up in the faded past of a country to which she has never returned.

. . .

Of all the testimonies that I have encountered, the most difficult for me to sit through is that of Chung Seo-woon, the only child of an affluent family in Southern Gyeong-sang Province. In a resigned cadence, she describes her father’s resistance to the Japanese military police, whom he called wae-nom-dul, those Japanese pirates.

Chung Seo-woon’s father was jailed for refusing to hand over the family’s ritual brassware for Japan’s war effort, after which the village foreman approached her about working in a factory in Japan in exchange for her father’s release. Her stepmother pled with her not to go, but she could not forget the image of her father’s hands, bloodied and bandaged after the police ripped out his fingernails, which her father had tried to conceal from her when a Japanese official brought her to visit him in prison.

Chung Seo-woon resolved to go abroad on assurances that her father would be set free the moment that she left for Japan. Instead, the ship docked at Bangkok, Saigon, Singapore, and Jakarta, from which she was taken to a “comfort station” in Semarang with thirteen other girls. There, the soldiers shot her up with opium to keep her immobilized. After the Allied Forces arrived in Indonesia in 1945, she was put on a ship headed towards home.

Upon her return, she learned that her father had died in prison and that Japanese soldiers had attempted to rape her stepmother, who then committed suicide. Alone in the house, for the next several months, she raged through a self-imposed detoxification, crawling on the floors and ripping at the walls, to get rid of the opium addiction and purge the last vestige of control by her military captors.

I can’t even count how many soldiers came in, especially on the weekends, lining up, still in their uniforms. There’s just so much to tell.

Both Chung Seo-woon and Hwang Geum-Joo were interviewed for Kim-Gibson’s documentary in the 1990s. Before she began filming, Hwang Geum-Joo laid down the rules:

You have to do your research right. For instance, in my case, you must stress that I went with an officially drafted notice. This is important because it means Japan’s deceit was official and systematic – the draft notice was from the government, just like an army draft. 

I tried to accept everything as my fate.

At the start of this year, I received an email about a paper by a Harvard Law professor arguing that Korean “comfort women” had negotiated the terms of their captivity, which seemed to imply that they had assumed the risk of every act done to them in the “comfort stations.”  The message was extreme but not a wholesale shock to me, at its core, a flashier restatement of the Japanese government’s position that it bears no legal responsibility for any “comfort women.”  The mainstream fury that this paper evoked, however, remains an ongoing source of surprise, as someone who has encountered mostly apathy around the subject.

At around the same time, I came across a HeForShe profile of Shinzo Abe, the former and longest-serving Prime Minister of Japan. As I scrolled down the page, I had to stand up and walk away, stunned by this veneration of a man who has attempted single-handedly to bury alive the elderly survivors and victims. In 2007, Abe announced in front of his Diet that there is no evidence of “comfort women” being coerced into places where their lives were nearly scraped out. He proceeded to criticize a U.S. publisher for stating the facts in textbooks and commandeered his envoys abroad to take down all of the statues, the sonyeosang, every single memorial to the victims, wherever they were, no matter the consequences, at any cost.

Until then, I had no knowledge about the male sexual organ, let alone about coitus. The officer raped me, and I tried to accept everything as my fate.

Choi Il-rye was born in a secluded village in Southern Cholla Province. Her mother died when she was little and her father was an agricultural laborer. When she was 16 years old and working as a domestic servant, two men in uniform came by and kidnapped her from near a village well. She was placed into a caravan of military trucks with around thirty other girls.

For thirteen years, from 1932 to 1945, Choi Il-rye was enslaved in a “comfort station” in Manchuria. She sang to the Japanese soldiers, washed their clothes, tended their wounds, attended their funerals, and sometimes served them alcohol, which gave her the opportunity to drink alongside them.

She was also repeatedly raped. For this, she received no wages, but eventually she managed to save “tips” amounting to about 1,000 yen.

Towards the end of the war, one of the officers singled out Choi Il-rye. He gave her identification papers and detailed instructions on how to escape. By the time she arrived in Seoul, Korea had been liberated, and she was able to return to her hometown right away.

. . .

This is the question that my mother asked me six years ago. “Why don’t you write about ‘comfort women’?” she said to me in passing, while I was in the hallway and on the way, perhaps, to the kitchen for a snack or out the door for an afternoon run.

I stopped in my tracks. I was caught off guard. Earlier that week, I had told my mother about a news report on the “comfort women,” the contents of which I have since forgotten. But the story must have stayed with her, lingered in her mind, a reminder of the country that she left nearly forty years ago.

Since my mother’s question, I have asked myself incessantly whether that history is mine, when I consider myself situated fully in America, and the modern perils of being a woman are too legion to be essentialized. But, in all the cases known to me, I have found the authorities’ response to evade the root causes of the crimes and the impulse to shift blame to the victims to be crushingly familiar.

Maybe it is human nature, when all the signs point in one direction, to keep moving the other way, towards only those facts which deliver ease of mind. As for myself, I am past neutrality when it comes to the “comfort women.” Having sat with their testimonies, the history books, the articles that I should have read in school, the corrosive threads of those who claim that the victims are lying, I am more at sea than ever about the right moment to look away. I only sense that the time is not now, not because of tenuous ties to the girl I was or where my family is from, but because the fact that such things can happen anywhere reveal the frailty of humankind.

And I am waiting tensely for that moment, when the last survivor passes away, when the floodgates open to the deniers of truth, and the history becomes fair game. I wonder then who will remember the grandmothers who were taken when they were young, when the things for which they longed were used as weapons of war.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Asian names are written in the order of family name, then given name.  The texts named in the essay are: the 1994 Report by the International Commission of Jurists; The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang; Comfort Women by Yoshimi Yoshiaki, translated by Suzanne O’Brien; and the documentary Silence Broken directed by Dai Sil Kim-Gibson and companion book.

The landmark testimony of Kim Hak-sun (alt:  Kim Hak-soon) is confirmed in multiple public records, including the website for the now-defunct Asian Women’s Fund. 

The quoted testimonies of survivors are from the following sources:  for Jan Ruff O’Herne, her autobiography entitled Fifty Years of Silence and companion documentary directed by Ned Landers; for Kim Bok-dong, an interview with Asian Boss and obituaries by BBC and the New York Times; for Song Shin-do, Silence Broken; for Hwang Geum-Joo, Silence Broken and Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military, edited by Sangmie Choi Schellstede; for Chung Seo-woon, the animated short Herstory directed by Kim Jun-ki; and for Choi Il-rye, The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan by Chunghee Sarah Soh. 

Mun Pil-gi’s experiences are included in Chunghee Sarah Soh’s book.  Chung Seo-woon recounted additional details to Kim-Gibson in an interview entitled “They Defiled My Body, Not My Spirit:  The Story of a Korean Comfort Woman, Chung Seo Woon,” published in Making More Waves New Writing by Asian American Women, edited by Elaine H. Kim, Lilia V. Villanueva, and Asian Women United of California. 

Additional sources include:  the 1996 and 1998 Reports of the Special Rapporteurs of the UN Human Rights Commission; the 2005 Report by

Amnesty International; and the Judgment of the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal for the Trial of Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery, held in Tokyo during December 8-12, 2000.

The case of Hwang Geum-joo and other victims was initially denied in the lower courts on grounds of sovereign immunity, then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which remanded the case back to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals (Hwang Geum Joo v. Japan, 413 F.3d 45, D.C. Cir. 2005).

Since completing this essay, two survivors from South Korea have passed away. As of the time of publication, there are thirteen registered survivors in South Korea and an estimated 100 known survivors across the victimized countries, including China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and East Timor.

Stephanie Minyoung Lee is a Los Angeles native and a film lawyer by day.  Her work has appeared in The Common and The Atticus Review.  She has also cowritten about “comfort women” for Just Security.