3 3 Kazuko Hirota, Shōgen Kiroku Jūgun Ianfu/Kangofu: Senjō ni Ikita Onna no Dōkoku (Tokyo: Shin Jinbutsu Ōraisha, 2009), p. Kikumaru's positive memory of her experience as an ‘elite’ ‘comfort woman’ was expressed in her interviews with the female journalist Hirota Kazuko in 19: ‘I had the best time of my life in Truk Island’. 2 2 See Yoshiaki Yoshimi, Jūgun Ianfu (Tokyo: Iwanami Shinsho, 1995) its English version, Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military during World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). Other women at the base were forced to serve numerous enlisted soldiers per day. In fact, she was reserved for only a few officers during her entire time at the ‘comfort station’. Kikumaru was among thirty-three ‘elite’ women on Truk Island who were allocated to a single officer per day. She thus became one of the euphemistically called, ‘comfort woman’, the victims of the Japanese military sexual slavery system during the Asia-Pacific War (1931–45).
In order to pay her poor family's debts back to her geisha house owner, this previous civilian prostitute spent two years between 19 working as a military prostitute at a Japanese naval ‘comfort station’ in Truk Island. 1 1 The name order of all Japanese and Korean persons follows their traditional pattern that is, the surname precedes the given name. Her birth name was Yamauchi Keiko (1924−72), but she was widely known by her geisha name, Kikumaru. She left behind only 870 yen, USD 2.80 at that time, and two suicide notes. Her death was attributed to self-induced carbon monoxide asphyxiation. On 26 April 1972, a forty-seven-year-old Japanese woman was found dead in her small apartment in Chiba prefecture, near Tokyo.
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