In 1946 Choi Sun-Hee travelled by steamer from Osaka in Japan
to Busan in Korea. She came back to a home that surprisingly
had changed little in the seven years she had been absent. She
came back to a husband whose appearance had changed much. This
was fitting, suitable, appropriate, because she had changed as
much as it is possible for a woman to change. At the age of
29, she was already old. For seven years she had been a dead
woman alive.
Choi Sun-Hee was chongshin-dae, a Korean comfort woman. In
Japanese, jugun ianfu, or teishintai, a member of the
“voluntary corps” that assisted the Japanese war effort. These
were the polite descriptions. The pitiless reality was that
for seven years she had been slave, indentured to the Japanese
Imperial Army. She had been compelled to have sex with
Japanese soldiers. Every day. For seven years, every day. And
every day not one Japanese soldier but many. On good days,
only three or four, and on bad days as many as 20.
Liberated, she came home and did not know why, except that it
seemed required of her by the American liberators. There was
never any question about her going home. Once they had
identified her, found her papers, they had been in indecent
haste to make it happen.
At times on the voyage home she had attempted to raise her
spirits. When the sun slanted over the calm waters of her
homeland, she leaned her arms on the railings and smelled the
sea air, and it seemed like a time of hope. But memory crushed
all that in minutes. She had no home. She was no woman. She
was no person at all.
Choi Soo Kim met her at the dock and he didn’t want to be
there. He didn’t say a word, but the awkward way he stood told
her how it was. Clearly her appearance distressed him. He took
her courteously by the elbow and led the way home. They walked
three miles without saying anything.
She came without luggage. All she brought home was herself.
The little house appeared unchanged from 1939. He looked at
her and nodded. You’re home, he said without saying so. She
nodded and walked into the little garden, looking up at the
grey clouds. She was home.
In Osaka home had been a stretcher in a room with 13 women,
mostly Korean women like herself. The others were from China.
There had been one from the Philippines but she had died after
a beating. She lived in that room for the past five years,
surrounded by women. Except when she went to work downstairs
in whatever room was vacant. The rooms were all the same. Each
had a low bed with a hard mattress. In the room a Japanese
soldier would stab her with his penis. Outside the room, waiting
patiently for him to finish, other Japanese soldiers waited in
a queue to do the same. Every day, every time she was stabbed,
she died a little. In seven years she had done much dying by
increment.
Every so often she would be beaten. She never knew why. She
had never resisted, never complained, but every so often they
beat her anyway. In 1942 she was beaten so badly she had 12
days free of soldiers stabbing her. She didn’t have to go
downstairs to the mattress. It had been a painful holiday.
She looked up at the grey clouds and knew her husband did not
want her back. This was not terrible. She understood him very
well. When they married in 1937 they had been practising
Confucians, as befitted their middle class status. A woman’s
chastity was beyond value. She came to the marriage bed a
virgin, and sex before, during, and after was never
discussed. He knew very well what she had been forced to
become, but it would not be discussed now or ever. Her shame
they both bore, but they bore it individually. It would have
been more convenient if she had vanished without trace. He did
not want her, and he certainly did not want to have sex with a
woman who had been used by a thousand men.
And she did not want him. She did not want any man. Not now,
not ever, as long as she should live.
Yet, because convention and culture said it must be so, they
would be forced to share a bed.
Choi Sun-Hee left the garden and went back into the house to
begin to prepare dinner. Her husband, she noted, had already
gone out. Her husband could not look at her, and he had many
reasons for not doing so. In his youthful enthusiasm, as a
trainee manager at the textile factory, he had led a
delegation of Korean workers to protest to the Japanese
occupation administration about conditions of work. Retribution
had been swift and terrible. He had been savagely beaten, and
the next day the soldiers came to the house and took her away.
She was raped in her own house, raped in the back of an army
truck, raped at the army barracks, raped on the ship to Japan,
and cast into the brothel in Osaka where she welcomed 17
Japanese soldiers on her first day.
She was pretty then.
In her husband’s house, Choi Sun-Hee realised with sudden
enormity the terrible burden she had placed on him by
returning home. She took a large carving knife from the
kitchen, went back into the courtyard garden, knelt in the
traditional fashion, and plunged the knife with two hands and
with bitter ferocity, to the hilt, into her abdomen. As blood
gushed into her lap, she twisted the knife sideways with her
last ounce of strength.
Her life drained away quickly. For the first time in seven
years, she was comforted.