The testimony they tried to bury—one woman's voice against an empire's silence.
Bae Ponggi, a Korean woman who became a comfort woman for the former Japanese military in 1944, testifies for the first time in Okinawa in 1975, after Okinawa was returned to the mainland. In the "red-tiled house" on Tokashiki Island, Okinawa, which was turned into a comfort station, she talks about her life and relationships, her situation after being left behind on the Korean Peninsula and unable to return to it after the war, and what happened afterwards.
Direction
Yamatani's restraint lets Bae's testimony breathe without exploitation.
Production
Return to actual comfort station—space becomes witness.
Director
Tetsuo Yamatani
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
This preceded the famous Kim Hak-sun 1991 public testimony by 12 years—part of a longer arc of Korean women breaking silence across diaspora.
Okinawa's 1972 reversion to Japan created brief political opening; Yamatani seized it before Japanese nationalist revisionism rehardened.
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