War rape victim's unendng battle

Kim Bok-dong, a victim of Japan’s sex slavery during World War II, at the House of Peace in Seoul on July 27 / Korea Times

Kim Bok-dong

transcends tragedy

to become women’s

rights advocate

By Kang Hyun-kyung

Kim Bok-dong’s business card reads “Women’s Rights Activist.” The front of the lavender card features pink butterflies flying in the background. The back states a bank account number to which people can donate to a campaign to help war rape victims abroad.

Kim, 89, herself a war rape victim, launched the Butterfly Fund in 2012 along with another victim, Gil Won-ok. The fund aims to help women whose lives were suddenly torn apart after becoming war rape victims and who have since been living with the effects of their traumatic experiences.

“I realized that there are many women overseas who were victimized by sexual violence during wars or conflicts,” she said during an interview with The Korea Times at the Seoul-based House of Peace, a shelter for sexual enslavement victims, on July 27.

“Most of them were struggling to make ends meet. Some of them were so financially strapped that they couldn’t even send their children to school. As they got old and weary, their lives became even worse because they had no families or relatives to rely on.”

Since 1992, when she broke her silence about being a sex slave during World War II, Kim has traveled to the United States, Europe and Japan to raise international awareness of war rape.

The victim-turned-activist sat down with The Korea Times weeks after she returned home from the United States, where she protested in front of the Japanese embassy in Washington D.C. in hopes of pressuring Japan to apologize for its crimes against women during World War II. Aug. 15 marks the 70th anniversary of the end of war.

Whenever she meets war rape victims overseas, Kim says her heart breaks because they remind her of what she had gone through during World War II.

During the War, she was taken by the Japanese military from her home in the southern city of Yangsan when she was just 14 years old. The Japanese officials told her mother that they would bring her to Japan for a factory job. It was a lie, however. Kim was brought to comfort stations in China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore, where she was forced to provide sexual services to Japanese soldiers for eight years until the end of the war.

In this framed letter at the House of Peace in Seoul, Gil Won-ok, a victim of sex slavery, demands that Japan offer apologies and pay reparations to war crime victims. / Korea Times

According to experts, the Japanese military first introduced comfort stations in the early 1930s “to boost soldiers’ morale.”

In June, Kim donated 50 million won ($50,000) to the Butterfly Fund. Kim and Gil decided to name the fund after butterflies because the creatures are born through a four-stage life cycle — they start out as eggs and then hatch into caterpillars before becoming pupae and then butterflies.

“We decided to name the fund after the butterfly because we want the victims to overcome their past ordeals and start new lives, just as caterpillars turn into beautiful butterflies that fly to the sky.”

If the Japanese government decides to compensate her, Kim said she will donate the money to help victims overseas.

Every Wednesday, she and fellow activists gather in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul and demand that the Japanese government apologize for the enslavement of women during the war and pay reparations to the victims. However, the Shinzo Abe government has turned a deaf ear to their demands.

“It’s frustrating that Japan’s position has not changed in the past decades since we first launched the weekly Wednesday protests in 1992. But we won’t give up,” she said.

She found hope amid her frustration, as an increasing number of people have joined the campaign to raise money for wartime victims. Some 30 war rape victims in Vietnam are now benefitting from the fund.

Kim has received recognition from several organizations, including the National Assembly and Seoul Metropolitan Government, for her courage to confront Japan’s war crimes and to raise international awareness of such crimes.

She is offended by the use of the term “comfort women,” the Japanese euphemism for the women who were forced to provide sexual services to Japanese soldiers.

“Don’t call us ‘comfort women.’ It’s the wrong expression,” she said. “We were under threat and forced to do horrible things against our will for years. We are victims, and we are not supposed to be called as such.”

Kim criticized Rep. Hwang Woo-yea, a member of the ruling Saenuri Party and the president of the National Assembly Human Rights Forum, for using “comfort women” when he presented the human rights activist of the year award to a group of war rape survivors, including Kim, on July 15. Every year, the members of the forum choose distinguished human rights activists for the award to recognize their contributions to the improvement of human rights.

The trophy given to Kim and her colleagues reads “Comfort Women: Winner of the 10thHuman Rights of the Year Award for their courage and role in raising awareness of the issue of wartime sex slavery.”

The terminology drew the ire of the victims, Kim said.

“This year, the world is commemorating the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. But we wartime sex slavery victims are not yet liberated from our traumatic experiences during the war because our calls for Japan’s apology and redress have not been heard,” she said.

Kim called on President Park Geun-hye government to use all diplomatic resources to settle the wartime slavery issue, hoping that the current president can fix the problems that her father, then President Park Chung-hee, created. Kim was referring to the fact that President Park Chung-hee did not include the war rape issue on the agenda of the Seoul-Tokyo talks when the two sides resumed diplomatic relations in 1965.

During World War II, approximately 200,000 Asian women were taken by the Japanese military to hundreds of thousands of brothels which throughout the Asia-Pacific region.Nearly 80 percent of the victims were Koreans.

Breaking silence

Kim admitted that her disclosure in 1992 about her traumatic experiences required a great deal of courage.

“If I were married and had children at that time, I wouldn’t have broken my silence. I know there are many women who refused to disclose their sufferings because of their families,” she said.

In the face of mounting pressure from activists, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs set up a fact-finding team to investigate the sex slavery in 1992. The sex slavery issue was first addressed in the late 1980s by Yoon Jung-ok, then a professor of Ewha WomenUniversity.

The ministry encouraged war rape victims to report their experiences to the Ministry of Interior or the Red Cross so that they could get financial support from the government.

She recalled the difficulty of launching “undong,” an awareness campaign, in the 1990s because the society at the time was not as supportive as it is today.

“Some sarcastic people would make fun of us and said that we were not supposed to speak in public about our shameful experiences. We were hurt,” she said.

“I was not used to speaking in public. I felt miserable whenever I had to detail what I had gone through in public. My fellow activists and I often cried together,” she said.

Kim took a seven-year hiatus starting in the mid-1990s and then rejoined the campaign in the early 2000s. She has never been married.

“At that time, I didn’t know how old I was. My family told me that I was 22. All of them thought that I was working at a manufacturing company in Japan,” she said, recalling her return home from Singapore in the wake of the war.

Kim said she kept her traumatic experiences a secret until her mother kept pressing her to have a blind date with a potential husband. She disclosed to her mother what she had gone through during the war, but her mother didn’t believe it at first.

“She was shocked after realizing what I told her was true. And she finally stopped pressing me to get married and prepared medicines and other remedies to help me recover from my wounds,” she said.

“When she was still alive, she blamed herself for letting such a horrible thing happen to me and said she would never forgive herself.”

After her mother’s death, Kim went to find a job in the southern port city of Busan, where one of her sisters ran a restaurant.

After working for months as a trainee and a waitress at a couple of restaurants in the city, she opened her own sushi restaurant in Dadaepo Port.

Her business had been doing well, but she decided to close it and devote her time to advocating for women’s rights.