WITNESS UNBOWED
Page 5 of 5

     It was in Jakarta--and I did know this name--that something totally unexpected and dreadful happened. There were twenty-three of us left and we were taken to a hospital. A doctor came in, inspected my body below there, and did something. I had never felt such piercing pain in my life; I felt as if my entire inside shrank into a small bundle and my body rolled like a ball with the whole world's pain compressed in it. I cried and bled for three days. I didn't know then but, of course, they operated on me to prevent pregnancy.

"You know, we die once, only once. It matters how we die. I was immensely proud of the way my parents died."

     Now changed to abrupt and coarse manners, the Japanese took us to a city called Semarang [a coastal city of Indonesia, about 250 miles east of Jakarta and occupied by the Japanese from 1942 to 1945]. Within the military compound, there were rows of barracks. I was ordered into one of the rooms. Night fell in a strange land, so far away from my father and mother. A Japanese officer in uniform came in, sat down, looked at me, and gestured to me to take off my clothes. Then, he started to undress himself. I crawled into a corner of the room, hid my face between my legs, and wished that I could shrink myself into nothing. The officer yelled, he jerked me to my feet, grabbed my clothes, and tore them off. I stood in my underwear, trembling like crazy. He took out his sword and used it to tear my underwear. I was sixteen, the only daughter in a family without sons.
     From the next day onward, five or six soldiers a day came, and the number increased to forty and fifty. Every time I fainted, they poured water over me and did the same thing all over. Much of the time, both body and spirit felt numb but when the bodily pain became unbearable, I screamed. Then they would give me shots, sometimes several times a day. Each time the shot soothed my pain and I was again under those soldiers. I didn't know it then but they made me into an opium junkie.
     Beginning at nine at night, officers came. In comparison with them, the soldiers were harmless. Because there were always lines outside the door and because they were not given much time, the soldiers had to hurry and go, but the officers--they were something else. They had more time, and those high-ranking ones, they could stay overnight. They demanded such unspeakable and weird things. When I didn't obey them, many of them took out swords, threatened me, and used them on my body. When they did, they made sure that I bled. Did you know that the Japanese believed that once the sword was out, unless it saw blood, it would not fit back into its case? Such strange people... [She asked me this question and looked out of the window, her eyes gazing far away]. To this day there are so many scars on my body from the sword wounds.
     I attempted suicide. I saved, every chance I got, strong pills for malaria. When I had forty of them, I swallowed them, no longer able to endure the pain and humiliation. However, two of my friends, who also saved the pills for the same purpose, could not go through with it and discovered me. They reported it and all I remember is that water came out from every part of my body--my mouth, nostrils... They revived me. It was then that I made up my mind to survive and tell my story, what Japan did to us. It was that determination that kept me alive until the day when some Indonesian women who did our laundry informed me that Japan had lost the war. Of the twenty-three of us, only nine were alive at the war's end. When our bodies could not be used, we were killed. They cut the women's throats in front of our eyes, warning us that we would be subject to the same fate if we disobeyed. The same Indonesian women informed the Allied soldiers about us, and they came to take us to Singapore and put us in a camp. I heard that the Japanese had been ordered to kill all of us to wipe away all trace of their atrocities.

     I had to wait almost a year before I was put on a ship home. When I returned home, our house was full of dust and spiderwebs, completely deserted. The neighbors came with brooms and cleaned the house. They told me about my parents. My father was never released; he died in prison. The Japanese came to the house and tried to rape my mother. Humiliated, holding a piece of iron between her lips, she killed herself. Then, the Japanese took the house and used it to entertain important visitors from Japan.
     Did I cry? No, I didn't. I held back tears with so much love and pride for my parents--my father, thinking back, who was undoubtedly involved in the independence movement, and my mother who chose death rather than be defiled by the Japanese. You know, we die once, only once. It matters how we die. I was immensely proud of the way my parents died. The Japanese took our country away but they could not take the spirit of my parents. The Japanese defiled my body through and through but not my spirit. I locked up the house and decided to get rid of the opium addiction. It was my personal battle to regain my dignity as a Korean woman, as a human being. I gnashed my teeth so much that my gums bled and I could not eat. I crawled around the room, ripping off the floor paper until only the mud underneath showed. Then, I dug the mud. I chewed off all my fingernails. It was a desperate scream to be free of the opium and to be human. It was an eight-month struggle.
     I was never able to have a normal sex life, but I met a kind man who wanted a companion more than anything else. He was a medical doctor who served in the Japanese army and had a nervous breakdown. He understood me. He is the one who wakes me up when I fight the Japanese soldiers in my dreams. I never hid what happened to me in Semarang. Why should I hide? I am not the one who should feel shame; it is Japan who should carry all the shame on its shoulders. Help me tell this story to America and to the whole world.

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