Song Sin-do was 16 and had yet to have her first menstrual period when she was tricked into working for a Japanese military “comfort station.” Over seven hellish years, she was impregnated many times and had to give away two babies. When the troops moved to the frontline, she was ordered to accompany them. Amid the echoes of gunfire, she had sex with dozens of soldiers every day.

Song was born in 1922 under Japanese rule, in the present-day Daejeon area in South Chungcheong Province. Her mother forced her to marry a man she disliked so she fled on her wedding night. Realizing her mother would not accept her back, she wandered aimlessly until a middle-aged Korean woman approached and told her that she could survive, if she went to work on the battlefront in China.

She followed the woman to Pyongyang, crossed into China, and ended up in Wuchang, on the Yangtze River. It was just after Wuchang was occupied. Soon after she arrived, she was told she had to undergo an exam by a military doctor. When she resisted, she was locked up in a dark room and not fed. Pimps told her that she owed money for her transportation, meals and clothing, and threatened she could not return to Korea until she paid her debt.

With virtually no choice except to believe the pimps, Song joined other teenage girls at the facility. She counted the number of men she served, using branches of a tree. When she claimed she must have cleared the debt, she was told that “this is all for the country,” and “the salary went into the donation for national defense.”

Song moved around Hankou, Changan, Yingshan and Puqi (currently Chibi city). She learned about Japan’s defeat in Xianning. But there was nowhere for her to go. She was tricked again. This time by a Japanese soldier, who offered to marry and go to Japan together. She agreed, but when they arrived at Hakata Port in spring 1946, the man left her, saying, “You could live by serving Americans now.”

In utter despair, Song attempted suicide, jumping from the Tohoku Main Line. When she told her story to the person who saved her, he took her to a Korean-Japanese man who lived alone in Onagawa, Miyagi Prefecture. She lived with him until 1982, when he passed away, but struggling all the way due to her illegal immigrant status and poverty.

In 1991, Kim Hak-soon broke her silence in Korea and became the first to give a public testimony on how she was forced into Imperial Japan’s WWII military sexual slavery. The next year, a document providing the Japanese government’s involvement with the military brothels was found. Japanese civic organizations established a hotline, “Comfort Woman 110,” and Song’s story became known through an anonymous informant. She was contacted and persuaded to go public with her history.

A support group was formed soon afterward. They helped Song file a case against the Japanese government and demand a formal apology in 1993, but the Tokyo District Court dismissed her case in 1999, as did the Tokyo High Court in 2000. The final decision by the Japanese Supreme Court came in 2003. The verdict recognized the state’s wrongdoing but rejected her request for a formal apology, on the grounds that the 20-year statute of limitations had expired.

Ahn Hae-ryong recorded the long legal battle waged by Song and her supporters in a full-length documentary, “My Heart is Not Broken Yet” (2007), with the funding by some 670 Japanese individuals. The film portrays the “unconventional” war victim, who exhibits “fury and humor unbefitting a sufferer,” as described by an Asahi Shimbun reporter. She is “as hard as nails” at first, but gradually softens while getting along with her supporters. She learns to open her heart to others and reconnects with her long-lost homeland.

Song’s unexpected charisma and wit, and her sharp tongue, makes the film as much amusing as it is inspirational. It depicts how a deeply distrusting individual transforms through camaraderie with her sympathizers. Rather than lamenting her past suffering, Song boldly condemns the horrors of war and straightforwardly denounces irrational politics. And during her meetings with a diversity of audiences, ranging from high-schoolers to war veterans, she constantly sends her fervent anti-war message.

The movie is a far cry from the usual anti-Japanese propaganda associated with historical issues from the colonial period. It also is a must-see for those historical revisionists -- New Right or whatever -- who insist that the “comfort women” voluntarily became prostitutes and had labor contracts. There were no such contracts in gathering young women and girls for the unspeakable labor.

Under patriarchal capitalism and fanatical militarism, daughters of poverty-stricken families were often deprived of freedom, let alone job choices -- whether in Korea or Japan. The preying on desperate females was no different than the trickery and coercion for “debt” payment used by sex traffickers around the world today. “Comfort women” endured extreme circumstances of state-engineered wartime violence against women.

Song died in 2017 in Tokyo, where she lived after being evacuated in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami in Tohoku in 2011 with the assistance of her supporters.

Lee Kyong-hee

Lee Kyong-hee is a former editor-in-chief of The Korea Herald. The views expressed here are the writer's own. -- Ed.