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by Miha Chon |
ISALC, Lewis and Clark College
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by Miha Chon |
The most unforgettable events that I have had were in North Korea, where I visited as the representative of Korean students of Japan, when I was a junior high school student. The official purpose of the visit was to study the scars of WWII, but at the same time for me, it was a great opportunity to perceive the people's real lives under the current system of government. I stayed mostly in Pyong Young which is the capital and the most wealthy part of North Korea. Even though it was the richest city, people were living in great pain, without hopes and dreams. What surprised me the most was that almost every child, even girls, told me that they wanted to be soldiers in the future and fight for their country. Living in one of the most stable and peaceful countries, Japan, the war was from bygone days and was nothing more than knowledge gained from a textbook. I felt that in both Korean societies, North and South, the war has been the main part of their lives for this half century. The war has not ended on the Korean Peninsula.
I met another group of women who could be called the greatest living witnesses of the war. They were the "comfort women" for the Japanese army in the World War II. This meeting was what I really wished to carry out in North Korea because when I was a little girl my grandmother often told me the story about one day during wartime when her young neighbors were forced to get on military trucks and they never came back again. She said they might have been used as sexual slaves of Japanese soldiers in China, Indonesia or other countries. The girls were not old enough to be considered women; they were only teenagers. As a female teenager, myself, I was really interested in this story. I have read books about the comfort women and attended many forums, seeking opportunities to meet with them. And my wish finally came true.
There were seven old women with agreeable smiles on their faces so that I could not have realized they were the people who had been suffering with their past. They warmly welcomed me. One, the youngest woman started talking about her days in China. "I was only fifteen years old when I was taken by the Japanese army and I was forced to have sex by twenty soldiers on the first day. I was stupefied with pain and shame. The next day when I woke up there were three other young girls in the room." She went on to tell me that they were fed only a few radish leaves, once a day. And, of course, they were not permitted to have cloth to bury their faces. After raping the girls the soldiers left useless, worthless paper money. If someone tried to run away and was caught , the soldiers would cut off her head in front of the other girls and put it into boiling water in order to make soup and let someone drink it as an example to the others. Or if a girl got pregnant, they left her out side of the houses without any care because she was useless after that. The worst event which she saw was that two girls, one who was pregnant, tried to escape, so the soldiers roped them to two trucks, and drove them in opposite directions, dividing the women into two. The soldiers were not satisfied with this and they started cutting the womb of the pregnant girl, hollowing the fetus away and stepping on it over and over again. The soldiers were not human; they were beasts. Another old lady showed me several scars of cigarettes on her back and genitals.
It was a vivid description of the war for me. When the women were leaving, they emphasized that I be free and independent in the future, which they had never experienced. Through this meeting, I learned so many things which I would never have gotten from books or forums. They were only the tip of the iceberg and there are hundreds of women who died, still hiding their sacrificed past. It is an obvious fact that the war never ended; it is still causing suffering to a great number of people all around world. I made up my mind to clear up what really happened during the wartime and figure out the best way to build up our century without war, even if it is difficult to achieve. These brave women, some who have died already, gave me great ambitions for the future. Only the correct perception of the past will be our best way to create a better future.
Created by: krauss@lclark.edu
Updated: 9/24/99