Kim Hak-sun

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This is a Korean name; the family name is Kim.
Kim Hak-sun
Born 1924
Died December, 1997
Occupation Human rights activist

Kim Hak-sun was a Korean former comfort woman. She helped to bring to the public's attention the issue of Japanese sex slavery during the Pacific War when she went public with her story in August, 1991. At a press conference, she said that seeing the Japanese imperial flag "still makes me shudder. Until now, I did not have the courage to speak, even though there are so many thing I want to say." [1] In December, 1991, she sued the Japanese government.[2] At that time, she was the first of what would become dozens of women from Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, and the Netherlands who came forward to tell their stories of being forced by the Japanese military to be sex slaves. She was the lead plaintiff and initially the only one to use her real name in connection with the case. She was inspired to finally take her story public after 40 years of silence, by the growth of the women's rights movement in South Korea.[3] Kim died in 1997, with the court case still ongoing.

Background

When she was 17, in 1939, during World War II, her step-father took her and a friend to China to get a job as a hostess. They ended up being abducted by the Japanese military and imprisoned as sex slaves in a "comfort station" that was a quasi-brothel. She and her friend as well as two others were enslaved there and serviced a small group of Japanese service men, as well as some other men the Japanese soldiers brought in. She spent four months at two different "comfort stations" in China before meeting a middle-aged Korean man who helped her to escape. He later married her and they had two children, a boy and a girl. By the time Kim came forward with her story, however, her husband and children were dead.

Book

The story of Kim's tragic life as a Korean "comfort woman" was published in the book The Korean Comfort Women Who Were Coercively Dragged Away for the Military, published in Korea in 1993. The book was edited by the Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, and includes the stories of 18 other women who were also forced to be comfort women. Her chapter of the book was translated into English and published in the book True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women."

In 1995, she appeared at a stage play entitled "Disappeared in Twilight" about the life of comfort women.

See also

References

  1. ↑ http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2011/12/14/2011121401645.html Chosun Ilbo (English Edition). Retrieved March 14, 2012.
  2. ↑ http://www.awf.or.jp/e2/survey.html Digital Museum, retrieved March 13, 2012.
  3. ↑ http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/11358 Reihana Mohideen. Green Left, July 31, 1996. Retrieved March 3, 2012

see also: Chunghee Sarah Soh. The comfort women: sexual violence and postcolonial memory in Korea and Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

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