I am Kim Yoon-shim from Seoul

I had just finished grade school two months before I was 13.  One day I was playing jump-rope in front of my house when an automobile drove up the road.  Trains even don’t come through my village, let alone cars.  Curious about something we had never seen before, all the children nearby ran to it and tried to climb up.  The driver shook the small children off and let me and my girlfriend get in it.  There were two other uniformed men inside.  I thought it would be a short ride, but the truck rolled on with us in it and then kept on going and going.

I asked them to let me out and, with tears, begged them to take me back to my village, to no avail.  The truck arrived in the City of Kwangju, Cholla Namdo Province, where I encountered 20 or so older girls.  I cried all night, repeating the same words: “Take me back to my mother.”

The next morning all of us were thrown into a cargo train; the compartment was covered with coal-soot and our clothes got all soiled.  There, I was separated from my friend from the village.  I later found out that she was sent to a textile factory because she had no education and couldn’t even read numbers.

The train traveled all day and all night, and all I could do was cry my heart out.  The next night I was put on a cargo ship that sailed for about three days, I think.  There were some soldiers and also civilians on board.  I cried continuously, which annoyed the guards.  So they tied my hands behind my back and threatened to drown me by lowering my tied body into the ocean if I didn’t stop crying.

At the port the girls were divided into two groups and transferred to military trucks.  I was put on a Harbin-bound truck.  We got to our destination, and I saw only an open field and some dug-up shelters.  All of us were confined like prisoners in cubicles called “comfort stations” and given only a small handful of rice to eat.  During the evening, three truck loads of soldiers arrived at the camp.

Every evening soldiers queued up in front of my cubicle and one by one raped me all night long.  Their bodies were filthy, and they didn’t speak a word.  I couldn’t sleep and cried all night.  As punishment for crying, I had to stand outside without any food.  I could not survive even if I escaped, they said, because there was no place to run in an empty open field.

My body was so young, and repeated sex caused my uterus to be inverted.  Sitting up was so painful; I could only lie down.  Penicillin shouts would heal my sores.  I was also injected with “#606.”  Many girls got pregnant but still were forced to have sex up until childbirth.  If a girl refused sex, the soldier would tie up her feet with his boot straps and force sex on her.  When she delivered a baby, a blue-uniform woman put the baby in a sack without cutting the umbilical cord properly and carried it away.  She was given no recovery period after the childbirth and was forced to have sex right away.  As a consequence, many girls got very ill.  When a girl got too sick, a guard would wrap her up in a blanket and carry her away.  I did not see any of the sick girls ever come back.

One day I went to a stream nearby to wash my clothes.  Suddenly I noticed a female hand stretched up from a blanket.  I realized later that it was the hand of the sick girl who had been buried alive, and who had struggled to free herself from the wrapped blanket

Many soldiers used saku (“sack” or condom) which they often washed, dried, and re-used.  Girls often got infected from the used condoms but the soldiers didn’t care.  I lived in fear because I knew if I got very ill, they would wrap me up in a blanket and carry me away like that girl I saw by the stream.

Verbal abuse from the soldiers was constant and unbearable.  They told me “Chosun” (a traditional name for Korea) people are liars, distrustful, subhumans and have no ancestors.  No one care; no one can trace if Chosun people are killed, the soldier said.

Such was my life in Harbin where I stayed for about a year until the next move.

One night I was told to get into a military truck.  After traveling all night, the truck arrived at another empty, open field.  I later found out it was a place called “Kwang-tung.”  During the night, three truckloads of soldiers arrived.  They queued up in front of the cubicles for sex.  Girls were identified with numbers.  I was simply known as “number 27.”  After each soldier, I wasn’t even given time to wash up and get dressed for the next soldier in line.  I serviced 8 to 10 soldiers during the night and about 7 officers in the daytime.  I once tried to hide under my blanket to avoid sex, but the soldier found me, and then beat me and kicked me with boots on.  Even now I can’t walk straight.

One day after sex, an officer felt sorry for me and gave me 500 yen.  With that money, I planned to escape.  That night I ran through the open field and finally reached a house I thought would be a private home.  It was full of soldiers.  They interrogated me and searched my body and found the hidden money.  They accused me of being a spy and turned me over to the military police.  The police beat my body severely and smashed my hands, waving a stiff pen between my fingers like this.  Look at my fingers now, all crooked.  I was sent back to the same hell I tried to escape from, and all day long I was left completely disrobed, with my ands and feet bound.

Another year passed like this.

It was about June of 1845.  A camp worker showed up at our location and whispered to us secretly to leave the place quickly; otherwise we would all die.  We didn’t know why, but we noticed the number of soldiers was decreasing and the remaining soldiers seemed spiritless.  So when the camp seemed deserted, I escaped with two other girls and ran all night, finally reaching a shore.  I found a boat and hid under the tarp.  The next morning the boat sailed out to sea, and I Was discovered when the fishermen lifted up the tarp.  I shamelessly pleased, “I’ll do anything, anything for you, only if you will drop me off on Korean shores.”  So I worked on the anchovy fishing boat for about a month, cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, and servicing sex.  When I found out one of the fishermen was a Korean, I was so overwhelmed and cried with joy.  It was like meeting my own parents.

Early dawn the captain dropped me off.  “From here on, it’s Korea,” he said.  It was an island.  I found out later that it was a leper colony.  I knocked on a gate.  The lepers came out with welcome and gave me some rice.  I made up stories about my past because I simply couldn’t tell the truth.  They helped me send a letter to my parents.  My mother had been so grief-stricken over my disappearance that she became very frail and developed a tumor inside her nose.  My parents came for me but I couldn’t go home with them for fear I might be kidnapped again.  Also, once a girl leaves home, she is not supposed to return to her parents’ home, according to our custom.

So I stayed with my relatives.  My parents married me off as a safeguard because the government was less likely to summon married women for work.  Completely affected by my past, I could not be happy in my marriage.  Korea was liberated, and all the Japanese left from our land, but I couldn’t be happy.  All these years I have lived in secret, in shame, and in pain.

I resent the Japanese.  How could they have done such unspeakable things to me?  And to so many innocent young girls?  Even now, the Japanese appear to be kind on the surface, but I don’t trust them.  They have a dual personality.  I worry now: what id a war breaks out in the future, how do we know that they will not repeat such atrocities again?

The testimony of Kim Yoon-Shin given at the International Symposium held at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. on September 30, 1996.

Source:
Schellstede, Sangmie Choi, ed.  Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military.  New York: Holmes and Meier, 2000.