Comfort women were women and girls forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces in occupied countries and territories before and during World War II. The term comfort women is a translation of the Japanese , a euphemism that literally means "comforting, consoling woman". During World War II, Japanese troops forced hundreds of thousands of women from Australia, Burma, China, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, East Timor, New Guinea and other countries into sexual enslavement for Japanese soldiers; however, the majority of the women were from Korea. Many women died due to brutal mistreatment and sustained physical and emotional distress. After the war, Japan denied the existence of comfort women, refusing to provide an apology or appropriate restitution. After numerous demands for an apology and the revelation of official records showing the Japanese government's culpability, the Japanese government began to offer an official apology and compensation in the 1990s. However, apologies have been criticized as insincere by victims, advocacy groups, and scholars. Many Japanese government officials have continued to either deny or minimize the existence of comfort women. The Japanese government officially denies that girls and women were coerced into sexual slavery. the exact numbers are still being researched and debated reflecting differences in archival evidence and post war documentation.
The brothels were originally established with the stated intent of providing soldiers with a controlled sexual outlet to reduce wartime rape and the spread of venereal diseases. However, the comfort stations failed to achieve the stated goals. The first victims were Japanese women, some of whom were recruited by conventional means, and others who were recruited through deception or kidnapping. The military later expanded recruitment to women in Japanese colonies, citing factors such as a shortage of Japanese volunteers and concerns about maintaining Japan’s international image. A significant percentage of comfort women were minors.
Outline of the comfort women system
Establishment by Japanese military
Given that prostitution in Japan was pervasive and organized, it was logical to find military prostitution in the Japanese armed forces. Military correspondence within the Imperial Japanese Army shows that the aims for facilitating comfort stations were: to reduce or prevent rape crimes by Japanese army personnel in an effort to prevent a worsening of anti-Japanese sentiment, to reduce venereal diseases among Japanese troops, and to prevent leakage of military secrets by civilians who were in contact with Japanese officers. Carmen Argibay, a former member of the Argentine Supreme Court of Justice, states that the Japanese government aimed to prevent atrocities like the Rape of Nanjing by confining rape and sexual abuse to military-controlled facilities, or stop incidents from leaking to the international press should they occur. She also states that the government wanted to minimize medical expenses on treating venereal diseases that the soldiers acquired from frequent and widespread rape, which hindered Japan's military capacity. Comfort women lived in sordid conditions, and were called "public toilets" by the Japanese. Yuki Tanaka states that local brothels outside of the military's reach had issues of security, since there were possibilities of spies disguised as workers of such private facilities. Japanese historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi further states that the Japanese military used comfort women to satisfy disgruntled soldiers during World War II and prevent military revolt. He said that, despite the goal of reducing rape and venereal disease, the comfort stations did the opposite—aggravating rape and increasing the spread of venereal disease.
Outline
In the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, Japan's military closely regulated privately operated brothels in Manchuria.
Comfort houses were first established in Shanghai after the Shanghai incident in 1932 as a response to wholesale rape of Chinese women by Japanese soldiers. Yasuji Okamura, the chief of staff in Shanghai, ordered the construction of comfort houses to prevent further rape. According to Yoshiaki Yoshimi, comfort stations were established to avoid criticism from China, the United States of America and Europe following the case of massive rapes between battles in Shanghai and Nanjing.
As Japan continued military expansion, the military found itself short of Japanese volunteers, and turned to local populations—abducting and coercing women into serving as sex slaves in the comfort stations. Many women responded to calls to work as factory workers or nurses, and did not know that they were being pressed into sexual slavery. The Japanese Army often required local collaborationist government to supply women to be sex slaves. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs resisted further issuance of travel visas for Japanese prostitutes, feeling it tarnished the image of the Japanese Empire. The military turned to acquiring comfort women outside mainland Japan, mostly from Korea and from occupied China. An existing system of licensed prostitution within Korea made it easy for Japan to recruit women in large numbers. Based on false characterizations and payments—by Japanese or by local recruitment agents—which could help relieve family debts, many Korean girls enlisted to take the job. Furthermore, the South East Asia Translation and Interrogation Center (SEATIC) Psychological Warfare Interrogation Bulletin No.2 states that a Japanese facility manager purchased Korean women for 300 to 1000 yen depending on their physical characteristics, who then became his property and were not released even after completing the servitude terms specified in the contract. In northern Hebei province of China, Hui Muslim girls were recruited to "Huimin Girls' school" to be trained as entertainers, but then forced to serve as sex slaves. The American historian Gerhard Weinberg wrote that a major issue was that no historian had examined whether the soldiers of the Indian National Army used comfort women, since there had been no investigation for it. Lebra wrote "None of those who have written on Bose's Indian national army has investigated whether, while they were trained by the Japanese army, they were permitted to share in the 'comfort' provided by thousands of kidnapped Korean young women held as sex slaves by the Imperial Japanese Army at its camps. This might have provided them with some insight into the nature of Japanese, as opposed to British, colonial rule, as well what might be in store for their sisters and daughters."
Under the strain of the war effort, the military became unable to provide enough supplies to Japanese units; in response, the units made up the difference by demanding or looting supplies from the locals. The military often directly demanded that local leaders procure women for the brothels along the front lines, especially in the countryside where middlemen were rare. When the locals were considered hostile in China, Japanese soldiers carried out the "Three Alls policy" ("kill all, burn all, loot all") which included indiscriminately kidnapping and raping local civilians.
Later archives
The Tokyo war crimes trials did not address the enslavement of women for sex by the Japanese army, given that rape was not viewed as a war crime.
On May 12, 2007, journalist Taichiro Kajimura announced the discovery of 30 Dutch government documents submitted to the Tokyo tribunal as evidence of a forced mass prostitution incident in 1944 in Magelang.
The South Korean government designated Bae Jeong-ja as a pro-Japanese collaborator () in September 2007 for recruiting comfort women.
In 2014, China produced almost 90 documents from the archives of the Kwantung Army on the issue. According to China, the documents provide ironclad proof that the Japanese military forced Asian women to work in front-line brothels before and during World War II.
In June 2014, more official documents were made public from the government of Japan's archives, documenting sexual violence and women forced into sexual slavery, committed by Imperial Japanese soldiers in French Indochina and Indonesia.
A 2015 study examined archival data which was previously difficult to access, partly due to the China–Japan Joint Communiqué of 1972 in which the Chinese government agreed not to seek any restitution for wartime crimes and incidents. New documents discovered in China shed light on facilities inside comfort stations operated within a Japanese army compound, and the conditions of the Korean comfort women. Documents were discovered verifying the Japanese Army as the funding agency for purchasing some comfort women.
Su Zhiliang, a Chinese professor at Shanghai Normal University, examined the Japanese Kwantung Army's records in Manchuria (now Northeast China), which are housed at the Jilin Archives in China. The operations of the Japanese Military Police, who were in charge of overseeing the "comfort stations" in various parts of China and Java, were the subject of these records.
Number of comfort women
Professor Su Jiliang concludes that during the seven-year period from 1938 to 1945, comfort women in the territory occupied by the Japanese numbered 360,000 to 410,000, among whom the Chinese were the largest group, about 200,000. Historians have arrived at various estimates by looking at surviving documentation, which indicates the ratio of soldiers in a particular area to the number of women and replacement rates of the women. Estimates by Japanese historians range from 20,000 to 200,000 comfort women.
Most academic researchers and media typically point to Yoshiaki's estimate as the most probable range of the numbers of women involved. This figure contrasts with the inscriptions on monuments in the United States such as those in New Jersey, New York, Virginia, and California, which state the number of comfort women as "more than 200,000".
The BBC quotes "200,000 to 300,000", and the International Commission of Jurists quotes "estimates of historians of 100,000 to 200,000 women".
Countries of origin
Most of the women were from occupied countries, including Korea, China, and the Philippines. Women who were used for military "comfort stations" also came from Burma, Thailand, French Indochina, Malaya, Manchukuo, Taiwan (then a Japanese dependency), the Dutch East Indies, Portuguese Timor, Papua New Guinea (including some mixed race Japanese-Papuans) and other Japanese-occupied territories. A smaller number of women of European origin were also involved, mostly from the Netherlands and Australia with an estimated 200–400 Dutch women alone, with an unknown number of other European women.
thumb|An ethnic Chinese comfort woman being interviewed by a [[flying officer of the Royal Air Force at Rangoon, August 8, 1945]]
thumb|Chinese and Malayan girls forcibly taken from [[Penang by the Japanese to work as 'comfort girls' for the troops]]
According to State University of New York at Buffalo professor Yoshiko Nozaki and other sources, the majority of the women were from Korea and China. Chuo University professor and historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi discovered an abundance of documentation and testimony proving the existence of 2,000 comfort women stations where approximately 200,000 Korean, Filipina, Taiwanese, Indonesian, Burmese, Dutch, Australian, and Japanese women, many of whom were teenagers, were confined and forced to perform sexual activities with Japanese troops. According to Qiu Peipei of Vassar College, comfort women were replaced with other women at a rapid rate, making her estimates of 200,000–400,000 comfort women plausible, with the majority being Chinese women. Ikuhiko Hata, a professor of Nihon University, estimated the number of women working in the licensed pleasure quarter was fewer than 20,000 and that they were 40% Japanese, 20% Koreans, 10% Chinese, with others making up the remaining 30%. According to Hata, the total number of government-regulated prostitutes in Japan was only 170,000 during World War II. Others came from the Philippines, Taiwan, the Dutch East Indies, and other Japanese-occupied countries and regions. Some Dutch women, captured in Dutch colonies in Asia, were also forced into sexual slavery.
In further analysis of the Imperial Army medical records for venereal disease treatment from 1940, Yoshimi concluded that if the percentages of women treated reflected the general makeup of the total comfort women population, Korean women made up 51.8 percent, Chinese 36 percent and Japanese 12.2 percent. In Korea, the daughters of the gentry and the bureaucracy were spared from being sent into the "comfort women corps" unless they or their families showed signs of pro-independence tendencies, and the overwhelming majority of the Korean girls taken into the "comfort women corps" came from the poor. The Army and Navy often subcontracted the work of taking girls into the "comfort women corps" in Korea to contractors, who were usually associated in some way with organized crime groups that were paid for girls they presented. The victims were as young as 12 years old at the time of their enslavement. As many of the survivors recall, the garrisons or comfort stations/brothels were spread all over the Philippines. The garrisons were located from the northern region of Cagayan Valley to the Davao region in the south.
During the initial invasion of Dutch East Indies, Japanese soldiers raped many Indonesian and European women and girls. The Kenpeitai established the comfort women program to control the problem. The Kenpeitai forced and coerced many interned women to serve as prostitutes, including several hundred European women. A few of these chose to live in the homes of Japanese officers to serve one man as a sex slave rather than many men in a brothel. One such European woman, K'tut Tantri, of Scottish ancestry, wrote a book describing her ordeal. A Dutch government study described the methods used by the Japanese military to seize the women by force. It concluded that among the 200 to 300 European women found in the Japanese military brothels, "some sixty five were most certainly forced into prostitution". Others, faced with starvation in the refugee camps, agreed to offers of food and payment for work, the nature of which was not completely revealed to them. Some of the women also volunteered in hopes of protecting the younger ones. The number of women forced into prostitution may therefore be much higher than the Dutch record indicated. The number of Dutch women that were sexually assaulted or molested was also largely ignored. It was not until individuals and groups such as the Foundation of Japanese Honorary Debts began advocating for victims of the Japanese occupation that the plight of Dutch comfort women entered the collective conscience. As well as being raped and sexually assaulted every day and night, the Dutch girls lived in constant fear of beatings and other physical violence.
J. F. van Wagtendonk and the Dutch Broadcast Foundation estimated a total number of 400 Dutch girls were taken from the camps to become comfort women.
thumb|[[Javanese people|Javanese girls liberated by Australian troops from a Japanese brothel in Koepang, Timor, October 2, 1945]]
Besides Dutch women, many Javanese were also recruited from Indonesia as comfort women, including around 1000 East Timorese women and girls who were also used as sexual slaves. Most were adolescent girls aged 14–19 who had completed some education and were deceived through promises of higher education in Tokyo or Singapore. Common destinations of comfort women from Java included Burma, Thailand, and Eastern Indonesia. Interviews conducted with former comfort women also suggest that some women came from the island of Flores. After the war, many Javanese comfort women who survived stayed in the locations where they had been trafficked to and became integrated into local populations.
Melanesian women from New Guinea were also used as comfort women. Local women were recruited from Rabaul as comfort women, along with some number of mixed Japanese-Papuan women born to Japanese fathers and Papuan mothers.
In 1985, Japanese comfort woman survivor Shirota Suzuko (1921–1993) released her autobiography, detailing the sufferings she and other women endured as comfort women.
More than 2,000 Taiwanese women were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military; as of 2020, only two were still believed to be alive. Yoshiaki Yoshimi notes that more than half of Taiwanese comfort women were minors. In 2023 the last surviving Taiwanese comfort woman died.
The Japanese academic Nakahara Michiko from Waseda University wrote a paper on comfort women in Malaysia who were forced to serve the Japanese military. She wrote that the Japanese targeted their comfort women recruitment from all ethnic groups and not just one in the occupied regions. The Malay Mustapha Yaakub, who was Youth International Bureau secretary for the UMNO -United Malays National Organisation (Pertubuhan Kebangsaan Melayu Bersatu, PEKEMBAR)- called for Malaysians who were victimized by Japanese soldiers such as comfort women to go out in public and talk about what happened in 1993. He received multiple letters including one known by the pseudonym P who was interviewed by Nakahara. However, Najib Tun Razak, the head of UMNO Youth and Defence Minister banned Mustapha Yaakub from talking about the Malay rape victims at the 1993 Austria United Nations Human Rights Conference. Nakahara wrote about an ethnic Malay comfort woman who was raped and forced into sex slavery at a comfort woman station by Japanese soldiers. The Malay rape victim said "I worked like an animal, they did to me just as they liked. I had to obey their orders until the surrender". Nakahara said "Her daughter told me her mother has nightmares and cries in her sleep. She used to wander aimlessly after the bad dreams ... She told me herself that she begged God for pardon for the sins she had committed. She still suffers from her memory and her feeling of having sinned. It seems nobody in her village ever told her that it was not her sin at all ... She had asked her daughter to write a letter for her. However, her long suffering was left unremedied". The Malay woman thought that the UMNO party would demand the Japanese government apologize and pay reparations since she was a member of the UMNO but the UMNO leadership refused to press the case.
thumb|Korean comfort women on Okinawa being interviewed by U.S. marines after liberation
The Japanese forced ethnic Malay Muslim girls into becoming comfort women to be raped by Japanese soldiers. One of these Malay girls had her experience made into a historical play drama called Hayatie's Life () when she was raped by the Japanese in Singapore. Another play called Wild Rice was also based on another Malay comfort woman who did not tell her family in the 1980s how she was raped by the Japanese in the 1940s and sought to hide her humiliation from them.
On October 16–17, 1992, in Nepal, Kathmandu, the "Conference of International Investigation Committee on the Crimes of War of Japan" took place with members attending from Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Japan, Algeria and France. The UMNO (United Malays National Organization) Youth secretary Musapha Yakuub was a Malay delegate at the meeting and comfort women were one of the topics there. Mustapha then started his own investigation and documentation of all Japanese crimes committed from 1942 to 1945 when they occupied Malaysia against its people. Mustapha urged all victims to report to him the atrocities that the Japanese had done in Malaysia and wanted to force the Japanese government to pay reparations and apologize by bringing up comfort women and forced labor which he called "cruel deeds" at the UN Human Rights Commission. Mustapha wanted to attend the May 1993 Austria, Vienna UN World Human Rights Conference and submit his report so that countries attacked by Japan could testify to the commission for the reparations and apologies. 3,500 Malaysians sent letters to Mustapha Yaakub in the span of 4 months. The victims thought the UMNO Malaysian government was going to demand reparations and an apology from Japan so they had turned up en masse since a UMNO official was behind the push. Their hopes were dashed when the UMNO heads led by Najiz Razak forced Mustapha Yaakub to back down so Japan did not apologize or pay reparations to Malay rape victims.
left|thumb|Nine of the 300 [[Indigenous peoples|Indigenous people, Malays and Javanese who survived starvation while in Japanese detention in Miri. UMNO Malay officials attempted to hide Japanese atrocities against ethnic Malays.]]
Indigenous Indonesian Muslim Javanese girls and women were taken as comfort women by Japanese soldiers and raped. One Indonesian seaman named Sukarno Martodiharjo (unrelated to the Indonesian President Sukarno) witnessed Indonesian Muslim Javanese girls trafficked as comfort women by Japanese soldiers. Indonesian writer Pramudya Ananta Tur wrote about how Javanese Muslim Indonesian girls were taken as sex slaves by the Japanese and the fact that they were from high class prominent families and their fathers were tricked into sending them into prostitution since the Japanese lied to them and told them their daughters would study in Japan. Javanese collaborators included public servants, school headmasters, policemen, village heads, subdistrict heads and other local chiefs. A Javanese Indonesian Muslim girl, Siti Fatimah recalled being raped as a comfort women by the Japanese after she was tricked into becoming a comfort woman. She was lied to and told she was being taken to Tokyo to study there and instead sent to a Japanese military brothel in Flores to be raped. Over 20,000 Indonesian women reported they were raped by Japanese soldiers since 1993 after the Indonesian government asked Indonesian women to report if they were victims of Japanese rape. Each Javanese Indonesian comfort woman trafficked to a station in Flores was raped by 23 Japanese men daily, 1 officer, 2 NCOs and 20 soldiers. They were expected to be raped by 100 men each week and received a ticket showing it from every one of them. The mass rapes committed by the Japanese against indigenous Javanese Indonesian Muslim women largely went unpunished since the Allied powers like the Dutch and Australians showed no interest in investigation or pressing charges against the Japanese for raping Indonesian women. The Dutch had sexually abused and raped indigenous Javanese Indonesian women for centuries, including using them as military prostitutes for Dutch soldiers; so the Dutch did not view what the Japanese did to Indonesians as a crime, but rather as a norm. The Japanese also destroyed tons of records related to Indonesian comfort women as they were losing the war so the true number of Indonesian comfort women is unknown. Sukarno, the first president of Indonesia, collaborated with the Japanese and recruited Indonesian girls as prostitutes for Japanese soldiers.
Treatment of comfort women
Women and girls were stripped of their agency and dehumanized as 'female ammunition', 'public toilets', or 'military supplies'. In order to help injured Japanese soldiers receive treatment, some of them were even forced to donate blood. Even though every victim's testimony was unique, they all shared commonalities: they all experienced severe and brutal physical, sexual, and psychological abuse. They were repeatedly beaten and forced to perform sexual service with 10 men on normal days and up to 40 men on days after combat.
Sufficient food, water, proper housing, toilets, and washing facilities were not provided to the women, and the extent of medical care was restricted to treating sexually transmitted diseases, sterilization, and terminating pregnancies. Torture was used against women who attempted to flee or refused to comply with the troops' demands. In addition, threats were made to the families of girls who attempted suicide.
Since comfort women were forced to travel to the battlefields with the Japanese Imperial Army, many comfort women perished as Allied forces overwhelmed Japan's Pacific defense and annihilated Japanese encampments. In certain cases, the Japanese military executed Korean comfort women when they fled from losing battles with the Allied Forces. During the last stand of Japanese forces in 1944–45, comfort women were often forced to commit suicide or were killed. During World war II, at Chuuk Lagoon, 70 comfort women were killed prior to the expected American assault, when the Navy mistook the American air raid as the prelude to an American landing. During the Battle of Saipan comfort women were among those who committed suicide by jumping off cliffs. One Korean woman, Kim Hak-sun, stated in a 1991 interview about how she was drafted into the "comfort women corps" in 1941: "When I was 17 years old, the Japanese soldiers came along in a truck, beat us [her and a friend], and then dragged us into the back. I was told if I were drafted, I could earn lots of money in a textile factory ... The first day I was raped and the rapes never stopped ... I was born a woman but never lived as a woman ... I feel sick when I come close to a man. Not just Japanese men, but all men – even my own husband who saved me from the brothel. I shiver whenever I see a Japanese flag ... Why should I feel ashamed? I don't have to feel ashamed." Kim stated that she was raped 30–40 times a day, every day of the year during her time as a "comfort woman". Reflecting their dehumanized status, Army and Navy records where referring to the movement of comfort women always used the term "units of war supplies".
In the Philippines according to the recounts of Filipino survivors Narcisa Claveria, who was enslaved for 18 months at the age of 13, during the day the women were forced to cook, clean, and do laundry. At night the Japanese soldiers raped and abused the women. The story of the comfort women doing household chores during the day and being sexually abused at night was also recounted by another Filipino Survivor Fedencia David, who was kidnapped by Japanese soldiers at age 14, who also remembered being forced to wash clothes and cook for the Japanese soldiers. At night, she was raped by as many as 5 to 10 Japanese soldiers. Along with being raped multiple times a day the women were subjected to separation from their families, often watching their families being murdered by Japanese soldiers. One survivor recounts that when the Japanese soldiers took her, "soldiers began to skin her father alive." This maltreatment left physical and emotional scars.
Military doctors and medical workers frequently raped the women during medical examinations. One Japanese Army doctor, Asō Tetsuo, testified that the comfort women were seen as "female ammunition" and as "public toilets"—as literally just things to be used and abused—with some comfort women being forced to donate blood for the treatment of wounded soldiers. Korea is a Confucian country where premarital sex was widely disapproved of, and since the Korean teenagers taken into the "comfort women corps" were almost always virgins, it was felt that this was the best way to limit the spread of venereal diseases that would otherwise incapacitate soldiers and sailors.
thumb|upright|Studio portrait of [[Jan Ruff O'Herne, taken shortly before she, her mother and sisters, and thousands of other Dutch women and children were interned by the Imperial Japanese Army in Ambarawa. Over the following months, O'Herne and six other Dutch women were repeatedly raped and beaten, day and night, by IJA personnel.]]
Ten Dutch women were taken by force from prison camps in Java by officers of the Imperial Japanese Army to become forced sex slaves in February 1944. They were systematically beaten and raped day and night. As a victim of the incident, in 1990, Jan Ruff-O'Herne testified to a U.S. House of Representatives committee: