Ex-’Comfort Girls’ End Silence on War Horrors : Human rights: Japan has admitted to the conscription of Asian women for sex during World War II, but some of the survivors are pressing for reparations.

The image is of a lonely Korean woman in her late 60s, working in a back street bar in Shanghai. It could be Manila. Or Taipei.

She is quiet. No one asks how she got there, so no one answers.

The image and the silence haunt Bok Lim Kim, a La Jolla resident who has for a decade tried to raise awareness of sex crimes committed against Korean and other Asian women during World War II.

The euphemism was “comfort girls.” In reality, they were sex slaves.

Recently the Japanese government was pressed into investigating whether up to a quarter million young women from Korea, China, Manchuria, the Philippines and the Indonesian archipelago were systematically abducted and raped by Japanese soldiers during World War II, Kim said.

Throughout Asia, scant public mention of the comfort girl conscription had been made--a 50-year silence that was broken recently, say scholars of Japan’s war crimes. Afraid of the social stigma, comfort girl survivors did not come forward to criticize their tormentors after the Allied defeat of Japan, said Kim, a clinical psychologist and social worker.

The issue had been all but buried, until incriminating military records became public earlier this year, Kim said. In recent months, activists on two continents have been pressuring Japan to pay reparations to the surviving comfort girls, whose ages when conscripted ranged from 13 to the mid-20s, according to records. About 80% of the girls and women were Korean, Kim said.

Three Korean survivors of the enslavement are suing the Japanese government for damages. In Southern California, Korean-American activists have called for a memorial to be established for women killed while serving the Japanese.

Although still nascent, the movement supported by Kim and counterparts overseas has drawn attention to the comfort girl issue, and has goaded Japan into exorcising a demon that still haunts modern Asia.

Shortly after the New Year’s holiday, Japanese government officials acknowledged that an undetermined number of Korean women were abducted from their homeland and forced to serve Japanese troops. On Jan. 16, during a state visit to Seoul, Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa expressed remorse for “immoral and inhumane” wartime conduct against Korean women. Many Koreans thought the apology was long overdue and were bitter. When Miyazawa stopped short of granting victims’ requests for financial reparations, activists said the apology was a hollow one.

Officials in Japan’s Foreign Ministry said earlier this month that an investigation into the enslavement has begun. The ministry is investigating reports of Japan’s slave practices in other countries.

A decision on how to compensate victims is pending, said Yamada Takio, assistant director of the Foreign Ministry’s Northeast Asian Department, during a phone interview from Tokyo.

“This is one of the most difficult issues between Korea and Japan,” Yamada said. “And there has been many misunderstandings about how this matter was handled. We have admitted that the Japanese military were involved in the recruitment and management of brothels in some way. We have not tried to hide that. We never directly denied the existence of the comfort women.”

The decision not to comment on accounts of the enslavement was not Japan’s alone, Yamada said. When South Korea and Japan normalized diplomatic relations in 1965, the Korean government accepted $300 million in economic development and another $500 million in soft loans, Yamada said. In return, Korean government officials signed away rights to additional restitution for damages incurred during the war, despite protests at home, Yamada said.

No mention of the comfort girl issue was made by the Korean government, Yamada said, nor any reference to compensation for women conscripted by the military for factory work.

“How can you really take this issue to the public when those who are hurt stay silent?” Yamada said. “We felt it was an issue of privacy. We were not in the position to bring this matter up.”

Concern for the victims of the comfort girl ordeal was eclipsed by efforts to raise Korea from the ravages of war, said Kim, 62. Korea then endured a civil war and three decades of political turmoil, during which the issue fell from the public consciousness, she said.

Although culpability for the comfort girl system has clearly been established, Kim says--retired military officers have admitted and records show that the conscription of young Korean women was part of a strategy to fortify troops in remote spots--half a century has passed without atonement, Kim said.

The goal now is to let the historical record reflect what happen, Kim said.

“Koreans here in the U.S. would tell me, ‘Oh, that’s a dead issue,’ ” she said. “It’s not something we want to hear. But I think we need to look at what it has done to our lives. My interest is in having people reflect on why a class of people and one sex were dehumanized. This is the way to keep it from happening again.”

Tempered by a historical animosity with Japan, which occupied Korea in 1905 and ruled until 1945, Korean activists used the harshest terms to define comfort girl policy.

“ Jung-shindae (comfort girls) were not only for satisfying the sexual desires of soldiers,” said Lee Hyo Chae, chairwoman of the Korean Council for Women Drafted into Sexual Service by Japan, a consortium of church and feminist groups. “They were part of an extermination policy.”

Many Koreans who lived through the Japanese occupation, those 50 and older, harbor the belief that Japan’s colonialist leaders were bent on genocide, said Lee, 68, a retired professor of sociology at Ewha Woman’s University in Seoul.

For a decade, Lee has sought comfort girl survivors and their stories. Her travels have taken her throughout the Korean peninsula, to Okinawa, Japan, to other cities in Asia and the United States.

From her interviews, Lee has drawn a bleak tableau of women held captive in “comfort stations,” or ramshackle huts, as soldiers lined up outside. The men rotated around the clock in intervals of 10 to 30 minutes, according to rank and demand, Lee said.

Comfort girls were given weekly injections to suppress symptoms of venereal disease that many contracted, as each was forced to perform sexual intercourse with an average of 30 men a day, Lee said. As venereal disease was allowed to fester, the women lost their ability to conceive children.

“Soldiers called the women public toilets,” Lee said.

Besides providing sex, comfort girls cooked, laundered uniforms and carried ammunition into battle, Lee said. The Imperial Army campaigns spread to the humid jungles of Indochina and the South Pacific. Korean comfort girls accompanied, and many suffered from exposure to the elements, Lee said. Medical treatment for them was minimal.

The injuries to body were matched by those of spirit, Kim said.

In the staunchly Confucian society of Korea in the 1940s, when virginity was a virtual requisite for marriage, many survivors bore a sense of shame when reunited with their families, Kim said. Most did not speak of their anguish, and lived in depression. Thousands remained abroad, living on the fringes of a foreign culture, Kim said.

So Lee, Kim and others began to search for information on the victims. It is not known how many are still alive, Kim said.

Records of comfort girls were kept with military supply lists, Kim said. The women were classified as ammunition. Once their bodies were spent, Kim said, comfort girls were abandoned.

Few records remain of the makeshift hospitals where injured women were sent, or grave sites where the dead were left, Kim said.

In January, women’s groups in Korea and Japan established telephone hot lines for survivors, witnesses or relatives to provide information on the location of victims.

Within weeks, more than 60 comfort girl survivors were identified in Korea, Lee said. In Japan, hundreds of witnesses have called, primarily former soldiers in their 70s and 80s who confessed to going to comfort stations.

With the information, activists hope to persuade international human rights groups to investigate the issue. Lee came to the United States in February to meet officials at the Center for Human Rights at the United Nations. For Kim and Lee, the search for victims and answers continues. Although they are separated by thousands of miles, the same emotional chord tugs at them to keep going. The chord is expressed by a concept at the heart of Korean thinking: han.

Han, in different contexts, is grief, hatred or lasting regret. And it is what Koreans fear may prevent the souls of dead comfort girls from coming to rest.

“Because they were given so much han, they cannot leave this world,” Kim said. “The han will remain until we bring ourselves to understand what they went through.”