Former Sex Slave Speaks Out

Kang Il Chul, a South Korean woman abducted from her home at age fifteen and forced into sex slavery during World War II by Japanese soldiers occupying Korea, told her story to a packed crowd of students at Harvard Law School’s Pound Hall yesterday evening.

“When they came for me it was on a day when my parents were not at home. I was fifteen. They had no way of knowing where I was,” Kang said through a translator. “They had to live with sorrow. How much I missed my country I could not explain.”

Kang was one of 200,000 Korean and Chinese women who were forced to live at “comfort stations” throughout imperial Japan as “comfort women”—essentially sex slaves. Three quarters of these women did not survive the war.

“This is the most stark example of institutionalized rape,” said Law School lecturer Diane L. Rosenfeld, who introduced Kang’s talk with a clip from her film “Rape Is.”

Rosenfeld said that the systematic rape and enslavement of Korean and Chinese women by the Japanese military was a way to psychologically “emasculate” China and Korea during the war.

Kang said her story of abduction was not unique.

Before reaching the age of puberty, Kang said, she was taken from her home in the GyeongSang province in southeastern South Korea to a Japanese military base in China.

She said she was relocated several times before winding up at a comfort station in Manchuria where she lived until the end of the war, locked in a cell and raped repeatedly.

“Five or six soldiers would come every day. Some insisted on not wearing condoms,” Kang said. “Once when I protested, he hit me hard on my head and broke my finger. From that day on my nose bleeds all the time. Whenever someone got sick or died they would just drag the girl out like a dog.”

Kang was most emotional when talking about her homeland, which she said she did not see again until 2000.

“Maybe it was because my country was small that I had to suffer,” she said. “When I came back to Korea, I did not tell anyone what I did in China.”

Last night’s event was sponsored by the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association as an opportunity to educate Law School students interested in Asian studies and gender justice.

“Under current standards of international law, what occurred with the comfort women would be illegal,” said Ryan Y. Park, the club’s political and outreach chair.

Park, a second-year student at the Law School, met Kang in 2007 in South Korea and wanted his fellow students to hear her story.

“The mission of these surviving comfort women is for Japan to claim responsibility and apologize to the victims,” Park said. “It is important to give students an opportunity to hear this woman’s story. Education is part of the mission.”