Wartime Sex Slaves Ask Abe to See Scars to Prove Japan Abuse

By Sam Kim Mar 25, 2014 10:14 AM ET

Yi Ok Seon, an 86-year-old survivor of Japan’s wartime use of sex slaves, rolled up her trouser cuff to reveal the scar that she said Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe should come to South Korea to see.

“I still remember vividly what they did to me,” says Yi, describing how military police slashed her right foot after she tried to escape from an Imperial Army brothel.

Yi, one of a handful of former “comfort women” residing at a shelter near Seoul, says she was abducted in 1942 at age 18 in the southeastern city of Ulsan while running an errand. “Beatings would follow if I resisted the rape,” she said. “I was helpless. When I look at my scars now, I am reminded how lucky I am to have survived those years.”

Yi’s trauma, shared by more than 200,000 women around the region according to one United Nations study, is at the center of an impasse that a three-way summit today between Abe, South Korean President Park Geun Hye and U.S. President Barack Obama may help address. Efforts by Korean officials to memorialize the victims have riled Japanese nationalists, while Abe’s plans to re-investigate grounds for a 1993 apology have sown Korean ire.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-24/wartime-sex-slaves-ask-abe-to-see-scars-to-prove-japan-s-abuse.html