House of Sharing

One day at the end of August, Colleen, Becky, and I went to The House of Sharing. This is a place built as a home for the surving so-called "Comfort Women," the name given to the women used as sex slaves by the Japanese army during World War II.

The house is out in the barely populated hills outside of Seoul, a place without bus access or even fully paved roads, which I found surprising since the secondary purpose of the place is to raise awareness of the issue.

Every Wednesday since 1992, at least some of the surviving women and their supporters protest outside the Japanese embassy, demanding compensation for their hardship, as well as acknowledgement of what was done to them. At first the Japanese government denied that "comfort women" had ever existed, then claimed the thousands of women from numerous countries were volunteer prostitutes, then claimed that some rogue soldiers may have forced some of the women into being prostitutes. This is all despite clear evidence that the women were tricked into thinking that they would be getting jobs in factories, or were outright abducted, and this practice was a systematic practice across the Japanese military. Most Japanese citizens have no idea that these atrocities took place, and one of the main sources of tours of the House of Sharing is Japanese people who have stumbled across the information and want to apologize on behalf of their nation.

The visit was with a tour group that picked us up in Seoul and bused us out to the complex. Inside we saw a short video about the comfort women and a museum documenting what is known about their plight. Things that stood out were testimonies from women who were taken as girls who had yet to have their first periods, replicas of the cells where the girls and women were held, and especially the woodblocks with the names of the "comfort women" written upon them in the style of a menu in a Japanese restaurant.

The tour ended with us meeting a couple of the survivors, who are all of course quite old at this point. They had already provided their testimonies for videos and the museum, so they did not recount anything further for us. Instead of a question and answer session, we simply indulged one woman's request that we all sing. After what she'd been through, we were all happy to oblige.