Young and cheerful albeit poor, 16-year-old Lee Yong-soo was taken to a Kamikaze unit in Taiwan by a Japanese man in what appeared to be a military uniform during World War II. She did not know she would be raped, repeatedly, and face electric torture if she disobeyed.

Now frail, diminutive and wheelchair-bound, the 86-year-old Korean flew to Cambridge, the U.S., to stage a silent vigil against Tokyo’s unbridled attempts to whitewash the appalling chapter of history at Harvard University, where Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe gave a speech on Monday. “I am a survivor of Japanese military sexual slavery,” reads the sign she held.

As Lee and some 150 students who took part in the rally awaited his arrival, the nationalist premier used the rear entrance apparently to evade an awkward, if not embarrassing scene. 

“The prime minister of a nation should have entered through the main gate in a dignified manner,” she grumbled after his entry. “What is it that so scares him that the prime minister of a nation could not act fair and square and would sneak in through the back door? Is it because he’s sinned?”

Lee is one of the 53 surviving “comfort women,” the victims of Japan’s sexual enslavement of women from Korea, China and other countries who were forced into sexual servitude on frontline brothels run by the Imperial Army. She is also among the women who braved social bias and controversy to step out of the shadow and declare themselves the victims.

Her trip to Washington was aimed at shedding light once again on the pains and agonies that the women went through, as well as Tokyo’s backpedalling on past apologies for the sex slavery and other colonial violence. Lee was last on the Harvard campus in April 2007 during Abe’s first premiership.

As she depicted her experience at a meeting with about 70 students a day earlier, the air was solemn and deathly still, with some weeping quietly, according to the participants.

“Abe has not changed at all. He is rather leading the campaign to distort history by the Japanese right who brand the comfort women as prostitutes,” she said.

With his speech to U.S. Congress on Wednesday drawing closer, pressure is building from the political, diplomatic, academic and activist circles at home and abroad on Abe to display a more repentant attitude toward history and help put the checkered past behind.

Yet Abe failed to sate expectations in the university lecture, expressing sadness and again calling the women the victims of “human trafficking,” which was criticized as another attempt to undercut Tokyo’s direct involvement in the conscription process.

By Shin Hyon-hee (heeshin@heraldcorp.com)