Justice Delayed 50 Years

Kim Yoon Sim was playing outside her home in the Korean mountains in 1943 when a truck drove up and two Japanese, a soldier and a police officer, invited her to come for a ride.

Trucks being a rarity at the time, the 14-year-old girl climbed aboard--and spent the rest of World War II enslaved by the Japanese Imperial Army in China, where she was forced to provide sex for several thousand soldiers. Kim said she was beaten, starved and tortured, her hands smashed by the secret police after a failed escape.

Against all odds, Kim made it back to Korea alive--then spent five decades hiding her past from her mother, from the husband who rejected her because her broken body could not conceive a child, even from her sympathetic sister.

“From the time I was 14, I have had this life. I have lived all this time like a fallen leaf that has been stamped on many times,” Kim said. “I am a person who has been thrown away.”

This September, however, the 67-year-old journeyed to Washington, along with five other Korean women, and bared details of their abduction and ordeal to investigators from a special unit of the U.S. Justice Department charged with identifying World War II war criminals.

Last week, Kim’s careworn face beamed at the news that the Justice Department had placed the names of 16 Japanese on a “watch list” of suspected war criminals barred from entering the United States.

The U.S. move has been seen by some Japanese as hypocritical, 50 years overdue and possibly counterproductive now that some geriatric culprits have begun clearing their consciences before they die.

But Kim feels vindicated.

“Please tell them in America how grateful I am,” said Kim, who has never received official acknowledgment from Japan that what was done to her was a crime.

“Before I die, I want this issue resolved,” she said, wiping away tears with her crabbed and thickened fingers. “Japan should punish the people who did this. They should prosecute them. . . . The Japanese government knows everything; how long are they going to keep hiding it?”

According to Eli Rosenbaum, chief of the Justice Department unit responsible for identifying World War II war criminals, some of the 16 Japanese added to the “watch list” were members of the Imperial Army’s notorious Unit 731, which conducted biological warfare and gruesome medical experiments on thousands of prisoners.

The rest of those on the list were members of the units that ran the front-line sex stations, at which anywhere from 20,000 to 200,000 women from Korea, Taiwan, China, the Philippines, the Netherlands East Indies, now known as Indonesia, were forced to serve as what the Japanese call “comfort women” and the Koreans “military sex slaves.”

None of the men who ordered these systematic horrors were punished by the United States or Japan, although some captured members of Unit 731 were convicted of war crimes in China and the Soviet Union.

Last weekend, Kim came to Tokyo on a lecture tour sponsored by Japanese activists to educate the public about Japan’s wartime activities and to pressure their government to buck the nation’s powerful and unrepentant apologists for militarism by offering an unfettered acknowledgment of wrongdoing to its still-suspicious Asian neighbors.

Sitting on a bare stage with an interpreter at her side, Kim explained to about 300 Japanese in the audience how she was rounded up with dozens of other young women and shipped in a filthy train to a harbor where they were loaded on a boat to China.

“On the ship, I cried and cried and begged them to let me go home,” Kim said. “They tied up my hands and feet and said, ‘If you really want to go home, we’ll send you.’ ” Her captors dangled her over the side of the ship and told her that if she opened her mouth again, they would throw her overboard.

The women wound up in army barracks in Harbin, China. During the day, they were hidden underground and heard bombers streaking overhead. At night, soldiers stood in line for them; Kim said she was forced to have sex with five or six men each night.

“Since I was so young, my uterus was displaced,” she said. “I hurt so badly I couldn’t stand. I had to crawl. All they did was give me a shot. I lay on the bed for three days. Then they made me take men again. There was nothing to do but give up, so I just let them do it.

“I cannot tell you the details,” Kim told the audience as she stared at the table before her. “All I can say is that when the men would come in, if I was wearing underwear they would tell me to take it off, and if I didn’t do it fast enough they would hit me. So after a while, I stopped wearing underwear.”

The women were given numbers and made to stand at roll call. They were forbidden to speak Korean. Any infraction brought beatings.

“They said in Japanese, ‘Even if one of us soldiers kills 10 of you Koreans, nothing will happen to us,’ ” Kim said.

One day, the women were walking down to a stream to do laundry when they noticed an indentation in the earth and saw a human hand. Terrified, they dug up the corpse. It was one of the “comfort women” who had fallen ill and been taken away wrapped in her blanket. The soldiers had said she was taken to a hospital. Her body was still wrapped in the blanket.

“I realized that all the women that had been taken away to the hospital had probably been killed,” Kim said.

Soon after, Kim fled the camp and walked all night. When she knocked on a door of a house, it turned out to be occupied by Japanese soldiers. The secret police were called, and Kim was accused of spying.

The police poured water over her, jabbed her chest with pens, and put sticks between her fingers and stomped on her hands to make her talk. She was returned to the barracks and beaten again.

After a year, the women were moved to a different area, where the Japanese soldiers seemed weaker and more discouraged, no barbed wire surrounded the camp and security was lax. As the Japanese position weakened, one man warned Kim that if the women stayed there, they would all be killed. Indeed, some Imperial Army units did slaughter prisoners as they retreated, according to historians.

Kim decided to make another escape attempt.

This time, she ran all night and at dawn came to a harbor. She stowed away on a Chinese civilian ship; eventually she was passed to another ship that left her on an island off the coast of Korea. It was a leper colony. Kindly inhabitants wrote to Kim’s mother, who came to fetch the daughter who had disappeared two years earlier and was believed dead.

“Korean society was so strict that once a woman left home, she was not allowed to come back; even if she had a fight with her husband, she could not return to her parents’ home. And I had been gone a long time,” Kim said. “My mother said I could not come home.”

Ashamed to admit what had happened, Kim told her mother that she had been kidnapped by the Japanese and forced to work in a factory.

She was sent to live with relatives, and a husband was found for her. He demanded to know why her sexual organs seemed abnormal. She told him she was deformed from birth. But when she did not have a child, he began to beat her and then sent her away.

Kim left her village and worked as a laborer and a maid. She remarried at 26, again hiding her past. To her surprise, she bore a child. But her daughter was mute, and that marriage failed. She raised the child alone, and now cares for two grandchildren.

After the former “sex slaves” began to tell their stories in 1991, the Korean government put out a call for those who had been forced to labor for the Japanese.

Kim kept her silence, but her sister registered Kim’s name. Eventually an official came to interview Kim and elicited the truth.

Across the Sea of Japan, coming to terms with the past has been almost as difficult a process.

After evading the issue of “comfort women” for years, the Japanese government acknowledged their existence in 1993.

Two years later, then-Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama of the Socialist Democratic Party apologized to the women.

However, hemmed in by conservative Liberal Democratic Party coalition partners, Murayama did not comply with demands that Japan acknowledge that the forced-sex system was a systematic and official policy, and so the apology has been rejected as inadequate by the South Korean and Taiwanese governments.

The Japanese government has set up a private committee to raise money from the public to compensate the women. Since last summer, six Filipinas have accepted $18,000 each and a letter of apology from Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto. One South Korean also reportedly is ready to accept the payment. Japan has also promised to allocate about $27,000 from the national budget to each woman who accepts the compensation package, to pay for housing and medical care.

The Japanese government has maintained that wartime guilt and reparations issues were settled by trials and a treaty after the war, and the vaguely defined payments to the women are not government reparations.

Korean activists complain that payments in lieu of official reparations imply that the “comfort women” were paid prostitutes who worked in private brothels, as Japanese conservatives have argued, rather than abductees dragooned by the invading army.

“I will not accept compensation,” Kim said angrily. “This is not a question of money, and we are not doing this because we need money. I feel insulted. If the Japanese government really feels sorry, then they would prosecute the criminals.”

Far from being prepared to prosecute, Japan is still racked by debate over its wartime responsibility. Many Japanese are outraged that the Ministry of Education has added descriptions of the “comfort women” to all high school textbooks and will add a mention to junior high textbooks next year.

Members of the far right call this historical “masochism” and say Japan is being hounded to make payoffs for wartime misdeeds of which other nations are equally guilty.

Thirty-eight members of parliament have organized a campaign to lobby the government to delete references to “comfort women” from textbooks.

One leading revisionist is a Tokyo University professor, Nobukatsu Fujioka. He was quoted this month criticizing the Ministry of Education stance in Sankei Shimbun, Japan’s fourth-largest newspaper--in an article that did not include any rebuttal of his views.

“There is no evidence that the Japanese Imperial Army forcefully abducted comfort women,” Fujioka said. “But the government is going to put this in the textbooks and teach our children lies.”

Chiaki Kitada of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.