Kim Hak-sun

Kim Hak-sun (1924–1997) was a Korean human rights activist who campaigned against sex slavery and wartime sexual violence.

Kim Hak-sun was born in 1924 in Jilin, China.

Her parents had originally resided in Pyongyang, however they had to move to China because of oppression by Japan.

Kim's biological father was a Korean independence activist who had spent his days and nights supporting the independence army.

She returned to Pyongyang with her mother after the death of her father, who died when she was only three months old.

While living in Pyongyang, Kim attended a missionary school where she held fond memories of "lessons, sports, and playing with my friends."

At the age of 14, her mother remarried.

She had a difficult time becoming accustomed to her stepfather and eventually rebelled, causing her mother to send her to live with a foster family who trained kisaeng.

She attended the academy for two years where she learned many forms of entertainment, including the art of dance, song, and pansori, among other things.

She graduated at the age of 17 and was thus unable to obtain a license to work as a kisaeng, which required a minimum age of 19.

Kim's foster father took her with another adopted daughter to China to sell them.

Kim's travel with her foster father eventually brought her to Beijing.

Upon their arrival, they were approached by a Japanese soldier who took her foster father aside, suspecting him to be a spy.

Hak-sun was subsequently abducted by other Japanese soldiers and was taken to a comfort station where she was forced to work as a comfort woman along with four other Korean women.

During her stay, she was given the Japanese name, Aiko.

After four months had passed, Hak-sun managed to escape the comfort station she was being held at with the help of a Korean man who later became her husband and the father of her two children.

There are some conflicting stories that Kim's foster father attempted to sell Kim to the owner of the comfort station, and her husband had tried to rape her before helping her escape.

Kim was one of the victims who had been forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army between the early 1930s up until the end of the Pacific War.

She is the first woman in Korea to come forward publicly and testify her experience as a comfort woman for the Japanese military.

Shortly after the liberation of Korea in 1945, Hak-sun and her family returned to Korea.

She lived in a refugee camp in Seoul for three months, where her daughter died from cholera.

Some time after 1953, her husband died due to wounds incurred when the roof of a building he had been working in collapsed on top of him.

Upon recalling the death of her husband, Hak-sun said: "I had suffered so much, living with this man who had supposedly been my husband. When he was drunk and aggressive, because he knew that I had been a comfort woman, he would insult me with words that had cut me to the heart (...) He had tortured me mentally so much that I did not miss him a lot. Her son died of a heart attack while swimming at sea.

For over four decades after the war ended, few heard about the comfort women.

This was due in part because many women died in the comfort stations, many committed suicide after the war, or did not feel comfortable sharing their experience because rape was too sensitive of a topic in Korean culture.

However, in the late 1980s, Korea had become a more democratic state and difficult topics like rape were more openly discussed.

Kim could disclose the truth of Japanese military's comfort station and disastrous life of the victims.

In 1990, the Japanese government announced that Japan was not responsible for the issue of military's comfort women, denying the fact that they forcibly took advantage of young women from numerous countries as sex slaves and the existence of comfort stations.

Her testimony was made on 14 August 1991.

In December 1991, she filed a class-action lawsuit against the Japanese government for the damages inflicted during the war.

She was the first of what would become hundreds of women from Korea, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and the Netherlands who came forward to tell their stories of their enslavement to the Imperial Japanese military.

She was inspired to finally take her story public after 40 years of silence by the growth of the women's rights movement in South Korea.

On 14 August 1991, Kim described: "I do not understand why Japan is lying. I made my determination after watching the news. I was not asked to do it. I am doing this out of my own will. I am almost 70 years old, and I am not afraid of anything. I will say what I have to say."

Kim was 67 years old when she made the first testimony in 1991.

She was coercively taken to Japanese military's comfort station which was located in China at the age of 17 by a Japanese military officer.

"I tried to escape, but I was caught soon and raped in tears. I was seventeen then."

When she resisted, the officer responded by kicking her and threatening her by saying that she would be killed if she did not obey him.

She was then brutally raped.

Together with other 4 young Korean women, she had to be a "hygienic tool used by Japanese soldiers to satisfy their sexual desire."

Kim died in 1997 and her court case was still ongoing.