Bitter Page of History : Koreatown Library Opens to Serve as Memorial to ‘Comfort Women’ Taken by Japan in WWII

Half a century after as many as 200,000 Asian women were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army, a memorial library has been established in Los Angeles’ Koreatown to carry on an international campaign to bring justice and reparations for the victims of one of the cruelest chapters in history.

Last week’s opening of the library by the Los Angeles-based Coalition Against Military Sexual Slavery by Japan coincided with the visit of prominent South Korean human rights leader Hyo-Chae Lee, who has been instrumental in bringing the issue to the attention of the international community.

The library contains books, photos and other materials documenting the government-run brothels, and interviews with survivors.

“It’s ironic that the first memorial to the women should be in America,” Lee said. The retired sociology professor has battled the Japanese and South Korean governments over the issue of reparations for the victims of what, she said, “can only be defined as a crime of genocide against the Korean people.”

Lee is co-chairwoman of the Seoul-based Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, which is demanding that the Japanese government fully disclose what happened and how many women were involved. It also wants Japan to set up a program to enable victims to file claims and to pay $40,000 in reparation to each victim.

Looking at the Koreatown photo exhibit that shows Japanese soldiers lined up for their turn outside a battlefield brothel, Lee said the brutality committed against the women, 80% of whom were Koreans, cannot be dismissed simply as one of the “horrors of war” because Korea was a Japanese colony.

“Japan’s crime against the women is unprecedented, even among the brutal war histories of humankind, because this enslavement of Korean women was carried out systematically as an official policy of the Japanese government,” said Lee, 70. She says she, too, could have been a victim, had she come from a less privileged background.

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Historians believe 100,000 to 200,000 women from Korea, Taiwan, China, Japan, the Philippines and parts of Southeast Asia were conscripted by the Japanese government to serve as sex slaves for the Japanese troops from the 1930s to 1945.

After decades of denial, the Japanese government in 1992 admitted its involvement. The admission came after Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s largest newspapers, printed documentary evidence unearthed in government archives by Japanese historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi.

Under the growing pressure of international public opinion, the Japanese government announced a multibillion-dollar program in September to indirectly compensate victims of Japan’s wartime atrocities by setting up a foundation that will build and operate youth centers in Asian countries to train young people, promote exchanges and collect historical materials.

News media in Japan and Korea have reported that the Japanese government is considering a plan to establish a $100-million, privately financed fund from which to make direct payments to the surviving women.

But Lee and other human rights activists say the reparations must be made by the Japanese government, and accompanied by an individual apology to the survivors.

Lee returned to Seoul this week after conferring with local supporters in time to attend a conference of Japanese and Korean Bar associations to discuss the issue in the South Korean capital.

She and other leaders have been critical of South Korean President Young-Sam Kim’s position that his country would take the “high moral ground” by not seeking monetary compensation for the women, and instead pay them monthly stipends from the South Korean treasury.

The local coalition is conducting a petition drive to gather 1 million signatures to submit to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights when it convenes in February in Geneva. The commission, which has been investigating complaints lodged with the agency by a consortium of human rights and women’s groups from South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and the United States, is expected to have an interim report.

Although a commission recommendation is not legally binding, it does have “moral and political authority,” said Charlotte Bunche, director of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University, which has been working with the coalition. Bunche said the international pressure has made the Tokyo government come as far as it has.

Oaksook Chun Kim, co-leader of the Los Angeles group, who has met with survivors in South and North Korea, said some of the so-called “comfort women” were 11 and 12 years old. Kim, retired director of the Korean Studies Center at UCLA, said the girls were shipped as “military supplies” and transported on military trains and ships to front line battlefields where they endured sexual abuses at the hands of Japanese soldiers.

Chung-Ja Noh, now 72, said that when she was 16 she was abducted from her Korean village and taken with 38 other girls to China amid the Sino-Japanese war. The girls were forced to have sexual intercourse, sometimes with as many as 30 soldiers a day, she said.

Two years ago, during former Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa’s state visit to Seoul, Noh overcame the shame and humiliation she had felt for more than five decades and joined demonstrators at the Japanese Embassy in Seoul.

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Unlike Noh, most “comfort women” did not live to return home after the war, according to Lee and other researchers. They died in the front lines with their oppressors in China, Manchuria, the Philippines, Burma, Okinawa and the Solomon Islands. Some were killed by Japanese soldiers bent on destroying evidence, she said.

With Japan’s defeat in 1945, the remaining women were dumped, according to Chung-Ok Yun, the other co-chairwoman of the Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan. She has researched the subject for two decades and tracked down dozens of survivors throughout Asia. Young women, many of them burdened with babies fathered by Japanese soldiers, were left to wander in Asia, she said. Only a few returned home.

In the last three years, at least 400 survivors--all in their late 60s and 70s--have come forward publicly to recount their nightmares.

“I cried a river when I met with survivors,” said Los Angeles attorney Inja Kim, who visited Pyongyang last year.

One woman in her 70s told Kim how Japanese soldiers made a group of Korean girls in one “comfort station” submit to them. “A lieutenant who was met with resistance from one girl, cut off her arms, legs and head and showed it to the other girls,” Inja Kim said.

Attorney Kim, noting Japan’s announced yearlong period of self-reflection leading to the 50th anniversary of Japan’s defeat next Aug. 15, said it’s time the country stopped evading its “moral, political and legal responsibilities.”

“No matter how rich Japan is, it can never stand tall in the community of nations,” she said, as long as it does not clear its past and make peace with its Asian neighbors.

As part of the observance, Kim suggested that the Japanese government create a monument to the victims in the heart of Tokyo. “That should serve as a reminder that this atrocity against women must never repeat itself,” Kim said.