Testimony of AHN Jeomsun

Wouldn’t it be okay if I told this story? My heart aches and I’m confused…

Grandmother AHN (74 yrs. old) was born on January 2, 1928, in Seoul's Mapo district. In Fall, 1942, at age 13, she was abducted by truck in Mapo and taken to China, returning to Seoul 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.  

Editor's note:

We first visited Grandmother AHN's house on the afternoon of Sunday, July 7th, 2002. As at first she told us that she did not want to meet anyone, we feared that she would be unwilling to talk at all. But she greeted us with great warmth, and she began slowly and carefully relate the story that she had silently kept inside for so long . As Grandmother AHN lived in a rented basement apartment by a Suwon City railroad track, we constantly heard the sound of trains passing by, in addition to the occasional sound of military planes taking off from a nearby Air Force base. Grandmother AHN was clearly used to this noisy environment and didn't concern herself with it.

1.

I used to live in Seoul. In the Mapo district, on a street named Boksagol, my mother had a small shop. It was so small I don’t even know if I should call it a shop—it wasn’t even large enough to provide a living for the whole family. As my father died when I was young, my mother suffered a lot in raising us alone. Mother was married at twelve years of age, and at seventeen she gave birth to my older brother. Then I was born, and my younger sister, and at twenty-nine my mother became a widow.

My big brother was five years older than me. My sister was born in the Year of the Rooster, five years after me, and was very beautiful. Whether she's dead or alive, during the commotion of the Korean War we lost contact. I've been living without knowing for so long now.  

I was born in 1928, in the Year of the Dragon, on the second day of the last month of the lunar year. The year came when I turned eight years old, and I was old enough to go to school. Following my mother's orders I went to Mapo Elementary School, but they told me that I was too young and had to wait another year. But when I went back after one year, they told me that I was too old and they couldn't accept me. So I had no choice but to go back home.   After that I couldn't even cross the threshold of a school. So until the present, I've had to understand everything for myself, and I'm only somewhat able to read simple writing. But I never even thought of wanting to go to school, of wanting to study more, because I thought that I had to work in order to help my mother.

From that time forward, I worked as a domestic servant, looked after other people’s children and ran their errands, trying to make some money so that I could buy a little food or even barley (Editor’s Note: Barley, which was cheaper than rice, was often used in its place or mixed in with the white grains of rice to make what was called ‘barley rice.’). Since my mother worked all the time at her shop, I had to do the house work as well. But at that time, I didn't know the meaning of suffering, and we all lived in such a difficult manner, so it's no wonder that I thought of it as the way things had to be.

Now, too, sitting here quietly, I can just see our house on Boksagol Street in the Mapo district, even though it’s probably changed completely. Our house was in a mountain valley, with Mapo Elementary School on the left, not far away. And on the right was the Mapo prison.  

At that time youth were dragged off for labor, dragged off by the Japanese military, you know. My older brother was almost dragged off that way. But my mother had decided to make sure that he was not taken away, so my brother was registered in the census as independent and without parents, as if he was the head of his own household, living alone.

And as we daughters also faced the threat of being dragged off for the "cheongsindae" (“volunteer labor corps”) my mother decided that my younger sister and I should be taken off our father’s family register and put on our maternal family’s. I think a lot of other families did likewise. So as my mother was named Mrs. Seok, we took the name Seok as well.  

Even though we changed things in this way, our elder brother still lived with us in our mother's home. Fearful that it might be discovered that our brother was still living with us we hid him under our blankets, we hid his shoes, we brought him food, and took his excrement out of the house—I remember all of that vividly. Whether it was due to our efforts to hide him or not, anyway our brother was not dragged off. After liberation when I came back to the house he was still living with my mother and sister in this way.  

2.

The year came when I turned thirteen, and it was fall. At that time the Pacific War had been going on for a while. It was 1942. The head of the neighborhood organization made an anouncement over the loudspeaker, asking all unmarried girls from one age to another (I can't remember precisely) to meet in front of the Boksagol neighborhood rice mill.  

Mother heard the announcement, and suggested we go together to see what it was all about. In the Mapo district, Gongdeok neighborhood, on Boksagol Street there was a large rice processing factory. And in front of that rice plant there was a huge scale for weighing rice sacks. When I came, a little late, different girls were already standing in a line with more girls and their families packed all around them. Besides the neighborhood people, there were Japanese soldiers in uniform, Japanese in civilian clothes, and other Koreans.  

Those girls were all being weighed on the rice scale one by one.  Tall girls and healthy ones were being put in a truck.  Japanese soldiers were putting the girls in the truck, lifting them up.

My turn came. I went up on the scale and I weighed in around fifty-five or sixty kilograms. From when I was very young I had a heavy frame, so even now I'm a little over sixty-two kilograms, and so then, at the age of fourteen, I was sixty kilograms. So those damned soldiers put me in the truck.

No matter how much I struggled, I wasn't able to resist the strength of the soldiers. As my mother cried and screamed “why are you taking my daughter, where are you taking her,” she clung to the truck along with other mothers, fighting with the fury of demons. But it was no use. With our mothers crying and crying without end behind the truck, in this way I was forcibly carried away from Boksagol Street. The truck we had boarded started off after pulling the flaps down. For a good while as we drove we could hear the sound of our mothers crying as they followed the truck. There were about ten girls who were carried away with me from Boksagol Street. Together with us in the back of the truck were two Japanese soldiers with guns who guarded us, and there was another soldier in the passenger seat by the driver.  

Although I'm not sure where it was, we later stopped for a moment and another group of girls boarded; we drove again, stopped, and another group boarded. In this way the truck was filled up with young girls. At that time I was thirteen, an age when you don't know anything. My heart was racing. I was scared, and I had no idea what I should do. I couldn't think. Living my whole life under my mother’s care, I had no idea what to do when I was suddenly faced with such a catastrophe, the tears wouldn’t even come out. In that dark, thrashing tent in the back of the truck, I had no idea where I was, and I became incredibly nauseous...

I’m not sure how far we went, but after a long time they put down the tent and told us to get off because we had to switch to a train. So we got off, and I found myself in a place that I had never seen before in my life. I couldn't read, so I couldn't tell which train station we had come to, and there was no one to tell me. The Japanese didn't tell us either. So there was no way for me to tell, especially since I was so young, to know where we were.

Then we boarded a train and crossed a huge bridge, just like the one over the Han River. It was absurdly long. I don't know whether that bridge was in Chosun or in China, but when we arrived we were in China. As we exited the train at the station we transferred to a truck, and we traveled again for a long while, and then were let out. But where was this place?

3.

My god, I'd never seen such a place in my life. There were no mountains, no trees, no water, just covered with yellow sand like a complete desert. So it was a Siberian plain, or something like it. Water was very precious and there was nothing but sandy shoals. I really thought I must be in hell. Sometimes I saw houses made of tarp; sometimes, going out, I saw some rough-looking Chinese houses few and far between, shabby houses that looked like hobgoblins would come out of them.

The Japanese soldiers took us to an imposing house in the middle of that desert. I heard that the house had been inhabited by Chinese who had been forced to leave. It was a house made of clay, and the floors were not even tatami (Japanese straw mat flooring) or ondol (Korean style heated floors) but rather simply bare earth.  

The Japanese soldiers assigned one girl to each room. That house, before we arrived, had been completely empty with no one living there but later after us more people also came.

For meals we were given balls made of rice, and, of course, there were no side dishes to go with it; we just ate the plain rice balls that they gave us. As I think about it now I can't seem to recall any taste. I don't remember anything other than being hungry everyday.  

There was no water, just sand. So we were unable to clean or wash properly, and we couldn’t wash even wash our faces, not to mention our bodies. Well, you’d have to say our life was pretty pathetic. Sometimes the Japanese soldiers would bring us some piped water they had hauled in with a truck, and then we would use a dish or whatever we could find to scoop out the water and wash ourselves. So you see, we couldn’t even wash our faces everyday but would go several days without washing at all.

In the comfort station the Japanese soldiers called me by a Japanese name, Yashita-san. Amongst ourselves there was no need to call each other by name either: if our ages were similar we called each other ‘friend’, and if someone was older we called her unni (big sister). We had not much in the way of clothing, no underwear; we just given one-piece dresses that could be easily removed and only had a couple of buttons on top that opened and closed easily. At that comfort station there were no civilians, and all activities were carried out by Japanese soldiers: the preparation of food, the division and distribution of clothing, everything.  

The first girls who went there were not kept together. Girls were sent to different places, and new ones would arrive. So the numbers would increase and decrease. So while at first there were six women who were let off there, later about ten women lived there constantly together.

While in the area surrounding that house we could find no civilians, the soldiers also did not live there constantly. The soldiers would go out to fight and come in waves to see us, constantly rotating.  

We didn't stay constantly in that same house. We were rotated around, sometimes staying in places with only tents, sometimes in other shabby houses, and sometimes in bunkers deep in the mountains. As the war progressed, we had to follow the Japanese soldiers wherever they went.

4.
At that time, they treated us like we were animals, not human beings. From the very first day, they wouldn’t leave me alone. As soon as I got there, they threw around all kinds of curses and were doing that horrible, unspeakable thing. That…you know. How was I supposed to know anything? All those bastards who were there then are probably dead by now. Ah, actually, if they’re around the same age as me, they might still be alive.

It was the afternoon of the first day that I arrived. An officer with two studs on his sleeve came by. Then he came over to me but he only observed and left. However, at night that officer came back 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 do as he said and making a huge uproar about killing me if I didn’t. I was ever so scared. I was so frightened that I panicked and ran away.

The house where I hid only had a floor heater, not even a fire hole, and there was only a little hole in the wall just big enough for people to go in and out. Even though I wondered how the people living there could live under those conditions, that was still the one and only place that I could hide after I ran away. If I had been taken by that officer, I probably would have died that night.

As I was crying the next morning, one onni came over to me and said that I have to do as people like that officer tell me. That’s the only way to stay alive, she said. She had been there before I arrived. But still, I really didn’t want to do that act. So I resisted a lot and ran away a lot too.

As soon as the Japanese soldiers finished their breakfast, they would begin to descend upon us. There was no night and day for us. Saturday and Sunday were resting days, so the weekends were especially worse. I think I had to deal with about ten soldiers per day on the weekdays but more than that on the weekends.

When regular soldiers came they couldn’t just stay as long as they wanted to. Instead, I think that the time they were allowed to stay was regulated and that I was supposed to serve a certain number of people . For that reason, those bastards were in a hurry and without even taking off their clothes, some of them would just put out that thing, their penis, and go off by themselves. There were others, though, who couldn’t even take off their pants when they saw me and just left.

The sound of gunfire, the booming of cannons, the sound of airplanes being bombarded in the air—in the midst of all this, there was no way to relax or comfortably have relations with them. Also, this was something that could never happen.

There were some good Japanese soldiers, too, though. I can’t remember their names now, but there was one Japanese soldier who would always hold my hand, telling me how sorry he was for me. In Japanese, it was “kawaiiso, kawaiiso” (“you poor thing, you poor thing”). He didn’t try to sleep with me but would just sit. Sometimes officers would also come to sleep with me.

Even though the Japanese soldiers would curse and swear at us and do that horrible thing to us, too, there wasn’t any really excessive violence or anything like that. Since the officers were standing guard outside. Also, it was always so crowded with soldiers swarming all around that one couldn’t make a big fuss. The only thing was that if you didn’t do as they demanded, they would hit you with their fists.

Below, I was torn, turned inside out, bleeding...

Oh, just thinking about it…

When my flesh was turned inside out and I was bleeding from the wounds, the soldiers would take me to the hospital. However, what they called treatment was nothing but putting a little red “akajinkkeu” (betadaine). Having applied the “akajinkkeu,”” I would also get stains from the red “akajinkkeu” liquid all over my buttocks and dress. In spite of calling it a hospital, too, it was nothing more than a makeshift tent, and with the exception of one or two female nurses, everyone there was a man.

I think it was about half a year after I arrived at that place. I must have been about 15 years old. By then I had suffered so much at the hands of those jerks that I was torn up below to the extent that I was a complete wreck. I had caught a venereal disease. That disease was a really nasty one. I really suffered a lot. Because of that disease…

Venereal disease, we called it “baitoko” (“syphilis” in Japanese), here, below, many bumps that looked kind of like sesame seeds appeared, surrounding the entire genital area like a gate made of branches and twigs. It was itchy to the point of agony. After I followed the soldiers to the hospital to get treated, it hurt below so I touched it and discovered that it had been tied up with something like a thread. After a while, it just fell off by itself.

I also got shots. It was called #606; I did indeed get a lot of #606. Even after liberation when I was living in Daegu, I went to the hospital because I wasn’t cured yet, and they told me that I had to get #606 to be cured. So I also received #606 then.

Additionally, while I was at the comfort station, a huge tumor formed on my leg. Because of it, I almost died. I was at a loss—and there was such a fuss—because we thought that it was going to go all the way into my leg and affect my bone too. For this, too, there was no other treatment. They just spread akajinkkeu on it and then sprinkled it with some yellow powder—that was the entire “treatment.” Well, I’m not really sure why that appeared. (Editor’s Note: According to a specialist, this type of symptom can arise when one has been infected with syphilis.)

I never even saw a ‘satku’ (condom). Also, where’s the time to use it? When I think about it, that was why I couldn’t help but be infected with so many diseases.

Before I was taken I didn’t have my period. After I went there, it must have been when I was sixteen. I began menstruating, you see. But the bastards kept coming even during my period. That didn’t stop them but they would get so insanely mad and curse, but would still do it.

Since I cried a lot because it was so hard for me, that onni who had been there before me came up one day and giving me a cigarette, told me to try smoking. If I did, she said it would be a lot better… That’s how I started smoking, and even now, I can’t quit. Now, cigarettes have become husband and children to me.

She was also the one who let me try opium. Instead of blowing it out right away, you’re supposed to hold the opium smoke in a little after you’ve inhaled. I tried it that way, then: my heart started throbbing; I seemed to lose all my senses; I didn’t know whether I was awake or asleep; and I didn’t have any feelings. So after smoking opium about three times, I didn’t smoke it again.

I think that girl had probably been there from a much earlier date than I had. I would see her snap back at the Japanese soldiers when they said things to her. Also, even though I don’t know how, she must have had connections with the Chinese people outside the comfort station since she would get cigarettes and opium.

I think I saw around two pregnant women. However, I never saw anyone give birth. I think I heard that they did something with them at the hospital.

There was no separately set aside resting time, but when there weren’t any soldiers, you would know to rest on your own. There wasn’t really anything that we could or would do while resting, though. There were some women who cried, some who just stared at the heavens worrying, and people like that. It was in this way that I spent three years at the comfort station.

5.

It was when I was seventeen that the war ended but at first we didn’t even realize it. We could never meet people like civilians; Japanese soldiers made up our entire world.

However, I did see Chinese people attacking and killing Japanese soldiers with their fists and knives. We were almost killed by the Chinese, too, but thankfully they realized that we weren’t Japanese women but Chosun women who had been forcefully taken to those camps to serve as comfort women. Because of that, the Chinese people actually helped us instead of attacking us. For that reason, several over women and I were able to walk out of there with the help of the Chinese.

On the way, I would sleep in empty houses and eat the food that I could get from others. In that way I walked for a little over one week and finally came to Beijing. It was there that I met a man in the Independence Army, a Mr. Yoon from Chuncheong Province. Upon hearing about my situation, Mr. Yoon and his wife said how pitiable it was and said that from then on I should travel with them.

Thereafter, I lived with Mr. Yoon and his wife for about eight months in Beijing. I would wash the laundry, clean the house, and cook; Mr. Yoon and his wife really treated me well. There were a lot of other people from the Independence Army who would visit Mr. Yoon’s house in Beijing, and they had many meetings and discussions amongst themselves.

Liberation came around April of the following year, and I left Beijing with Mr. Yoon and his wife for Chunjin, where we waited for a boat to take us back to Chosun. In that place, also, I saw a lot of Japanese who were killed when they were discovered by Chinese people.

There were three boats among which the people were divided, and I got put on the third boat together with Mr. Yoon. Instead of getting off as soon as we got to Incheon, though, we had to stay on the boat for another week. I heard that there was an epidemic going around Chosun. Also, when I got off the boat, they sprinkled white DDT powder all over my body.

After getting off the boat, I was separated from Mr. Yoon and his wife. I couldn’t express my thanks or even say goodbye properly…

While getting off the boat, everybody who got off in front of the boat received something like 800 won or 700 won. Adults got 1000 won, children 700 won, and I think I might have gotten 800 won. After receiving that, I got on a train going from Incheon to Seoul and was able to finally find my house by asking and asking different people how to get to Boksagol Street in Gongduk, Mapo.

By asking people along the way and finding myself back in the Mapo area of Seoul, I also met my mother on her way back from the river’s edge in Mapo, where she had gone early every morning with rice cakes to pray that I could somehow make it back home.

It was around 3 or 4 in the morning then. You can’t imagine how happy we were… Looking back now, I believe it was because of my mother’s prayers that I was able to meet Mr. Yoon, receive his help, and safely return to my hometown in the midst of all of the hardship and especially confusion at the end.

6.

Coming from Chunjin to Chosun, I also threw up a lot on the boat, and when I came home, perhaps because I could finally relax at home, I was ill and laid in bed for three months. They said it was malaria: one day my whole body would feel as if it was on fire; another day I wouldn’t hurt at all and would be fine. At that time, my whole family thought that I was going to die. Since there was no special kind of medicine back then, I barely recovered after eating all different kinds medicinal herbs that my mother got for me.

Also, from then on I began to work hard in order to eat and live again. I helped out at other people’s stores, worked as a maid in wealthy people’s homes, and lived in that way.

Because when I came back from the comfort station I was still only seventeen years old, I was still pretty young. Although I heard constantly that I should get married I hated the thought of marriage or men. A woman in my neighborhood kept nagging me so once I finally went out to meet the son of the family that ran our neighborhood Western-style clothing store; I guess he fell for me because he would wait in front of my house every day. But I really hated seeing him. If you just said the word “man,” I would shudder. All I had to do was see a man to be reminded of the comfort station, and it disgusted me. That’s way I hated the very idea of marriage or men, and I was always running away from him.

As I was deceived into doing that terrible work and forced to do such terrible things, of course I couldn’t marry. Also, after going through such suffering, how could I turn my life into some rosy, picture perfect movie by getting married? However, when I see other people married, living together so happily with their sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, together in harmony, I really envy them. My insides ache. Because of that terrible time, the springtime of my youth was lost.

Then the Korean War broke out. Trying to escape from the confusion of the war, I left for a shelter in Oaegwang, Taegu City, North Kyeongsang Province, where there was an American military base, a supply base, which supplied rice and blankets, a base involved in transporting food to the front lines at the height of the war. I passed the war washing laundry for the American soldiers in exchange for food, chocolate and candies. When the war ended I got a job in a friend’s store in Kangwon Province, made some money, and moved down once more to Taegu at around thirty years of age, where I lived alone and had a restaurant. And then about ten years ago I came up here to Suwon and am living here. But now the government provides me with money for living and housing, so my life has become so much more comfortable...

If I think of my suffered at the hands of those bastards, my chest still trembles in this way. Because of those bastards I was robbed of the springtime of my life. To this day I was unable to marry; I caught anything you could call a disease; I am growing old without a family of my own; and I have to live depending on my maternal nephews.

Well, I wasn’t going to say anything because what kind of a good thing is this to tell, but Japanese government continues to tell so many lies. Until now they haven’t come forward with an apology or reparations, and because I’m exasperated, I’ve decided to come forward with this testimony.