Author: Keum Suk Gendry-Kim
Content Warning
Sexual assault and violence relating to sexual slavery by the Japanese military
notes
- Story of Lee Ok-sun
- Cruelty
- Sword-killing competition
- Using bayonet mutilation or burying alive to save ammunition
- Youth and powerlessness
- “Why didn’t you run away?” “It never occurred to me. Plus, I didn’t know the way home.”
- “The ad was recruiting girls age eighteen or younger to work in restaurants in Manchuria.”
- The thirteen year old girl “didn’t service regular soldiers, but only older, high-ranking men, like commanders.”
- Objectification
- “When I didn’t get better for two months the managers got desperate, since I couldn’t make them any money. They got a hold of some mercury. They’d gotten it from the medic, who told them to boil the mercury in a small dish and get me to expose my genitals to the vapor. So the managers forced me to cover my face and squat naked over the boiling mercury. I got better eventually, but because of that, I could never have any children.”
- Power and control
- “The high-ranking officers were the violent ones.”
- Soviet soldiers: “I saw so many girls raped then shot or set on fire by those monsters.”
- Korean Volunteer Army: fought with Chinese communists, went to Manchuria and into Korea
- Because of the boy, she couldn’t leave the man with the gambling and drinking problems
- Divide caused by trauma
- Family couldn’t empathize with or understand what she had gone through
- Refusal to believe family member could’ve done wrong
- {How could you reject your own sibling who’s been done so wrong? Purity culture}
When this harsh winter passes, a sun-kissed letter will surely come from the south, bearing news of spring. Delicate sprigs are trembling at the end of a long winter. New life is struggling to emerge from within. The ground that had been slumbering wakes, and the young grass pokes out from between the dead withered leaves. Grass springs up again, though knocked down by the wind, trampled and crushed under foot. Maybe it will brush against your legs and whisper a shy greeting.
thoughts
- Why would you ask someone who was a comfort women whether there was a soldier who loved her? That seems insensitive.
- “You need something like a lifeline that’s connecting you to hope. So that you don’t go crazy. So that you can keep breathing when one day feels like ten years.”