A War’s Cold Comfort in China

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Ahn Sehong had to go to China to recover a vanishing â€" and painful â€" part of Korea’s wartime history. Visiting small villages and overcoming barriers of language and distrust, he documented the tales of women â€" some barely teenagers â€" who had been forced into sexual slavery during World War II by the Japanese Army.

Starting in 2001, he began tracking down 13 of these women who had been stranded in China after the war. Now in their 80s and 90s, some were childless, others penniless. Most lived in hovels, often in the same dusty rural towns where they had endured the war. They had been away from their native land so long, some could no longer speak Korean.

Mr. Ahn had no doubts about their identity.

“Each one of these women is history,” he said. “They have suffered the biggest pain created by the war. Everyone forgot about the suffering these women went through. But I want to embrace them. As Koreans, we have to take care of them.”

“Comfort Women” â€" the euphemistic term bestowed on them by their Japanese masters â€" is the name of an exhibition of Mr. Ahn’s black-and-white photographs that opened last week at the Korea Press Center in Palisades Park, N.J. The city, which has a substantial Korean population, has also been a site of controversy in recent years after Japanese officials lobbied local authorities to remove from a public park a plaque commemorating these women.

Japan’s 35-year colonial rule of Korea still provokes anger and controversy despite formal apologies. Mr. Ahn, a native of South Korea who now lives in Japan, had been set to show his work at Nikon galleries in Tokyo and Osaka last year when the company withdrew the offer with little explanation. News reports said Nikon officials thought Mr. Ahn was pursuing a political agenda. The Tokyo show went on after Mr. Ahn pursued the matter in court, although the exhibition was marred by right-wing protesters who rushed into the gallery denouncing the women as prostitutes. Litigation on the Osaka show is pending, Mr. Ahn said.

Nikon did not respond to an e-mail and three phone calls seeking comment since last week.

Mr. Ahn, 42, started working as a magazine photographer in Seoul in 1996 when he learned about the plight of women who had been forced into prostitution in Korea and other countries under Japanese rule. The topic he said, had been taboo for decades, although he was drawn in once he started looking into the women who were still living in China. He worked with researchers who had been tracking down the women.

In 2001, he made the first of seven trips to China, where he found the women reluctant to discuss how they had been forced into prostitution during the war.

“They were very ashamed of the fact they had been comfort women,” Mr. Ahn said. “But in time I gained their friendship.”

Ahn Sehong Park Seo-un was born in 1915 and drafted in 1934. Her comfort station was in Chunhua, China, where she still lives. Because of her ordeal, she was unable to have children.

The women told him they had been lured to China with false job offers or were pressed into “voluntary” service by the Japanese Army. They described how they were raped even before they arrived in China, where they would have relations with as many as 10 men a day. Some weren’t even women yet; Bae Sam-yeop (Slide 6) said she was 13 when she lost her virginity to a high-ranking Japanese officer.

Left behind in rural areas after World War II, the women were further isolated after the Korean War, when China had no diplomatic relations with South Korea. The North Korean government, Mr. Ahn said, provided some assistance and citizenship, but the aid ended in the 1980s and few of the women wanted to relocate to North Korea, where conditions were worse.

Yet life in China was agonizingly difficult.

Ahn Sehong “Each one of these women is history,” Mr. Ahn said. “As Koreans, we have to take care of them.”

“They had no family and no one to support them,” he said. “Because they had been comfort women, it was hard to get a decent husband. Some of them got raped and beaten when they did get married. Most of them were not able to have babies. They lived poor in rural areas. Most of them lived only with the support of their neighbors.”

In New Jeresy, the exhibition has attracted crowds â€" mostly Korean â€" who have begun to explore part of their history. Mac Han, who organized the show, said he did so as an act of free expression, something he prizes as someone who became an American citizen last year.

“I’m an American,” he said. “In a country of justice, where civil rights exist, I wanted to open this up to everyone, to look at this history that no one can deny.”

Mr. Ahn said that of the nine women featured in the show, only three are still alive. He hopes to pursue his project to raise awareness and aid, even though he knows it will also raise hackles. South Korea, once weakened by war and poverty, he said, is now in a better position to help them.

“We couldn’t take care of them after the war,” he said. “But now we have money and power to help them. People forget very easily the memory of the war. Korea has evolved. But since they have evolved very fast, they let go of the past.”

Ahn Sehong Park Dae-im.

“Comfort Women” will be on view at the Korea Press Center, 7 Broad Avenue, Palisades Park, N.J., through April 18.

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