|
SEOUL, Aug. 14-- A South Korean granny wept, and sometimes wailed, when she recalled her unforgettable, awful memory when she was a teenager in the 1940s. The memory was full of terror, hunger and anxiety that turned currently into irresistible fury over the Japanese government. Kim Jeong-ju shared her memory at a press conference with foreign correspondents in Seoul Wednesday, a day before the 74th anniversary of the Liberation Day to mark the liberation of the Korean Peninsula from the 1910-1945 Japanese colonization. The 88-year-old was forced into hard labor by Imperial Japan when she was a primary school student. She was told by a Japanese school teacher that if she went to Japan, she could meet her elder sister and attend secondary school with the sister. It did not take long before realizing that she was duped by the teacher. As soon as she arrived at a munition factory of Nachi-Fujikoshi Corp., Kim received a military uniform and slept the first night at a dormitory fenced with barbed wires. Kim woke up 5:00 a.m. every morning, and went to the factory singing a military song after having a meager breakfast. A slice of bread was given for lunch. She had to stand on two columns of apple boxes to work as she was too short to reach out to machinery. With extreme hunger, she had to pluck up grass to eat. Suffering from heavy labor and chronic starvation, she saw her hair fall off. The teenager never slept taking off shoes for fear of air strike until she came back to her hometown about three months after the peninsula's liberation. | 
