Mun Okju

Moon Ok-ju (; 1924 – 26 October 1996) was a South Korean comfort woman during the Japanese occupation of Korea in World War II. Her testimony created controversy about whether she was truly a comfort woman or if she was a prostitute because she received payments for her work. Ultimately, Moon's testimony challenged the idea that she was a prostitute because she gave firsthand accounts of how she was deceived and forced into this work.

To help support her family, she assisted her mother with household chores, worked part-time at a slipper factory, and attended gwon-beon—a private training school for gisaeng, traditional female entertainers who performed and served at social gatherings for men. As a gisaeng, Moon occasionally sang at social gatherings for patrons to earn an income. She retained the pansori lines and lyrics she had informally learned outside of the gwon-beon classroom. Although her older brother, eight years older than her, had strongly opposed her earlier aspiration to become a gisaeng—deeming it inappropriate for a daughter of a yangban family—he later came to rely on her earnings. The owner of the comfort station, also from Daegu, told Moon and the comfort women that he would collect military scrip and later pay them the equivalent amount once they returned to Korea. However, aside from small amount of money given locally for necessities, she never received any payment. To survive in the brothel, Moon tried to gain favorable treatment from soldiers who would offer the comfort women small accommodations if the women provided musical entertainment. Drawing on the strategies she had developed in Manchuria, she attempted to maintain favorable relations with the soldiers to protect herself. She listened calmly to their stories of family and hometown life and sang Japanese songs to lift their mood. These actions functioned both as a method of self-preservation—especially when facing soldiers who viewed Koreans with disdain or who were prone to violence—and as a means of securing small gratuities from officers. She never received the wages the Japanese soldiers had promised. In the spring of 1943, the Japanese military soldiers moved her from Mandalay to Akyab, then to Prome and Yangon, following the general movements of the division while evading air raids and advancing Allied forces. Throughout these retreats, Japanese soldiers continued to demand sexual services. Whenever military headquarters demanded the services, she was required to comply.

She had saved tips through the military field post system but never received the 26,145 yen she had saved, and with the interest accrued after the war, the balance as of 1965—when the Treaty on Basic Relations Between Japan and the Republic of Korea was concluded—the total was 50,108 yen. She died on October 26, 1996, in the early morning at Daegu Dongsan Hospital.

On August 14th,1991, Moon became the second person in South Korea after Kim Hak-sun to come forward publicly about her experience as a survivor of the Japanese sexual slavery system. Hak-sun, who had contacted a women's rights group, gave her testimony at a South Korean public broadcast service. Hak-sun's testimony prompted Moon to speak out as she did in her memoir written by Machiko Marikawa. In spite of testimonies, the Japanese government denied Moon's and the other women's claims that they were coerced into sexual slavery.

After the testimony Moon and Kim’s public testimonies encouraged other victims of Japanese military sexual slavery to share their experiences as comfort women. Reports from survivors increased significantly after the testimonies, and former comfort women provided additional testimonies that contributed to the growing documentation of the comfort women issue.

In March 1992, Moon filed a claim against the Shimonoseki Post Office in Japan to receive payment for the military postal savings of 26,145 yen she stated she had deposited from tips received during her time as a comfort woman. However, Japan claimed that individual rights to claims were extinguished under the 1965 Korea-Japan Claims Agreement, and therefore would not return the military postal savings of Koreans. She never received the financial compensation.

Machiko Morikawa and Moon's collaboration Machiko Morikawa, a Japanese human rights activist and a freelance writer, visited Moon in Daegu on September 1993, asking Moon's permission to write her biography, and Moon consented. Over the following three years, she visited Daegu on eighteen occasions, typically staying for two to four days at a time to record Moon's testimony. Although Moon sometimes insisted she had nothing more to share, she often recalled additional memories just as Morikawa prepared to leave for Fukuoka.

Machiko's project of recording Moon' life alongside historical sources contributed to a broader recognition of the suffering endured by victims who died without leaving testimonies and by those who continue to conceal their experiences, while also preserving the history of women's experiences in Myanmar during the Asia–Pacific War.

Debates over prostitution and sexual slavery While the majority of the comfort women received little to no remuneration, Moon reportedly earned substantial income during her time in the system through tips, though she was not able to access most of these earnings. This controversy has reverberated in global public discourse as well. The documentary Shusenjo: The Main Battleground of the Comfort Women Issue (2024) presents a range of perspectives on the controversy, including interviews with individuals in the United States whose views parallel right-winged Japanese arguments that comfort women should be characterized as prostitutes who received compensation for their work.

Ramseyer's Claims and subsequent scholarly criticism One influential and widely debated intervention in the comfort women controversy came from Harvard Law Professor J. Mark Ramseyer. In the article “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War,” published in the International Review of Law and Economics in December 2021, Ramseyer challenged the notion that Japan comfort women system operated on contractual, rather than coercive, terms. He claimed that women agreed to work in military brothels as prostitutes for fixed periods and cited Moon Ok-ju as an example, pointing to her reported tips which she was said to have saved, as evidence of financial remuneration. Ramseyer further argued that Moon’s ability to leave the brothel and return home indicated that her labor was voluntary rather than forced. His article generated significant controversy because it challenged the prevailing scholarly consensus that the comfort women system involved coercion and state-organized sexual violence.

Other mainstream historians, human rights activists, and feminists have rejected Ramseyer's claim that comfort women voluntarily entered prostitution contracts during the wars . Several historians have identified several methodological problems in Ramseyer's article, noting that he does not provide any actual wartime contracts involving Korean comfort women and instead bases his analysis on prewar Japanese licensed prostitution contracts, which come from a different period and legal context. According to Stanley, Schieder, Ambaras, Shepherd, and Chatani (2021), this creates a misleading comparison because Ramseyer assumes that contractual practices documented in Japan before the war can be used to characterize the experiences of Korean comfort women during World War II, despite the absence of direct evidence . Their review concludes that Ramseyer's interpretation selectively draws from official Japanese discourse and ignores the firsthand accounts of comfort women during the wars .