(CNN)Kim
Bok-dong is 89 now, and is going blind and deaf. She knows her health
is fading, and she can no longer walk unassisted. But her eyes burn
bright with a passion borne of redressing her suffering of a lifetime
ago.
She enters a meeting of
Tokyo foreign correspondents in a wheelchair, visibly exhausted after a
flight from Seoul and days of interviews and meetings.
The
nightmares from five years as a sex slave of the Japanese army, from
1940 onwards, are still crystal clear. Kim is determined to share her
story with anyone who will listen, until she's no longer physically
able.
"My only wish is to set the record straight about the past. Before I die," Kim says.
Nightmare begins
Kim
was a 14-year-old girl when the Japanese came to her village in Korea.
She says they told her she had no choice but to leave her home and
family to support the war effort by working at a sewing factory.
"There was no option not to go," she recalls. "If we didn't go, we'd be considered traitors,"
Korean 'comfort women' meet with Pope 02:07
Instead
of going to a sewing factory, Kim says she ended up in Japanese
military brothels in half a dozen countries. Along with about 30 other
women, she says she was locked in a room and forced to do things no
teenage girl -- no woman -- should ever have to do.
Kim describes seemingly endless days of soldiers lined up outside the brothel, called a "comfort station."
Often they were so close to the front lines, they could hear the battles of World War Two happening all around them.
