House of Sharing: A Comfort Women Memorial Near Seoul

Last Updated on April 28, 2026

If you come to Korea and have the opportunity to learn about the comfort women, don’t pass it up. The House of Sharing was established in 1992, funded privately by Korean citizens and a Buddhist organization, as a home for the surviving halmoni, a respectful Korean term meaning grandmother, who had been subjected to wartime sexual slavery during World War II.

The day I visited was filled with testimony, tears, and stories of resilience through an ordeal that would leave anyone searching for words. I have not stopped thinking about it.

Today, the House of Sharing operates primarily as the Museum of Sexual Slavery by Japanese Military, a permanent memorial and exhibition space where the testimonies, belongings, and artwork of the halmoni are preserved. A commemoration park holds the graves and bronze busts of the women who lived in the house. Almost all of them have now passed away without receiving the formal government apology they spent their lives asking for.

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The History You Need To Know

From 1932 onward, the Japanese military forcibly abducted and deceived an estimated 200,000 women and girls from across Asia, with 80 to 90 percent coming from Korea, into a system of wartime sexual slavery. The women ranged in age from approximately 12 to 30. Some were girls who had not yet reached puberty.

These women are often referred to in historical accounts as “comfort women,” a euphemism that the survivors themselves rejected. They said there was nothing comfortable about what was done to them. They preferred to be called halmoni, grandmother, the respectful Korean term.

Korea was a territory of Japan at the time. While forcing women into sexual slavery was illegal under Japanese law, those laws made no mention of Japan’s territories. Using this gap, the military recruited women with false promises, jobs in factories, money for their families, opportunities abroad, and then transported them to “service stations” across Asia: China, Taiwan, Cambodia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Manchuria, Burma, and elsewhere.

At these stations, women were raped, abused, starved, and tortured. Many were killed. Estimates suggest only 25 percent of the women survived. At the war’s end, those who remained were either killed to conceal the system or abandoned in countries where they did not speak the language and had no way home.

Women who managed to return to Korea often could not tell their families what had happened, for fear of being labeled. Some were officially declared dead during their absence and spent years trying to be legally recognized as alive again.

Women could be subjected to 20 to 40 men a day. The Japanese military, concerned about sexually transmitted disease, forced women to take doses of mercury, believed at the time to cleanse the body. It did not. It chemically altered them in ways that left many unable to have children after the war.

In South Korea, 220 former survivors came forward to give testimony. That figure represents only those who were able to come forward.

War and Women's Human Rights Museum, Seongsan-dong, Mapo-gu, Seoul, Korea

The Stories I Heard

We heard testimonies that the women have made over time of different atrocities they themselves witnessed. One story tells of a woman who tried to escape and was subsequently caught. To make an example of her the officers rolled her on a bed of nails until her skin was falling off and there was blood everywhere. To teach the women a lesson he said, they were to cook the skin of the woman and the others were to eat it.

Another tells of a woman who was caught trying to commit suicide, she was stopped and tortured with a sword so that the other women could see it would never be their choice to leave. At the end her head was chopped off.

Trying to commit suicide, becoming pregnant, or trying to escape were all reasons to be brutally killed as a comfort woman. The Japanese not wanting to spread sexually transmitted diseases also made the women take doses of mercury, thought at the time to clean out the system, as we know now it did none of that except chemically alter these women so that after the war many of them could no longer have the ability to have children.

In South Korea, 220 former ‘comfort women’ came forward and that isn’t the total number, that is just the woman that could come forward. Many women were abandoned to start new lives in countries in distant lands. Many women came back to Korea and couldn’t tell their families what had happened for fear of being labeled a whore.

What’s In the Museum

The House of Sharing now operates as the Museum of Sexual Slavery by Japanese Military. The site includes six distinct spaces:

Exhibition Hall 1: The history of the comfort women system, the reality of what happened and the documented evidence of how it operated.

Exhibition Hall 2: A reconstructed model of a “comfort station” based on the testimonies of survivors, so that visitors can understand, as directly as possible, what the physical reality of these places was.

Special Exhibition Hall: Documents the decades of activism by the halmoni and the ongoing efforts to achieve formal recognition and resolution.

Exhibition Hall of Relics: Personal belongings of the halmoni who lived at the House of Sharing, the objects that made up their individual lives after everything they endured.

Art Exhibition Hall: Paintings by the halmoni themselves. The artwork originated in an art therapy program begun at the House of Sharing in 1993. The paintings are vivid. They are among the most direct ways the women found to communicate what words sometimes could not.

Memorial Hall: A space dedicated to remembering the halmoni from Korea and around the world who passed away before receiving an apology from the Japanese government. The commemoration park outside holds their graves and bronze busts.

The Halmoni of the House of Sharing

The women who lived at the House of Sharing are now almost all gone. The profiles below honor six of the halmoni who were living there in 2019. Their stories are preserved in the museum, in their artwork, and in the testimonies they gave over decades.

Il Chul Kang: Born in Sangju, Gyeongsangbuk-do in 1928, she was just sixteen when she was abducted by a police officer. She was taken to Manchuria and forced to serve as a sexual slave. When the war ended, she had severe typhoid fever so the military officers shipped her off with the corpses to be cremated alive.

Ok Sun Park: Born in Milyang Gyeongsangnam-do in 1924, she was lied to by a broker who told her she could earn money in the factories when she was eighteen. She was forced to work as a sexual slave for four years. Her station was bombed and she was left wandering in the mountains and was finally returned to Korea in 2001.

Bok Soo Jeong: Born in 1916 in Imsil, Jeollabuk-do. She was taken to the South Sea Islands in 1943 to be a sexual slave for Japanese soldiers.

Ok Sun Lee: Born in 1927 in Busan, she was offered an opportunity to gather money for schooling in 1940 and began working at a hotel in Ulsan. In 1942, a Korean local and Japanese man forcibly abducted her to Yanji, currently Jilin Province of Northwest China. She was forced to be a sexual slave for three years.

Ok Seon Lee: Born in 1930 in Daegu, she was taken to a comfort station in 1942 when she was just twelve years old. She was forced to be a sexual slave for Japanese soldiers in Haicheong, Manchuria, China.

Soo Im Ha: Born in Hapcheonm, Gyeongsangnam-do in 1930, she was taken to Nagoya, Japan in 1944. She was a sexual slave for two years before being returned to Korea.

What’s Happening Today

Up until the 90’s the Japanese government officially stated that they had no involvement in these brothels and that they were run by private contractors. However, in 1991 Yoshiaki Yoshimi discovered documents in the archives of the Japanese Defense Ministry that incriminated the Japanese government and indicated their direct involvement in running these brothels.

In 1993 the Japanese government made a statement that admitted an unspecified role in the brothels and rejected any legal responsibility for that role. They have also stated that the brothels were not a part of a ‘system’ and was therefore not a war crime or crime against humanity. This statement did little to ease the tensions these grandmothers have been feeling almost their entire lives.

Japanese leaders have apologized but it has not been officially recorded in their history books and that is one big thing these women are fighting for. They want children to learn of this now so that in the future similar things don’t happen again. This is something the Japanese government is very unwilling to do.

Though these women have gotten some compensation, it wasn’t the money they were after, and this money didn’t come from the Japanese government it came by private donations from Japanese people. Again, this is not what the women want. They want it from the government so that it has to be officially recorded in their books.

With only a small number of these women still alive to tell their story it’s clearly a race against time for them, and the governments are just waiting until the last one is gone. Every Wednesday these women, weather rain, cold, or shine, from 12 to 1 hold a demonstration outside of the Japanese embassy. And every Wednesday from 12 to 1 all of the windows in the embassy are shut and have the shutters drawn to keep the women out. This is the only protest that has been grandfathered in and is accepted every week without question by the Korean government.

Where Else To Learn

The War and Women’s Human Rights Museum in Mapo-gu, Seoul provides additional documentation and context. Comfort women statues have been placed around the world, in Korean cities, in California, and elsewhere, as permanent reminders.

The documentary The House of Sharing: Conversations with Korean Comfort Women (2017, directed by Hein S. Seok, 80 minutes, Korean with English subtitles) is worth seeking out. It visits with several of the halmoni at the House of Sharing, capturing their daily lives, their stories, their paintings, and their songs.

These women were not asking for much. They asked to be remembered, to have what happened to them acknowledged in the formal record, and to contribute to a world where it does not happen again. Wartime sexual slavery is not only history. It continues in various forms today.

Visiting the House of Sharing, now a museum that preserves the testimony and art and belongings of the halmoni, is one of the things anyone visiting Korea can do to honor that request.

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