Housewife 1946 (Busan)

In 1946 Choi Sun-Hee travelled by steamer from Osaka in Japan 
to Busan in Korea. She came back to a home that surprisingly 
had changed little in the seven years she had been absent. She 
came back to a husband whose appearance had changed much. This 
was fitting, suitable, appropriate, because she had changed as 
much as it is possible for a woman to change. At the age of 
29, she was already old. For seven years she had been a dead 
woman alive.

Choi Sun-Hee was chongshin-dae, a Korean comfort woman. In 
Japanese, jugun ianfu, or teishintai, a member of the 
"voluntary corps" that assisted the Japanese war effort. These 
were the polite descriptions. The pitiless reality was that 
for seven years she had been slave, indentured to the Japanese 
Imperial Army. She had been compelled to have sex with 
Japanese soldiers. Every day. For seven years, every day. And 
every day not one Japanese soldier but many. On good days, 
only three or four, and on bad days as many as 20.

Liberated, she came home and did not know why, except that it 
seemed required of her by the American liberators. There was 
never any question about her going home. Once they had 
identified her, found her papers, they had been in indecent 
haste to make it happen.

At times on the voyage home she had attempted to raise her 
spirits. When the sun slanted over the calm waters of her 
homeland, she leaned her arms on the railings and smelled the 
sea air, and it seemed like a time of hope. But memory crushed 
all that in minutes. She had no home. She was no woman. She 
was no person at all. 
   
Choi Soo Kim met her at the dock and he didn't want to be 
there. He didn't say a word, but the awkward way he stood told 
her how it was. Clearly her appearance distressed him. He took 
her courteously by the elbow and led the way home. They walked 
three miles without saying anything.

She came without luggage. All she brought home was herself. 
The little house appeared unchanged from 1939. He looked at 
her and nodded. You're home, he said without saying so. She 
nodded and walked into the little garden, looking up at the 
grey clouds. She was home. 

In Osaka home had been a stretcher in a room with 13 women, 
mostly Korean women like herself. The others were from China. 
There had been one from the Philippines but she had died after 
a beating. She lived in that room for the past five years, 
surrounded by women. Except when she went to work downstairs 
in whatever room was vacant. The rooms were all the same. Each 
had a low bed with a hard mattress. In the room a Japanese 
soldier would stab her with his penis. Outside the room, waiting 
patiently for him to finish, other Japanese soldiers waited in 
a queue to do the same. Every day, every time she was stabbed, 
she died a little. In seven years she had done much dying by 
increment.

Every so often she would be beaten. She never knew why. She 
had never resisted, never complained, but every so often they 
beat her anyway. In 1942 she was beaten so badly she had 12 
days free of soldiers stabbing her. She didn't have to go 
downstairs to the mattress. It had been a painful holiday.

She looked up at the grey clouds and knew her husband did not 
want her back. This was not terrible. She understood him very 
well. When they married in 1937 they had been practising 
Confucians, as befitted their middle class status. A woman's 
chastity was beyond value. She came to the marriage bed a 
virgin, and sex before, during, and after was never 
discussed. He knew very well what she had been forced to 
become, but it would not be discussed now or ever. Her shame 
they both bore, but they bore it individually. It would have 
been more convenient if she had vanished without trace. He did 
not want her, and he certainly did not want to have sex with a 
woman who had been used by a thousand men. 

And she did not want him. She did not want any man. Not now, 
not ever, as long as she should live.

Yet, because convention and culture said it must be so, they 
would be forced to share a bed.

Choi Sun-Hee left the garden and went back into the house to 
begin to prepare dinner. Her husband, she noted, had already 
gone out. Her husband could not look at her, and he had many 
reasons for not doing so. In his youthful enthusiasm, as a 
trainee manager at the textile factory, he had led a 
delegation of Korean workers to protest to the Japanese 
occupation administration about conditions of work. Retribution 
had been swift and terrible. He had been savagely beaten, and 
the next day the soldiers came to the house and took her away. 
She was raped in her own house, raped in the back of an army 
truck, raped at the army barracks, raped on the ship to Japan, 
and cast into the brothel in Osaka where she welcomed 17 
Japanese soldiers on her first day.

She was pretty then.

In her husband's house, Choi Sun-Hee realised with sudden 
enormity the terrible burden she had placed on him by 
returning home. She took a large carving knife from the 
kitchen, went back into the courtyard garden, knelt in the 
traditional fashion, and plunged the knife with two hands and 
with bitter ferocity, to the hilt, into her abdomen. As blood 
gushed into her lap, she twisted the knife sideways with her 
last ounce of strength.

Her life drained away quickly. For the first time in seven 
years, she was comforted.

ENDS