Korean News

A couple days ago an actress apologized to a group of old women here in Korea, getting down on her knees in the dirt outside the house they share and tearfully choking out the words, "I'm so sorry, I did something truly wrong." The television crews caught it all on tape, naturally.

Her offense? She posed nude (a recent trend among Korean actresses) for some photos. That in itself is slightly controversial but pretty widely accepted, but the real issue was that the photos depict her as a Korean comfort woman.

The comfort women, about 80 to 90 percent of whom were Korean, were forced to serve as sexual slaves by the Japanese Imperial Army in the period before and during WWII. (Women from Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and other Japanese-occupied territories of the time rounded out the sex slave population.) The Japanese government first denied the existence of such women and then recanted and apologized in the early 1990s. Some Japanese conservative nationalists still assert that there was no evidence of coercion. The question of reparations and an official governmental apology are still ongoing topics of discussion.

Some of the old women sitting outside the group home for former comfort women watched the young actress sob before them, and reprimanded her for capitalizing on their suffering. The actress had originally asserted, along with her producers, that the photo series was supposed to illuminate the bravery of the comfort women.

Horribly tasteless, I must say, but it did bring fresh publicity to an issue where the principals are dying off. In 1991, Kim Hak Sun became the first Korean woman to give public testimony about her life as a comfort woman when she and two other Korean women filed a lawsuit against the Japanese government. In 1995, she told an anthropologist that she thought the Japanese tactics would be to stall the legal proceedings until all the litigants were dead. She died four months before the Shimonoseki Branch of the Yamaguchi Prefectural Court in Japan ruled in favor of the three women.