Terrible news. Lee Ok-seon Halmeoni, one of the South Korean survivors of Japanese military sexual slavery who used to live at the House of Sharing, died last Sunday. She was 97, and she must have been in poor health for some time.
I had the good fortune to meet Lee Ok-seon Halmeoni in group settings at the House of Sharing in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2019. Usually the guides who facilitated communication tried to keep the conversation light and avoid difficult topics, but in 2019 Lee Ok-seon Halmeoni delivered an important message.
She urged us to learn about the history of Japanese military sexual slavery in East Asia and spread it throughout the world. She didn’t hate the Japanese people, she said, but the Japanese government was denying everything she went through during the war and accusing her and the other survivors of lying. She urged us to educate ourselves to stop more wars from happening, in this country and in every country.
I worried that our visits might be retraumatizing for her, but I found out later just how important it was to her to speak out at every opportunity. She went abroad many times to talk about her experiences, and she attended the weekly Wednesday protests outside the former site of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul as long as she physically could.
In 2021, we spoke again via Zoom with the help of a House of Sharing staff member. Once again, she talked about the importance of remembering history and pushing Japan to acknowledge its wrongdoing. She said the fight would have to go on even after all the victims died. That interview became the subject of a 2021 blog post, but I took it down because it needed a rewrite.
October 2025 update
It’s taken a long time to put together the information I needed to finish this blog post, and I apologize for that.
I’m sure if Lee Ok-seon Halmeoni were here, she’d encourage us all to keep learning and talking about history, so here are a few resources for people who want to learn more.
The graphic novel “Grass” (2017) by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, translated into English by Janet Hong (2019, 2020), chronicles Lee Ok-seon Halmeoni’s life and her decadeslong fight for justice. I went looking for a copy shortly after hearing the news in May, but the bookstore was sold out and couldn’t order it for me. It wasn’t available on Amazon either, at least not for customers in Korea. Fortunately, a bookstore staff member helped me find a copy on Coupang.
Despite how thick it is, “Grass” was a surprisingly fast read. I already knew part of Lee Ok-seon Halmeoni’s story, but the book filled in some gaps — for example, it gave me a clearer picture of how desperate she must have been after the war ended, homeless and begging for food in China. I also wasn’t aware of her first husband’s betrayal.
Other book resources include “Silenced No More: Voices of ‘Comfort Women’” (2015) by Sylvia S.J. Friedman (Sylvia Yu Friedman), also available as an audiobook narrated by “virtual voice”; and “Fifty Years of Silence: The Extraordinary Memoir of a War Rape Survivor” (2011) by Dutch Australian survivor Jan Ruff-O’Herne. When I listened to “Fifty Years of Silence” as an audiobook narrated by Beverley Dunn, I was struck by the optimistic tone the author used when writing about international efforts to promote reconciliation and healing in the 1990s and early 2000s. It’s hard not to feel sad that today, governments around the world don’t seem to be listening.
Kim Jun-ki’s Korean-language picture book “Herstory” centers on Chung Seo-woon Halmeoni, an outspoken survivor-activist who died in 2004. It wasn’t an easy read for me as an intermediate Korean learner, but I managed to get through it with the help of automatic translation services like Papago.
Additional resources
There are many films about the sexual slavery issue. Some, like “63 Years On (Unfinished War),” are available for free on YouTube with English subtitles or narration. For others, there may be access restrictions in different countries or subtitles may not be available.
Museum tours are apparently still going on at the House of Sharing, but visitors won’t see the grandmothers anymore. The last I heard only Kang Il-chul Halmeoni was still alive, having been moved to a convalescent care facility sometime last year.
You can also visit the War and Women’s Human Rights Museum in Seoul’s Hongdae area. As far as I know it doesn’t offer guided tours, but it provides audio devices explaining the exhibits in English and a few other languages.
One exhibit at the Hongdae museum is dedicated to the Vietnamese women raped by South Korean troops during the Vietnam War. Another exhibit links the grandmothers’ suffering with military sexual violence in wars and conflicts throughout the world. For so many of them, their movement for reparations is also a peace movement.
The survivors at the House of Sharing and their supporters will be the focus of one chapter in my upcoming book, which I hope will be ready for publication soon. It can’t and won’t cover all the topics I’ve mentioned here, but Lee Ok-seon Halmeoni is part of the story and I’m grateful for her participation. I’ll always look up to her as someone who changed the world and never gave up.
Photo collage created in Canva. Many thanks to Kim MinHee for taking the picture of me and Lee Ok-seon Halmeoni at the House of Sharing in 2010. The others are mine, taken at the House of Sharing and at a Wednesday demonstration in Seoul.