Comfort women”

 




"Comfort women”

Comfort women” refers to the system of sexual slavery created and controlled by the Imperial Japanese government between 1932 and 1945. It is the largest case of government-sponsored human trafficking and sexual slavery in modern history.

Many scholars have argued that the term comfort women, a euphemism coined by the Japanese military, obscures the gravity of the crime. While the authors agree that “military sexual slaves” is a much more accurate and appropriate phrase, we use the term comfort women in this article to refer specifically to the victims of the Japanese military’s sexual slavery system during World War II and “on which decades of international debate, historical research, and legal discourses are mounted,” following the earlier scholarly works. Estimates vary as to how many women were involved, but most scholars agree that hundreds of thousands of women were victimized, and that includes girls as young as twelve years old.

A majority of the women who were forced into sexual slavery came from Korea and China, although many women from Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Việt Nam, Thailand, East Timor, and the Dutch East Indies, as well as European women in Japanese-occupied territories, were forced into sexual slavery.

The history of the comfort women is still largely unknown in the United States, but more and more educators are paying attention to the issue as a significant historical precedent in human trafficking and sexual violence.

The case study of comfort women is a significant historical issue, not only because it affected so many women, but also because it teaches us the value of human rights, much like other historical atrocities, such as the sexual degradation of many black women in US antebellum slave states and contemporary international sexual human trafficking.


During the early twentieth century, Japan gradually established its power and control over East Asia, including Taiwan (colonized in 1895), Korea (made a protectorate of Japan in 1905 and annexed in 1910), and Manchuria (a puppet government set up in 1932). Beginning with the outbreak of the Second Sino–Japanese War (1937), Asia was constantly at war, a state of affairs that later became part of World War II. During the period of constant warfare from the early 1930s to 1945, the Japanese Imperial Army implemented and maintained the comfort women system. That the Japanese military set up and controlled the system is clearly evidenced by official Japanese military records and personal memoirs. For example, Okabe Naosaburō, a senior staff officer in the Shanghai Expeditionary Force, wrote the following in his diary, related to establishing a comfort station in the Shangai area in 1932:


Recently, soldiers have been prowling around everywhere looking for women, and I often heard obscene stories [about their behavior]. As long as conditions are peaceful and the army is not engaged in fighting, these incidents are difficult to prevent. Rather, we should recognize that we can actively provide facilities. I have considered many policy options for resolving the troops’ sexual problems and have set to work on realizing that goal. Lieutenant Cononel Nagami [Toshinori] will bear primary responsibility in this matter.


The document indicates that senior staff officers of each army typically issued orders to establish comfort stations, and staff officers of subordinate units made a plan and carried it out. Comfort stations were to be used exclusively for troops and officers. The Japanese military used several justifications for creating the system: to boost army morale; to control the behavior of the soldiers; to contain venereal diseases among the troops; and to prevent rapes by Japanese soldiers, thus avoiding the rise of hostility among the inhabitants of occupied areas.

Comfort stations were established first in Shanghai in 1932, then in Japan, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaya, Thailand, Burma, East New Guinea, Hong Kong, Macau, French Indochina, and other regions. Comfort stations were established wherever the Japanese troops went.

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