GWANGJU, South Korea — Since 2000, Tsukasa Yajima has taken stark, poignant portraits of former intercourse slaves for Japan’s World Struggle II military to assist the world study their painful historical past.
Now, the 51-year-old photographer from Japan finds himself on the heart of a present scandal concerning the therapy of the ladies, greater than three-quarters of a century after the top of the struggle, throughout which they have been compelled to have intercourse with Japanese troopers.
Within the years after its founding in 1992, the Home of Sharing, in Gwangju, South Korea, assumed the aura of a sacred place, the place politicians and college students got here to satisfy dozens of former intercourse slaves, identified euphemistically as “consolation girls,” who had discovered shelter there, together with the 4 at present in residence.
However previously two years, Mr. Yajima, who runs its worldwide outreach program, together with six South Korean staff on the shelter have accused managers of housing the ladies, all now of their 90s, in a substandard nursing facility whereas amassing hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in donations to complement South Korea’s largest and strongest Buddhist order, Jogye.
Though the donations have been collected for the ladies’s welfare, little has been used for them, Mr. Yajima and the opposite whistle-blowers mentioned. As a substitute, they mentioned, the managers saved the cash for Jogye to develop the shelter right into a future luxurious nursing residence for many who can afford to pay — as soon as the ladies dwelling there now have all died.
“It’s vital to protect the Home of Sharing as a spot of historic and academic worth, as wartime sexual violence in opposition to girls continues to occur in as we speak’s world, in locations like Ukraine,” Mr. Yajima mentioned. “Their plan to show it into a standard nursing house is a challenge of eradicating historical past.”
The whistle-blowing led to felony indictments. Two former managers are on trial on fraud, embezzlement and different felony expenses. The shelter’s board members, together with one of many nation’s most outstanding Buddhist monks, have been fired for negligence. Offended donors have sued the Home of Sharing, demanding their a reimbursement. Donations plummeted to $35,300 within the first six months of this yr, down from $1.9 million in 2019.
Whereas they’ve received reward for his or her actions, Mr. Yajima and the opposite whistle-blowers have additionally needed to pay a value for what they uncovered.
The shelter’s new and former managers and folks near them have filed dozens of defamation and different lawsuits in opposition to the whistle-blowers, accusing them of spreading false rumors.
As a Japanese nationwide, Mr. Yajima has been a spotlight of a lot of the backlash. The sexual slavery of so-called consolation girls is essentially the most emotional of the various historic disputes which have strained ties between South Korea and Japan, the 2 most vital allies of the US in East Asia.
“Why the hell is a Japanese worker employed on this place for consolation girls?” learn a banner held on the wall of a Home of Sharing constructing the place Mr. Yajima labored. Folks near the managers threw ethnic slurs at him, based on the findings of a human rights heart.
4 of the seven whistle-blowers stop final month, complaining about harassment.
However not Mr. Yajima, who has insisted on staying on.
His marketing campaign has raised vital questions for South Korea, mentioned Lim Mi-ri, a professor at Korea College in Seoul. Ms. Lim mentioned the ladies have been taken to conferences and protest rallies the place they have been handled as an inviolable image of Korea’s struggling below Japanese colonial rule and warriors for historic justice. However few requested how the ladies truly lived behind the scenes.
“Yajima is without doubt one of the uncommon activists I do know who targeted on consolation girls as particular person people whereas the remainder of the marketing campaign tended to objectify them as victims and use them for a political agenda or fund-raising,” Ms. Lim mentioned.
Mr. Yajima mentioned he grew to become considering feminism and Japan’s colonial period when he studied historical past at Waseda College in Tokyo. He started visiting the Home of Sharing in 2000, initially working there as a translator and photographer from 2003 to 2006.
“In my images, I attempt to present the ladies’s collective picture as victims, but in addition the ladies as people with personalities,” Mr. Yajima mentioned. “Should you get to dwell and eat with them as I’ve, growing a grandmdifferent and grandchild-like relationship, you get to see issues that occasional guests can’t. Folks see them as heroic warriors. However when they’re amongst themselves, they’ll additionally argue like kindergartners over issues like who was given yet one more sweet when donated items have been divided.”
In 2006, Mr. Yajima moved to Germany, the place he continued to work for the ladies’s trigger. He helped manage lectures and photograph exhibitions and invited one of many girls to share her story. By the point he returned to the Home of Sharing in 2019, what he noticed deeply troubled him.
When a lady fell from a damaged mattress, the managers refused to take her to the hospital or purchase a brand new mattress, he mentioned. When the girls’s dwelling quarters have been renovated, their belongings have been stacked outdoors, uncovered to a monsoon rain. In a supervisor’s desk drawers, the whistle-blowers discovered money donations from overseas that weren’t correctly registered within the books.
An investigation by a joint panel of presidency officers and civilian consultants confirmed many of the whistle-blowers’ accusations and extra.
In its 366-page report, considered by The New York Occasions, the panel mentioned the Home of Sharing had “mobilized” its consolation girls for fund-raising occasions whereas it denied them private outings. Staffers emotionally abused them, threatening to “abandon them out on the road.” The panel mentioned that the Home of Sharing collected $6.8 million in money donations between 2015 and 2019. But it surely solely used $154,000 for the operation of the dwelling quarters the place the ladies “lived in a below-average nursing residence facility.”
“Accumulating donations with a promise to make use of them for the consolation girls, their welfare and their actions however not utilizing the cash for them is an act of defrauding the folks,” it mentioned.
The Home of Sharing has made “errors” and “violated” the legal guidelines governing donations, mentioned the Venerable Seonghwa, a Buddhist monk Jogye appointed in Might to go its board of administrators.
However Seonghwa mentioned that the ladies have been getting sufficient monetary assist — $2,600 a month, in addition to a $10,810 annual medical stipend — from the federal government. That they had little use for the money donated from residents, he mentioned.
And the plan to remodel the shelter right into a luxurious nursing residence has been mentioned as an choice in a rustic combating a quickly getting old inhabitants. However the plan has by no means been formalized, he mentioned. Seonghwa confused that the way forward for the shelter might be determined by consultations with the federal government.
“We’re correcting issues we now have discovered and dealing exhausting to take the perfect care of the consolation girls till the final of them dies,” he mentioned.
Throughout latest visits, the Home of Sharing’s 3.4-acre compound appeared peaceable. The bronze bust statues of former intercourse slaves greeted guests on the gate. Its museum featured a recreation of a so-called consolation station, a Japanese military-run brothel, the place the ladies have been compelled to have intercourse with dozens of Japanese troopers every single day.
“I’ll always remember the struggle crimes of Japan,” reads the epitaph for Lee Yong-nyo, one of many eight former residents of the power buried in a memorial backyard.
On the heart of the compound was a two-story constructing the place 4 of South Korea’s 11 surviving consolation girls have been spending their closing days. The variety of caregivers has been doubled to 10, permitting for round the clock service for the ladies, aged 92 to 98 — an enchancment applied by the managers within the wake of the whistle-blowing.
However the girls’s capability to demand higher therapy has atrophied, mentioned Heo Jeong-a, a former caregiver who joined Mr. Yajima within the whistle-blowing.
Frail and struggling varied levels of dementia, the girls appeared principally oblivious to the turmoil engulfing their shelter. Throughout a latest go to, a Occasions reporter was allowed into the ladies’s dwelling quarters and talked to a couple girls who appeared extra cognizant than the others.
“I’ve meals, garments and a spot to dwell right here,” said Lee Okay-sun, 95, taken to China to work in army brothels when she was 15 and who lived there till she was provided shelter within the Home of Sharing in 2001. “It retains me heat in winter and funky in summer season.”
Such a solution didn’t shock Mr. Yajima.
“That they had such a tough life in China and elsewhere that they are saying they’re OK with what they get,” he mentioned. “However they deserved the perfect care we might present, and we now have failed.”
Supply: NY Times