Hwang Keum-ju was an 18 year-old foster-daughter of a wealthy Korean family when she received a draft notice from the Japanese government during its wartime occupation of Korea. She was sent to an army barrack in a deserted area of Manchuria — a "comfort station" where she would be forced to repeatedly engage in sexual intercourse with Japanese soldiers everyday for over four years.
By the time the war ended, Hwang had been raped so often that she lost her uterus and had contracted multiple sexually transmitted diseases.
Hwang was what the Japanese euphemistically referred to as a "comfort woman," whom the Japanese government recruited, shipped and distributed to its soldiers stationed all over the Pacific. Supply lists catalogued them under the heading of "ammunition." Two hundred thousand women, about 80 percent of whom were Korean and other large percentages of whom were Chinese, Taiwanese or Filipino, were subjected to atrocities in Japan's attempts at strengthening its war effort.
Hwang will be speaking about her experience this afternoon as part of an intercollegiate visitation seminar with Harvard, Yale, New York, Georgetown and Cornell universities. Her visit to the University is sponsored by the campus's Korean-American Students Association.
"I feel that tragic events such as this should not be forgotten, else they are bound to happen again," KASA president Tom Chang '02 said. "Our goal is not to point fingers at Japan, but rather we want to inform and educate people on the atrocious acts people are capable of committing so that it would never happen again.
"We have received tremendous support from the various university organizations. So far, the organizations that have given us monetary support are the EAS program, history department, the Council on Regional Studies, the Humanities Council and the Program in the Study of Women and Gender," he added.
Comfort women were often girls as young as 11 years old. According to some testimonies, the women were raped as many as 30 to 40 times a day. Their services required a fixed price by soldiers who frequented the stations; the revenues went to the Japanese government. At the end of the war, many of these women were killed or abandoned by retreating Japanese troops.
The United States Army played its role in the subjugation of these women when the Japanese opened its comfort stations to the Allied troops on August 18, 1945. U.S. soldiers took advantage of the offer and even requested that more stations be built. It was not until concerns about sexually transmitted diseases arose that the stations were closed.
Although several members of the Japanese government have expressed remorse over the issue, the government as a whole has continued to deny responsibility.
Lawsuits filed in the United States against the Japanese by some of the women were dismissed as recently as this October when U.S. courts decided that reparations should be sought from a government-to-government basis through diplomatic channels rather than through U.S. intervention.
Chang said that one of KASA's goal's is to "to have Japan acknowledge their wrongs, and this admission is necessary. Countries have to be accountable for their actions. If a country is allowed to commit wrongs and not acknowledge them, then they are entitled to do anything they please. There are people's lives that were shattered, and these kinds of human rights violations should never occur."
