Xinhua
03 May 2021, 11:00 GMT+10
SEOUL, May 3 (Xinhua) -- An elderly South Korean woman, who was forced into sexual slavery for Japanese military brothels during World War II, has died at the age of 92, reducing the number of surviving victims in the country to 14, a civic group said Monday.
The woman, identified only with her surname Yoon, passed away at about 10:00 p.m. local time on Sunday in Seoul, according to the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, a civic group for the former sex slaves who are euphemistically called "the comfort women".
Yoon, born in North Chungcheong province in 1929, was dragged to Japan in 1941 after resisting Japanese soldiers who assaulted her grandfather.
She was forced to work at a textile company in Shimonoseki for about three years, before being taken to Hiroshima where she suffered from sexual slavery.
After the Korean Peninsula's liberation from the 1910-45 Japanese colonization, Yoon returned to South Korea's port city of Busan and lived for the rest of her life here with both her body and mind scarred badly, the advocacy group said.
She registered with the South Korean government as one of the wartime sex enslavement victims in 1993, and had since devoted herself to the cause of speaking for comfort women victims.
With her death, the number of surviving victims in South Korea dipped to 14 out of 240 officially registered with the government.
Historians say as many as 400,000 women from Asian countries were coerced, duped or kidnapped into sex slavery at Japanese military brothels before and during the Pacific War.
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