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GWANGJU, South Korea — Since 2000, Tsukasa Yajima has taken stark, poignant portraits of former intercourse slaves for Japan’s World Warfare II military to assist the world find out about their painful historical past.
Now, the 51-year-old photographer from Japan finds himself on the heart of a present scandal in regards to the therapy of the ladies, greater than three-quarters of a century after the tip of the battle, throughout which they have been pressured 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 fulfill dozens of former intercourse slaves, recognized euphemistically as “consolation girls,” who had discovered shelter there, together with the 4 at present in residence.
However up to now 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 thousands and thousands of {dollars} in donations to counterpoint South Korea’s greatest 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 stated. As a substitute, they stated, the managers saved the cash for Jogye to broaden the shelter right into a future luxurious nursing dwelling for individuals who can afford to pay — as soon as the ladies residing 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 right this moment’s world, in locations like Ukraine,” Mr. Yajima stated. “Their plan to show it into a typical nursing house is a venture 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 distinguished 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 gained reward for his or her actions, Mr. Yajima and the opposite whistle-blowers have additionally needed to pay a worth 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 numerous historic disputes which have strained ties between South Korea and Japan, the 2 most vital allies of the USA 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, in line with the findings of a human rights heart.
4 of the seven whistle-blowers give up 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, stated Lim Mi-ri, a professor at Korea College in Seoul. Ms. Lim stated the ladies have been taken to conferences and protest rallies the place they have been handled as an inviolable image of Korea’s struggling beneath Japanese colonial rule and warriors for historic justice. However few requested how the ladies truly lived behind the scenes.
“Yajima is likely 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 stated.
Mr. Yajima stated he turned serious about 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 stated. “When you get to dwell and eat with them as I’ve, creating 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 will additionally argue like kindergartners over issues like who was given yet another 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 set up lectures and picture 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 stated. When the girls’s residing quarters have been renovated, their belongings have been stacked exterior, 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 specialists confirmed many of the whistle-blowers’ accusations and extra.
In its 366-page report, seen by The New York Instances, the panel stated 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 stated that the Home of Sharing collected $6.8 million in money donations between 2015 and 2019. However it solely used $154,000 for the operation of the residing quarters the place the ladies “lived in a below-average nursing dwelling facility.”
“Amassing 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 stated.
The Home of Sharing has made “errors” and “violated” the legal guidelines governing donations, stated the Venerable Seonghwa, a Buddhist monk Jogye appointed in Might to go its board of administrators.
However Seonghwa stated 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 stated.
And the plan to remodel the shelter right into a luxurious nursing dwelling has been mentioned as an possibility in a rustic scuffling with a quickly growing older inhabitants. However the plan has by no means been formalized, he stated. Seonghwa burdened that the way forward for the shelter might be determined by way of consultations with the federal government.
“We’re correcting issues we now have discovered and dealing laborious to take the very best care of the consolation girls till the final of them dies,” he stated.
Throughout latest visits, the Home of Sharing’s 3.4-acre compound seemed 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 pressured to have intercourse with dozens of Japanese troopers each day.
“I’ll always remember the battle crimes of Japan,” reads the epitaph for Lee Yong-nyo, one of many eight former residents of the ability 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 remaining 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 capacity to demand higher therapy has atrophied, stated 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 Instances reporter was allowed into the ladies’s residing 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 supplied 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 stated. “However they deserved the very best care we might present, and we now have failed.”
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