Still Waiting for Closure

The last few surviving comfort women in Asia, now in their 80s and 90s, are still demanding justice for the sufferings they went through during World War II.

- Mara Cepeda

She wonders if she will have any visitors; sometimes, she says, the loneliness does get to her.

She tries her best to fight against sad memories bubbling up and causing tears "that will fill the Han River if I let them flow," she said.

Madam Park, one of the last surviving comfort women in South Korea, was born into a life of luxury in 1928, before it was all taken away from her one fateful day when she was 16.

Her father was a wealthy farmer who owned most of the land in the village. Her family had two servants, she recalls.

One day, while her parents were out working in the fields, she was ambushed at home by Japanese soldiers, who "dragged her like a dog" into a truck. She was then forced onto a ship at Busan that sailed for Japan, and told that she would be working for a textile company.

It was a lie. Instead, she became one of the estimated 200,000 to 400,000 women across Asia forced into providing sexual services to Japanese Imperial Army troops during World War II, from 1939 to 1945.

They were forced to serve the soldiers in military-run or military-supervised brothels known as comfort stations, which were set up to boost the soldiers' morale and minimize the backlash from widespread rapes by the military.

While no official figures are available, most estimates suggest that there were around 1,000 comfort stations scattered across Japanese-occupied territories in Asia and the Pacific.

Most of the women were from Korea, a Japanese colony at that time, and China, which was invaded by Japan in 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Others came from countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Myanmar, Singapore, then East Timor, and modern-day Papua New Guinea.

Today, the number of surviving comfort women is dwindling fast, and survivors are now mostly in their 90s.

South Korea has six known survivors.