Gil Won-ok, one of the last survivors of sexual slavery for Japan’s World War II troops, who campaigned to bring international attention to the suffering of thousands of women like her, died on Sunday at her home in Incheon, South Korea, west of Seoul. She was 96.
Her death was confirmed by the South Korean government. Officials said that in her last years she had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
To her final days, Ms. Gil had fiercely criticized Japan, accusing its government of refusing to take legal responsibility for sexual slavery and offer compensation to the victims, euphemistically known as “comfort women,” who were raped repeatedly in military brothels.
She died with her demand unmet, but she had said that the campaign for justice would continue after her death.
“They are wrong if they think it will be over when the last of us die,” Ms. Gil said in 2013. “There will be our descendants continuing to campaign as long as it takes to get the apology we deserve. It will not be over with our death.”
Despite the stigma, about 240 South Korean women came forward to report their painful past as comfort women after the government began accepting registration in the early 1990s. Today, only seven of them, with an average age of 95, survive.
In South Korea, the women forced into sexual slavery have been widely accepted as a deeply emotional symbol of Korea’s suffering under colonial rule by Japan from 1910 to 1945, and of a need for historical justice. A host of politicians and senior government officials attended the funeral service for Ms. Gil on Tuesday or sent wreaths and issued statements in her honor.
“Through her life, we have seen what human dignity is,” Woo Won-shik, the speaker of the National Assembly, said in a social media post after visiting a mourning station on Monday.
Gil Won-ok was born in 1928 in Hoichon, in what is now the northwest of North Korea. At the time, Japan ruled Korea as a colony, and Korea had not yet been divided into North and South.
She was barely 13 and living in poverty in Pyongyang when she was recruited for Japanese soldiers in northeast China. After one year, she was sent home with sexually transmitted diseases. After returning to China in 1942 to find work to support her family, she was again forced to work in a military brothel for Japanese troops.
After the war ended with Japan’s defeat, Ms. Gil returned to Korea.
Like many former comfort women, she never married and kept her past a secret for many years. She later adopted a son and made a living as a street-food vendor.
In 1991, as South Korea was emerging from military rule, some of the women who were enslaved by Japan during the war broke decades of silence to talk about what they had gone through. Historians estimate that up to 200,000 women, mostly from Korea, were compelled to work in the front line brothels, where they were raped by several Japanese soldiers every day.
Ms. Gil decided to come forward after watching a television broadcast of former comfort women protesting in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul in 1998. Since then, she had attended weekly protest rallies there and traveled around the world, testifying at international conferences and collecting signatures supporting the women’s demand that Japan atone and apologize for its colonial past.
The controversy surrounding the comfort women remains the most emotionally charged historical dispute that divides South Korea and Japan, the United States’ two most important allies in East Asia.
Tokyo insists that it has apologized enough and that all claims arising from its colonial rule were settled under a treaty re-establishing diplomatic ties between the two nations in 1965. But the women say that their grievances were not properly addressed in the treaty.
Until South Korea rallied behind the women in the 1990s, female victims of sexual violence were left to live in shame and silence rather than seek redress. When reporters asked her about her past, Ms. Gil often called her experience “the worst humiliation a woman could possibly suffer.”
She said her love of singing helped sustain her.
“When I was lonely and felt empty at heart, I always sang songs to myself,” Ms. Gil said in 2017, when she released an album.
The Rev. Jeong Seok-won, who led Ms. Gil’s funeral service, said her life in South Korea had been akin to that of a rape victim who had to constantly move to different places to avoid being shamed.
“But she decided to expose her own pain so that it will not be repeated,” he said, according to the national news agency Yonhap. “She overcame her painful past to lead a great life.”
