>>12535424"How could I have told them about my experiences?" she asked. "I had things done to me that were unfathomable."
She wasn't alone in her silence, as the University of Connecticut's Alexis Dudden explains.
"I think her history following her return to Korea is a really good explanation of the double victimisation of those who survived," the history professor said. "There was not space in this society for the women to go public."
Kim did find her voice though, a few years after her return. Her mother wanted her to marry, and she felt she had to explain why she would not.
"I confessed that, given all the abuse done to my body, I didn't want to screw up another man's life," she told Asian Boss.
Her mother, she said, became distressed. Unable to share her daughter's secret, she died shortly afterwards of a heart attack. Kim believed it was the pain of the secret which killed her.
'It's not about money'
It would take decades for Kim Bok-dong to talk again about what happened to her. She moved to Busan, where she ran a successful fish restaurant.
And then Kim Hak-sun came forward, sharing her own story of being imprisoned as a "comfort woman" by the Japanese in China - the first South Korean victim to break her silence so publicly. It was 1991. By March 1992, Kim Bok-dong had come forward to tell the world her account.
"She had incredible strength - she was a survivor," says Prof Dudden, who first met her more than two decades ago. "She came forward to tell her truth. That is when she makes her mark on the page."
Her story would not just impact her fellow survivors in South Korea, though. It would bring together survivors from around the world - including women in Vietnam who had been attacked by South Korean soldiers during the US war. In 2014, she set up The Butterfly Fund to support fellow victims.
