In my last post about Liberation Day, I touched briefly on stories that are disappearing.
The point was this: once no one who lived through something is left, memory turns into mere information.
Today I want to look more closely at one of those stories: the story of the surviving comfort women.
Of the 240 government-registered comfort women survivors, five are still alive. Their average age is ninety-six.
Since the late Kim Hak-sun's first public testimony in 1991, roughly 230 survivors have passed away.
And through all that time, the Japanese government has never once formally acknowledged state-level legal responsibility.
But there's something heavier than the absence of an apology: only five people remain who can even demand one.
Even Documentation Stalls for Lack of Staff and Funding
This past May, the Kyunghyang Shinmun interviewed Han Kyung-hee, the newly appointed chair of the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance.
As an organization that has led this movement for over 35 years now moves from an "era of testimony" to an "era of archiving," Chair Han said in the interview that they currently lack both the space and the staff to properly preserve these records.
What she emphasized boils down to one sentence: sustainable, public-level infrastructure needs to be built.
In the same interview, she said the strongest way to counter voices that deny this history is to keep building and sharing the record.
And yet the reality right now is that there isn't enough space to hold that record, or enough people to do the work.
The full text of survivor Lee Yong-soo's 1993 testimony was once archived on the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family's e-History Museum for comfort women victims. For reasons that remain unclear, it's no longer there.
Even after more than 30 years of testimony work, the record itself is still leaking away.
Testimony Is Not Just Data
When we talk about the comfort women issue, we tend to reach for words like "data," "records," "historical fact."
But what the survivors actually left behind wasn't a document. It was a voice.
The moment speech catches and stops becomes, in transcription, just a period.
And the time left to hear that voice directly is now genuinely running out.
A Dilemma We Can Neither Rush Nor Delay
Most of the surviving women are in their mid-to-late nineties, which means a long interview is often physically difficult for them to sit through.
Their memories of that time are bound up with severe trauma, so repeatedly asking the same questions to collect testimony can itself become a fresh source of pain.
Add the lack of space and staff mentioned earlier, and this becomes work that a handful of government agencies and a small number of researchers and organizations simply cannot carry alone.
So we now find ourselves facing a strange dilemma: there's no time left, and yet we can't rush either.
What It Means That Only a Few Are Left
Reduced to a number, it's just "5."
But once these five women are gone, we will no longer have a history we can hear directly, in someone's own voice.
After that, this issue will exist only through the records, footage, and sentences left behind.
Honestly, I don't know how much of that record exists right now, or how much more we can still preserve.
But this question stays. What are we doing, before this voice disappears?
I'd Love to Hear What You Think
Have you ever heard or read a survivor's testimony firsthand? Tell me which part stayed with you and I'll go find it.
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