An 83-year-old woman lifted her shirtsleeve to reveal a bright red reminder of the day a Japanese soldier stabbed her and twisted the knife.
"I was fiery and spoke up sometimes," Yi Ok-seon explained through a translator. "They didn't like that."
"They" were her abductors, Japanese military men who kidnapped her and forced her into sexual slavery when she was 14.
This halmoni (Korean for grandmother) was one of an estimated 50,000 to 200,000 women, mostly from Asia, who were brutally raped, tortured and often murdered by Japanese servicemen in the 1930s and '40s.
When finally freed from her so-called "comfort station" after three years, Ok-seon halmoni remained in China for 58 years, unable to return to her native Korea. She built a life in China, but told us she was always haunted by the traumas she endured.
Ok-seon halmoni eventually moved to The Sharing House outside of Seoul, where nine survivors of sexual slavery by the Japanese military reside. The women, all in their 80s and 90s, campaign for the Japanese government's acknowledgment of and apology for rape crimes. Each Wednesday at lunchtime, at least one halmoni pickets outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul.
They also work to raise awareness of the tragedy among fellow Koreans. One young Seoul native visiting for the first time said he was ashamed that he'd never heard these women's stories before today. This painful history has been buried, omitted from textbooks.
To keep memories alive after they're gone, the women share their experiences through verbal testimony and visual artworks. The late Duk-Kyung Kang, the first Korean survivor to go public with her story, painted the above work, "Innocence Stolen," in 1995.
A group of impassioned volunteers leads regular Sunday visits to the House of Sharing in English. More information is online at www.houseofsharing.org.
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