{"id":58,"date":"2019-02-19T17:19:34","date_gmt":"2019-02-19T16:19:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/trostfrauen.museum\/en\/?page_id=58"},"modified":"2019-02-20T10:56:42","modified_gmt":"2019-02-20T09:56:42","slug":"yi-ok-seon","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/trostfrauen.museum\/en\/face-to-face\/yi-ok-seon\/","title":{"rendered":"Yi Ok-seon"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Yi Ok-seon (1927- )
born in Busan, Gyeongsang-do, South Korea<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"Yi-Ok-seon\"

\u00a9 Tsukasa Yajima

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Yi Okseon was born in Busan in 1927.  She was born to a poor family and although she wanted to study, she was unable to go to school.  In 1940 someone offered her \u201can opportunity to gather money for schooling,\u201d and so she began working in a hotel in Ulsan.  In 1942 a Korean and a Japanese came and forcibly abducted her to Yanji, currently in Jilin Province in Northwest China.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After this she lived as a sexual slave for three years.  As the result of repeated injections of the antisyphilis drug arsphenamine 606 and mercury vapor treatments, she became unable to bear children.  While at a \u201ccomfort station\u201d near East Yanji Airport she fell in love with a Korean forced conscript in the Japanese military. After the end of the war, she drifted on foot seeking him and eventually settled in Badaozhen, also in Jilin Province. They married, but when war broke out in China, he was enlisted in the military and whisked away.  She lived for years as a husbandless newlywed in her in-laws\u2019 home, as was the tradition at the time; but she finally remarried ten years later when he did not return.  Until 2000, when she finally returned to Korea, she lived in Yanji with her husband\u2019s son from a former marriage.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yi Okseon greatly regrets that she couldn\u2019t go to school as a child and so she reads with great ardor anything she can get her hands on\u2014books, letters, fliers, declarations from the weekly Wednesday noontime demonstration in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul; and she has become a fervent and fiery human rights activist.  Her song, \u201cLiving in a Foreign Land,\u201d is one of her showpiece songs that she sings often.  She sang it on a fall day when we were cracking acorns together, the sound of the breaking shells blending with her songbird voice.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tahyang Sali \u2013 Life in a Foreign Land (1934)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Composition: Son Mok-in
Lyrics: Kim Neung-in
Vocal: Go Bok-su<\/p>\n\n\n\n