{UAH} What is a historical fact that would sadden most people if they found out?

What is a historical fact that would sadden most people if they found out?

[Warning: This answer discusses sensitive topics including trauma and sexual assault. Discretion is advised.]

In June 1932, a 12 year old girl name Ok-sun Jung was preparing lunch for her family. Both of her parents were out working on a farm. Ok-sun Jung at the time lived in Korea, which was under occupation by Imperial Japan.

On a day whose date she can no longer remember, Ok-sun Jung was abducted by a Japanese soldier. She never saw her parents again.

She was taken to a nearby police station where she was repeatedly raped by several Japanese Military officers. When she attempted to fight back, an officer punched her so hard that she went permanently blind in her left eye.

Several days later she was transferred to a facility where she and several hundred other women were enslaved and to be used as sex slaves for several THOUSAND Japanese soldiers. They were told that their bodies now belonged to the Emperor of Japan.

The women in the camp were expected to service at least a dozen soldiers every night. Some nights they could expect to be raped by as many as 40 soldiers.

One day in the camp, Ok-sun Jung remembers all of the girls being rounded up and asked a question to test their commitment.

"Who among you can take 100 soldiers?"

All but 15 of the women answered yes. The 15 who said no were stripped naked, rolled upon a bed of hundreds of nails until they died of blood loss.

Ok-sun Jung remembers she and many other girls staring at this in horror. A Japanese officer, amused by this, cut off the head of one of the dead women and tossed it in a cauldron of hot water to create a broth. He then proceeded to force the women to drink the "soup".

Ok-sun Jung recalls many other practices she witnessed at the camps.

• Women who became infected with STDs and unknowingly passed them along to their captors were brutally executed. One woman had a red hot poker shoved inside of her and due to already being weakened by disease, died from shock.
• After a failed escape attempt, the camp overseers tortured various women to find out who planned the escape attempt. Their preferred method to extract information was forcefully carving tattoos onto the flesh of women until they talked.
• Those who became pregnant by Japanese soldiers had their uterus surgically removed, essentially sterilizing them. Ok-sun Jung was one such victim.

After a few years of this hell, Ok-sun Jung and about 40 other girls were one day collected and transported out of the camp. They were brought to a giant pit, tossed into said pit before the Japanese soldiers buried all of them alive. A Chinese man stumbled upon the massacre and waited for the soldiers to leave. From the pit he rescued two, barely alive children covered in scars and tattoos. Ok-sun Jung was one of them. Though she survived long after that, she was never able to find her family.

This woman, Ok-sun Jung is unfortunately, not unique. Her story is the same story as hundreds of thousands of women who were enslaved and used as "Comfort women" by Imperial Japan between the years 1932 and 1945. All these people stolen from their lives, branded, scarred and abused. Years later they somehow survived and endured shame and trauma unimaginable, haunted forever by what had been done to them. Now it's decades later and a frightening number of people don't know about any of this. So many people remember the Holocaust or the Holodomor or the Atlantic Slave Trade, but not this.

It's understandable why some people don't want to talk about this. It's a story full of pain and sadness and shame. But it's a story that needs to be remembered. It's a cautionary tale worth being told, to remind all of us what humans are capable of. So I'm asking you dear reader to please not forget what you have learned here today. If we forget something like this can happen, it will happen again,

Ok-sun Jung, still bearing the scars of torture and her forced abortion that left her sterile.

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Gwokto La'Kitgum

Find Me on LinkedIn

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"Unless the penis dies young it shall surely eat bearded meat" Chinua Achebe in: Arrow Of God

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