Story Highlights
Kim Bok-dong is determined to share her story of sexual slavery until she is no longer physically capable
Kim was held prisoner by the Japanese military in a “comfort station” for five years and was raped incessantly.
He says he will not rest until he receives a formal apology from the Japanese government.
cnn
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Kim Bok-dong is now 89 years old and is going blind and deaf. He knows that his health is deteriorating and that he can no longer walk without assistance. But his eyes shine with a passion born from repairing the suffering of a lifetime.
She enters a meeting of foreign correspondents in Tokyo in a wheelchair, visibly exhausted after a flight from Seoul and days of interviews and meetings.
The nightmares of five years as a sex slave in the Japanese army, from 1940 onwards, remain very clear. Kim is determined to share her story with anyone who will listen, until she is no longer physically capable.
“My only wish is to set the record straight about the past. Before I die,” Kim says.
Kim was a 14-year-old girl when the Japanese came to her village in Korea. She says she was told she had no choice but to leave her home and family to support the war effort by working in a sewing factory.
“There was no option not to go,” he remembers. “If we didn't go, they would consider us traitors”
Instead of going to a sewing factory, Kim says he ended up in Japanese military brothels in half a dozen countries. Along with 30 other women, she says she was locked in a room and forced to do things that no teenager – no woman – should ever have to do.
Kim describes seemingly endless days of soldiers lining up outside the brothel, called a “comfort station.”
They were often so close to the front lines that they could hear the battles of World War II happening around them.
“Our job was to revitalize the soldiers,” he says. “On Saturdays they started lining up at noon. And it would last until 8 at night. There was always a long line of soldiers. On Sunday it was from 8am to 5pm Again, a long line. “I didn’t have a chance to count how many.”
Kim estimates that each Japanese soldier took about three minutes. They usually left their boots and leg wraps on, and finished hastily so the next soldier could have his turn. Kim says he was dehumanizing, exhausting and often unbearable.
“When it was over, I couldn't even get up. This lasted a long time. When the sun set, I could no longer use my lower body at all. After the first year, we were like machines,” she says.
Kim believes the years of physical abuse had a permanent effect on her body. Tears run down her cheeks as she explains that she was never able to fulfill her dream of having children.
“When I started, the Japanese army often beat me because I wasn't submissive,” Kim says.
“There are no words to describe my suffering. Even now. I can't live without medicines. “I always have pain.”
Kim is part of an NGO called “Korean Council for Women Recruited into Military Sexual Slavery by Japan,” which is fighting for an apology.
Some Japanese prime ministers have personally apologized in the past, but the NGO director believes it is not enough.
Tokyo maintains that its legal responsibility for the irregularities was exonerated by a bilateral claims treaty signed in 1965 between South Korea and Japan.
Kim's story coincides with the testimony of other so-called “comfort women.”
In Washington, as Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe makes a state visit to the United States, former Korean sex slave Lee Yong-soo makes a tearful plea to him, demanding an official apology for Japan's sexual slavery of some 200,000. comfort women, mostly Korean. and Chinese. Many have died since then, but those still alive want individual compensation for the treatment they received.
Critics say Abe hasn't spoken enough. They fear his administration is trying to whitewash the past, to appease conservatives who feel the comfort women were paid prostitutes, not victims of official military policy.
“When it comes to the comfort women sexual slavery system, it is quite unique to Japan. I think Nazi Germany had some of that, although to a lesser extent. But in the Japanese case it was large-scale and essentially state-sponsored,” says Koichi Nakano, a political science professor at Sophia University in Tokyo.
Nakano notes that since Abe came to power, his government has managed to remove references to “comfort women” from many Japanese school textbooks.
It's part of what critics call Japan's record of glossing over its war crimes.
“(The comfort women) have gone through tremendous trauma. And in a way, the Japanese government risks a second violation by discrediting their testimonies and treating (their experiences) as if they were lies,” Nakano says.
Abe insists that he and other prime ministers have repeatedly apologized.
“It pains me deeply to think of the comfort women who experienced immeasurable pain and suffering,” Abe told Diet lawmakers last year.
Abe made a similar statement during a press conference Tuesday in Washington, D.C., leading critics to question the sincerity of Abe's expressions of regret on the issue. Abe has said he does not believe women were forced to work in military brothels.
Nakano says Abe and conservative lawmakers feel “singled out.”
“They feel there is some kind of plot by other Asian countries to tarnish the Japanese name for their benefit.”
With Abe's historic visit to the United States just months before the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, Kim wants President Obama to pressure his key Asian ally to do more to acknowledge history.
Meanwhile, Kim has had enough of the excuses that she says are hindering her efforts to finally achieve peace.
“To say there is no evidence is absurd. I am the evidence,” she says.
