hankyoreh

staff photographer)

Ha Sang-suk, a former comfort woman for the Imperial Japanese Army, passed away on the morning of Aug. 28. She was 89 years old. Ha died at 9:10 am of septicemia resulting from a chronic medical condition, the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (Jeongdaehyeop) announced on the same day. Ha’s passing brings the number of surviving comfort women down to 36.

Ha was born in Seosan, South Chungcheong Province, in 1928. In 1944, at the age of 16, she was living in Yesan when she fell for a comfort woman recruitment scheme that promised her a factory job where she could make a living. She was taken to a comfort station in Hankou in Wuhan, in China’s Hubei Province, by way of Seoul (then called Gyeongseong), Pyongyang, Sinuiju, Dandong, and Tianjin.

Medical personnel and Korean Air crew prepare to transfer Ha Sang-suk to an ambulance on April 10

After being detained at the comfort station for nearly eight months, Ha was released upon Japan’s surrender the following year. But she married a Chinese man instead of returning to Korea because she was too embarrassed to see the people in her hometown after being violated by the Japanese. Though she couldn’t bear any children, Ha raised her husband’s three children as if they were her own. Following the death of her husband in 1994, she lived with their youngest daughter.

After Korea’s liberation, Ha remained a Korean national, but all Korean nationals in China were reclassified as being North Koreans due to the division of the peninsula. As a result, Ha was unable able to gain South Korean citizenship until 1999, when the South Korean government agreed to accept the restoration of her nationality. In 2003, Ha stepped foot in her homeland of Korea for the first time since going to China nearly six decades before.

Vice Director of the War & Women’s Human Rights Museum at her hospital bed in Seoul on Aug. 9. (Lee Jeong-a

During her lifetime, Ha played an active role in testifying to the suffering of the comfort women, and she stood as a witness in the Women's International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan's Military Sexual Slavery, which was held in Tokyo in Dec. 2000.

“At the age of 17, before I could even get married, I entered [the comfort station]. Japan did such wicked things and then claims that they never happened. Will they get away with their lies? I can’t die until I hear [the Japanese government] say they were wrong,” Ha said through her tears during an international symposium held in Seoul in 2013 to raise awareness about the international comfort women memorial day.

Ha Sang-suk greets Kim Dong-hee

Ha’s health took a turn for the worse last year after she was pushed down a flight of stairs during an argument with her neighbors in China. Because of the serious injuries she suffered during the fall, including broken ribs and a broken hip, she returned to South Korea to be hospitalized.

“We’d been relieved because [Ha] had been getting a lot better recently, but she passed away without receiving an official apology or legal compensation. We hope that she is resting in a better place,” Jeongdaehyeop said.

Ha’s funeral was held at Room No. 12 of the funeral home at Kyung Hee University Hospital at Gangdong.

By Hwang Geum-bi, staff reporter

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