A diminutive, elderly, Korean women keeps a crowd of students quiet and fascinated for a full hour. Her voice is strong and although she has the benefit of a translator the emotions she expresses need no translation.
Gil Won Ok’s story sheds light on a part of history that is rarely discussed and that many, the Japanese Government in particular, do not care to remember. “I was thirteen when a man promised me work in a factory,” she begins: duped into sex slavery at a ‘comfort camp’ in North China, it would be 67 years before Gil Won Ok would see her Korean home again.
Along with thousands of other women she was enlisted as a ‘comfort woman’ for the Japanese army. They were routinely raped; non compliance was not an option. “When I was not co-operating they would fetch the guards. The guards would beat me, pull my hair and tell me I deserved to die.”
At times the beatings were so brutal and the women were left so bloodied and weak that their clothes had to be peeled off with knives. During this endless cycle of violence she had her first period. As a naive thirteen year old she thought that the bleeding was a sign of permanent damage.
“The abuse continued during our periods. We were given a cloth. But they got dirty and coated and then the guards would beat us for not keeping them clean. And you know us girls, we like to keep clean”. This persisted for three years until the end of the war. Her ordeal, however, did not end with the triumph of the allies over the Japanese.
Upon return by ship to Korea Gil Won Ok and her peers had to endure two weeks aboard a docked ship awaiting permission to enter. They were without any washing facilities, “smelling like rotten animals,” she recalls. Upon arrival they were taken to hospital where they were examined and promised food and clothes if they were obedient. Without money they had no means of returning home. They received rice and beds “a pittance probably from the government”.
The long term consequences of such abuse has been considerable. In particular her womb was infected and she was left unable to conceive. She says this was a pain felt deeply “as a human. As a women I do not feel complete without giving birth. It was a torment”.
Ultimately though her message today is one of hope. “Life is really resilient. After all I’m still here,” she tells me. She adopted a child and proudly speaks of his Masters degree, accomplishments in business and her grandchildren. “He is good to me. I feel the hardship I went through has been repaid.”
She remains determined to receive an apology and recognition of the harm done from the Japanese Government. “They think once we die we will be forgotten and the abuse will die with us and be erased. But you the young people must not let that happen.”
So far the Japanese government has been stubborn in its refusal to display contrition or compensate the comfort women. Gil Won Ok bemoans the lack of strong support from the Korean government.
“I have never seen a Korean politician despite being Korean. I am a citizen and a daughter of Korea but I feel like a foreigner.” She informs me that she and her fellow campaigners derive great strength and comfort from support of the youth of South Korea and from other campaigners around the world, who back her demand for an apology from the Japanese government. “That makes me feel completely healthy and that life is worth living.”
She feels that the younger generations in Korea are less reluctant to address the issue head on; a consequence she attributes to the renewed sense of national sovereignty, increasing Korean patriotism, and changing attitudes. There are many reasons to be optimistic that she will live long enough to receive an official apology.
On the 3 November last year the UN Human Rights Committee issued its concluding observations and recommendations to the Government of Japan, expressing “concern that the State party [of Japan] has still not accepted its responsibility for the ‘comfort women’ system during World War II.”
Gil Won Ok demands that Japan “should accept legal responsibility and apologize unreservedly for the ‘comfort women’ system in a way that is acceptable to the majority of victims and restores their dignity, prosecute perpetrators who are still alive, take immediate and effective legislative and administrative measures to adequately compensate all survivors as a matter of right, educate students and the general public about the issue, and to refute and sanction any attempts to defame victims or to deny the events.”
The US, the Netherlands, Canada, and the 27 member states of the EU have all urged the government of Japan to provide a public, unambiguous and formal apology for the sex slavery system perpetrated during the Second World War.
Gil Won Ok appears apologetic for speaking at such length about her ordeal and campaign – “a habit of the elderly I’m afraid” – but she emphasises the importance of continuing support for the organisations which provide housing and food for former ‘comfort women’.
She implores us all to “think of the not one, not two but 2,000 women taken away from playing fields, villages, families and friends.” And with that, she leaves to tell her story in another location to another crowd, confident the more people who are told her harrowing story the less likely it becomes that the atrocities committed against thousands of Korean women will fade into a short paragraph of a history text book.
