What a sacrifice that is: to stand up in public, as an old woman, having kept the traumas of your past hidden until this time and tell how, for years, you had been systematically raped and abused by the troops of an invading army. Yet it is a tribute to the support they have had in the new South Korea that they are now generally considered with great respect and sympathy.
We will never know how many ‘Comfort Women’ there were as most are now dead, and only a few of those remaining have been able to face publicly acknowledging what happened to them over 50 years ago. These women are some of the oldest surviving slaves.
Jang Jum Dol was 14 and on the way to do laundry when she was taken by a Japanese man and told she was going to a factory to make money, but she was tied up in a house with an 11 year old girl and then taken with some other girls to Manchuria. She tried to escape and was captured and beaten and kept as at a sex station with a wire fence around it. She had three children there and two of them died, the surviving girl had a weak heart. She had to continue as a sex slave. When she came back to Korea with her daughter after the war she was so poor she had to sleep in the streets.
Chris Steele-Perkins,"Comfort Women"; Magnum Photos, 2009.
