Kim Jung-ju, 87, wartime forced laborer at Nachi-Fujikoshi's aircraft part factory in 1945, wipes away tears during an interview with The Korea Times at her home in Seoul, Nov. 21. Korea Times photo by Choi Won-suk



By Lee Suh-yoon

They told her she was going to a boarding school in Japan.



"Ms. Ogaki, my Japanese homeroom teacher, told me I could meet my sister in Japan," Kim Jung-ju, 87, said in an interview at her home in Seoul last week. "There, I could also keep studying, enter middle school and stay in the same dormitory as my sister."



In the final years of Japan's occupation of Korea ― which started in 1910 and ended with Japan's surrender at the end of World War II in 1945 ― hundreds of thousands of Koreans were mobilized in factories and mines scattered across East Asia. Roughly 250,000 Koreans were estimated to have been forced into labor and sexual slavery during the harsh colonial rule.



Kim, a native of Suncheon, South Jeolla Province, was one of over 1,000 teenage girls mobilized to assemble Japan's war supplies at a factory run by Nachi-Fujikoshi from 1944 to 1945 as part of an all-female "volunteer labor corp."



A landmark ruling Oct. 30, in which the Supreme Court ordered Nippon Steel to compensate four male forced laborers, finally opened a path for people like Kim to win their long court battles against Japanese firms.



Last Thursday, the Supreme Court ordered Mitsubishi to compensate five female forced laborers who, like Kim, were sent in their teenage years to an aircraft factory in Nagoya from 1944 to 1945. Kim's older sister Kim Sung-ju, 89, was one of them.



On the same day, the court also ordered Mitsubishi to compensate five atomic bomb survivors who were forced to work in its factories and shipyards in Hiroshima.







In her sister's footsteps



Like her sister did, before leaving the previous year, the 13-year-old Kim Jung-ju "borrowed" her father's seal from the family coffer and signed the papers given to her by Ms. Ogaki. Her father was not home, having been enlisted into a labor group in a city in Korea. Her mother was dead. Her grandparents did not know.



As she left her home in Suncheon in February 1945, her grandmother hung onto her, sobbing. A Japanese policeman peeled her away from Kim, threatening to arrest her. After a short farewell ceremony held in front of the city hall, Kim and hundreds of teenage girls from other parts of the country were herded onto a ship in Yeosu and taken to Toyama Prefecture on the west coast of Japan.



On her arrival, Kim realized something was wrong.



"There was no sign of my sister anywhere ― that's when I started crying," Kim said, her eyes tearing up again.



They were shown to a two-story dormitory that hosted hundreds on each floor. Around 30 girls slept in each room, which had two rows of tatami mats lining the floor. Girls from the southwestern Jeolla region like Kim were assigned to the first floor, and those from Gyeonggi Province, the second.



"It was one of the coldest winters in Toyama's history, but they didn't give us a single pair of gloves or socks," Kim said spitefully. "In summer, I could not take a single bath."



The girls woke up at 5 a.m. every day. After everyone took turns washing their faces at the taps, one scoop of rice and watery miso soup was handed out to each person.



"Before leaving for work, they made us sing Japan's official military song," Kim said, her voice suddenly breaking out into a marching tune, "Katte kuruzoto isamasiku.." (Bravely swearing to return with victory..)

Together, the girls walked for over two hours to get to the factory.







"The factory was huge, rows of machines next to narrow passageways. The floor was slippery, coated over with black oil," Kim said.



Every day, each girl had to shave 25 to 30 steel ball bearing discs used in jet engines.



"We shaved off the rust and adjusted the size with a spinning machine, using a ruler to measure it to the millimeter," Kim said. "I was too short to operate the machine, so they made me work on top of two stacked apple crates."



Stray hairs or hands got sucked into the machine, causing frequent injuries.



Hunger was the hardest part. Kim enviously watched as the Japanese girls who worked alongside them ― usually assigned to the easier finishing touches ― eat their packed lunches. Dinner back at the dormitory after work ended at 5 p.m. was a spoonful of rice and three pieces of pickled radish.



"We were so hungry, we ate the grass and weeds growing on the dormitory grounds inside the wire fence," Kim said. "Our hair started falling out after that."



Nighttime ordeals



The girls got no rest. American air raids covered Toyama every night.



"We slept with our shoes on," she said. "Whenever the alarm went off, hundreds of us, each holding their blanket over their head, filed out the entrance of the fenced grounds. We just followed each other like a herd in the dark, not knowing where to go, tripping in ditches and rice paddies whenever a bomb went off with a flash nearby. The walk back felt like decades."



Back in their rooms, the girls were overcome with homesickness.



"One girl would suddenly point in the direction she thought back home was and say 'that's our home but we can't go back' and soon the whole room would be filled with sniffles and sobs of girls calling out 'mother, mother, why am I here.'"





Kim Jung-ju Korea Times photo by Choi Won-suk



They did not know the war had ended until they were dropped off at a Yeosu port in November.



"Our dorms and factory were in the middle of nowhere, so we did not hear the Japanese people's cries. We came back wearing army uniforms and still singing that military song. They only said we were free to go home after we got off at Yeosu. We even left the clothes we brought from home back in the dormitory."



The girls did not receive a single cent in compensation for their work. Some had their cash taken away by the dormitory supervisor.



A lonely fight



Life did not return to normal after she got back from Japan. Kim could not enroll in middle school, or take a spot in a nursing school that her uncle arranged with the headmaster.



Many in Korea considered them the same as "comfort women," the term that came to be used for women who were forced to work as sex slaves by the Japanese military.



"I didn't know what comfort women meant then. I later realized that's how Korean society identified us, just because we were also taken away under the all-women labor volunteer corp. as the sex slavery victims were," Kim sighed. "A few years ago, even the male forced laborers who were rallying with us outside the Japanese Embassy called us comfort women."



In patriarchal society where a wife's chastity is valued above all else, the comfort woman label cracked Kim and her sister's marriages.



"After my brother-in-law found out about my sister's time in Japan, he became paranoid about her loyalty," Kim said in a low voice. "She never even put on makeup when going outside due to his paranoid surveillance."



Both sisters eventually divorced their husbands.





Kim holds out a Japanese newspaper clipping from 10 years ago showing her and other forced laborers trying to enter the Fujikoshi headquarters in Tokyo. They went to demand a formal apology and compensation after their call for a face-to-face meeting with its executives was rejected. Korea Times photo by Choi Won-suk



With help from Japanese civic groups, Kim visited Japan countless times to appeal her case at Japanese courts and Fujikoshi shareholder meetings.



"I got more help from the Japanese than I got from most Koreans. They flew us there, paid for our accommodations and food," Kim said, her voice cracking with sorrow. "But when we came back to Korea after each court defeat in Japan, we could not tell anyone. But all the neighbors knew we'd been to Japan again."



Kim's case, along with a dozen others representing around 950 plaintiffs, is finally being scheduled for court hearings again, after a five-year delay caused by one of the biggest judiciary power abuse scandals in Korea.



Kim continues to be shocked by emerging evidence of how the former Park Geun-hye administration colluded with former Supreme Court Chief Justice Yang Sung-tae to keep the lid on forced labor cases ― in the name of maintaining good ties with Japan.



"I went to Park Geun-hye's office in the National Assembly several times when she was a lawmaker, asking for her support in our case," Kim said, her voice trembling with rage. "How could she, a president of our own country, betray us like that? Park and Yang, they're the ones who made us cry a second time."