Comfort women seeking atonement from Japan
DAEGU
(South Korea): When 17- year- old Lee Yong- soo returned home to South Korea in 1945 after years as a child sex slave for Japanese troops, her family, having given her up for dead, thought she was a ghost.
“When I returned, I had a deep wound,” said Lee, holding a black and white photo of herself in a traditional Korean dress, taken in her first year back home.
She still remembers the blue and purple fabric of that dress, but other memories from those years are more traumatic.
“I thought I was going to die,” Lee said of the abuse and torture she endured in a brothel at an airfield in Taiwan used by Japanese kamikaze pilots in the final years of World War Two.
Lee, 90, says she feels like a sincere apology from Japanese authorities for the wartime exploitation of so-called ‘comfort women’ is no nearer now than when she returned home more than 70 years ago.
Japan says the claims have been settled by past agreements and apologies, and that the continued controversy threatens relations between the two countries.
Some historians estimate 30,000 to 200,000 Korean women were forced into sex slavery during Japan’s occupation from 1910 to 1945, in some cases under the pretext of employment or to pay off a relative’s debt.
Now with only 27 registered South Korean survivors still alive, there is a sense of urgency behind efforts by the women to receive a formal apology as well as legal compensation while their voices can still be heard. — Reuters