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Trampled Blossoms: What They Stole from Grandma
A young adult novel recounting the devastation of a victim of Japanese military sexual slavery.
Grandma Chun-ja is dead. Yu-ri and her family are shocked and confused by the sudden news, three years after Grandma Chun-ja had disappeared from their lives. Why had the news come from the House of Sharing, a shelter for victims of Japanese military sexual slavery? What was the secret that Grandma Chun-ja had hidden her entire life, even from her family? What really happened on that spring day in 1937, when 13-year-old Chun-ja hopped on a truck she thought was headed to a paying job at a textile factory?
Many are familiar with the history of the "comfort women," the victims of Japanese military sexual slavery, but few fully understand exactly why and how the girls came to be "comfort women," the scope of the assault they endured at the "comfort stations" set up throughout regions colonized by Japan, and how they lived out their lives after they returned to Korea post-liberation. 'Trampled Blossoms' is an honest and vivid depiction of the victims' accounts of sexual slavery under the Japanese military.
Grandma Chun-ja is dead. Yu-ri and her family are shocked and confused by the sudden news, three years after Grandma Chun-ja had disappeared from their lives. Why had the news come from the House of Sharing, a shelter for victims of Japanese military sexual slavery? What was the secret that Grandma Chun-ja had hidden her entire life, even from her family? What really happened on that spring day in 1937, when 13-year-old Chun-ja hopped on a truck she thought was headed to a paying job at a textile factory?
Many are familiar with the history of the "comfort women," the victims of Japanese military sexual slavery, but few fully understand exactly why and how the girls came to be "comfort women," the scope of the assault they endured at the "comfort stations" set up throughout regions colonized by Japan, and how they lived out their lives after they returned to Korea post-liberation. 'Trampled Blossoms' is an honest and vivid depiction of the victims' accounts of sexual slavery under the Japanese military.
248 pages, Paperback
Published August 8, 2019
3 people are currently reading
1030 people want to read
About the author
Young-sook Moon
2 books24 followersMoon Young-sook was born in Seosan, South Chungcheong Province, in 1953. Her literary career took off when she won the 2nd Blue Literature Prize in 2004 and the 6th Literature Neighborhood Prize for Children's Literature in 2005. In 2012, she received a creative grant from the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture.
Moon's main reason for writing stories is to teach young people about parts of Korean history that Koreans must never forget. Some of her best-known works are the young adult historical novels The Kareiski's Endless Wandering and The Children of Henequen. She has also written a number of children's novels, including Picture in the Tomb, The Dark Sea, Hagi: Lady of the Court, The Coat of Many Colors, The Old Man Who Became a Little Child, and The Bread of Kaesong.
Moon's main reason for writing stories is to teach young people about parts of Korean history that Koreans must never forget. Some of her best-known works are the young adult historical novels The Kareiski's Endless Wandering and The Children of Henequen. She has also written a number of children's novels, including Picture in the Tomb, The Dark Sea, Hagi: Lady of the Court, The Coat of Many Colors, The Old Man Who Became a Little Child, and The Bread of Kaesong.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
December 27, 2019
Trampled Blossoms Teaches Essential Korean History All Women Need
Korean history is fascinating and I particularly love the idea of learning a hidden aspect of World War II. Trampled Blossoms: What They Stole From Grandma may shock and horrify you, but women everywhere ought to face it head on. This happened to real women.
Did Trampled Blossoms fascinate this Korean Fangirl?
Rarer and rarer do I find a book that I just can’t put down. I know it’s captured my attention because even if I’m feeling all sorts of emotions, pain, fear, horror, anger, I just keep reading. I’ll even put the book down but a few minutes later pick it up again. Because I have to consume it. I have to know how it ends, for bad or worse. Trampled Blossoms was just such a book!
Multiple generations are effected by mental trauma.
Yuri has just graduated from high school when she learns her embarrassing grandma who’s been missing for 3 years is dead. Such is the start of her journey to learn why her grandma had been so over protective of her, even if it pushed away that granddaughter. I loved how Yuri wouldn’t take her mother’s silence on the issue and searched out answers for herself. And what she learns is shocking.
Chunja opens our eyes to the nature of war.
The Japanese believed they were in the right during World War II. Their emperor gave them their orders and everything was done in his name. But that didn’t mean those running the show couldn’t set up some “special” rewards for the soldiers going out to slaughter. This reward was found at a comfort house. Chunja, Yuri’s grandma, was a worker in one of these houses from the age of 13 years old, before she’d even had her period.
A comfort house was a reward to those dying.
Korean women were tricked into going with Japanese men sent to collect women for these comfort houses. Chunja was one of these girls. Given a Japanese name and some bleach water to clean down there she was put to work in a small room on a thin pallet. From her first soldier we understand that we are getting a glimpse into what the Japanese believe about the war. Over the years, as she was sent to different areas, different soldiers reveal different mindsets about the war, their service and her ‘comfort.’
And torture to those women who served inside them.
Some soldiers realized sex before death was patronizing. Just a way to soothe them into fighting. One refused her services, being a Korean in search for kinship, himself serving the Japanese. Another went into a bestial rage determined to leave something behind. Through her extreme trials servicing countless men each day Chunja gives us a glimpse into this hidden part of WWII. It’s eye opening and you can’t help but be sucked into her experience.
Trampled Blossoms is so powerful because you feel right inside the experience.
This wasn’t a graphic depiction of a girl being repeatedly raped. It was a story of survival. While I was horrified at what Chunja shared with Yuri and the reader it wasn’t done in an overwrought or sensationalized way. This wasn’t written to make people reading it feel guilty about what happened. It was clearly about allowing us to experience what a comfort house woman might have gone through.
Chunja didn’t belabor the rapes, the men, the bleach water they were forced to use. These things became a part of the fabric of her life. Like her we live in the moment taking each trial as it comes. The loss of each friend is a wound on her heart. It’s real. It’s powerful. It’s history.
Trampled Blossoms: What They Stole From Grandma reveals a hidden aspect of World War II that you probably don’t know about… but you need to learn about. It’s horrifying and shocking, war is bad but this is arguably worse. Well worth the read!
Korean history is fascinating and I particularly love the idea of learning a hidden aspect of World War II. Trampled Blossoms: What They Stole From Grandma may shock and horrify you, but women everywhere ought to face it head on. This happened to real women.
Did Trampled Blossoms fascinate this Korean Fangirl?
Rarer and rarer do I find a book that I just can’t put down. I know it’s captured my attention because even if I’m feeling all sorts of emotions, pain, fear, horror, anger, I just keep reading. I’ll even put the book down but a few minutes later pick it up again. Because I have to consume it. I have to know how it ends, for bad or worse. Trampled Blossoms was just such a book!
Multiple generations are effected by mental trauma.
Yuri has just graduated from high school when she learns her embarrassing grandma who’s been missing for 3 years is dead. Such is the start of her journey to learn why her grandma had been so over protective of her, even if it pushed away that granddaughter. I loved how Yuri wouldn’t take her mother’s silence on the issue and searched out answers for herself. And what she learns is shocking.
Chunja opens our eyes to the nature of war.
The Japanese believed they were in the right during World War II. Their emperor gave them their orders and everything was done in his name. But that didn’t mean those running the show couldn’t set up some “special” rewards for the soldiers going out to slaughter. This reward was found at a comfort house. Chunja, Yuri’s grandma, was a worker in one of these houses from the age of 13 years old, before she’d even had her period.
A comfort house was a reward to those dying.
Korean women were tricked into going with Japanese men sent to collect women for these comfort houses. Chunja was one of these girls. Given a Japanese name and some bleach water to clean down there she was put to work in a small room on a thin pallet. From her first soldier we understand that we are getting a glimpse into what the Japanese believe about the war. Over the years, as she was sent to different areas, different soldiers reveal different mindsets about the war, their service and her ‘comfort.’
And torture to those women who served inside them.
Some soldiers realized sex before death was patronizing. Just a way to soothe them into fighting. One refused her services, being a Korean in search for kinship, himself serving the Japanese. Another went into a bestial rage determined to leave something behind. Through her extreme trials servicing countless men each day Chunja gives us a glimpse into this hidden part of WWII. It’s eye opening and you can’t help but be sucked into her experience.
Trampled Blossoms is so powerful because you feel right inside the experience.
This wasn’t a graphic depiction of a girl being repeatedly raped. It was a story of survival. While I was horrified at what Chunja shared with Yuri and the reader it wasn’t done in an overwrought or sensationalized way. This wasn’t written to make people reading it feel guilty about what happened. It was clearly about allowing us to experience what a comfort house woman might have gone through.
Chunja didn’t belabor the rapes, the men, the bleach water they were forced to use. These things became a part of the fabric of her life. Like her we live in the moment taking each trial as it comes. The loss of each friend is a wound on her heart. It’s real. It’s powerful. It’s history.
Trampled Blossoms: What They Stole From Grandma reveals a hidden aspect of World War II that you probably don’t know about… but you need to learn about. It’s horrifying and shocking, war is bad but this is arguably worse. Well worth the read!
January 14, 2024
Rating this book is tricky because it’s an important topic and historical fiction is an underdeveloped genre in Korean literature, so even a poor contribution is pushing the genre forward. But I just couldn’t find a reason while reading this for it to be a novel rather than a collection of interviews.
The language is dry and straightforward to a fault. I knew I was in for a grueling time at the beginning of the book when the main character is first locked into her room and starts to hear screaming from the other rooms. There was no description of her reaction as a thirteen year old girl who still thinks she’s there to work at a factory. No description of fear, confusion, anything. And that’s how the whole book was, just flat descriptions of things happening with little emotion beyond “I hate the Japanese military.” The other characters were flimsy, and there wasn’t actually an overall arc or story of any kind. It would skip forward years without showing any changes in the main character as she aged, or any changes in her character at all. There are few human details about the experiences of the women described. It’s just bare-bones descriptions of events.
That would be fine if it was the real words of those who experiences it, but it’s not. It’s a novel. A novel is an opportunity to make history come to life, give it emotion and make it compelling. A good historical novel draws you into the events, helps you understand what it would be like to actually live through them. This book did none of that, it just listed hardships in extremely simple and sterile (it’s a young adult novel, so there are no graphic descriptions of atrocities, which is fine but just makes the whole thing even less impactful) terms and then ended. It was just a shame.
The language is dry and straightforward to a fault. I knew I was in for a grueling time at the beginning of the book when the main character is first locked into her room and starts to hear screaming from the other rooms. There was no description of her reaction as a thirteen year old girl who still thinks she’s there to work at a factory. No description of fear, confusion, anything. And that’s how the whole book was, just flat descriptions of things happening with little emotion beyond “I hate the Japanese military.” The other characters were flimsy, and there wasn’t actually an overall arc or story of any kind. It would skip forward years without showing any changes in the main character as she aged, or any changes in her character at all. There are few human details about the experiences of the women described. It’s just bare-bones descriptions of events.
That would be fine if it was the real words of those who experiences it, but it’s not. It’s a novel. A novel is an opportunity to make history come to life, give it emotion and make it compelling. A good historical novel draws you into the events, helps you understand what it would be like to actually live through them. This book did none of that, it just listed hardships in extremely simple and sterile (it’s a young adult novel, so there are no graphic descriptions of atrocities, which is fine but just makes the whole thing even less impactful) terms and then ended. It was just a shame.
September 7, 2022
Trampled Blossoms is a fictional narrative based on Korea’s true historic event, wherein Moon recounts the heart-wrenching ordeal of countless ‘comfort women’ who were victimised by sexual slavery during the Japanese colonial period. Moon unfolds the ineffable sufferings undergone by comfort women through a detailed account of Chun-ja.
In the early twentieth century during the annexation of Korea, ‘comfort stations’ which is a euphemism for public toilets were arranged in the vicinity of the Japanese military base. Such stations were frequented by the Japanese military to relieve their anxiety and stress from the war, by having comfort women service them under duress.
The tribulations that Chun-ja and many women were subjected to were immeasurably painful to read. Deeds that one could deem as atrocious and inhumane transpired in comfort stations, ensuing in innumerable deaths. For some impregnated women including Chun-ja, hysterectomy was performed without a consent, which had left an unbearable scar that incessantly tormented Chun-ja more mentally than physically, as it was a constant reminder that she couldn’t bear a child of her own.
Comfort women had been subjugated, abused, and coerced to become sex slaves for the Japanese military, which had caused them both physical and psychological trauma for the entirety of their lives. For decades, comfort women had longed for Japan’s sincere apology; however to this day, no apology has been granted by the Japanese government. The agreement between the South Korean and the Japanese governments based on the issue of ‘comfort women’ did take place in 2015. However, it was soon negated as Abe proceeded with the agreement without revising it, therefore deemed an insincere act. Furthermore, Abe had proclaimed (after the agreement) that there was no evidence of the Japanese military having conducted such misdeeds.
I’d highly recommend ‘Trampled blossoms’. It’s a young adult fiction so it’s easy to follow through, informative, and imparts the history of Korea and Japan that should be more widely acknowledged. Just be mindful of the trigger warnings prior reading this.
TW:
- Rape, sexual assault
- Self-harm, blood
- Abuse (physical, sexual)
- Suicide, death
- Abortion, hysterectomy
In the early twentieth century during the annexation of Korea, ‘comfort stations’ which is a euphemism for public toilets were arranged in the vicinity of the Japanese military base. Such stations were frequented by the Japanese military to relieve their anxiety and stress from the war, by having comfort women service them under duress.
The tribulations that Chun-ja and many women were subjected to were immeasurably painful to read. Deeds that one could deem as atrocious and inhumane transpired in comfort stations, ensuing in innumerable deaths. For some impregnated women including Chun-ja, hysterectomy was performed without a consent, which had left an unbearable scar that incessantly tormented Chun-ja more mentally than physically, as it was a constant reminder that she couldn’t bear a child of her own.
Comfort women had been subjugated, abused, and coerced to become sex slaves for the Japanese military, which had caused them both physical and psychological trauma for the entirety of their lives. For decades, comfort women had longed for Japan’s sincere apology; however to this day, no apology has been granted by the Japanese government. The agreement between the South Korean and the Japanese governments based on the issue of ‘comfort women’ did take place in 2015. However, it was soon negated as Abe proceeded with the agreement without revising it, therefore deemed an insincere act. Furthermore, Abe had proclaimed (after the agreement) that there was no evidence of the Japanese military having conducted such misdeeds.
I’d highly recommend ‘Trampled blossoms’. It’s a young adult fiction so it’s easy to follow through, informative, and imparts the history of Korea and Japan that should be more widely acknowledged. Just be mindful of the trigger warnings prior reading this.
TW:
- Rape, sexual assault
- Self-harm, blood
- Abuse (physical, sexual)
- Suicide, death
- Abortion, hysterectomy
August 12, 2022
The history of comfort women is horrifying and Trampled Blossoms is a competent representation of that. Due to the subject matter, Moon’s novel is effective by default. Despite that, at its core it is an unremarkable YA novel. I admired its intentions, but the prose is simple and the characters aren’t well developed. I also wish it had spent more time on the protagonist’s post-war life, which is rushed through over a couple of pages. Worth reading if you are interested in the history, but can’t stomach non-fiction accounts. Definitely worth reading for younger audiences to introduce them to this particular issue. Either way, it’s nice to see historical YA in translation.
June 17, 2020
Really important topic that has not been talked about enough, however I do not think the book does it justice as it is quite frankly not executed nearly as well as it could have been. I still appreciate the chance to read about the tragic events that occurred during this time, but I would have wished for a story that was written better. However it was quick and easy to read so I think it's okay, as it doesn't have to be a book you're stuck with for a long time anyway.
December 25, 2023
As a European, it takes a book like this to truly realize what the Japanese were like during their imperial period. We are all focused on concentration camps, and for good reason; however, I wish there was more focus on the Japanese too in high school history classes. It provides depth and understanding of why the two WW2 regimes were so similar and ended up in an alliance.
April 19, 2020
😭😭 (will comeback later with the review)
February 6, 2023
really was an engrossing read just skip the tws that concludes abuse (sexual,physical)
April 19, 2025
Such an important topic, but 3 stars because of the writing
February 27, 2020
The horrors that this book depicts are heartbreaking, the author doesnt go into detail but this only serves to somehow make the nightmares more real.
November 30, 2019
YA historical fiction in translation about the experiences of a teenage comfort woman in WWII, and how those experiences affected her entire life. Great for a perspective on WWII suffering that is not often taught or mentioned in America. The pacing sometimes seemed a bit brusque or rushed, but I also found the book to be unputdownable.
I’m glad I got the chance to read a Korean author’s depiction of this time in history. Recommended for grades 9-12 WWII units, women’s studies projects, Korean heritage projects.
I’m glad I got the chance to read a Korean author’s depiction of this time in history. Recommended for grades 9-12 WWII units, women’s studies projects, Korean heritage projects.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews