Voices of the Korean Comfort Women: History Rewritten from Memories ~ By Chungmoo Choi and Hyunah Yang, ed and trans.
(Routledge Publishers, London, 2023, ISBN #978-1-03-223057-3)
Review by Joanne Rhim Lee (Summer 2024)
On August 14, 1991, 67-year-old Hak-sun Kim, a survivor of the Japanese military sexual slavery system (referred to as the comfort women) was the first to publicly share her story. She told of being taken from her home and forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II. In the decade that followed, hundreds of other former comfort women came forward to share their testimonies, and an international campaign launched and grew in strength and numbers to demand a formal apology from Japan and obtain monetary compensation for the victims.
In 2000, the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery was held in Tokyo, at which nine women bravely shared their testimonies (KQ attended and covered the tribunal in it’s Winter 2001 issue). These nine stories were translated and edited by Chungmoo Choi and Hyunah Yang in their powerful anthology, Voices of the Korean Comfort Women: History Rewritten from Memories.
The Japanese military systematically kidnapped or coerced tens of thousands of mostly teenage girls from countries it occupied before and during World War II; they came from China, the Philippines, Burma, Indonesia, Okinawa, and other areas of the Pacific Rim. Because Korea was a longtime colony of Japan (from approximately 1910 to 1945), the largest number of these women were Korean. Many of them were either killed by the Japanese, or died by suicide during or after the war. Thousands have never come forward, due to the shame that it would bring upon themselves and their families. Thus, it is difficult to know the depths of the horror experienced by these women.
With the help of six translator who were all doctoral students in the East Asian Studies Department at the University of California-Irvine, the editors interviewed nine survivors, meticulously recording their stories over several months in 2000. Since then, all nine women have died, and the number of known former comfort women is dwindling, believed to be less than 10 today.
Editors Choi and Yang include an excellent introduction, providing key context about the history of the sexual slavery system. They include descriptions of the use of systemic rape as a weapon of war in recent history, for example, during the Rwandan Genocide in 1994, the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Bosnian War from 1992 to 1995, the Sudanese Civil War in 2012, and in even more recent conflicts in Nigeria, Myanmar, and Ukraine.
Though awareness of the former comfort women and their story is becoming more widely known, reading what happened to these nine women, in their own words, is shocking. Kap-sun Ch’oe wrote how just as she would try to clean herself up after a Japanese soldier raped her, another one would come in, over and over. Many of the women were denied food and experienced severe malnutrition, and others became addicted to opium to escape the pain.
This destruction of individual lives, as well as the permanent harm to families and communities, is apparent throughout these nine testimonies. After Japan was defeated in World War II, many of the women attempted to return home, but were shunned by their families. Yun-hong An was pregnant when she returned home in 1945, but she was rejected not only by her family, but by her entire community, who spread rumors about her and called her a “tramp” and a “bad girl.” She was forced to give birth to her baby in a barn.
Several of the women expressed guilt about what happened to them, as if they were to blame for the crimes committed against them. Ok-son Han said, “The story of my hardship, you cannot write in one book, you need several books. I need many more days and nights to talk about it all, and it’s still not enough, more so because of my sin of going as a comfort woman.”
All of the women were taken as teenagers, though one, Sun-man Na (pseudonym), was taken to Japan in 1941 at age 12, along with a paternal aunt. She worked at a comfort station near Hiroshima, where she was repeatedly raped by Japanese soldiers. Her story illustrates the many ways that the women tried to resist; she bit the men, tearing parts of their faces off with her teeth. One of these men twisted her arm and broke it, and she lived with a crooked arm for the rest of her life. The interviewer noted that her left arm was bent outward, and she could not raise it above her head.
Kap-sun Ch’oe was more than 80 years old during her interview. She shared that although she was lonely, she was happy that she could finally talk about her painful past. Even amidst the horror and pain of these memories, there is great strength and hope in the stories, and the reader develops appreciation for the women’s courage to share their stories publicly, and that it is a privilege to be able to read them.
