"It was the first night of my arrival, an officer with two studs on his sleeve came with a long sword and demanded that I do a strange thing with him. But when I rejected him, he pulled out that long sword, demanding that I did as he said and making a huge uproar about killing me if I didn't," AHN recalled.

She survived the four years of atrocious treatment at the "comfort station" and finally returned home in 1946, one year after the defeat of Japan and the liberation of Korea. She never married and lived constantly alone. Now she lives in Suwon City, in Kyeonggi Province, South Korea, with her nephew.

In 1992 he chaired the organizing committee of the International Public Hearing on Military Comfort Women and Laborers Forced to Work. In 1993 he founded and became the director of Center for Research and Documentation on Japan's War Responsibility. He contributed a series of articles to the Center's Bulletin. He has published numerous books which include: Senso sekinin ron (Essays on War Responsibility), Dainiji sekai taisen (The Second World War), Genbaku touka eno michi (Why Were A-Bombs Dropped?) , Gerunika monogatari (Story of Guernica)

Stephen Benedict
Steve Benedict comes from the DeHavilland Aircraft unit of the Canadian Auto Workers. He was elected Committeeperson and member of the bargaining committee. As a discussion leader in the union’s education activities he participated in a number of exchange programmes with trade unionists from Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America.

From 1993 until January 1996, he was an Education Officer at the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), located in Brussels. During that time, he had responsibility for organizing a World Conference on Trade Union Education. He also took an active part in development cooperation issues and educational development and programming in Latin America and Africa.

Steve is National Director of International Affairs at the Canadian Labour Congress.

Iris Chang received her B.A. from the University of Illinois in 1989. After completing her graduate work at Johns Hopkins University, she wrote two critically acclaimed books published by Basic Books, Thread of the Silkworm and The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.

The Rape of Nanking, an international bestseller, remained on the New York Times bestseller list for several months and was cited by Bookman Review Syndicate as one of the best books of 1997. She has written for numerous media, such as the New York Times, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Associated Press, and has been featured by Nightline, the Jim Lehrer News Hour, Charlie Rose, Good Morning America, C-Span's Booknotes, the Wall Street Journal and the front cover of Reader's Digest. Her third book, The Chinese in America: A Narrative History, will be published by Viking Penguin in 2003.

Iris Chang has won a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Program on Peace and International Cooperation award, the 1998 Woman of the Year Award from the Organization of Chinese Americans, and an honorary doctorate from the College of Wooster.

Josephine Chiu-Duke
Josephine Chiu-Duke is a Senior Instructor in Chinese Studies, Asian Studies Department, University of British Columbia. She received her M.A. (History, U. Wisconsin) and Ph.D. (Asian Studies, UBC) in Chinese Intellectual History. Her book, To Rebuild the Empire: Lu Chih's Confucian Pragmatist Approach to the Mid-T'ang Predicament, was published by State University of New York Press in 2000. Recent articles include: "The Role of Confucian Revivalists in the Confucianization of T'ang Women," Asia Major, Vol. VIII, Part I (1995), and "Significant Paradoxes in Contemporary Chinese Communist Theoretical Discourse," forthcoming in Professor Leo Liu, ed. Taiwan in Transition: The 2000 Presidential Election and Its Aftermath, Chinese Canadian Academic and Professional Society, Fall, 2002.