The First Encounter with Halmoni

I remember vividly the moment I met a halmoni when I visited the Museum of Sexual Slavery by Japanese Military in Gyeonggi-do in 2005. It was my first time hearing a firsthand testimony of systematic sexual violence, even though I had learned about mass rapes in armed conflicts. Looking back, the moment was a turning point in my life, both personally and in my academic career.

The following week, I attended my first Wednesday Demonstration. There, I could meet more “Comfort Women” calling for justice alongside activists, members of religious organizations, and people who, like me, were approaching this encounter for the first time. I decided to work on the atrocities committed by Japan during the colonization of the peninsula. I knew I had many challenges ahead, in my understanding, because the “Comfort Women” issue belonged to a Korea I did not yet fully understand. Most halmonis were born during the colonial period, before 1945, in rural areas; many of them had not been allowed to study and had suffered through hunger and poverty. In a way, they did not fit the stereotype of the developed and thriving Korea that had originally drawn me to Seoul.

During my Master’s studies, I enrolled in every available course on colonialism, the contemporary history of Korea and Japan, and I took Korean language classes. However, in my courses—which were always taught by male professors—the female perspective was notably absent. While colonialism and post-colonialism were central to the academic debates of the time, the issue of sexual slavery was often sidelined, or at times, created tension in the classroom through comments that questioned the meaning of the “Comfort Women” movement.

Feeling neither professionally nor psychologically prepared to work directly with survivors yet, I wrote my Master’s and doctoral theses on historical memory of the colonial era in contemporary Korean cinema. One chapter was dedicated to the “Comfort Women,” specifically to the wonderful, moving, and invaluable documentary series by Byun Young-joo: The Murmuring, Habitual Sadness, and My Own Breathing. I believe that today, her work has become a historical document that anyone interested in this subject should see.

A Latin American Lens on Transnational Solidarity

By 2014, back in Argentina and holding a permanent professorship in subjects specifically related to the history and politics of Korea and East Asia, a new stage began in my research on sexual slavery. While teaching, I noticed a profound interest in the topic. At that time—unlike today—most of my students were unfamiliar with the case of the “Comfort Women.” Once the issue was introduced, classrooms became dynamic spaces for discussing women's human rights, developments in international law, transnational feminism, women’s roles prior to 1945, women's movements in Korea, and the recurring nature of violence against women's bodies in armed conflicts and situations of political repression. Although these issues have been debated in academic literature on “Comfort Women,” the perspective from Latin America was, to a certain extent, different.

As an Argentine, I was struck by the movement’s transnational social advocacy. International news reports published in Spanish consistently mentioned tensions between China, Korea, and Japan—or between China and Taiwan, or between the two Koreas—but they rarely spoke of the solidarity achieved by the “Comfort Women” movement. Yet what I encountered was a massive regional solidarity that transcended geopolitical problems and differences in political regimes. For decades, diverse social actors from the countries affected by this human trafficking network had been working together—not only to defend victims and demand justice, but also to investigate what had occurred, uncover sources, compile testimonies from victims, repentant perpetrators, and witnesses, promote documentaries, organize conferences, erect monuments, and curate exhibitions, among many other collective actions that ultimately gave the issue broad visibility. Without their work, the world would not know that the Imperial Army’s system of sexual enslavement was the most organized, managed, and well-funded networks of military-run trafficking of women in twentieth-century history.

Another aspect that sparked my intellectual curiosity was how victims from different countries had achieved such an admirable sense of sisterhood. In documentaries, photographs, and archival footage, they can be seen weeping together, embracing, and also laughing and celebrating their struggle. The fact that “Comfort Women” from different linguistic, cultural, social, and religious backgrounds could unite so strongly left a deep impression—especially coming from Hispanic America, where a shared identity often rests on common language and certain cultural and religious traditions. Over the years, it became clear that the shared past they had endured, and the political struggle have waged, forged a form of universal feminist emancipation with its own language: solidarity and a sense of humanity.

Regrettably, living and working so far away made it impossible to conduct fieldwork in all of the countries involved. With support from fellowships and grants, research on cases in South Korea, Japan, mainland China, and Taiwan became possible. By then, I was much better prepared to interview survivors. Extensive reading on the history of colonialism and women in Korea, the war, and the classic texts related to “Comfort Women” had provided the necessary grounding. Interestingly, in English, many of the best-known books were written by Japanese and Korean scholars, or by Korean descendants in the United States. While these were invaluable for approaching the topic, the challenge remained: to rethink the subject from my own perspective—as an Argentine woman academic with no family ties to any of the countries affected by the system of sexual enslavement.

An Embrace Worth More Than a Thousand Words

I conducted several interviews and participated in various activities alongside the Korean grandmothers at the House of Sharing. The most inspiring encounter for me was meeting the survivor Kim Bok-dong in 2016. In a small notebook that I still keep today, I wrote down my reflections on her story in that very moment:

“Everything took place in the darkness of total confinement. It was there that she lost her very existence. She did not know where she was, nor did her family; no one could plead for her. The war happened only within her body. There was no outside world. Whether Japan continued to advance, whether it was being overthrown, or whether the conflict would last a long or short time—these were facts unknown to her. Even amid the horrific violence repeated day after day, she feared neither death, nor bombings, nor the battlefields. Her memories do not resemble the war I studied. There are no wounded, no maimed, and no massacres.”

Until that moment, the magnitude of living through such daily horror—sexual violence, beatings, torture, hunger, forced pregnancies, forced abortions, insults, and mutilations—in a state of total deprivation of liberty had not fully registered. In the case of the Korean victims, unlike the interviews I conducted in Hunan (People's Republic of China), they had been taken very far from their hometowns: some to China, others to Southeast Asia, or to various sites occupied by Japan during the war. The distance meant that their families and acquaintances often did not know what had happened to them or where they were. In China, abductions were harder to conceal because they frequently occurred in plain sight of their neighbors. For those who managed to return to the Korean Peninsula, geographical distance was used to hide the horror they had endured—different in form, but no less torturous.

The conquest of the bodies of the Imperial Army’s sexual slaves left irreversible physical and psychological scars. It destroyed the social and familial fabric, shattered emotional bonds, and left behind a sentiment of ‘humiliated nations.’ When the war ended, few wanted to listen to, understand, or help the “Comfort Women.” Survivors often felt guilty for their fate as slaves, and their societies reinforced this guilt by holding them responsible for the loss of their “honor.” Some were even suspected of having collaborated with the enemy by “giving themselves” to soldiers. Social pressure rooted in patriarchal expectations that women remain chaste until marriage, perform domestic labor, and care for husbands, children, and in-laws led many to see themselves as “unfit” for society. Survivors felt alone, stripped of everything, stigmatized, and suffered from trauma. Seeking refuge in silence, a new war began for all of them—regardless of nationality or where they lived—a war without bombs, tanks, or soldiers. An intimate, decades-long struggle to understand what to live for, and why.

The revictimization lasted officially for 46 years, if Kim Hak-sun’s testimony in 1991 is taken as the breaking point for the issue's visibility. Yet it remained in practice for several years longer. In the beginning, each time a “Comfort Woman” shared her story, she did so while trying to prove her blamelessness. The fear of social mistreatment was not imagined; it grew out of the grievances they had endured—and continued to face—from conservative sectors that denied or doubted the credibility of their testimonies. The denigrating situations imposed on them during and after the war often made survivors feel suspect, guilty, ashamed, and humiliated for not having been able to resist the inevitable. This is why encounters among victims mattered so deeply. In those meetings, they empowered one another, giving each other strength and courage to continue fighting together. An embrace was worth more than a thousand words.

Movement Beyond National Borders

Another key aspect of my research was the social advocacy movement. It became clear that the participants came from very different personal and professional backgrounds, yet were strongly united in the pursuit of truth, memory, and justice. This was, in many ways, a movement that emerged from the top down: social actors “found” victims, supported them, and created spaces in which they could exercise their rights. For example, many of the members and directors encountered at the Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation (TWRF) were university professors and feminists, while in Shanghai, the Research Center for Chinese Comfort Women (RCCW) is comprised of history professors, including its director, the renowned Su Zhiliang. In Korea, the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (Korean Council) and the House of Sharing collaborated with committed activists and diverse support groups, including various religious organizations—a coalition that would be unthinkable in the case of China. In Japan, despite limited resources, the women at the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM) conduct remarkable outreach work, emphasizing the problem of denialism within their country.

The diversity of actions at the national level, and the different stances on memory politics and public outreach, have only enriched the movement, creating strong bonds and shared agendas—such as the ongoing effort to include the “Comfort Women” case in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. Meeting activists, professors, researchers, lawyers, and volunteers involved in this transnational network clarified the scale of regional solidarity and the importance of approaching the “Comfort Women” issue through a gender perspective that can transcend local and international political tensions. Violence against women is never justified, minimized, or hidden; it must always be condemned.

Writing Halmoni for Spanish Readers Amid Rising Historical Denialism

After years of fieldwork—and after publishing several academic articles and speaking in the media to share about the “Comfort Women” issue—conceiving a book for a Spanish-speaking audience posed new challenges. I did not want a book intended solely for academics. I wanted a book that could be read by anyone interested in sexual violence, in Korea, or by those who already knew about the “Comfort Women” and wished to delve deeper. Taking into account that a Eurocentric education still prevails—one in which the war in Asia and the colonization of Korea are hardly studied, in which many Latin Americans confuse Korean culture with stereotypes drawn from K-dramas, and in which few understand the reality and complexity of the peninsula throughout the twentieth century—I wrote Halmoni: The Revolution of Korean Grandmothers.

The book was published in November 2025 by Debate (Penguin Random House), and it is the first Spanish-language work to document the history of Korea’s “Comfort Women.” It synthesizes twenty years of research, covering not only the women sexually enslaved by the Imperial Japanese Army but also the broader history of Korean women, postcolonialism, and the transnational advocacy movement. The book also reflects six years as a student in Seoul, alongside subsequent research stays and visits to the country. Across seven chapters, it traces a unique journey through Korean history—from the colonial era to the present day—interweaving the testimonies of “Comfort Women” with personal and professional experiences in South Korea, mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan.

While writing the final chapters in October and November 2024, the fact that the Statue of Peace in front of the Japanese Embassy was—and still is—fenced off to prevent vandalism remained troubling. The emergence of “counter-protests” during the Wednesday Demonstrations was equally unsettling. On the same day and at the same time, conservative groups now gather to deny what happened, to minimize the struggle, and to demand a final closure to the issue. They seek to erase memory. Victims are hardly seen at the demonstrations anymore, because there are almost no halmoni left alive, or in a condition to protest in the streets. Nor are the large crowds of young people and groups that used to gather every Wednesday before the pandemic as visible as they once were.

Nevertheless, in the years since my first encounter with the issue in 2005, many positive changes have taken place. Today, museums in Seoul, Tokyo, Taipei, Shanghai, Nanjing, and Berlin, as well as temporary and permanent exhibitions at memorial sites around the world, address the “Comfort Women” issue. Commemorative statues stand across South Korea, in mainland China and Taiwan, in countries such as Germany, and the United States. My students now recognize the case not only through the classroom, but also through social media posts and books, including the Spanish translation of Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s graphic novel Grass.

Fears about the current rise of denialism do not overshadow a broader truth: even as some groups attempt to delegitimize the past, the testimonies of the “Comfort Women” have already traveled far beyond the Korean Peninsula. With or without halmoni, the revolution of the grandmothers is unstoppable. My book stands as part of their legacy—of their teachings and their unwavering struggle for women's human rights.