Telling Their Stories of Terror
Film documents lives of Korean sex slaves
By Tom Lee

There are some injustices that are too grave to comprehend. Only through telling their stories can the victims of such atrocities begin to heal. Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women (premiering Thursday, May 18 at 10 p.m. on PBS) is a film detailing the accounts of Korean girls forced into institutionalized sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II. Now over 50 years later, these women are the last surviving voice to bring to light these crimes against humanity.

Dai Sil Kim-Gibson’s documentary combines gripping personal testimonies of former Korean comfort women with graphic still images and film footage of the war taken from historical archives. Its goal was to create a haunting illustration of how these wartime experiences have ruined the women’s lives forever. As the film opens, we hear a haunting song wailing in the background, resonating so strong that it eventually takes over the foreground. This sad song, Life in Foreign Land, sung by former comfort woman Song Shin Do, sets the stage for the next hour.

The song sums up all the pain and suffering these women had to endure by being in a strange new land. Korean comfort women sang Life in Foreign Land while they were in the captivity of the Japanese army to comfort themselves. Many who remained in China after the war ended had forgotten their mother tongue of Korea yet still remember these haunting lyrics. A lone violin plays throughout the film making the transitions between the different filmed segments. Occasional bursts of traditional Korean and Japanese period music fill out the other gaps between dialogue.

For Japan, though, these women were forgotten. The Japanese government and media did not speak a word on the subject for half a century except to dismiss the comfort women as volunteers who willingly served the Japanese soldiers in order to make money. If not for the courage of some survivors to speak out, the horrors these women endured may have been just an unwritten page in history.

Kim Hak Soon was the first to publicly testify on the subject of comfort women on August 14, 1991. “I stepped forward in 1991. That’s how the silence was broken,” she recounts in the film. “I am a living witness.”

Soon’s words serve as a fitting opening montage to the film as her actions poured open a floodgate to allow other former comfort women to come forward with their tales. One after another we are bombarded with horrific anecdotes of intense suffering. It is to Kim-Gibson’s credit that few camera angles and cuts were used to distract us from the underlying story. Instead the camera is set up for the women to pour their souls into, freely, loudly and confidently. The clear, minimalist style of the first half of the documentary delivers a more powerful punch to the actual words told by the survivors. In this case, simplistic filmmaking wins out over dramatic flair to tell a more compelling story.

With their silence broken, many of the women no longer have to feel ashamed for what happened to them. “I have nothing to be ashamed of. Those who think it is shameful, they are strange. When I came home, I openly told friends and neighbors. I hid nothing,” says former comfort woman Chung Seo Woon proudly. “Those who dragged us away and treated us like slaves, they should feel shame. The Japanese government should be ashamed.”

The film goes into detailed accounts of the definition of comfort women and how they were treated. During World War II, the Japanese Imperial Army forced more than 200,000 women, some barely teenagers, into a life of sexual servitude. The argument was that a system of readily available women supplied by the government would decrease the spread of venereal disease and the loss of soldiers as a result of these diseases. It was also believed that the soldiers would be able to fight better when they were sexually satisfied. “The Japanese couldn’t fight without the relationship with women. That’s why they took Korean virgins. Because our country was powerless, we were taken,” explained one of the survivors.

Tearful testimonies fill in the details of how the comfort women were treated. The women were regarded as military supplies and tossed around like objects. The women had to give up their names and instead be identified by numbers. They were nothing more than playthings to occupy the soldiers time between bouts of fighting.

It is surprising to note that not one of the women presented in the film had married or given birth. This is due to the fact that some were sterilized while they were comfort women. Others simply just cannot forget the horrors of what they endured to ever lead a normal life. Many expressed angrily into the camera that their only wish is for a husband, children, and to lead a simple life but their experiences haunt them and prevent them from doing so.

The comfort women were recruited from Japan-occupied territories as well as its prewar colonies. Although the comfort women were made up of many ethnicities, including Chinese and Filipino, about 80 to 90 percent were Korean. These girls were obtained under coercion or force. Whole villages were raided in order to identify potential comfort women. Even schools, traditionally institutions bestowed with the honor of protecting children, were pressured to give up their young girls to sexual servitude.

Kim-Gibson is careful not to make her film too one-sided. Many opposing viewpoints from Japanese soldiers, scholars and university professors pepper the documentary to deny the Japanese government’s involvement with comfort women. “Calling them sex slaves, being forced into sex, is something that as a Japanese I definitely refute,” says Tokyo University professor Fujioka Nobukatsu. Others in Japan share Nobukatsu’s sentiment. Former Japanese soldier Tokuda Masanori doesn’t deny that comfort women existed. He just refuses to believe they performed their duties against their will. “I can completely deny recent reports that comfort women were forced to work for the Imperial Army because women can earn more in the war zones than in their hometowns. Comfort women lived more comfortably than the Japanese,” he claims.

The former comfort women today only want an acknowledgment and formal apology from the Japanese government. To accept monetary compensation would be like equating them with prostitutes.

The narrative flow of the film and straightforward style, however, gets interrupted midway with a jolt of dramatic exuberance. The voices of the survivors are superimposed upon dramatic reenactments of the abuse committed toward comfort women. We are treated to images of actresses being packed onto trains, beaten by soldiers and tortured. We are supposed to cringe when we see a girl bound and gagged, then stabbed all because she was pregnant and no longer useful as a comfort woman. Yet this over-dramatization distracts from the survivors’ narrative; it loosens the grip of reality. In some situations, less is more.

Despite the dramatic licenses Kim-Gibson took, Broken Silence: Korean Comfort Women is a hauntingly brilliant film. Kim-Gibson’s goal was to give the former comfort women a voice and let the world know their stories. With this film, she has succeeded. The stench of human indignity committed against these women linger with us long after the film is over. However informative and emotionally draining the film is, it leaves us feeling empty inside with more question than answers. That must be how the former Korean comfort women feel about their lives.