One woman's story.
Comfort women protest.
Japanese slow to repay.
Other links.
|
|
Comfort Women
by Dottie Horn
Comfort women. For Caroline Berndt, the phrase evokes no
comfort, only the brutality of men at
war. As part of her honors thesis in Asian studies, Berndt, a recent
graduate and current UNC-CH law student, translated
the story of Pak Kumjoo, one of the Japanese Army's comfort women during
World War II.
The story of the army's comfort stations begins in 1932, with Japanese
Lieutenant-General Okamura Yasuji. Seeking a
solution to the 223 reported rapes by Japanese troops, he asked for
comfort women to be sent for his soldiers in Shanghai,
China. The Japanese Army used comfort stations extensively until the
war ended in the Pacific in 1945.
At a typical comfort station, a soldier paid a fee, obtained a ticket and
a condom, and was admitted to a woman's space, which might have been
partioned
with sheets.
Pak (her surname) was about 17, living in Hamun, Korea, when local
Korean officials, acting on orders from the Japanese, began
recruiting women for factory work. Someone from Pak's house had to go.
In April of 1942, Korean officials turned Pak and
other young women over to the Japanese, who took them into China, not
into factories.
Pak's history is not unusual. A majority of the women who provided sex
for Japanese soldiers were forcibly taken from their
families, or were recruited deceptively. Sometimes family members
were beaten or killed if they tried to rescue the women, most
in their teens. Once the women arrived at the comfort station, they were
forced to have sex, typically with 20 to 30 men a day. If
they resisted, they were beaten or killed.
A majority of the 80,000 to 200,000 comfort women were from Korea,
though others were recruited or kidnapped from China,
the Phillipines, Burma, and Indonesia. Some Japanese women who worked as
prostitutes before the war also became comfort
women.
With help from her advisor, Jan Bardsley, assistant professor of Asian
studies,
Berndt analyzed the attitude, prevalent throughout history, that rape is
unavoidably a part of war. She also examined international laws intended
to pro
tect women from sexual violence during war. But the heart of her thesis
was her translation of Pak's narrative.
"To see what happened to one woman is a way of making history
concrete," Berndt says. "I felt I was discovering her history
sentence by sentence."
Many women became sterile from the repeated rapes. Women who became
pregnant or infected with a sexually transmitted
disease were given a shot of the antibiotic terramycin, which the women
referred to as "Number 606."
"The drug made the women's bodies swell up and would usually
induce an abortion," Berndt says.
Nearly all of the two-and-a-half million Japanese soldiers who
surrended to the Allies in 1945 would have known about the
comfort system, according to George Hicks' book
The Comfort Women. However, after the war the comfort stations quickly
faded from public consciousness, and for years the issue received little
attention. Accounts of former comfort women reveal
that many told only a few family members or no one about their
experiences.
The events that led to international awareness of the issue began in
1988. In that year, Professor Yun Chung Ok of Ehwa Women's University in Korea began to lead an
activist group that conducted and presented research about the comfort women.
In 1990, 37 women's groups in Korea formed the Voluntary Service Corps
Problem Resolution Council and demanded that the
Japanese government admit that Korean women had been forcibly drafted to
serve as comfort women, publicly apologize, fully
disclose what happened, raise a memorial, compensate survivors or their
families, and include the facts in historical education.
In response, the Japanese government denied that women had been forced
to work at comfort stations and maintained that it
was never involved in operating comfort stations. In 1991, three Korean
former comfort women filed a lawsuit against the
Japanese government.
In 1992, Professor Yoshimi Yoshiaki of Chuo University found wartime
documents in the Library of the National Institute
for Defence Studies that confirmed that the Japanese Forces had operated
comfort stations. On the same day that excerpts
from the documents were published in Japanese newspapers, the government
admitted its involvement.
Berndt says that meeting the comfort women's demands could help Japan
discourage what she calls the "commodification"
of women, not only in war but in peacetime. According to Berndt's
sources, some Japanese corporations still reward
hardworking businessmen by organizing "sex tours" of
prostitution houses in cities across Southeast Asia.
Berndt also found reports that women from Southeast Asia are recruited
by agencies for work in Japan as receptionists, host
esses, and waitresses. When the women arrive, the agency takes their
passports, and many become prostitutes.
"The idea that these types of practices are so rampant today
scares me," Berndt says. "If Japan could address the comfort women
issue, it might send a stronger message against current
practices."
In 1993, 18 Filipina former comfort women filed a lawsuit against the
Japanese government. So far, neither the
Korean nor the Filipina women's lawsuits have been resolved, and the
Japanese government has not proposed alternative reparations
satisfactory to the former comfort women. "I'm feeling pessimistic
about the government or the
courts giving the women what they want," Berndt says. "But I
do think that the women have continued to bond together and affirm their
own dignity through
their testimonies."
The story of Pak Kumjoo
excerpts from a translation by Caroline Berndt
--
Whether it was morning or night, once one soldier left, the next
soldier came. Twenty men would come in one day...
--
We would try to talk each other out of committing suicide, but even
with that, women still did. There were women who
stole opium and took it. If they took a lot of it, they would vomit
blood and die. There were people who died after gulping
medicine whose name they didn't even know. There were also people who
hanged themselves with their clothing when
inside the toilet. Because there were people who tried to kill
themselves even if they only had some string, we tried to hide
string from each other...
--
Then, about six months after I was made a "military comfort
woman," I told a colonel in the army, "Do you think we are
your maids and your prostitutes? How can you be a human being after
making us do such things? We came because we
were told we were going to a factory, and we didn't come knowing we
would be prostituted." I spat in his face.
--
From there, that soldier said, "It is the command of the army.
The country's order is the Emperor's order. If you have
something to say, you can say it to the Emperor." Then he beat me.
I was in a coma for three days. Even when I regained
consciousness, I couldn't move. Even now I feel pain from that time, and
scars remain.
|