50 Years of Shamed Silence
Kim Hak-sun was seventeen when the Japanese army took her. She was sixty-seven when she finally said so out loud — and broke open one of the largest buried atrocities of the twentieth century.
By Teona Abuladze · 9 min read
Kim Hak-sun was sixty-seven years old and ill with lung disease, and she had kept the central fact of her life secret for half a century — from her neighbours, from her acquaintances, from the country she lived in.
On 14 August 1991 she walked into a press conference in Seoul, faced the cameras, and said her name out loud.
It was the first time any woman had publicly identified herself as a survivor of the system Japan called comfort stations. Everything that has happened since — the archives opened, the apology issued, the hundreds of women who came forward — began in that room.
What the euphemism hides
They were called comfort women.
The phrase is a translation of a Japanese military euphemism, and like all such phrases it was built to make something unbearable sound administrative. There was no comfort in it. Historians estimate that from the early 1930s until 1945, as many as 200,000 women and girls were coerced or deceived into military-run “comfort stations” across Asia and the Pacific — from Korea, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Burma, and among Dutch women interned in occupied territories.
The stations were built, supplied and regulated by the Imperial Japanese Army. Women were held in rooms, “inspected” for disease, and made available to soldiers. Many did not survive. Those who did carried it into a peace that had no place for them.
The United Nations would later define what happened to them as crimes against humanity. But that definition came in 1998 — and it came only because seven years earlier, one woman decided that being silent was worse than being known.
Half a century of silence
Understand what the silence was made of, because it wasn’t cowardice.
These women returned to societies where a raped woman was a ruined woman. Where the shame attached to her, not to the army that took her. Many never married. Many never told their families. They lived in poverty, often childless, often in poor health from what had been done to their bodies, holding a secret that would have cost them what little standing they had left.
And the official world kept the silence too. As late as 1990, the Japanese government stated flatly that it bore no responsibility — that the comfort stations had been run by private operators, that the military had not been involved.
That denial is the thing that finally moved Kim Hak-sun. She saw it on the news, and something in her gave way.
“I do not understand why Japan is lying. I made my decision after watching the news. Nobody asked me to do this. I am doing it of my own will. I am almost seventy years old, and I am not afraid of anything. I will say what I have to say.”
Her life before the silence
She was born on 20 October 1924 in Jilin, in Manchuria, where her parents had moved to escape Japanese rule over Korea. Her father — an independence activist — died when she was three months old. Her mother took her back to Pyongyang.
She went to a missionary school, and she remembered it warmly: lessons, sport, playing with her friends. That detail matters. Before all of it, she was a schoolgirl with friends.
Her family was poor. When she was fourteen her mother remarried, and the household could not hold. At fifteen she was placed with a foster family and sent to a kisaeng academy, where girls trained as traditional entertainers — music, dance, poetry.
In 1941, at seventeen, she was told she was going to work. She travelled to China. What waited for her there was a Japanese army unit in occupied territory, and a room, and years she would not describe in public until she was almost seventy.
She was freed in 1945 when the war ended. She came home to a Korea that would soon tear itself in half, and she said nothing about any of it for forty-six years.
The fourteenth of August
At the press conference she wept, and she kept talking anyway.
She described being taken at seventeen. She described the soldiers. She described trying to escape and being caught and dragged back. She used ordinary, exact words for things that governments had spent decades wrapping in euphemism.
In December of that same year she did something even more extraordinary: she filed a lawsuit in the Tokyo District Court against the Japanese government, demanding legal redress.
Then she stood outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul, in a protest that began in 1992 and has continued every Wednesday for more than three decades — one of the longest-running demonstrations in the world.
What one woman’s testimony did
The effect was immediate, and it was enormous.
Within months, other survivors came forward — first two more Korean women, then hundreds, from Korea, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia and the Netherlands. Women who had held the same secret in the same isolation learned they were not alone and not unbelievable.
Her testimony sent historians into the archives, where they found the documentary evidence that Japan had denied existed. In 1993, Tokyo issued the Kōno Statement, acknowledging for the first time that the military had been “directly or indirectly” involved in establishing and managing the comfort stations, and that coercion had been used.
A former UN special rapporteur, whose 1998 report defined this system as crimes against humanity, said afterwards that nothing she had written came close to the impact of Kim Hak-sun’s personal account.
One woman, one afternoon, one name.
Her testimony did what fifty years of documents could not: it made the thing undeniable by making it human.
She did not live to see an apology she accepted
Kim Hak-sun died of lung disease on 16 December 1997, at seventy-three. Her lawsuit was still unresolved.
In her final interview, already ill, she was still demanding the same thing: a proper apology, from the highest level of the Japanese government.
The dispute has never fully closed. Successive Japanese governments have offered statements, funds and partial apologies; survivors and their advocates have found them inadequate or have watched them be walked back by later politicians. The women themselves are nearly all gone now — the last survivors are in their late nineties.
South Korea marks 14 August as a national memorial day for the victims. Since 2012 it has been observed internationally. The date is the anniversary not of the crime, but of the moment a woman refused to keep quiet about it.
Why we’re telling it here
Because this is what happens to women in war, and it is not history.
It happened to hundreds of thousands of Asian women in the 1930s and 40s. It happened in Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s. It is happening now, in wars being fought as you read this. Sexual violence remains one of the most reliably deployed and least prosecuted weapons in existence, and the same mechanism protects it every time: the shame is transferred to the woman, and the woman goes quiet.
That’s the mechanism Kim Hak-sun broke. Not with evidence — she had none. Not with power — she had none of that either. With a name, said out loud, at sixty-seven, on camera, while crying.
She was not asked to do it. She said so herself: nobody asked me. I am doing it of my own will.
They called them comfort women. Their names were Kim Hak-sun, and Kim Soon-duk, and two hundred thousand others we will never know.
Shansi means chance. She had no good ones — until she made one, at the very end of her life, and gave it away to every woman who came after her.
Sources: National Human Rights Commission of Korea; The New York Times; UN reports on wartime sexual violence; Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance; The Kōno Statement, 1993; survivor testimony archives.
This article deals with wartime sexual violence. If it touches something in your own life and you need support, please reach out to someone you trust or to a specialist service in your country.
