Testimony of HWANG Keum Joo

I Want to Live without Being Treated with Contempt

1. Youth

I came from a well-born, scholarly, gentry family. My paternal grandfather was from Buyo in Chungcheong province and my maternal grandfather from Suwon in Kyunggi. They had been close friends for many years, and it is said that they promised to marry their children to each other’s children before they were even born. My paternal grandfather died earlier than was normal. The year when my mother turned 17 and my father 12 they married.

I was their first child, born in Buyo on 15 August 1922 according to the lunar calendar. A second girl and a boy were born after me. We were not financially well off, but my father was very bright and went to Japan to study after graduation from a high school in Seoul. My maternal uncle, who was 20 years older than my father, ran a judicial scrivener’s office in Suwon and helped my father pay for his education. This support was insufficient, and he had to do various odd jobs like shining shoes or delivering newspapers in order to complete his studies. Just as he was about to finish, his health began to fail. He returned to Korea and helped my uncle at the office, but his illness gradually grew more serious. He eventually came home to Buyo for treatment, but nothing seemed to make him better, and the cost of the treatment used up what little money we had. Father took to his bed, reading newspapers which were not freely available to the general public. I often had to go and fetch these papers from the town office in the centre of Buyo.

One day, we heard of a special drug which cost 100 Yen. We didn’t have so much money sitting around, and could only continue to worry, until a friend of my mother introduced us to a man from Hamhung who ran a big business in Seoul. We told him of our predicament. He took pity on my father and gave us the 100 yen. It wasn’t a free gift. In exchange for the money, I was fostered to him and started to help with housework at the house of his mistress in Seoul. Later, I learned that although my father had used the money to buy the medicine, he didn’t benefit from it. He died within a year. When I left home, I made up my mind not to contact any of my family until I became successful. I thought I was doing my duty as a filial daughter. I was 13.

The man I went to work for was a Mr. Choi. His mistress was a cruel woman who often beat me. I tolerated her harshness for two years before I told Mr. Choi how I was being treated. He said he had guessed as much and sent me to his own wife, who was then living in Hamhung. The man who accompanied me on the journey to Hamhung was paid 100 yen by my foster mother, so the debt I had to pay back was now increased to 200 yen, and knowing this would always lay heavy on my mind. Mr. Choi had two sons and two daughters. His wife was a kinder woman and she sent me to evening school when I turned 17. It was called the Hamhung Ladies Institute, and was run by a large church. It had four classes, grades one through four. I attended the first two grades, studying mainly Japanese and mathematics. We had only two hours a week for Korean lessons. By now, I was particularly good at knitting and sewing.

I took a year off after two years at the Institute. The community head of the village where we lived was Japanese, and he stayed in a rented house right behind ours. We often saw his wife and children, but we saw very little of him. His wife went around the village, saying ‘If you go to work for three years in a military goods factory in Japan, you will earn a lot of money. At least one person from each household must go to work there.’ I had heard of a government official who had sent his daughter to a factory to work, and there was a woman in our neighborhood who had returned after having earned a great deal of money in such a Japanese factory. So I had no doubt that these factories actually existed. There were three girls, including me, with my foster parents. I felt that at least one of us would have to agree to go to a factory to work. The eldest son of my foster parents was at university in Seoul, and the second was attending a university in Japan, The youngest daughter was in high school and the eldest had finished her education. My foster mother was worried, because the head’s wife kept nagging her to send one of the girls. So I volunteered to go. I thought it wouldn’t do for the daughters, who should be studying, to go. And I reckoned that if I went I would be able to pay the money back if I worked for three years. My foster mother was touched with my idea and promised to find me a good husband once I returned after the lunar calendar, and I was 20.

Two girls were drafted from the neighborhood. The community head’s wife told us when and where to meet, and I accordingly went to Hamhung station at the appointed hour. There, I found about 20 girls gathered from different counties. Most of them looked about 15 or 16, and I seemed to be the oldest. We had no farewell ceremony, but many families and relatives came to see the girls off. I was wearing a black skirt and white silk blouse, and carried a black cotton bundle which held my underwear, sanitary towels, soap, a toothbrush, a comb, digestive tablets and several sets of winter and summers clothes. All of this, I reckoned, would last me the three years. A man in his fifties met us and handed us over to a Japanese soldier. The soldier put us on board a long train of carriages, and all the other carriages except ours were full of soldiers. In our carriage there were about 50 women, including us. There could have been more women in other parts of the train, but I’m not sure. In ours, the 20 of us who had met at Hamhung station soon became friends, but we didn’t get to know all the others. The windows were covered with black greaseproof paper which could be pulled down as blinds. Having to leave home made everyone sad, so we sat, rather quiet, lost in our sorrow. Before we pulled away, and as I looked out through a gap in the blinds, I saw the soldier who had led us to the train hand over a roll of papers to a military policeman. He received a second roll of papers in exchange. The two seemed to be exchanging some kind of document. As I watched, my heart suddenly sank. This scene kept recurring in my mind for many years afterwards. I can still vividly remember it. The train was guarded by military police at each entrance; we were trapped.

We couldn’t look outside because of the blinds on the windows, nor were any lights put on. So we sat in darkness for the journey. But we sensed that the train was moving northwards. As I had expected to go to Seoul, I felt uneasy when it kept moving towards the north, but there was no one to ask what was happening. Sometimes the train stopped in tunnels, and at nights it didn’t speed up; it would creep along slowly. Several times we had to get off and stay in some sort of storeroom. We might have changed trains, but I cannot remember that clearly. We were given a ball of cooked rice with water twice a day. That was our food. We had no way of knowing the hours that were passing, but after about two or perhaps three days, the train stopped. We were herded off the train as a loudspeaker announced something. We asked what was being said and were told that we had arrived in Jilin, China.

In front of the station were trucks, all soiled with dirt and dust, their covers torn. We were divided into groups and pushed on to the trucks. Each of us held on to the bundles containing our belongings. The trucks drove for a few hours, bumping up and down as they traversed a very rough track.

2. Inhumanity

The trucks put us down at a place where only barrack after barrack could be seen. There was not one ordinary house on the horizon. We were allowed one of the many barracks called a koya and stayed there the night. Our koya was a roundish hut built of tin. The floor was laid with boards covered with tatami. We were each given a blanket and a quilt. But it was so cold that we huddled up to each other to keep warm through the night. At that time I thought to myself that our job must be to cook and wash clothes for the soldiers. There were a few women who had been there when we arrived, and they said to us: ‘Poor things, you are dead now.’ We asked what our job was, and they replied: ‘It is a job, but not a job in the ordinary sense. Just do what you are told. If you don’t, you will be beaten to death.’

The next day, soldiers came and took us away one by one. I was taken to an officer. He was sitting near his bed and asked me to come over. He tried to hug me. I resisted, saying that I would do anything, cleaning, washing and so on. But he ignored me and tried to embrace me again. When I continued to resist he slapped me on the face. I begged him to leave me alone, but he told me to do as I was told, to which I replied I would rather die than oblige him. He grabbed my skirt and pulled it so hard that it was torn from the belt. To this point I was still wearing that black skirt and white blouse I had on when I left Hamhung and had my long hair braided. Left in my underwear, I knelt before him and pleaded with him to spare me. He grabbed me by my hair, pulled me up and ripped my underwear off with a knife. I was so shocked that I fainted. When I came round, sometime later, he was sitting a few paces away from me wiping sweat from his brow. A soldier came in and took me away. I had to grab my underwear around me and wrap myself in my torn skirt. The women who had been there when we arrived said: 'Do you see what we mean? We won't be able to leave this place alive.'

The officers called for us three or four times a day for the first fortnight or so. The new girls were to serve the officers, as they were virgins. The officers didn't use condoms, so quite a few of us became pregnant quite early on, but we were naive and weren't aware of it. I was all right, but those who fell pregnant were injected with 'No. 606'. They began to feel chilly, their bodies swelled, and they started to discharge blood. They were then taken to the hospital to have an abortion. After this had happened three or four times, they became barren.

After perhaps a fortnight of this rude awakening, I was moved to a comfort station, leaving my luggage in the koya. The station was a makeshift building, and each main room was divided into five or six small cubicles by wooden planks. The entrance to each cubicle was draped with a blanket as a substitute for a door. There were three or four buildings built in a row. I heard that there were more comfort stations in addition to these. There was no sign outside. The cubicle had a wooden floor covered with a blanket and was just big enough for one person to lie down, leaving sufficient room for another person to stand at the side.

Each day when our duties were over, we were supposed to go back to the koya to sleep. But often the soldiers came till late at night or all through the night, and sometimes we were too tired to return to our hut. So, more often than not, we slept at the station. It was bitterly cold there with just a single blanket to cover us. We took our meals in an army canteen, and the soldiers cooked for us. The meals were mainly rice, soya bean soup and pickled radish. When we first arrived, we were given baggy trousers, a short jacket, military socks, a cap, black canvas shoes, a padded coat and padded trousers. Later we were given some kind of military training suit. Later still, the supply completely stopped, and we had to wear the clothes that had been discarded by soldiers. When we entered 1945, the supply shortage became so serious that we were not given any clothes anymore. The supply of vegetables also stopped, as did that of soy sauce and soya bean paste. We had to eat balls of rice cooked in salt water. That was it.

There were no fixed hours for the soldiers to visit us, and officers and the rank and file came at the same time. The officers didn't come often, I suppose because they were afraid of catching venereal infection. On weekdays, each of us had to serve 30 to 40 men, but at weekends there were even more soldiers lined up outside the station, some of them with their trousers down and underpants already off. Some got so impatient that they lifted the curtains and entered the rooms while their colleagues were still going at it. If anyone took slightly longer than usual, they would shout at him 'Hayaku! hayaku!', 'Hurry, hurry'. Those who were facing an imminent battle used all their strength, and some of them wept as they carried on with us. On such occasions I could even feel pity for them. All the soldiers were different. Some came already wearing condoms. some asked me to put condoms on for them, and some didn't bother to bring protection at all. We were given a box of condoms each, and I initially reckoned that if I didn't have any, many of the soldiers still came, and I was the one to suffer. While working there, I was never paid. No cash and no tickets were given to me.

During the first year we had to go to the hospital two or three times a month to have medical check-ups. But after that year, a military surgeon came to one of the barracks and set himself up in a room which looked like an office equipped with the necessary bits and pieces. He disinfected us, applied ointment or gave the dreaded 'No. 606' injection. We hardly saw a female nurse. After continuing like this for about a year, not a single one of us remained in good health. Most of us had been pregnant two or three times or had caught various infections. Women with serious problems were put into isolated rooms and were allocated the use of separate bathing facilities and toilets. When they recovered they were brought back. We were treated in this way up to two times, but if anyone came back ill for a third time she was taken away by a soldier and we never saw her again. There was one girl whose lower abdomen began to fester with yellow pus. Her face became yellow and swelled up. She was taken away by a soldier and never returned. Of the 20 of us who had started out together from Hamhung station, in the end I alone was left. All the others disappeared. Some became ill and disappeared, and some were moved to other places. Seven new women who arrived to replace them were also taken away one after another, and in the end only seven women were left in the whole koya. We were all Koreans, and we were all stricken with illness.

We were given some sort of cotton wool to use during our monthly periods. But the supply of cotton stopped after a year, and from then onwards we either stole someone else's sanitary towel as it was drying on the washing line or collected, washed and used gaiters discarded by the soldiers. If we were caught taking the gaiters, we would be beaten up; the soldiers regarded this sort of thing as unlucky.

The comfort women in the military unit were not treated like human beings. We were beaten almost every day. If we looked at the moon, we were hit as the soldiers asked what we were thinking of. If we talked to ourselves they hit us again, saying we must be swearing at them. We were told to behave as if we didn’t see anything or hear anything. So we walked about with our hands covering our eyes. If we tried to take a walk outside the barracks we were kicked back inside. So we had no opportunity to look around at where we were. I don’t know what the name of the unit was, nor can I remember the names, the faces or the ranks of the soldiers. I was particularly rebellious, and earned more beatings than the other girls. Even now, my ears sometimes go fuzzy and I can’t hear anything for a while. I have strong magnetic strips attached to my knees and hips. If I take these off to have a bath and forget to put them back on, then my knees and hips swell up within five or six hours, and I am unable to sit down.

One day, when I was unable to serve soldiers because my womb had swollen and was bleeding, an officer ordered me to suck his penis. He claimed I was not able to do what he called my ‘duty’. I shouted at him: ‘I’d rather eat your shit than suck you!’ This made him very angry. He beat me and threw me about, shouting ‘Konoyaro koroside yarouka’, something like ‘I am going to kill you, you bitch’. I blacked out, and when I came round I was told that I had been in a coma for three days.

Among the women, there was a girl who had been captured by soldiers on the street when she was in China visiting relatives during the school holidays. She was about 20 by the time I knew her. The women in my koya were all Korean except for one Chinese. Many of the Koreans came from the North, though there was one from Nonsan, in the South. Like myself, most of them had been cheated by being told the lie that they were going to earn money in factories making military supplies. There was no one soldier that I was particularly close to, though I got quite familiar with someone from the medical corps for a short time. He worked in the army hospital and I got to the stage of asking him to look after my friends who were very ill in the koya. I knew him only for a very short time and, besides him, there was no one else I got close to. I didn’t have time to feel lonely, since we were kept too busy serving the soldiers.

One day, we were told that some army personnel were moving to a different place, and if we wanted to go with them we could do so. I thought somewhere else might be better than where I was being held and decided to go along with them. About ten of us left together. We were taken on the back of a lorry, but I was so travelsick that I wasn’t able to look around. We might have been traveling on a boat for some time. I can’t remember clearly. The soldiers dropped us at a comfort station which looked similar to the one where I had been before. I don’t know where we were, but at night the bombing was very heavy, and we weren’t allowed to put on any lights. There were already a few women there, two Chinese and some Koreans, and these old hands told us that even if we were let out and given our freedom we would only drown. It didn’t seem to be an army unit. Most of the men that used the station were sailors, and from time to time we had to deal with military personnel from different units. Here the men were even more cruel; they were savage. Those who knew they were about to go into combat were even worse. It was simply unbearable. After eight or nine months, the unit began a retreat towards Jilin, and I alone followed them, risking my life. In this way I managed to return to the station where I had started from. Sometime after I had got back to Manchuria, Korea was liberated.

3. Abandoned

One evening, there was no call for supper. There seemed to be nobody around, and it was strangely silent. I crept out of the barracks and could find no trucks, vehicles or horses. There were only mats hanging on the barbed wire, mats being blown by the strong wind. I crept quietly to the dining room and found the place completely deserted. There was not a single human being in sight. Then, as I was drinking some water a soldier appeared. He said he had returned after he had been sent on an errand to some far away, remote mountain, only to find the unit deserted. He said he had been left a memo from his officer telling him to leave this place immediately. He told me ‘An atomic bomb has fallen in Japan and we have been defeated. It would be best if you returned to your own country. If you stay on here you will be killed by the Chinese.’

I rushed back to the koya and told the seven remaining women what I had heard. All seven were Korean. They said they were too ill to go anywhere and told me to leave on my own. I hated to leave them, but I felt I had no choice. I left the koya and went back to the dining room, but the soldier had already disappeared. It was quite cold for August, so I put on three training suits abandoned by the soldiers and found an odd pair of chikadabi shoes for my feet. I tied my lice-infested hair in a scarf, and began to run.

The unit was much larger than I had expected. I had to pass three gates and then a fourth and final gate of barbed wire. I had to walk about 12 km before I began to see anybody. I walked a little further, and the roads began to be packed with soldiers, labourers and their families. I walked along with them, begging food from people who were cooking on the roadside or from villages. I slept on the road, crouched before fires made by other people as they went along in this mass exodus. As I walked, I changed my clothes into whatever I could find, and got some different shoes. I reached Korea, and around Chuncheon I hitched a lift on a cargo train carrying coal. Finally, I arrived at Cheongyangri station in Seoul. It was the beginning of December.

I stepped into a restaurant and begged for food. When I told the owner that I had come all the way from Manchuria, she gave me some scraps. As I ate I wept. And I wept. I didn’t want to go home in this state, so I told the owner that I had no way of finding my family or relatives. She took pity on me and told me I could stay with her. I had a hat and put on an old cardigan and baggy trousers she gave to me. She cut my hair short, combed out the lice and sprayed my scalp with DDT. I worked in her restaurant for three years and saved a little money. After that I worked in the Taechang Textile Factory until I was 27.

I kept needing treatment for venereal infection with penicillin that I could only obtain from an American military unit. It took me a further ten years of treatment to be completely healed. In my third year of working in the factory, the Korean War broke out, and I was evacuated further south, taking only my savings book. On my way I found two orphans and handed them to an orphanage after looking after them for a short while. Later on I came across three more orphans whom I handed over to another orphanage. After the war, I settled down in Cheongpyung and cultivated a farm for four or five years. I brought the three orphans I had met previously to the farm and raised them. One of them died, but a boy and a girl have grown up and married. They still come to see me. At times, I thought of ending my life, for it was too difficult to continue living on my own. I came back to Seoul and kept a small stall that sold vegetables. Then I tried selling cooked noodles for a while. At present I run a small café in Shillim-dong, south of the river in Seoul. I manage to make a living, but with some difficulty. I do everything on my own.

Every other morning I rise at 5.00 a.m. and go to the market at either Yongdungpo, Garak or Yongsan to buy groceries. I need to have five or six cups of coffee every day to keep me going. My knees often hurt. I had my womb removed. I am continually being looked down upon and always ill.

I have lived my life with a resentful heart. I have wanted to tell my government what I have had to suffer, but I haven’t been given the opportunity. In November 1991, at 10.00 p.m, I watched Kim Haksun tell her story on national television. The following morning, I rang the number which had been shown, and met up with her. She showed me how to report what had happened to me.

I left home thinking I was doing my duty as a faithful child. But that action ruined my life. From now on, I would like to live the rest of my days without being ignored by others. It is my wish to help poor people and eventually to die without being a burden on others.