Tears of blood

In Korea they call them halmoni (grandmothers), although many are so scarred mentally and physically that they have never married or had children. In Japan, they are known as 'comfort women', a hated euphemism for their forced role of providing 'comfort' to marauding troops in military brothels. But around the world, another, altogether starker term will follow them to their graves: sex slaves.

Kang il-chul is one of a handful of the surviving women living out their final days in Sharing House, a museum and communal refuge two hours from the South Korean capital, Seoul. It is an austere, concrete building off a country road in a sparsely populated area of rice fields and scraggly mountain forests. But she has found some peace in Gyeonggi Province.

Aged 15, and the baby in a family of 12, Ms Kang said she was snatched from an area nearby in 1943 and sent north on a train to a Japanese army base in Manchuria. On her second night she was raped. Soldiers lined up night after night to abuse her. She has scars just below her neck from cigarette burns and says she suffers headaches from a beating she took at the hands of an officer.

'I still have blood tears in my soul when I think about what happened,' she said, using a Korean phrase to express her memories. Like many of the women, she finds it traumatic to recall the past, crying and knotting a handkerchief, and swaying from side to side as she talks. But she turns angry and slaps the table in front of her when ex-Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe is mentioned. 'That horrible man,' she said. 'He wants us to die.'

Last year, Mr Abe stunned the residents of Sharing House by claiming there was 'no evidence' to prove the women were coerced 'in the strict sense of the term', reversing Japan's long-term official position. Amid a growing political storm and pressure from Japan's allies in Washington, Mr Abe subsequently backtracked in a series of carefully worded statements that took the heat out of the controversy. But the denial terrified Ms Kang. 'I felt that my heart had been turned inside out,' she said.

The director of Sharing House, Ahn Sin-kweon, said the women's greatest fear was that the crimes against them would be forgotten when they died. 'After they pass away it will be difficult to keep their memory alive because they won't be here to describe it themselves,' he said.