Memory of my late sister-in-law
By Chang Soon-hee
A Japanese officer in the black police uniform leading three Korean men strode into a farm village in now North Gyeongsang Province. In his proud parade his left boot hit his sabre dangling from his waist producing a metallic clanging sound. Earlier the farm villagers had gathered kitchen brassware from their homes. In 1944 at the peak of the “Pacific War,” Japan was in desperate need of the metal for the production of shell cartridges.
A few days after the brassware confiscation incident, two adolescent girls knocked on our back door at night. The village women didn't go to bed early, and were busy spinning hemp under a kerosene lamp. Using their front teeth, they first split the hemp into a thin jute yarn then rolled the threads on their bare thighs, and made yarn from the long hemp twine for weaving.
The girls wore knee long black skirts and short white jackets, with their hair tied in pony tails. “We are sorry to disturb you but our parents asked if you could hide us in your house,” they blurted out. I was only five years old and didn't understand exactly what they were talking about, but later learned that it had something to do with men and women.
Led by a Japanese policeman, two Korean men visited the houses in the village that had young unmarried woman. At first, they spoke cordially that in order to become loyal imperial Japanese citizens, healthy young women should volunteer to serve as domestic workers to support the soldiers fighting overseas. The remuneration would be significant, they added. But the words persisted gradually becoming coercive and even extortionate.
The men didn't visit our house as we had no young women. I was a child. My unmarried elder brother, 23 years old then, placed some blankets in the attic as a hideout for the girls from the next village. He then removed the ladder. My father, being a scholar of Confucianism and the elder of the village, arranged for one girl to marry my brother and the other another boy in the village. Cursorily prepared, the two weddings ensued one after another on a straw mat in our yard, and the marriage registers were quickly filed at the town office.
Seventy years after the yard weddings, my now senile sister-in-law visited her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren to spend Chuseok together in Seoul. “Hi, Soon-hee!” narrowing her eyes she said, “Where is your groom?” She had witnessed my wedding which had taken place 60 years ago on a straw mat in the same yard she, as a young woman, had hastily married my brother. That Chuseok morning she didn't wake up. She was 91.
One of the former so-called comfort women, a rather fine-looking elderly woman, recently spoke of her displeasure and the discords she had with her supporting organization. She must have been a pretty young girl when she was coercively recruited some 76 years earlier. My now late sister-in-law was a beautiful woman, too.
The writer is an elderly woman who lives in Seoul.