Meet the Halmoni

Yi Okseon was born in Pusan in 1927.  She was born to a poor family and was unable to go to school.  In 1940 someone offered her "an opportunity to gather money for schooling", and so she began working in a hotel in Usan.  In 1942 a Korean and a Japanese came and forcibly abducted her to Yanji, currently in Jilin Province in Northwest China.  After this she lived as a "comfort woman" for more than three years.  As the result of repeated injections of the anti-syphilis arsphenamine 606 and mercury vapor treatments, she became unable to bear children.  While at a "comfort station" near East Yanji Airport she fell in love with a Korean forced conscript in the Japanese military.  After the end of the war, she drifted on foot seeking him and eventually settled in Baodaozhen, also in Jilin Province.  They married but when war broke out in China, he was enlisted in the military and whisked away.  She lived for years as a husbandless newlywed in her in-laws' home, as was the tradtion at the time; but she finally remarried ten years later when he did not return.  Until 2000, when she finally returned to Korea and started to live at the Sharing House, she lived in Yanji with her husband's son from a former marriage.

Bae Chunhui was born in 1923 in Seongju, Northern Gyeongsang Province in Southeastern Korea.  At the age of nineteen, one day when she was spending time with her friend Bongsun, she heard about local recruitment for the Women's Voluntary Labor Corps.  There she was told she would earn money, but not that she would be forced to provide sex to soldiers, and she and Bongsun volunteered together.  However, rather than being given a job, she was taken to Manchuria, and forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military.  At the end of the war, she was unable to return directly into Korea, and after remaining for six years in now-Chinese Manchuria, she crossed to Japan in 1951.  She remained there for thirty years and returned to Korea in 1981.

Kim Soon-ok was born in 1922 in Southern Pyeongan Province in Northeastern Korea. Since her family was poor, she had worked as a maid since she was seven.  Her father sold her as a 'gisaeng' (a singing and dancing female entertainer) to support her younger siblings.  Thinking of going back home again, she worked hard and paid off the debt and returned to her house.  However, her father eventually sold her again and she was forced into Shimenzi "comfort station" in Heilong Jianga, China.  When the war ended, she could not imagine the very thought of going back to her home town, and so she stayed in the place where the former "comfort station" was.  Kim Soon-ok returned to Korea in 2005 and is currently living in the House of Sharing.

She was born in 1929 in Jinju, Gyeongsang province in southeastern Korea. Her teacher, who was Japanese, persuaded her to join the Women's Voluntary Labor Corps and go to Japan as one of the first members of the Corps. But the hard labor there made her attempt to escape, and on the way she was captured and taken to a "comfort station". After the war she delivered a baby who had been conceived at the "comfort station" but the baby died of pneumonia at age four. While staying at the "House of Sharing", she was a strong activist, participating in demonstrations, giving testimony and expressing her experiences in her paintings. She died of lung cancer on February 2nd, 1997.

Pak Ok-seon was born in Miryand, Gyeonsang Province, in Southeastern Korea in 1924, into a poor family with seven children.  In 1941, when she was eighteen, a friend told her that there was money to be made in China and jobs to be had in factories, and proposed that they go together to work in a textile and manufacturing plant.  As her family would most likely have forbidden her going, she snuck out at night and caught a train with her friend.  But she was taken, with twenty girls her age, to a "comfort station" in the Muling area of Heliongijang, Manchuria.  She lived there as a "comfort woman" for four years.  Eventually, her base was bombed, and she was wandering in the mountains when the war ended.  She married an ethnic Korean and settled in Muling.  She finally returned to Korea in 2001 and is currently living in the House of Sharing.

Pan Onglyeon was born in Muju City, Jeolla Province in Southwestern Korea in 1920.  At sixteen she was married off into a poor family, but she fled and at the age of eighteen she remarried.  But after difficult and arduous days, her husband sold her off to an employment agency.  In 1941, at the age of twenty three, she was taken to the small island of Rabaul in Papua New Guinea, the scene of some of the greatest battles in the Southern Pacific theater, and made a "comfort woman" of the Japanese military.  As the Japanese base on Rabaul faced constant bombardment, she was evacuated twice by ship, but because of fierce bombardment and rough seas, both ships were sunk and she was brought back both times to the island.  Of fifty girls and women she was one of only four survivors.  In 1944 she narrowly caught another boat that took her to Shimonoseki, Japan, and from there she was able to return to Korea safely in 1945.

Kang Il-Chul was born in 1928 in Sangju, in Gyeongsang Province in Southeastern Korea.  In 1943, when she was sixteen, a military officer came to her house and abducted her, saying that she was being conscripted for the National Guard.  She was taken to Manchuria, and after stopping in Shenyang, was made a "comfort woman" of the Japanese military at Changchun "comfort station" and later at one in Mudanjang.  At the time that the war ended she was stricken by severe typhoid fever, and thinking that she would die, military personal transferred her outside of the military base to be cremated alive with corpses; but she was subsequently rescued by Korean independence fighters.  After the war, she remained in China.  After the Korean War she served as a military nurse for Korean communist troops and upon her discharge she moved to Jilin City, also in Northwestern China, and served as a nurse there.  She married a Chinese man in Jilin, and remained there.  She finally returned to Korea in 2000 and is currently living in the House of Sharing.

Kim Gunja was born in 1926 in Pyeongchang City, in Gangwon Province of Central Korea. She was born to a father who married past forty after living a secluded mountain life in pursuit of Taoist enlightenment, and to a mother who was just fifteen when she was wed.  She was the first born of three daughters.  Her father died when she was just nine, and four years later her mother left the world as well, and so she and her little sisters were scattered among the houses of their relatives.  She lived as the foster daughter of a policeman, until in 1942, at the age of seventeen, thinking that she was being sent on an errand by the policeman, she was sent to a "comfort station" in Hunchin, Manchuria.  She remained there as a "comfort woman" of the Japanese military until the end of the war.  After the war, she returned to Korea.  She sold clothes and worked as a domestic servant.  She lived for a while in a temple as a Buddhist devotee and later converted to Catholicism.