Well, the book said that I was going to die that year, but if I went to another country, my life might be saved. So I came by boat to Shimonoseki [approximately 1932]. I didn’t know a word of Japanese. I traveled with about nineteen others who were also going to work for the same factory. A distant cousin of mine was then living and studying in Tokyo’s Ōimachi. One day he came back to Korea to recruit some workers for a relative of his who had opened a factory in Japan. So I guess the timing was just aright. I worked and lived in the factory for about three years. Then my brother settled in Nagoya and asked that I live with him. He worked in a factory.

To come to Japan, I needed to get a travel permit from police headquarters. Luckily, my father was quite close to some of the police, and he got the permit for me. My father was well-known in town for being learned. He was well versed in the Chinese classics, which he studied under my grandfather, who built a sŏtang [private school] in our house. My grandmother passed away when my father was five years old. My father began his studies in the Chinese classics from the time he was kazoe [Korean way of counting the age of a new born as one] five years old. Back then one who mastered Chinese classical learning was considered to have a deeper understanding of things than even a Buddhist monk. In fact, my father had an ability to look at a person’s face and know things—for example, he would say this person would be happy or that person will face difficulties in life. My father also could predict if there would be a lot of rain, or sometimes if there would be earthquakes. . . . He knew what the weather would be like for the day, by saying things like "Today it will rain," or "Tomorrow it will snow." He knew of such things. He would say, "Today it is going to be rainy, so hurry and clear things away," and after we did, rain always fell, just as he said. When he saw a pregnant woman, he could tell by the way she walked whether she would have a boy or girl. People now would say that only monks would know such things, but back then, elders who were educated in the Chinese classics knew and understood many things. Men who had finished such high education of Chinese learning would say that han’gŭl [Korean alphabet] was only for women who learned it in the toilet.

In those days they didn’t allow girls to study. Although there were reading classes and night classes as well, girls weren’t allowed to go, because they said when girls went to school, all they did was lift up their legs and start dancing. I wanted to go to school so badly, I would take a little piece of thick paper and pretend to write on it. But no matter how much I begged, my parents wouldn’t allow it. All of my brothers were able to go to school, though. When I was little, my father thought that at least I should be able to read and write han’gŭl. So I was lucky enough to be taught how to read and write a bit here and there. Later, when I had children, I taught all of them how to read and write Korean, because although we live in Japan, we are Korean. I told them that they must at least learn how to read and write in Korean.

I didn’t want to come to Japan. What fourteen-year-old would want to leave her parents to go away to a far-off land? I cried so much. The people at the factory told me just to bear it for a little while longer. You know the thread in the lightbulb? Well, I was at a factory that made these threads. So I did that work for about three years, then my cousin brought me to Nagoya –about 1935 where my brother was. In those times there were rickshaws where you would sit in the back and then a man would pull you from the front. When we got off the train we rode a rickshaw to my brother’s house. I thought that my brother would send me back to my kohyang [birthplace]. But instead he told me to marry this man and that is how I ended up marrying my husband in January of my seventeenth year. Actually, in the umry?k (lunar calendar) I wasn’t even sixteen yet. My mother agreed to the marriage because she thought that if I were to marry in Korea, I would have to really suffer with so much work, as well as having to take care of many in-laws. I guess my mother was hoping that I would find a better situation by marrying in Japan. I soon had children after that. My husband was twenty-four years old when we married. My husband, he really liked women very much, so even before I married him, he went out with this woman and that woman. Well, he was so-so looking. Ha, ha, ha ... (she laughs shyly). But I didn’t know all of this, so that was how I ended up marrying him. I guess my brother didn’t know either.

It was in Nagoya that I got married, and I had three children there. When I was twenty years old [1938] I came to Kawasaki. In Kawasaki, even women could find enough work to pay for some of the food. So that is why we ended up leaving Nagoya for Kawasaki. In Kawasaki there was the Nihon Kōkan (Japan steel pipe company). It was said that the Kōkan company was one of the biggest and most famous in Japan. It was said that if this company were to go down, half of the people in Japan would starve. I remember hearing one of the very first explosions coming from the chimney of this company. When I went outside, it was just black dust everywhere from the ashes. The black smoke rising from the chimneys of the steel factory was like a gigantic cloud.

You know, during the war when they were dropping bombs-I think it happened first in Kawasaki near Kōkan-dōri, the street near where Pastor Yi lives. After the bomb was dropped there, everyone had to move near where that marketplace is now. Bombs were dropped here in Kawasaki, and near Tokyo, and Kamata on a daily basis. On the road there were dead bodies all over the place. If I’d had only one child then I could have put the child on my back and escaped to a faraway place. But I had three children-my first daughter who went to North Korea, my son, and then my second daughter. I put one child on my back and took the other two in each hand, and then I went from one place to another escaping the bombings. But I was never able to go very far. But as the war progressed, there was no other way but to escape, and so that is how I ended up in Gunma prefecture. In Gunma, there was nothing but tall mountains one after an-other. There was absolutely nothing but little houses far apart here and there. There really was nothing.... I couldn’t live there.... And because it was high up in the mountains, during the summer the sound of thunder would be more frightening than the sound of the bombings. At night because of the thunder it sounded as if the sky were cracking in pieces and the children couldn’t sleep. I stayed there for only one year, and then I came back out to Kawasaki lugging the children and our belongings, because I couldn’t stand that place any longer.

So we moved out to Hama-chō. As the war progressed, every day bombs were dropping all over the place and we heard stories of so many people getting killed. The tonari-gumi-chō, the person who was in charge of my neighbor hood, told me that I had to take the kids and escape to the countryside, because the bombings were getting more and more frequent and closer to Kawasaki. So we ended up in the countryside of Saitama. All of my family, relatives, friends, and neighbors escaped to the mountains of Saitama. It was deep in the countryside and there was no work and no food. So one day when I saw a farmer working busily in the fields, I asked him if he needed some help in exchange for food. I had small children [she had also lost several babies], but the wife of the farmer offered to look after the baby while I went out to work in the fields in exchange for some vegetables. I didn’t know anything. In Korea, I had never even touched a hoe or an axe. When I went to work in the fields, I had to pull weeds or help plow the fields, plant seeds and sometimes harvest, but I didn’t know how to do anything. The owner of the farm taught me the difference between weeds and plants-what to pull out and what to leave alone, how to plant, how to plow.... So every day he taught me what to do, and the first two years were very hard. In the mountains there was no food and no work except for farming. And you know in Korea, in my day, women did a lot of work inside the house, but they were never sent out to the field to do farmwork. I heard that in the Chŏlla area and also up North, women even in my time worked in the fields almost the same as men. But where I was from in the Kyŏngsang-do area, daughters and daughters-in-law-women in general-were never sent out to the field to do farmwork. Then when I came to Japan and had to go out into the fields to work in order to eat, I didn’t know plants from weeds. In the fields there were some turnips, but I thought they were weeds, so I went right down the line and pulled them all out. Then the farmer whom I was helping told me that they were edible and to leave them alone, and he showed me what to pull out.

The landowner came from a very wealthy family. I heard that his brother made a lot of money during those times when many Japanese people were living in Taiwan. That is how he came to have so much land and houses. He was so kind. He used to tell me to come and clean the chicken coop and then he would give me a basket full of eggs. He taught me everything I know about farming, and by helping him out on his farm, I was able to feed my children with potatoes, barley, corn, and such. That really helped, because otherwise there would have been no food.

It was the hardest when I was in the countryside—escaping the war and with nothing to eat. I don’t remember a day that we managed to eat three decent meals. I went here and there, and during winter there was no work in the fields, and so I went up in the mountains to get wood for fire. Up in the mountains there was plenty of wood, but it was full of sharp thorns and splinters. Of course, if it were now there would be gloves, but back then I had to gather them with my bare hands. By the time I came down from the mountains, I would be scarred and scratched all over my hands, neck, and face. My hands would be sticky from the blood. People who owned plots of land, including small hills and mountains, were able to go and get good wood. But Koreans and poor Japanese people had to go up to the wild mountains for wood. Anyway, I would gather enough wood to cook with, for the bath, and to keep us warm until late spring.

While we were living in the country, the children’s clothes were so old and worn that if I washed them once or twice, they would fall apart. So I went around the neighborhood and looked in the trash for pieces of cloth, red or white or any color, and I used them to mend the holes and the torn places. But still you could see the holes and the tears. The children sometimes would say, it’s because their mother never went to school, that I didn’t know whether one color matched with another ... (she smiles). At that time it didn’t matter whether or not the colors matched, just going around town looking for pieces of cloth in the trash was hard enough work as it was. When we left the countryside and came to the city of Saitama, I saved some money and bought the children some decent clothes that wouldn’t come apart after a couple of washings ... they were so happy. I was really glad to move to the city. In the city when I went to work in the factories, they paid me with cash, but working in the fields I was compensated with flour, barley, potatoes. Together with whatever we received on paegŏp [ration] of oat and wheat was how we were able to eat. But it tasted so bad, no person who wasn’t unusually hungry would be able to eat it. The kids would just stare at it gloomily, and so I would try to add some taste to it by adding salt, and then boiling it for a long time like gruel, but the kids wouldn’t be able to eat it. So I would go out and stand in line for some udon (noodles) and make it for them.

After the war ended everyone was going back to Korea. All of my relatives and friends, everyone decided to go. We were the only ones left. We wanted to go to Korea, but because we didn’t have enough money for the fares, we ended up pushing back our repatriation until we were able to save more money. My younger sister, my nieces, and nephews, all went back to South Korea, and we were the only ones left here in Japan. My husband was living with a Japanese woman at that time. Well, he said he couldn’t leave that woman, and he told me to take the kids and go back to Korea by myself. So I made up my mind and decided to go back with my relatives. I sent everything with my sister-in-law, and told her that we would follow as soon as we had enough money to buy the tickets for me and the children. Well, making enough money took more than a year, close to two years. Then one evening when I was squatting in front of the house cleaning, I saw a figure in the distance coming closer and closer. He looked quite familiar and in fact looked like one of my distant relatives who had gone back to Korea. I thought to myself, I must be seeing a ghost. "Why would a person who had left for Korea come back to Japan?" When he came closer, I recognized him and asked him why he had come back. He told me that the situation in Korea was so poor that in order to live he came back to Japan. He said that there was nothing to eat, and that people were pulling grass and weeds for food and eating bark off the trees up in the mountains. So my sister-in-law who left before me asked him if he were to arrive safely back in Japan, to come and warn me not to come back if I didn’t want to die of starvation. Thankful for him coming all the way to find me, I made some gruel mixed with barley and gave it to him. My kids always complained about eating such food, but he was eating it so delightedly. He said that in Korea one wouldn’t even be able to see such food. Then, a while later after the Korean War, everyone was talking about how wonderful North Korea was and many people decided to go there. I decided to go to North Korea as well. Then, one of my friends from my hometown warned me not to go, because again, there was nothing to eat but potatoes, fern weed, and corn. That friend warned me a number of times, so I decided once more to stay in Japan.

Kim, Jackie J. Chapter 8, "Now I Can Say that I’m Happy," Hidden Treasures: Lives of First-Generation Korean Women in Japan. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005; 112-115, 118.